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E-Mail Interview By Steven Ward
J.D. Considine has been writing about popular music since 1977. During
his more than 22-year career in rock criticism, he has polarized as many of
his fellow critics as enlightened the readers who follow his work. The
reason: Considine has always written about the music he likes. Considine
has never worried about following the rock critic pack--only praising the
unheard of and left field alternatives so obscure, college radio DJs give
you a blank stare at mere mention of the band's name. That's not to say
Considine only embraces mainstream music. On the contrary, Considine loves
PJ Harvey, trance rock, and the Japanese pop music of Namie Amuro and
Hikaru Utada. But don't be surprised when Considine tells you he loves the
pop country balladry of Faith Hill, the sultry and introspective R&B of
Toni Braxton and (no joke) 'N Sync. He's serious and explains in great
detail in his reviews why he enjoys the music so much.
Because of Considine's job as the pop music critic for the Baltimore
Sun, he's forced to examine mainstream music and popular music culture
in ways that snobby, trying-to-impress-other-critics writers at The
Village Voice and Spin don't really have to worry about.
Considine's reviews are a revelation. He is one of the very few rock
critics out there--Chuck Eddy can do this too, but his writing is not as
serious or straightforward--who writes about the music. Considine will be
the first to tell you that lyrics--the overwhelming preoccupation with 90
percent of the rock critics out there--is something he hardly pays any
attention to. Instead of dissecting lyrics (Considine is not interested in
teaching freshman poetry to college students), he has the amazing ability to
tell you about the music, what it sounds like and why a consumer might like
it or not.
Writing about the music and what it sounds like is Considine's secret
weapon. It's not easy and he will be the first to tell you about it. (Elvis
Costello once put it best: "Writing about music is like dancing about
architecture.") I recently conducted an e-mail interview with Considine
where he sounded off on a number of matters: why music magazines today
suck, which ones he believes are the best (you may be surprised), his love
of his job as the pop music critic for a major daily newspaper, and his
strange entrance into the world of music criticism in his high
school/college days.
Last but not least, Considine will tell you how unfashionable he is--a
trait that he thinks allows him to write about the music he loves. Steven: Let's start out with some bio
info. How old are you? Where did you grow up, go to college, etc?
J.D.: I'm 43. I was born in Albany,
New York, and moved with my family to Baltimore (where both my parents grew
up) in 1962. We lived in Towson, MD, a suburb that weirdly enough was home
to John Dos Passos, Spiro T. Agnew, and John Waters. All at the same time,
for a while there. It's also the fictional home of Elaine from "Seinfeld,"
which seems to impress no one. Including the natives. I went to public
school, and then attended the Johns Hopkins
University, a school which at the time taught neither music nor journalism.
What I studied was called the Humanistic Studies Area major, which was a
pretty vague concept for a major (though it did have the advantage of
appearing as "Human Stud" on transcripts). Mainly what I learned was
structuralism.
Basically, I've been in Baltimore most of my life. Not because I love it
here--the weather sucks, and apart from a couple specialty shops, we have
no decent CD stores--but because I've never had to leave. If I were offered
a job in New York, I'd go, but so far, all my full-time employment is here
in Baltimore. So I stay.
Steven: At what age did you realize
you wanted to write for a living and what writers, books, magazines or
events shaped that decision?
J.D.: I can't remember not being
interested in music. My parents tell me I was a music critic in utero--they
could tell by how I kicked whether I liked the music they were playing. But
I don't think it occurred to me that I could make a living at kicking like
that until I was in high school. It'd be nice to tell a story about reading
a Jon Landau or Lester Bangs review and tearily realizing that I'd found my
destiny, but I have no such story. I didn't read rock reviews when I was in
high school. My musical interests, for the most part, were in jazz and
classical music. So I read Downbeat, and even then more for the
information than the opinions.
When I was a junior in high school, a new program called "Career
Development" was introduced. Basically, it was an attempt at giving seniors
real-world experience as interns, working with lawyers, architects, etc.
Being a smart-ass, I told the program's co-ordinator that I wanted to be a
music critic, and asked what sort of internship he could set up for me.
Amazingly, he managed to get me a chance to audit a class in music
criticism that was being taught by Elliott Galkin--who was the critic for
the Baltimore Sun and a real big deal in the classical music
world--at the Peabody Conservatory in downtown Baltimore.
Not that I could just waltz into the class and start writing criticism.
No, I had to audition. Galkin sat me down at the piano and handed me a
study score of a Handel concerto grosso. My job was to read and play the
thing. I was a crap pianist (still am), but I can read, and read it I did,
transposing the parts transposed in my head as I went along. Bingo, I was
in.
In for what, though? When I arrived at class the first day, I was
terrified to discover that my two--yes, only two--classmates were both
Peabody grad students. Talk about sink or swim! Plus, all the reviewing
would be of classical concerts in the Baltimore area (most of which Galkin
would be covering for the Sun).
Up to that point, I'd written exactly no music reviews. In fact, I made
a point of not working on the school paper in high school. Somehow, though,
I was able to hold my own with the other students. Galkin believed that a
good critic should be a writer and a musician in equal measure, and deftly
work-shopped our reviews. He taught me the value of leavening a negative
review with humor, and hammered home the importance of avoiding hyperbole
and non-sequiturs. By the end of the year, I really felt as if I had found
my métier.
Good thing, too, as that turned out to be the only journalism training I
ever had.
Steven: When did you discover your
love of music? Tell me about your favorite bands, songs and albums from the
old days.
J.D.: When I was a kid, from junior
high school on, all I ever wanted for Christmas was musical instruments,
stereo equipment, or records. I of course had no idea how much the first
two cost, so I was always vaguely disappointed only to get records.
Although I did get a Longines Stereo for my birthday when I was 13 or so.
Neither of my parents are particularly musical. They like music well
enough, especially light classical, broadway shows and big band swing. But
neither ever learned to play an instrument, which was odd, because my
father's mother was a trained musician who came from a long line of
classical musicians. Still, my sibs and I had piano lessons, and played in
the school band. Which was lucky for me, because I would "borrow" their
instruments and learn how to play them. By the time I got to college, I
could play (with varying degrees of proficiency) trombone, tuba, double
bass, saxophone, trumpet, piano and guitar.
When I wasn't playing, I was listening. I lusted after music. All the
time. At first, it was classical that had me in its clutches. Wilhelm
Furtwangler conducting Wagner, the Jussi Bjorling/Victoria De Los Angeles
"La Boheme," Dennis Brain playing the Mozart Horn Concertos .$B%`. (those
were some of my favorites when I was in junior high school. It's a wonder I
didn't get beaten up on a regular basis).
By 9th grade, I had discovered both jazz and the public library. Once a
week, I'd paw through the bulky, plastic-sleeved LP packages, looking for
anything I didn't know and wanted to learn about. I discovered Miles Davis'
Bitches Brew, the Milestone recordings of Monk and Coltrane, the
Guild recordings of Dizzy Gillespie with Charlie Parker. Ever curious, I
had expanded to world music by high school, and was transfixed by the
Nonesuch Explorer recordings of Balinese gamelan and Bulgarian folk songs.
It was amazing how much I picked up at that library.
When I bought records, it was almost always stuff I'd never heard. I
remember buying Roland Kirk's Rip, Rig and Panic pretty much at
random, because I'd heard so much about the guy's weird habit of playing
two and three saxophones at once, but had no idea what his music sounded
like. To me, the whole point was to learn as much about music as possible.
Not that I ignored pop. I just had, well, weird taste for a teen in the
early '70s. I liked the Stones and the Who more than the Beatles (back
then, anyway), but I adored Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire (from
Head to the Sky on), James Brown, and War. Especially War.
The World Is a Ghetto, Deliver the Word, War
Live--these were constantly on my turntable through high school. I
also mistakenly assumed that jazz/rock was pretty much the same as rock,
and was forever bewildered that few of my friends were as taken as I was by
Miles Davis's Live/Evil and On the Corner, Mahavishnu
Orchestra's Innermounting Flame, the first two Weather Report
albums, Return to Forever's Light As a Feather, and Carla Bley's
Escalator Over the Hill.
Perversely enough, I also fell head-over-heels for Harry Nilsson's
Nilsson Schmilsson and Linda Ronstadt's Heart Like a
Wheel. The richness of the melodies and the opulent warmth of the
production lit me up like a roman candle. To me, even then, those pop
virtues were every bit as valid as the things I liked about more demanding
fare like jazz and classical.
When I got to college, I wound up taking a job at a record store to help
pay for school--this was when a minimum-wage job actually could
make a dent in tuition. I was hired as the jazz & classical guy and spent
about four years (1975-79) in the biz. It was a great time to be in retail,
actually. Not only did I get to
see, first-hand, what it meant to "ship platinum and return gold" (my store
alone must've returned a hundred copies of Draw the Line), but I
got to see the record industry move away from its old status as a field of
independent companies and toward its current state of multinational
mega-corp domination. Plus, I was there for the initial rise and fall of
Kiss; I watched Springsteen go from cultish popularity with The Wild,
the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle to mass popularity with
Born to Run; I worked through both the disco craze and
Frampton Comes Alive; and I was able to be among the first to pick
up the early punk and rap singles. (It was through my record store savvy
that I wound up writing one of the first rap record reviews, a piece on
"Rapper's Delight" that ran in The Village Voice in November of
1979.)
But it was the Sex Pistols
who truly changed my life. Hearing "Anarchy
in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen" (which I'd bought on import at
another store) made me totally re-evaluate my aesthetics. Here was music
that carried the same emotional intensity as the post-Coltrane jazz I
loved, yet spoke a language that was simple and direct--as immediate as a
blow to the head. In an instant, my goals had changed. Where once I wanted
to write mainly about jazz and classical music, now I seriously wanted to
think about pop music. And the work of everybody else I'd been listening
to--from EWF and Steely Dan to Graham Parker and Springsteen--suddenly
seemed that much deeper and more significant.
Steven: How and when did you discover
journalism and when and how did the music and journalism come together for
you.
J.D.: I can't remember when I didn't
read newspapers. Granted, my earliest recollections are of reading the
comics (I was the only kid in my sixth grade class who thought "Pogo" was
funny), but I know I looked at other things early on. I also started
reading Newsweek in seventh grade, which briefly but seriously
warped my mind.
The first music journalism I read was Downbeat, mainly because
it was easily available in the libraries. But I had no idea, when I was in
junior high school, that there was even such a thing as rock criticism. It
wasn't until I got to college and started reading The Village
Voice--and, later, Rolling Stone and Creem--that I
became indoctrinated. But to be honest, I was already writing reviews
before I became influenced by other reviewers.
Steven: Were there certain rock
writers that influenced you when you first started reading rock journalism?
What about other writing influences, favourite novels etc.
J.D.: Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs were
the first rock critics I noticed, mainly because of their passion and the
immediacy of their language. I also studied Robert Christgau, whose command
of rhetoric made even the slightest observation seem like deep wisdom. But
it was with Robert
Palmer that I began to see a true personal direction, because he so clearly
valued music above all else, and used sound as a means to put subculture
into context instead of the other way around.
But I don't know that I much tried to imitate them. OK, once I cracked
the code, I could do a pretty good Christgau. But to be honest, I was just
too damned lazy to go to the trouble of learning to sound like anybody
else. About the only writer whose style I consciously tried to imitate was
James Wolcott, who liked to animate his ideas, making them dance and
frolic. I couldn't really pull it off, but the notion that ideas could be
forces unto themselves, engaging the reader on a visceral level, has
remained something I try to achieve in my writing.
Steven: When and where was your first
piece of professional rock journalism published?
J.D.: Rock journalism? Sometime in the
summer of '77, though I'm not sure I was paid for it. My debut as a
money-earning professional was in May, 1977, when I began freelancing for
the Baltimore Sun. But that was a jazz
writer. Being ridiculously cocky, I had decided that the stringer the
Sun had covering jazz was a hack, and that I could write at least
as well as he did. So I hauled my 20-year old self down to the paper, found
the features editor, and made my pitch. "I could do a better job than this
guy," I told him. Bless his heart, he didn't throw me out. Instead, he
said, "Well, son, why don't you go to a concert, write it up, and we'll
look at it."
"Well, I'm going to see Milt Jackson tonight," I said.
"OK. Write us 450 words, have it here by 10 a.m., and we'll see," he
told me.
So I went to the show. I wrote my review. I made the deadline. They ran
the piece the next day. I was 20 years old, and all of a sudden, I was a
pro. Oddly enough, the editor seemed to want me to do rock reviewing as
well, but I wasn't interested just yet. So I think my first "rock" piece
for pay was reviewing Renaissance, who opened a concert for Jean-Luc Ponty
that summer. But I could be wrong.
Steven: If you can remember, (I know
there have been many) how many magazines and newspapers have you been
published in?
J.D.: Oh, jeez. You know, the scary
thing is, I probably canremember. Newspapers are simple. Lessee,
I've been on staff at the Baltimore City Paper (1977-1980), the
Baltimore News American (1980-81), and the Baltimore Sun
(1986-present). Between the News American and Sun gigs, I
freelanced for the Sun and for the Washington Post. I
also had one story in the Washington Times, but felt too creeped
out by the Moonie connection to write any more for them. I also wrote
various short pieces for The Village Voice in the late '70s and
early '80s.
The first rock magazine to publish me was New York Rocker, in
'79. Also that year, I wrote my first review for Rolling Stone, of
an album by Trillion. I started writing for Musician in 1981, and
wrote for Record for much of its existence. Various pieces went
into Spin, Vibe, Fi, Request,
Standing Ovation, Model, Guitar for the Practising
Musician, Oldie, Playboy, Entertainment
Weekly, Baltimore, the Neiman Quarterly, Extreme
Guitar, and Guitar World. These days, my main freelance
outlets are Guitar World and Revolver.
I've been reprinted in a bunch of places, from New Musical
Express to Utne Reader. Also, my Sun stories have
run (via the Washington Post/L.A. Times wire service) in
papers all across America, as well as Australia and Japan. If only I got
royalties from that...
Steven: Most rock critics (guys like
Dave Marsh and Greil Marcus especially) seem to be concerned with lyrics
and the translation of a songwriter's songs. One of the reasons your
writing stands out from most is because you actually write about the music.
You have the ability to write about
what the music sounds like. Not that you don't ever write about lyrics, but
most of the time your reviews deal with how the music sounds--information
most record buyers can actually use. Do you agree with that?
J.D.: Well, I don't know that I'd call
Marsh a lyrics-only guy, as he writes vividly and evocatively about singing
(though not necessarily from a technical perspective). But yeah, a lot of
music critics write as if music were simply something attached to the
"poetry" of the songs. Do I really have to say what horseshit that is?
Apart from the fact that rock lyrics rarely count as poetry--most would
have a hard time hacking it as doggerel--the music is clearly the main
draw. Otherwise, wouldn't Patti Smith have had greater success in
literature than in music?
Writing about music, on the other hand, is hard. With words, you have a
narrative, and you can fold that into the argument of your review. But what
does the sound of Jimmy Page's guitar solo in "In the Evening"
mean? I have no idea how it might fit into the narrative of
Robert Plant's lyrics, but I can tell you how it works against what the
rhythm section is doing. And I can damn sure say how the whole thing makes
me feel. Which is what I, as a reviewer, try to do.
Of course, I should add that the other reason I don't write about lyrics
is that they're the last thing I ever pay attention to. Indeed, some of my
favourite records are in languages I only partially understand (like
Japanese) or don't know at all (like Portuguese). Maybe this goes back to
my early days listening to classical music, I don't know. But I've always
reacted to pure sound first, and have tried to convey what I hear and feel
in my writing.
Steven: My favourite record review of
yours was a lead review in Rolling Stone about Pearl Jam's second
album, Vs. It was a wonderful album and you said so and why. Your
review focused on how the drummer's approach to the music and the rhythmic
influence of the record was the backbone and secret weapon behind the
album's success. I hardly ever read CD reviews like that anymore. Do you
feel like there is a lack of good music writing about the actual music?
J.D.: It always amazes me when people
remember reviews of mine like that, because I sure don't. I mean, I
remember writing the thing (kinda), but I have no idea what I said
in it. So I'll have to take your word on the bit about the drummer (which,
frankly, sounds right). But to get to your actual question, yeah, I'd say
there's a definite dearth of good writing about actual music. Which is one
reason I read so little rock record reviewing these days.
To be fair, though, there are a growing number of younger writers who at
least recognize that there's more to record reviewing than reading the
lyric sheet or indulging in autobiography. Their prose may not be there,
but at least they're moving in the right direction. And good writing takes
time and practice to develop. Lord knows, I'm still working at it.
At the same time, there's the underlying issue of music comprehension.
You don't need musical training to enjoy music, but I think you should have
some technical understanding of music if you intend to write about it. That
doesn't mean instrumental proficiency, necessarily, but a rock reviewer
ought to know at least enough about music to be able to identify the
instruments he or she is hearing; should know enough about musical
structure to know what the difference between a chorus, verse and bridge
is, or be able to count how many chord changes there are in a harmonic
cycle, or be able to identify specific beats. It would be better if he or
she knew enough about performance practices to be able to identify specific
techniques, and better still is the reviewer could follow a theme and
variations, recognize basic forms of counterpoint, and identify common
harmonies. Not because that sort of information belongs in every review.
Rather, if the reviewer understands on a structural level what's going on
in the music, it will be that much easier for him or her to explain his or
her observations to the reader--provided, of course, that he or she writes
well enough to make those ideas comprehensible.
Now, I'm not going to go so far as to say that a stupid music mistake in
a review--say, when Neil Strauss mistook one of Tom Morello's guitar
effects for a harmonica solo in his Rolling Stone review of the
latest RATM album--invalidates what the reviewer has to say. But I do
believe that not knowing what you're talking about makes your argument less
convincing.
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