Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, soundsignal.fm collects, curates, and annotates ~50 of the best pieces of music (related) writing around, providing you a window into the conversation regardless of where that’s happening. Below is an excerpt of that content.
Now that we’ve had a couple weeks to digest and process the news of Brooklyn Vegan and Alt Press’ demise, the news hasn’t gotten any easier to take and hits on a few different levels for me. As the curator for a publication that surfaces the best music (and cultural) writing, the absence will be felt. As a music fan and frequent concert goer who lives in New York, Brooklyn Vegan in particular will be missed in a very real way. And, as someone who’s worked with music writers and critics for over two decades, this feels like the latest blow to our community.
Two of this week’s top articles take a deep dive into the subject of the decline. Mitch Stevens over at Line of Best Fit pens a eulogy, of sorts, for the fallen publications, and makes a full-throated case that publications like this are “part of a larger ecosystem that helps us define our own cultural history now and for generations to come,” and insists they need to be protected. Shawn Reynaldo, meanwhile, doesn’t directly address the recent layoffs, but takes a deep dive into what is perhaps at the heart of these losses: the public’s loss of trust in music criticism and media.
Both pieces are well reasoned and worth a read. I would like to offer a glimmer of hope here. Curating Sound Signal over the past two months or so (first privately, and then, over the last month, publicly) has demonstrated just how robust and healthy the quality of music writing is at this moment. It’s every bit as good as it was ten or twenty years ago. And not only is the quality high, but seeing it all together and in the same space, also reveals there are real various narrative and thematic threads that pull the writings together.
And these throughlines are important, for both writers and readers. When a reader encounters an isolated piece of great writing, they nod their head in appreciation. When they venture into an ongoing “conversation,” they become participants. In some ways, the lack of this connective tissue can be tied to the death of viable publications, but it’s also a structural issue in how our platforms treat (and distribute) media. Substack has been a blessing and a curse. It’s great that it allows writers to directly monetize their work, but it’s awfully atomized. And while it’s understandable, the fact that so much of writing is behind the paywall probably isn’t great for the long-term health of the ecosystem. The enshittification of our social platforms (and the more or less total collapse of Twitter/X) also contributes to this feeling of balkanization.
We try to do our part here to pull the threads together, but it’s not enough, and the fix needs to be more structural.
Charles.A.D.;’s latest is deeply faithful to dub techno’s formula of rippling chords and crisply stepping kick/hat patterns, with the Basic Channel, Maurizio and Deepchord clearly in the mix. What sets the Japanese producer apart emerges the more you engage with it: the carefree fillip to the chords of “Epiplegic Zone,” the airy melancholy of “Urban Night #0,” and the muted wash and serrated lead of “Urban Night #5.”
First Floor · Shawn Reynaldo
Shawn Reynaldo, a two-decade veteran of the music press, unpacks why so many listeners are convinced that music criticism is rigged. The Chaotic Good saga (a marketing firm that bragged about buying influencers and staging viral moments) certainly didn’t help our matters, nor did James Blake claiming writers get paid off by labels. But Reynaldo goes deeper, and probes how music journalism is like a “closed club,” where “active membership is only possible for a very narrow (and generally very privileged) slice of the populace.” Writers’ coziness to the music industry, and the supposed hangover from years of “poptimism,” where writers rarely posted negative reviews, didn’t help.
The Line of Best Fit · Mitch Stevens
The Line of Best Fit connects the dots. AltPress, BrooklynVegan, Revolver and Goldmine all got gutted by the same parent company, Veeps, the livestream platform LiveNation took a majority stake in back in 2021. And each publication was a valuable asset to the communities they covered, and provided a social history or sorts for those scenes. The pattern is familiar: a legacy title gets “saved” by venture funding and then quietly gets hollowed out, and another cultural archive treated as line-item overhead. It’s grim, and Stevens ends the piece pleading for us to create an ecosystem that doesn’t require us to depend on outsiders.
New York Times · Dan Charnas
BTS recently pulled “Arirang” from Grammy contention to protest the new Asian Pop category, which it felt was a demeaning, marginalizing way to contextualize their music. On some level, it looked like a niche fight involving one band, but Dan Charnas, NYU professor and author of “Dilla Time,” argues that it revealed a basic flaw in our way of thinking about music (and pop in particular). Months after Beyoncé won Best Country Album, the Academy split it in two. After “K-Pop Demon Hunters” broke through, “Asian Pop” appeared. The genre machinery, Charnas writes, is segregation’s leftover engine, still quietly deciding who counts as mainstream.
NPR · Ann Powers
There’s been no shortage of great writing around the new Phoebe Bridgers release, but Ann Powers pens one of the finest examples, and her piece examines the hypnotic subtly of Lost Weekend, from the “phantom low-frequency hum” and “vibrational hush” to the difficulty of telling a story that “includes so many contradictory elements, conflicting perspectives, shadowy corners and hidden passageways.” It’s good analysis, but also inspiringly great writing from one of our best critics.
Pirate Wires · Mitchell Jackson
Mitchell Jackson spent 2012 to 2018 inside VICE, where he was the guy assigned to farm right-wing “hate traffic” by feeding woke articles to conservative journalists to mock. For Pirate Wires, Jackson argues the collapse wasn’t investors, the harassment, or even politics. Shane Smith lost his course when he abandoned the editorial vision and team that got him there and chased the Gen-X allure of a cable channel. In 2026, few will probably mourn the loss of a site that frequently preyed on its subjects, and Jackson’s piece re-affirms the basic capriciousness of its architects.
New Yorker · lauren michele jackson
Jackson provides a well thoughtful and well-considered take on what has surprisingly become one of the summer’s biggest stories. Jackson argues that Ariana’s hit “Petal,” and its subsequent video, is a misdirection, “its melancholic tone undercut by the swagger of its vocalist.” But Jackson’s main focus is the dialogue around the video. “Concern is an emotional bricolage,” she writes, but also finds that the “indelicacy” is somewhat of a relief. We need to be able to talk about these subjects. And while there is “no underestimating the volume and intensity of rubbernecking on the internet,” she tries to map out ways to discuss our issues in good faith.
Stems · Drew Thurlow
Thurlow translates a recent statement from AI music giant Suno, and finds a lot of misdirection and faux-moral positioning designed to avoid accountability. In the end, he finds that Suno ultimately care about Suno, and behind all their lofty language is the desire to protect their own ground.
Luminate · Ikenna Ugwu
Ugwu begins the piece by focusing on the well-understood truism that after all these years, as hip-hop rose in popularity, and then subsequently declined, the genre remains regional. Cities listen to rappers from those cities. But, what’s really interesting about the analysis is the finding that rappers from overseas do particularly well in cities that serve as influences for their particular style. And, increasingly, fans in those cities are looking for collaborations.
POW magazine gives Sparky D a proper homecoming in their retrospective to one of hip-hop’s most silently influential pioneers. From chronicling her birth in Brownsville’s Van Dyke Housing Projects to recounting her legendary battle with Roxanne Shanty, DJ Short does an amazing job of evoking hip-hop’s formative years. It’s a fun read about a rarely acknowledged figure, and it also underscores the fact that “hip-hop was a unisex sport.”
JazzWax · Marc Myers
It’s an open secret that our most vital music forms are created (and destroyed) in courtrooms. Hip-Hop is a clear example of this, but Myers maps the history of bee bop through the 1946 case of Arnstein v. Porter, which stated that “printed sheet music did qualify as “writing” by its composer and was protected,” while “Bebop songs that featured original melodies using the chord progressions of standards were immune from royalty payments or litigation.” This led to a wave of bee bop tracks where the chord progressions were based on standards, and Myers highlights a few in his piece.
→ Read more of this week’s best articles here
Thom Yorke’s looped prayer and DJ Shadow’s doomed strings soundtrack Jonathan Glazer’s grim film of a man stumbling through a tunnel and getting repeatedly pounded by cars until he reaches a sort of messianic transcendence. This is peak Y2K paranoia, and a bit of an historical document, but the track still bangs and the music video feels fresh long after the millennial ball drop.
Curating and designing content systems has been central to our work at Third Bridge Creative, and this new site is no different. Any other questions, please reach out to us at info@thirdbridgecreative.com.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.