Last week, I shared my review of the second edition of Jessica Hopper’s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic. This week, I want to share the full interview with Jessica, which is full of insights into the music industry, the state of criticism, and post-Trump politics. I hope you enjoy.
MD: In the expanded edition of The First Collection, your writing seems to be more explicitly political than it used to be. But even though the writing has grown in that way, it’s still tethered to the humanity in music, without which it would be easy to become cynical.
JH: As I wrote in the afterword [to the second edition], after The First Collection came out, I had gotten to a pretty cynical place, in part because I had gotten further instilled within the music journalism industry, which was very grimly patriarchal. Before that, I had been working for myself. I didn’t have a job working for another person or a company between the time I was 19 and the time I was 38, when The First Collection came out. Seeing inside the machine was a really grim experience, because I didn’t think it was a space where I could have the autonomy and power that I was used to. I found myself working some place where I realized after I had gotten there that some of the men around me wanted to wear my politics, or me as a “known feminist writer” or a “feminist firebrand” — they wanted to wear them like a ring to make up for their lack thereof. These were people who were like “I can’t be sexist; I love PJ Harvey.”
Encountering that, and being in a situation where working in that way was deeply dispiriting and really dehumanizing, really did a number on me. That was happening at the same time I was going around the world on book tour and hearing young folks’ tales of survival, particularly young women’s tales of survival in the music industry. People were really looking to me for advice on how to survive and how to make it work, in spite of the fact that you’re working with people who are trying to sleep with you or steal your ideas. These were, in particular, young women, whose energy is the fuel for the patriarchal vampire system that is the music industry.
I don’t think I realized how cynical and burnt out I was after doing both of those things. It was kind of this tandem track, of being really inspired by young new writers and people who were coming into criticism and people who were doing the work to create equitable systems within music, and then at the same time just being dispirited by being around long enough to see how little was changing and being fed up with that. That was a pretty recent development, in 2015–2016, and by that point I was mostly working as an editor, not writing, so I don’t think there’s a lot of that expressed in the book. My best friend read the afterword and said “you’ve never written anything this candid; some of this really surprised me.” I was really exhausted and kind of traumatized by it. I realized that I was supposed to continually invest and acclimate and co-sign this culture if I was supposed to succeed. Finding places where that wasn’t the case took a huge amount of energy.
MD: Laura Marling did a podcast a few years ago in which each episode was an interview with a woman in the music industry. The story I kept hearing in all the episodes was: “I made it, but it was really hard, and I’m struggling all the time, and the whole time I was trying to make it, I also saw a ton of my women friends decide to quit. And I found my own way to cope, but it’s really hard.” I wonder whether you think there’s a way out of this dilemma that all women in the arts keep finding themselves in.
JH: There are a few things that really buoyed me. The community within Rookie Mag, which was built on peer mentorship, peer support, resource-sharing, and showing up for each other. We all explicitly opened our Rolodexes and networks to each other and basically said, “if I can help you do this thing that you need to do to succeed, professionally, personally, physically, spiritually, then I will do it.”
All of us managed to succeed in new and bold ways. Multiple book projects came out of the very short one- or two-year period of all of us really applying ourselves in that way. That allowed for a very different, insulated system that went beyond just cheerleading. We were giving each other rungs and a solid place to work from, basically creating a parallel feminist online world.
That was just for the Rookie staff. But I think there are ways to replicate that in a bigger way. I don’t want to say that it takes “a moment like this,” but my real hope, coming out the other side of this pandemic and its deep travails for many people, is that it has been a time where people have examined their relationship to capitalism, seeing with clarity their role in dehumanizing systems, and gathering their own personal manifesto of “what am I willing to do for things to be different?”
Right now I have a lot of feminist friends and peers who more so than ever are saying “This whole system is kind of unworkably rotten. I don’t want to play shows at XYZ places, because they’re all run by this promoter who we know is a shitbag.” Before we just thought, “that’s just how it has to be.” But then you get to a point where you’re really fed up and feeling like this is a moment of reconstructing and dreaming anew, and you’re burnt out as fuck — I mean who’s not burnt out? I don’t trust anybody who’s not burnt out right now — and going “alright, I don’t want to put my energies into something that isn’t sustainable.”
We know the capitalist music world system is not built for sustainability. It’s built for the churn. It’s built so that people are the fodder; they are the kindling. And if we cannot be real about those things, then we’ll continue to replicate it, continue to throw ourselves on the pyre. A lot of people are just going, “I’m not willing to do that. I want to put my energies into making this an equitable, vibrant place, to not dehumanize my trans friends, to not have this ambient fear about saying ‘no’ to the powerful white men who still believe they own this place because they’re the ones that profit off of it.”
Some people are going, “I don’t want to participate at all in this system right now, but I still want to make music, so how am I gonna fuckin’ do that?” We have been really discouraged from having equitable dreams and feminist dreams, and for a long time, as my book — I don’t want to say “gestures to” — stomps on every page, this patriarchal, hierarchical, music business world-view that we’ve been raised in, that we’ve been told has to be this way it exists, its very function is to cut us off from any sort of matrilineal inheritance. If you cut people in the scene off from queer wisdom, from feminist wisdom, from how the roots of every scene are basically weird Black and Latinx and queer kids and women, if you cut them off from that idea, it keeps them having to start over and reinvent the wheel and start at this place of being the giddy intern, rather than being able to build on those struggles.
Time did a cover story of women in rock “arriving” in 1968. Janis Joplin was still fucking alive! I don’t know how different my career would be if I hadn’t been continually fed this idea, and come to believe this idea, that if women can get there and just be good enough, that we could prove to these men that we can shred. This is an idea I had from the time I was 15 to the time I was… I want to say I was 28 before I really started interrogating that. I believed that. And I’m speaking as someone who came up in riot grrrl, who saw Bikini Kill’s first tour.
What to me is exciting is the people going, “Fuck this. I’m going to figure out my own system. I don’t accept the terms of the deal, and I’d rather have a difficult career outside of this, where I’m much more connected with my fans, rather than doing the dance to fit in this system. I’d rather do this and tour kind of rough for the rest of my life and be able to do it on my own terms.” I think we’re going to see a lot more people doing that.
That’s the place where I got to in my own career. I did something this week for the LA Times, but my most recent byline before that is like, two years ago. Because the work I want to do is not for a rock-critical career, and I don’t know where I would write the ways that I write.
There aren’t a lot of places for music criticism. There’s not a lot of paying work for criticism. I love writing profiles, but right now, I’m really interested in women who are like, 50, 60, 70, 80, or dead, and they’re the last people that anyone will let you profile. I still get a lot of offers that are like, “Will you do six weeks of reporting work on this musician who is probably a rapist, and talk to like, 18 women, and all these women who were fired from their jobs because they reported this creep, and we’ll pay you $500.” Or it’s good money, but the story is really horrifying, and I don’t believe that it’s going to get through legal or editorial.
So I just haven’t been doing that work. Instead, I’ve been working on my book, and producing podcasts, because the “opportunities” that are available to me, 30 years into my career, 97% of the time are not opportunities that preserve my humanity or build my skill or where my expertise is getting honored for what it’s worth.
MD: For so many musicians and writers, you take whatever gig because you need to survive — you write about this in your essay about indie “selling out” — or you’re brought into “sanitize” — Look! We have a woman on staff! — or you make a choice not to do that stuff, but then how do you get paid or hone your craft? It’s this impossible bind. Reading the interview with Lido Pimienta, I was thinking: can industries really ever address these problems?
JH: Absolutely not. I think part of the gag is trying to keep us thinking that yes, they can, and that it’s incumbent on us, if we’re just good enough, if we just do it the right way, if we’re willing to get permission from the right person. And it’s like, motherfucker, no. Some of the most painful times in my career were the times when I bought into that. I bought into thinking that was a way to survive and to be able to do the work that I wanted. If I could just open people’s eyes, then it would change.
Looking back at my work now, with the clarity of hindsight and distance, I see so that much of my early work, even though I think it’s very strong and feminist, was written in this sort of petitioning way, like, get off our necks, guys! See, we’re good! I see that in “Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t.” I didn’t figure that out until way late, and part of that is because I was surrounded by dudes.
I don’t fault young me for that, and that’s part of the reason it’s been such a gift to come back to this book again. It has really freed me from even envisioning my audience within this patriarchal paradigm. That’s what feminism is supposed to free us from: constantly viewing ourselves through this patriarchal lens and being this little poodle that’s like, “if I can just jump through this hoop well enough, I might get free.” And working within music journalism and the music industry, that is really the only hoop that exists. There’s not another track. The other track is truly build-it-yourself, DIY, outsider success. And there were times when I did kind of have that, by virtue of doing my own thing for so fucking long, but I was still dependent on the people that published me and doing work that they approved of.
Around the time I started as an editor at Pitchfork, part of it was because I was much more interested in other people’s ideas, and I thought I had taken some of my biggest ideas to their logical conclusion, I was interested in seeing other people who were interested in building on them or rejecting them, and I could help bring that further. The fourth or fifth time that somebody was coming to me to write a piece about St. Vincent being a shredder and how that’s kind of new for women, like a trend piece that’s about women in rock based around St. Vincent, I was like, dude, this is her fucking third album, and also I wrote like three of these pieces around the first album. And I thought, I can’t do this, I can’t write this piece with any kind of self-respect, and also it’s not fucking true! So I’m gonna go edit so I can assign different kinds of pieces about Annie Clark.
MD: Do you feel like you were able to do that?
JH: Yes and no. When I went to Pitchfork, it was, I believe, the first time a woman had been hired in a senior editorial position. I worked with a lot of women who had started as interns and stayed for a long time, worked their way up. But when I came in as a senior editor, they told me I was the first woman who had been hired at a senior level, and they’d been a website for 18 years. I don’t know what that was about, and I don’t really care. I was there for eleven months, and I am very grateful that during that time I got to start editorial relationships with Carvell Wallace, Hanif Abdurraqib, Doreen St. Félix, Sinéad Stubbins, Megan Garvey — people that I brought into the fold when I went to MTV News.
At MTV News, we knew we were a lamprey on the back of a shark, which was Viacom. No newsroom shop there had made it longer than 17 months without being nuked. We thought: maybe we get 16 months out of it. So it was like, what can we do to bring in these writers, and basically fucking sprint. Everyone write whatever the fuck they want. Write bananas stories. Let’s send somebody to Russia; let’s do stuff you can’t do anywhere. Let’s assign people totally weird things to do so that they can build a portfolio, and we can help make them expensive to other people on the other side of this, so they can podcast, and produce, and write for TV, and that’s what we did.
MD: It seems like everything you’re talking about is the exception to the rule.
JH: Yes, it was. It was so exciting to do that, and it’s never going to exist again, and it ended in such a nuclear fashion. I don’t have the proverbial balls to bring anybody into that situation again. I will only do things that I build and that people have a stake in.
MD: The first edition of The First Collection came out in 2015, right before Trump, and now this one is coming out after Trump is out of office. We can see the end of the pandemic on the horizon, maybe; we saw this huge uprising last year; there was #MeToo before that. How did you take the political context into account, given how explicitly and implicitly political your writing is, in a world where a lot of music writing is just about selling records?
JH: I do think music criticism has changed in the last five years, largely due to critics of color. I think in some ways that’s helped make criticism more relevant, bring better context to it, because there are more people saying that it’s not just about aesthetics. It’s not just their writing, but it’s also about those critics being in places like New York Magazine, and The New Yorker, and seeing so much of Hanif Abdurraqib’s writing in The New York Times, and books like Sasha Geffen’s Glitter Up the Dark — these things really bring people in who’ve otherwise been marginalized by criticism and by the culture around music. People who have always said, when reading criticism, what the fuck does this have to do with me? They can now see so much more of their perspective and receive invitations in Hanif’s work.
There’s just a greater breadth of humanity in that, whereas historically, white male patriarchal criticism has been super competitive; there’s nothing you can build on; there’s a lot of finger-wagging, saying “you’re not as smart as me” or “you’re not valid if you don’t believe this hierarchy;” and it doesn’t take real people’s lives and experiences into account beyond like, “this really reminds me of this break-up I had with this lady.” All that competitiveness and marginalization that previous eras of criticism and critics as an institution did, they made it so that it’s in the shambles that it’s in today, so that it’s not vital, so the people who made it vital dropped out.
So the people who are doing it now are doing it in ways that are buildable, viable, exciting, that invite people in. I think that is the political shift in criticism. All of that has very much informed where I am now as a writer, in the last five, six, seven years. Part of that was working with some of those writers, but part of that was being inspired by that to interrogate my place in that world of music criticism, my place as a writer, my feminism, and really hold it up to the light and go, how do I do better with this? When I look back, even to two years ago, all I see is the holes. I ask, how do I do better? What do I need to know? I want to contribute to this dialogue. I want to use what power I have to help keep criticism useful, viable, part of a real dialogue with music and music culture and culture at large.
MD: Right, there’s the “business” of music on the one hand, and then on the other hand there’s the very real, heavy role that music plays in people’s lives. There’s that line in the “Emo” essay, where you put the word “just” in scare quotes: “It’s ‘just’ music.” But it’s never “just” music.
JH: No! It’s not. One of the first bands I really, truly loved was Fugazi. The idea that a band could give you politics seems really, really silly in 2021, but at the time, particularly when you come out of DIY, you can see a much greater gulf between mainstream and underground. Because of my particular late Gen-X timing, it was right at a moment when there was an identity to be had, where you didn’t participate in mainstream culture. I think a lot of that idea of building something yourself, and being outside of something, comes from that for me.
Because I have seen worlds outside of the mainstream, because I have seen closed punk-rock ecosystems of various levels of success and various abilities to be sustained — that informed my idea that it’s very possible to do that, because I came out of something like that. But I think enough time has passed, and there’s enough distance from viable DIY methods, that people are going “streaming is easier” or “we can’t do Bandcamp Fridays forever” or “you can’t do XYZ unless the artist is streaming on Spotify.” I’m old enough to have been alive when anything you had within independent music you had to build yourself — you had to press your own records! — and everybody did that. It was a big, shared, communal knowledge, and it was much less competitive because you couldn’t do it in a vacuum. So much of this — by “this” I mean capitalism in music — really wants people to think that they are these atomized beings who have to do everything by themselves, and build everything by themselves, and it’s going to be very hard, because it doesn’t want collective power. This is such a no-brainer. I am basically the equivalent of an Instagram slide right now.
Part of the reason I wanted to put some of these things I put in the book in there — whether it was Rolling Stone women, or Lido Pimienta, or women in Nashville building a scene, or the Village Voice piece talking about mentorship — is that there are only certain sorts of stories we get about music, because we’re constantly writing about what’s new, what’s popular, who’s this new person, what’s their Instagram doing. It keeps us from ever talking to anybody who knows how to build a thing without the mechanisms of these corporations, of music’s big forces.
So part of the reason I wanted to put these stories in is that it’s important to have documentation of people who are building things, who came before you and built things, so that you can build atop those struggles and do what worked rather than having to reinvent the wheel. So many parts of my career were reinventing the wheel, because I was isolated. And it kept me really believing some not-great things about my writing and about music as much as I believed in its liberatory power.
MD: The story about The Smell showed exactly what you’re talking about: the labor —
JH: YES!
MD: You’re talking about the labor that it takes to keep a place like that running. There’s always this myth: this person had a vision and they saw it through, and it’s just running on vibes. But actually, no, here’s a guy, who’s coming in, day-in and day-out, and there’s lots of people around him who are doing that, too.
JH: And he’s like, if you want this, I can’t be the only one here.