Music Critic, Emeritus
I've written a great deal about music over the last ten years --
a vocation (or as my account puts it, "an avocation") that is peculiarly
depend on the largesse of industry publicists. This file was formerly
titled "Send Me Music to Review": it was the file that I would point to
then I wanted a publicist to send me a record, or better still put me
on their mailing lists and send me lots of records. I've been moderately
successful at this, but the paying market for writing music reviews has
steadily declined over the past decade -- technology often gets the blame
here, but one should not overlook the increasing small-mindedness of the
business class, a phenomenon which has transformed the boom-and-bust
cycle into bust-and-retrench.
As of January 1, 2014, I'm withdrawing my request that you send me
records. I'm suspending publication of my Jazz Prospecting column --
almost all of the CDs I have been receiving were aimed at review in
that column -- and I am not actively soliciting freelance jobs for
writing music reviews. (See my initial blog announcement
here). I expect that since I won't be reviewing your
records in that column, it will no longer be cost-effective (if indeed
it ever was) for you to send me CDs. (However, I will qualify this
slightly near the bottom of this file.)
But first, a brief history of my music writing, virtually all
available somewhere on this website:
In the mid-1970s I decided that rock criticism could be a serious
as well as amusing way to look at American culture and politics, so I
started dabbling. Robert Christgau read some of my stuff and invited
me to write for the Village Voice, which I did occasionally 1975-79.
During this time I also co-founded a short-lived 'zine, Terminal
Zone. Those pieces, plus a couple from the mid-1990s and "A Rock
& Roll Critic Is Something to Be" -- my contribution to Christgau's
2001 Festschrift, are archived
here. From 1980 to 2000 I worked as a software engineer. I made good money
and bought a lot of records, but wrote very little about them. In the
early 1990s I started making a systematic effort to fill in the various
holes in my knowledge of popular music history: blues, country, r&b,
world, and especially jazz. I became generally expert in all those areas,
and started writing a bit (e.g., the 1995 "Jazz for Dummies" piece, in
the archive above). In 2001, I lost my software job. I explored several interests for
a while, the most fateful being the website I build for
Robert Christgau. Among
other things, it led me into contact with numerous fans of Christgau's
work. One of them, Michael Tatum, edited a Chicago-based webzine at
the time, Static Multimedia. He offered me carte blanche to write a
column, so I came up with
Recycled Goods, a consumer guide to
reissues (later expanded to include new as well as old world music).
This started in February 2003 and "ended" -- 51 columns and 2207
records later -- after January 2008. Here "ended" means at Static
Multimedia. I continued posting Recycled Goods columns on my website
up to December 2013 (115 columns, 4088 records total), although in
later columns I was more likely to review old records than recent
reissues. I also wrote some additional pieces for Static -- most
notably an extended "consumer guide" to William Parker and Matthew
Shipp -- archived
here. Starting in 2003, I wrote several pieces for the Village Voice,
mostly on jazz (Jimmy Lyons, Miroslav Vitous, Ken Vandermark, David
S. Ware, Billy Bang, David Murray, Anthony Braxton, but also John
Prine). These are archived
here. In 2005, after Gary Giddins
left the Voice, Robert Christgau asked me to write a Jazz Consumer
Guide column, which I did approximately every three months until
2012. By that time Christgau had been cut loose and replacement
music editor Rob Harvilla had left. Subsequent Voice editors were
incommunicative and evidently uninterested in jazz -- thus ended
my main paying outlet for my writing. The Jazz Consumer Guides
are archived
here, along with prospecting notes. Along the way, I had a few more gigs. In 2004, I wrote a reissues
column,
Rearview Mirror, for Michaelangelo Matos
at Seattle Weekly. I wrote a package of 25 entries for Rolling Stone's
[New] Rolling Stone Album Guide in 2004.
I also wrote a weekly column for
F5 in 2006. After six Jazz Consumer Guides, I decided that I was getting
many more records than I would ever be able to squeeze into my limited
column space, so I started posting Jazz Prospecting notes every week:
the main point being to make the entire process more transparent,
but also to keep a more extensive record of as much new jazz as I
was able to get my hands on. After Jazz CG expired, I kept on posting
Jazz Prospecting every week, up through December 30, 2013. I then
collected these posts into monthly chunks from February 2012 through
December 2013, archived
here. In 2007 I did some work for Rhapsody: Christgau had worked out a
deal where they paid him to be able to use his Consumer Guide reviews,
and I did much of the technical work to make that possible. I got a
free Rhapsody subscription as part of the deal, and started to keep
notes on records I heard using it. I later wound up paying for my
subscription, and eventually settled into a pattern of posting my
notes monthly. Over time I expanded this to include other download
sources, as well as the few non-jazz CDs I got (or bought). As of
December 31, 2013, the
archive contains notes on 4172
records.
As of January 1, 2014, the archive area of the website adds up to about
2.5 million words. The website also contains a
database
with ratings of 22,655 records (and discographical information on another
25,000 records, selected as noteworthy from any of dozens of guides).
There is a list of
1,000 highly recommended albums.
There are lists of rated albums from 2003 forward, which show increasing
coverage from 2003 (646 records) to 2012 (1190). (I stop adding records
to these files the end of the following year. The
2013 file has 1118 records as of
December 31, 2013, and will continue to grow in 2014. I've also kept
increasingly sophisticated metacritic data files from
2007 through
2013 -- the latter tracking
over 8000 new releases (including the separate compilations file). For
more links, see
here.
Actually, from January 1, 2014 into the indefinite future, I do plan
on continuing to write the following on my website:
I will (normally) write a weekly "Music Week" post, which will
start (as it has for the last year or two) with a "rated count" metric,
and will end with two (probably short) lists: one is a list of the
week's newly rated albums (but no reviews or notes), the second an
unpacking list. If anyone does send me a record, I will at least list
it in the unpacking list. I won't guarantee that I'll rate it, but
if I do eventually it will show up in the rated list, as well as in
the database and the year-end file. This gives people who follow my
blog for music advice some reason to continue to do so, while greatly
reducing my workload. The weekly posts may include additional thoughts
about music as strike me as appropriate. I'm not going to stop listening
to music (although I imagine I'll be spending more time listening to
old music I still own rather than trying to keep track of new music
I won't get). I will post at least one Rhapsody Streamnotes file per month,
probably toward the end of the month. Entries will be graded, and may
(or may not) include a note or review. Most will come from Rhapsody
or other streaming services, but any actual CDs will be merged in, as
well any download links I follow up on. (Another way of looking at
this is that I'll be merging the discontinued Jazz Prospecting and
Recycled Goods columns into RS -- although I expect a reduction in
my workload from doing so.) I expect that I will also continue to be invited to vote in
polls, at least for a while, and these will result in music-oriented
blog posts.
I expect to spend most of my time working on non-music-related writing
projects, but I do expect to put some work into several music-related
ventures:
I will write a spec for a community-oriented music info website,
and do some technical work to build such a website, but the day-to-day
operation of such a website will depend on other people taking charge.
If this does happen, I may contribute some writing to the website, and
that may lead to a revision of this file. I am also willing to seed
such a website with my writing-and-data-to-date. I have a domain name
I've been planning on using for this --
terminalzone.net -- although
someone else could take over implementation of the spec. I want to write (or collaborate on) a piece of free software to
manage and coordinate a ratings and rankings database for music records.
This could be used by the above website, but as free software can also
be used to create other websites, or indeed to manage personal inventories
such as my own ratings database. I want to implement an in-house jukebox system, and publish some
sort of document on how others can do the same. Presumably most of the
software is already available, and maybe even the know how -- I just
haven't figured it out yet. I will continue to support the website needs of Robert Christgau
and Francis Davis, and would consider doing so for other notable
critics.
I have many reasons for wanting to cut back on the amount of time
that I have been spending reviewing records: to work on other writing
projects, to simplify my own lifestyle. Another is that I've taken
some satisfaction in regarding myself as a "professional" writer, and
it's hard to do that when you're not making any money: in 2013 my
writing income finally dropped to $0, despite working harder than
ever. I've left open the possibility that I might again write music
reviews if offered paying gigs. If that does (miraculously) happen
I may need to revise this file. I've never shown any aptness whatsoever
for pitching my writing -- to date, all my writing jobs (paying ones,
anyway) have dropped into my lap. So I'll leave myself that out, but
don't expect anything to come of it.
If, despite my disclaimer, you still with to send me CDs, use the
following address:
Tom Hull
747 N. Faulkner
Wichita, KS 67203
You can send me email.
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