ran through the jungle (of modern music)

 

Fun piece by Kieran Press-Reynolds looking at oblique strategies for digging up weird music, with a hierarchy of engagements mode from basic to ultra-obscurantist.

I had to look up the word "ran-through" 

Calling All Pop Music Critics!

My friends Oliver Wang and Sharon Mizota are conducting a survey of music critics who currently work in America.  Please participate if you fit the description and can spare a few minutes to leave some completely anonymized data. Message from Wang / Mizota below:

Calling all pop music critics! Please take the Critical Minded Pop Music Critic Survey. This survey is open to pop music critics working in the U.S. or for U.S.-based outlets and seeks to understand the opportunities and obstacles you’ve encountered over the course of your career. The results will be included in a report by Critical Minded in early 2026, including recommendations for how critics of color and criticism in general can be better supported in the future. Critical Minded is a grantmaking and learning initiative fiscally sponsored by Allied Media. Please click here for more information and to take the survey.

WHEN MATES MAKE BOOKS - Pat Blashill, Someday All the Adults Will Die! - The Birth of Texas Punk

 

Writer-photographer Pat Blashill is a very old mate. We've been friends since 1989, after working together on some stories in New York for Melody Maker - he did the artist portraits and I wrote up the interviews. One of them was Sun Ra, would you believe!

Before he moved to New York, Pat was involved in Austin's punk-and-after scene, documenting the mayhem in real-time with his camera. That pictorial trove fed into his first book Texas Is The Reason. Now Blashill has written the definitive history on the Texas punk and postpunk scene. Someday All The Adults Will Die! For which I was glad to offer this ringing endorsement: 

"Texas had America’s wildest, weirdest punk-and-after scene – a primal playpen of shock rock, instinctive Dada, psychedelic freakout, performance art, scream therapy and absurdist anti-politics. Austin native Pat Blashill was in the thick of it, photographing the messy madness as it unfolded. In Some Day All The Adults Will Die!, Blashill shepherds the ultra-vivid memories of his contemporaries and threads through his own hindsight insights, forming an essential document thick with the textures of a long-gone real-gone time.  Hilarious and poignant, this is a story never before told – and an inspiration to future free-thinkers and trouble-makers."

Published by the University of Texas Press, Someday All the Adults Will Die! is available here.