Hasten to read - while the paywall is relaxed for 24 hours - this fascinating conversation between Kieran Press-Reynolds and Shawn Reynaldo (no relation) for the latter's substack First Floor. Kieran talks about being a Gen Z writer about music + memes + internet subcultures - or as Reynaldo puts it, "mapping the brainrot continuum".
There's also some glimpses into Press-Reynolds family life.
E.g.
"I
think I always wanted to be a writer. When I was six, I made my own newspaper.
But I also had that teenage rebellion thing where I thought that what my
parents did was the lamest thing ever. I’d come home from school and my dad
would be playing weird ambient alien sounds, and I’d think, 'I just want to go
play Minecraft. Turn this off.' Then my mom would come home and she
was exhausted every day from work. Both of my parents were like, 'This is the
worst job. Do not follow in our footsteps'."
I must say I don't remember ever saying it was "the worst job", being a critic - after all, it's got a lot of upsides.
But we did kind of hope he would choose a path that didn't lead to precarity.
And we really didn't expect him to go down that same path. As a teenager he showed no interest at all. I always thought Kieran would do something involving video. Or invent an app.
But he's joined us in the incredible shrinking field.
Here's one you should really read - a loving portrait from his close friend Simon Price, full of details and stories I never knew. For The Quietus.
Update February 1st: lovely extended meditation by Cam Scott on Neil and specifically his bookEastern Spring: a 2nd Gen Memoir . Here's a mix Neil made to go along with Eastern Spring.
David Stubbs directs Kulkarni fans to a classic installment of the Chart Music podcast, in which Neil rails against the turn-to-shite of Melody Maker in the final years of the '90s, late period Britpop, the infamous "Craig David" cover, etc. From about 35 mins in...
David's Gofundme for Neil's daughters has just topped 40K - an amazing testament to the love and respect he inspired. Contribute if you can.
Neil's colleagues at The Wire have assembled a medley of his pieces for the magazine across 20 years of being a contributor. They have also published what may well one of Neil's last bits of writing - they invited him to pick - and comment on - his own favorite pieces written by other people from The Wire's vastarchives.
Apparently there are plans afoot for a Neil Kulkarni anthology. Below are a few links to classic pieces that are already online - some of them rant-mode and some just passionately perceptive about music he loved.
Neil in dialogue with Rudy Tambala of A.R. Kane around the time of the One Little Indian singles anthology (which reminds me that I've still not read his sleevenotes to last year's Kane box A.R.Kive - can anybody help me out here?)
Neil's series A New Nineties, about the groups that have come to be known as The Lost Generation - i.e. first-wave UK post-rock. For The Quietus:
He also did a follow-up Quietus series about the US end of the "New Nineties", worth looking for although some of the groups, the appeal always eluded me I must say.
Finally, a bit of Kulkarni meta-talk... Neil was fierily eloquent about music journalism as a vocation, the point and purpose of criticism, how to do it right.... often this would come out by implication, a sort of photographic negative, in his tirades about the shite that the latterday NME was trying to foist on the world, famous feats of fight-picking that riled up the guilty parties no end. But here at Drowned In Sound, is one of his positive articulations of How to Do It and Why To Do It.
Stunned, heartbroken, by the news about Neil Kulkarni.
I never met Neil in the flesh but I feel like I did, his personality is so vivid in his writing, and as a social media presence and podcaster. By the time Neil started coming down to Melody Maker from Coventry, I would have been mostly in New York. I did have some lovely phone conversations with him when getting him to review rap records for Spin (his opinions annoyed some of my staider colleagues - mission accomplished!). But mostly I know him through his writing and his presence on Facebook, where he'd be chatting about the stuff of everyday life as much as music ( he was enormously knowledgeable and opinionated about crisps, for instance! And one of his last tweets was a photo he took of a large Swiss roll someone mysteriously left on a stairwell banister).
As a music writer, Neil Kulkarni is one of the greats - the kind of stylist and personality born for (and born in) the UK’s weekly music press. Like many readers I expect, my favorite Neil mode was the rant – these were things of great rhythmic beauty, deadly in their accuracy - incendiary devices that incensed their deserving targets. The energy he could transmit through words was extraordinary. But Neil wrote in many other modes beyond the polemical and shouty - ruminative and tender, for instance, in the pieces for The Quietus that evolved into Eastern Spring: a 2nd Gen Memoir,his 2012 book for Zer0.
"Life force" is a phrase I keep seeing in tributes. I so wish I’d felt the heat of it up close and in person, but it blazed through his writing. It seems inconceivable that this fire has been extinguished, way too early. The world feels colder today.
My heart goes out to Neil's daughters, partner, and family; his friends; his colleagues past and present; his bandmates; his students; and his fans and readers.
Close friend and fellow Chart Music podcaster David Stubbs has started a Go-Fund Me for Neil's children.
Neil aged 18 going on 19, in 1991, just before starting to write for Melody Maker.
Tributes from his friends and editors and colleagues are too numerous to list here, but here's a few to start with
Simon Price meets the moment with this loving portrait at The Quietus
Derek Walmsley, who worked with Neil at the Wire, remembers him at his blog Slow Motion
Bizarrely, both me and my son had pieces pending when the news came - and they've both just run.
One of the great things about Pitchfork is the space they've given to young writers to go wide and deep (old writers too!). Here's Kieran Press-Reynolds with a thinkpiece on shitpost-modernism: "the flood of 2020s music that straddles the line between serious and silly, shattering conventions and exploding taste boundaries".
One of my favorite things - as a reader and a contributor - Pitchfork does is the Sunday Review: writers going long and deep on records the magazine never covered before, usually because they came out long before the website existed. After a tough week, it feels bittersweet to be this Sunday’s Reviewer, with a paean to Cocteau Twins and Head Over Heels, one of my favorite albums of all time.
In the piece, I reference a rave review in NME that turned my head around after initially finding the album off-putting. By Barney Hoskyns, that review can be read here at Pantheon. And here (also here as scans) is a much later piece where Barney interviews Cocteau Twins about the length and breadth of their career.
On the subject of music journalists and music journalism, there's been a lot of interesting, if necessarilyanguished commentary about what happened at Pitchfork and the future for criticism. I particularly like these thoughts for NPR music from Ann Powers, especially the last of her three points:
"To me, the best thing about music writing is that compared to other elements of the culture economy, it’s relatively useless. Some forms of entertainment journalism feed the star-maker machinery more than others: celebrity profiles, for example, flesh out the personae that turn artists into fetish objects....What I love about music writing , though, is that it can sidestep that productive, competitive side of culture, the market-driven need to sell more tickets, more records, more streams. Instead, great music writing messes with productivity by creating a space to slow down and really immerse in someone else’s creative work. To really listen..... I feel nourished by the daring of my fellow scribes, by the way their words are indeed extraneous to the churn of art and emotion as product, carving out a zone where the pause matters, time spent thinking, laughing at a good line, feeling my brain crackle as it absorbs an insight.... In the end, what matters about music writing is exactly the same as what matters about music: It isn’t leading anywhere productive. Instead, it’s offering a break from the grind, a free zone for thought and a few glorious, rejuvenating moments of fun.... Music writing says: Slow down. Pay attention. It witnesses the unfolding of meaning within measured time, and calls back to it"
Absolutely - music and music writing are alike in being one of life's essential inessentials. You can get by without either of them - but why would you want to?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
postscript: former Pitchfork editor in chief Mark Richardson with some fond reminiscences about colleagues who abruptly no longer work there either anymore.
Shawn Reynaldo is a music writer who'sjust published his debut bookFirst Floor: Reflections on Electronic Dance Culturethrough Velocity Press, which has a growing catalogue of interesting tomes on dance music.
The title comes from Shawn's Substack / newsletter First Floor. Check out his columns like this recent one on the rise of spectacle within dance culture.
Recently Shawn and I had a really enjoyable, wide-ranging chat about club culture, nostalgia, futurity, music journalism, genre-naming, and more. For a day or two, the conversation is accessible to non-subscribers here.
I put it to Shawn that we are phonetic near-namesakes. Strangely, he said this had never occurred to him! Perhaps when I was starting my writing career, I should have put an 'o' on the end of my byline - it has a dashing, swashbuckling air.
I had a lot of fun writing this Tidal piece about ChatGPT and whether AI can replace people like me - critics, music journalists, professional opinionators, pundits, pontificators, etc etc. Until they invent something that manifestly enjoys the sound of its own voice, I would say "not quite, not yet".
There's also a playlist I pulled together to go with it, only tangentially linked really but a cool journey through the Man-Machine Interface in music from Tonto's "Jetsex" to Raime's "Our Valleys Are Always Uncanny"
