I've just been turned away from the front door at Living Gallery in Bushwick, as a line forms on a rainy Thursday night.
I called Milan Verma, one of the editors of No Bells, the blog covering internet music, which organized tonight's event. “Hey, this is Adlan, can you let me in?”
“I don’t know, man,” Verma replies. “We're at capacity. Badly.”
This is madness. Won't I get into reading the music press?
But minutes later, Verma's partner and No Bells founder, Mano Sundaresan, appeared at the front door, motioned me in, and said, “You're good.” Oof.
Inside is a room filled with blank white walls, a single microphone, a string of lights in No Bells' signature purple, and a few music journalists. Within fifteen minutes, I'm throwing my newly purchased t-shirt over my shoulders like I'm at a music festival, and half the room is full and I'm already starting to sweat. I was starting to feel like I might recognize every other face from Twitter. The J train rumbles overhead, and Sundaresan grabs the microphone and announces that the readings will begin soon, despite the devastating media news. In the world of music journalism And then, he's glad so many people gathered to hear some of his favorite music writers read their music.
The first reader, Kieran Bryce Reynolds, announced that he was a culture correspondent at Insider “until today, so I'm here to celebrate unemployment with Yale,” and the audience cheered. He pays tribute to Pitchfork editors Ryan Dombal and Jillian Mapes, and tells us about the Dada music cultures developing online. Then Mancaper read Conté from her own Rolling Stone cover story on SZA (“I'm a reformed theater kid, so I live for this”), and Alphonse Pierre read his profile of Cash Cobain, the New York drill guru who drove him from Queens to downtown Manhattan Preparing for his show at the Bowery Ballroom, his hands were slippery from pizza grease.
Last week, it seemed like music journalism had taken a backseat – I thought that maybe the idea of people wanting to read other people's critical reactions to music was just a circumstantial quirk of the last century. But somehow, just a week later, I found myself looking around at a sold-out room full of people who had come just to hear people reading music journalism on their phones. Music is collective, and so are our reactions to it. Even in the absence of industry, people may still be interested.
I look at these links and see the press present:
