A message to student journalists

I posted highlights of LMU’s two commencement speeches on social media this weekend. Now I’m sharing the comments that I wrote for the LMU Journalism department’s senior awards party. I didn’t actually look at my notes when I spoke, so this is not exactly what came out of my mouth, but it is the gist of it. This was the evening of May 2, the day after four student journalists were assaulted several miles up the 405 from us at UCLA.

“I look out at you and I see a dark present and a bright future. I think I speak for all of us faculty when I say my heart has been heavy the last few weeks, as students like you across the United States have been stripped of their constitutional rights, sometimes violently. On May 1 at almost 3:30 in the morning, four student journalists at UCLA were assaulted by counter-protestors while they were in the act of doing their job: reporting. Two student journalists at Dartmouth were arrested by police while exercising their first amendment rights. You, the class of 2024, know better than anyone that we live in dangerous times. You have been through it all: Covid, Black Lives Matter, January 6, climate change, and now this. We adults have failed you. I feel this as a teacher and a parent. I recently hosted a forum about the imperative and future of journalism. The imperative – the need for voices reporting from the frontlines, voices of students like those at Columbia’s radio station, which the authorities tried to shut down, because they were daring to report what is actually going on – has never been clearer. Student journalists are under fire because you hold the keys to our democracy. No one knows more than you what a mess we have made of the world, and as the past month has proven, no one is more committed to fixing it. The minute the force of the world turns against you, that is the minute you know you are winning. Keep reporting and telling the truth. Build networks with your peers across the country, because you know what is happening. You are the future of journalism.”

Forum on the future of journalism today!

Fear of a Female Planet

What is the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame afraid of?

The 2024 nominations for popular music’s most famous, and infamous, hall were announced this morning. There are some excellent choices: Cher, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, A Tribe Called Quest, Sade, Eric B. & Rakim, Kool & the Gang, and most of all Sinéad O’Connor. And there are some appalling choices, which I won’t be churlish enough to name here, but I’m guessing you can guess.

My team and I are still counting and calculating, but the racial diversity looks good: 10 of 15 acts have at least one person of color; that’s 66.6 percent. Good. Five have at least one woman: 33.3 percent. Not bad. In terms of individual nominees – which means people who, if inducted, get to vote and have this on their resume for the rest of their lives and in their obituary – there are five women, 47 men. Females account for 9.62 percent of the nominees.

That’s a shade better than the 8 percent figure that the total number of inductees has hovered around since I began counting the individuals in 2019. But it’s still pretty shady.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is afraid of girl power. I said it in 2019, and it’s still evident: They are terrified of women banding together. They repeatedly ignore all-female, or mostly female bands, never nominating, let alone inducting, Labelle, Fanny, TLC, Destiny’s Child, Bikini Kill, Salt-N-Pepa, the Shangri-Las (RIP Mary Weiss), Hole, L7, etc. Yet they love them a collection of mediocre male classic rockers. Okay, I’ll say it: I’m looking at you Foreigner. (Full disclosure: I was a young teen when Double Vision came out and “Hot Blooded” was my jam, but I have moved on.)

It’s a classic technique: Divide and conquer. Honor the individuals, not the collective. It’s also very much a male-gaze thing: It’s easy to objectify a woman alone on stage, much scarier to see a group of women enjoying each other’s support and egging each other on. Jann Wenner may be gone, but the Rock Hall is still led by men, the nominating committee is majority male, and they are still following the same old tired Master narrative.

Once again, no Willie Mae Thornton? After Lynnee Denise’s book and Doja Cat’s song?! And no hailing Queen Latifah?! Rock Hall, do better.

Here’s the complete list of nominees:

Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Cher, Dave Matthews Band, Eric B. & Rakim, Foreigner, Peter Frampton, Jane’s Addiction, Kool & the Gang, Lenny Kravitz, Oasis, Sinéad O’Connor, Ozzy Osbourne, Sade and A Tribe Called Quest

This post has been corrected from an earlier version.

Talking Joan Didion With Rabbi Sol Solomon

Tune in tomorrow, Saturday Jan. 27, to hear me in conversation with the good Rabbi Sol Solomon on the Dave’s Gone By podcast. I bet you will laugh!

Remember? Mary Weiss

The song starts with an echoing minor key piano chord. Then three women in subdued voices with strong Long Island accents have a conversation over the sound of melancholy humming. 

“Is she really going out with him?”

“I don’t know. There she is, let’s ask her.”

Thus begins the melodramatic story of Jimmy and Betty in “Leader of the Pack,” one of the most famous songs of the 1960s. In a high-pitched wail over a backdrop of heavily reverbed drums, Mary Weiss tells the tragic tale of her doomed love affair with a biker, complete with racing engine and screeching brakes sound effects. Forget girl group odes to soldier boys; the Shangri-Las sang the praises of the bad boy. 

Loving bad boys made the Shangri-Las bad girls. They dressed the part: tight pants, black leather boots, heavy eye makeup. The Shangri-Las featured not one but two pairs of sisters: Mary and Betty Weiss and twins Marge and Mary Ann Ganser. They met at Andrew Jackson High School in Queens, New York. They were white working class women who grew up singing in church. Their tough girl look reflected their urban street roots. At a time when the Beatles were still wearing mod matching suits, girl groups such as the Shangri-Las and the Ronettes were rebelling against respectable fashion, lifestyle, and politics. 

“Leader” and “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” the Shangri-Las’ other iconic smash hit, offer over the top productions by the infamous Shadow Morton. These are not showcases of great singing or profound lyrics. They are more like miniature B movies, glorious in their unrepentant cheese and teenage angst. Bands like the Shangri-Las made young women everywhere feel like this was something they could do: sing straight from their hearts with a group of their literal or symbolic sisters. RIP Mary Weiss.

Stick a fork in it

The news that Pitchfork is being swallowed by GQ dealt a body blow to many of us for multiple reasons. My heart goes out to those able journalists now looking for work in a market increasingly flooded with workers from other recent layoffs, such as those at Bandcamp. The shrinking of platforms for professional critical discourse and news about music is alarming for artists and labels as well as those who work for websites. For me, the most sickening aspect is the fact a music publication has been consumed by a men’s journal. This has been a huge part of the problem of music journalism for decades; it’s one of the reasons Rolling Stone has always covered women so little and poorly – in the ‘90s when I freelanced for Stone, we were always told that it was a men’s magazine; Wenner Media sibling publication Us was for women. P4k started off being a rather typical nerdy indie boy blog, but it rose above those snarky beginnings to become a platform for diverse types of music and writers. I loved the way it reckoned with its own past by reevaluating its reviews. The fact that a female POC, Puja Patel, has lost her admirable run as editor in chief is a stab in the guts – that the knife was wielded by another woman, Anna Wintour, sickening. (For the record, I never wrote for Pitchfork and never felt a part of its community, but still I grieve.)

That said, I discussed the news with the 14 undergraduate students in my music journalism class on Wednesday. Only two of them said they ever pay attention to Pitchfork, and all they really know about the site is its rating system – and they aren’t crazy about that. They see it as arrogant, judgmental. Instead this group of dedicated music lovers prefers to find out about new releases through Spotify, social media, and friends and family. (One student reads The New York Times, bless her heart.)

This is a small survey sampling, but it confirms what many of us know: Forget the death of newspapers and magazines (that’s old news about old news), we are now in the end of the era of websites and blogs. Young people crowd source their news, information, entertainment, and opinions. As one student said, she would rather figure out whether she is going to like an artist by reading a bunch of different people’s comments about them, rather than one person’s opinion. And of course, consumers don’t need critics to tell them what records to buy any more: they can hear them themselves on apps and YouTube.

This is all very disturbing for critics, journalists, and media companies, and it’s also bad news for artists – criminally underpaid by Spotify – and the music industry. The only comfort this offers to the talented people at Pitchfork is that they should realize it’s not that they weren’t doing good and important work. It’s just, well, the times, they are a changing. Again.

Notes from a book tour

Researching The World According to Joan Didion, I traced the writer’s movements, from her birth and childhood in Sacramento, to her education at Cal, to her publishing apprenticeship in Manhattan, to her emergence as a celebrated writer and dedicated family woman in LA, back to the Upper East Side. I started to retrace the tracing last week in a short book tour.

With Robert Weidner

At the reading at the picturesque Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley, history repeated: Joan’s old beau, Robert Weidner, was back in town, telling stories of their romance from the front row. At the Center for Sacramento History, where I had found the Didions’ old addresses in phonebooks and disturbing racism in her grandparents’ papers, the audience was sharp and inquisitive, teaching me a thing or two. Back home, the Book Jewel welcomed me with its excellent book AND plushie collection, plus the store cat. The well-informed audience included neighbors, colleagues, students, and political legend Jane Harman. But my faves were the three South Bay women who were taking an online Didion course together – and meeting each other in person for the first time. Writers need readers.

Like a true Californian, I drove, which was a delight as I rode the river roads in the Sacramento Delta and ate some of the best wonton soup I’ve ever had, but exhausting on the endless freeway there and back. Joan wrote about this route too, in “Notes from a Native Daughter”: “All day long, all that moves is the sun, and the big Rainbird sprinklers.”

With research assistant Tyler Roland

With LA Times reporter Seema Mehta

Dear friends the Palmers

Paiges the Book Jewel cat

In Isleton

Jane Harman signed my poster

With sculptor Lisa Reinertson

Isleton