Some of the best writing about music does not come from traditional music criticism.
Sometimes it comes from novelists, poets, essayists, memoirists, and critics who approach music from the side: through memory, obsession, fandom, grief, identity, place, desire, or the strange way a song can attach itself to a life.
Writers on Music is a series about music as literature, memory, and lived experience.
These posts look at books and essays where writers take music seriously without always writing like experts. They may be writing about a favorite band, a cultural moment, a vanished scene, a genre, a musician, or the private feeling of listening to one song at exactly the wrong or right time.
The point is not just to ask whether the writer “gets” the music.
The better question is: what does music allow the writer to see?
A great piece of writing about music can become more than commentary. It can be autobiography, criticism, cultural history, love letter, argument, confession, or elegy. Sometimes the song is the subject. Sometimes the song is the doorway.
Full Archive
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The Best Writing About Music Is Not Always Music Criticism
Some of the best writing about music does not tell you whether an album is good. That may sound like a dig at music criticism, but it’s not.… Continue Reading
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Ralph Ellison and Jazz: How It Helped Him Hear the Complexity of America
Some writers mention music to set a scene, whereas Ralph Ellison treated music as a way of knowing. That difference matters. With Ellison, jazz is not just atmosphere.… Continue Reading
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Novelists Who Couldn’t Stop Writing About Rock
A tour through the fiction writers who turned amps, afterparties, and guitar feedback into literary language. Some novelists reference music. Others live in it. Their characters walk through… Continue Reading
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Susan Sontag, Greil Marcus, and the Art of Writing About Music
There’s the famous phrase that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, meaning it’s beautiful but pointless, a doomed translation between two incompatible languages. I can personally… Continue Reading