Music
Open Letter to Oxford American
Dear Editors of the Oxford American-
Congratulations on your latest, the annual “Music Issue” complete with a 26 song CD of (mostly) undiscovered southern music. The publication is one of the most anticipated of the year among all magazines, and it is to your credit as editors and tastemakers.
However, one thing caught our notice — this list of contributors posted on pages 14-16 (see below):
Baretta. White male; receding hair line.
Barthelme. White male; older.
Bowers. White male; fake-hipster.
Brockmeier. White male; as baby.
Cohen. White male; w/ hand gesture.
Cook. White male; w/ glasses.
Ehrhardt. White female!
Gardiner. White male. Nondescript.
Greenman. White male; from Brooklyn.
Himes. White male; with mask.
Jenkins. White male; with fu manchu.
Petrusich. White female!
Powell. White male; w/ umbrella.
St. Germain. White female!
Stephenson. White male; from a distance.
Sullivan. White male; w/ buttondown.
Uhl. White male; w/ mountain beard.
Wasik. White male. Nondescript.
Whorton. White male; in shadow.
Zanes. White male; w/ smile.
Seriously. We’ve seen more diversity at a Strom Thurmond family reunion. To be fair, music journalism is a field inordinately dominated by white males, but did you even try to find anyone of a different ethnic background? And as a magazine based in Arkansas, is this very good for your image?
There’s an even bigger point here. For a long while now, music journalism has been a fairly unchanged art form. Lester Bangs wrote the rules, Nick Kent tweaked them, and hundreds of kids on places like Pitchfork follow them like a sacred scroll. Until music journalism finds new voices from varied backgrounds, the same boring results will remain. And by not actively seeking out writers of another gender or race you’re actively endorsing the overblown, turgid language that is slowly killing the genre.
As one of the great venues of music writing in America, you are held to a higher standard, and you must do better.
And now for an ad hominem attack. Can someone please slap those sunglasses off William Bowers’s face? You ain’t foolin’ us, nerd-o!
* * *
Open Letter to the Editors of the Believer.
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Preson Tense is a professional dancer living in Brooklyn.
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Open Letter to Obsolete Vernicular:
Dear Obsolete Vernacular,
I appreciate your interest in THE OXFORD AMERICAN’s annual Southern Music Issue and CD, I really do. It is a true labor of love.
I also think it is fair and relevant for you to mention the lack of “ethnic” faces in our lineup of writers for the recent issue.
But when you ask the incredibly lazy rhetorical question of, “[D] id you even try to find anyone of a different ethnic background?,” you clearly imply racism, which crosses a moral line.
In this day and age, people quickly lose their careers and public standing if they are found guilty of racism. Out of respect for the power of that charge, one MUST ALWAYS TAKE EXTRA CARE in leveling it.
Go the extra step, so to speak, to make sure one’s charge of racism has validity.
For example, why didn’t you just ask somebody here directly if we had “even [tried]” to sign up a writer of a different ethnic background before so loosely presenting that as a possibility or was the pleasure in making a cheapshot just too juicy to ignore?
Certainly implying that other people are racist makes it clear you are not!
Guess what? We tried, over and over, to sign up writers with “different ethnic” backgrounds. But guess what? We failed. We don’t control people and writers have a right to turn us down whenever they want, regardless of their ethic background.
Another crucial point is that we don’t judge writers by the color of their skin. (We may go after writers who happen to have ethnic backgrounds but that’s not why we go after them.) The majority of the manuscripts we accept are done so without knowledge of the writer’s skin color, political or sexual persuasion, religious beliefs, etc. Sometimes you can’t even tell a writer’s gender by his or her name.
Martin Luther King, Jr., said that people should be judged by the content of their character—and I believe that, fervently, whether you do or don’t. And I will adhere to that belief even if it means it opens me up to occassional ridicule.
I mean, for crying out loud, I don’t know what ethic background you are. Should I know that before deciding whether to think about your comments?
Another point is that the issues that we put out, music and otherwise, regularly focus on people and issues of particular interest to people of “different ethnic backgrounds.” Is that history irrelevant in a discussion about a magazine’s racial proclivities?
In your book it is!
Mid-way through our work on the Music Issue somebody wrote to me to say, You know it would be quite ballsy of you all to put Thelonius Monk on your cover. To which I replied: Quite frankly, it was ballsy of us to put Sam Cooke on last year’s Music Issue.
In the end, we did put Monk on the cover but not because we thought it was ballsy—or because Monk was black. We put in the image on the cover because we fell in love with it. (We were already in love with the subject.) Not that it matters to ME, but the person who proposed the particular image we ended up using was white.
Again to be crystal clear: I am not saying I was happy that we didn’t have more ethnic variety with our contributors. But I am saying your very pointed implication was shabby, lazy, and factually wrong.
Please judge us by our content.
Sincerely,
Marc Smirnoff
editor
THE OXFORD AMERICAN
201 Donaghey Avenue, Main 107
Conway, Arkansas 72035-5001
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Phone: (501) 450-3497
Cell: (501) 412-2190
http://www.oxfordamericanmag.com
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