Maria Sherman, Music & Culture Writer
Maria Sherman, Music & Culture Writer
💭 Thoughts on highlighting under appreciated aspects of culture, the Another Subculture newsletter, and building a life however you see fit.
Maria Sherman is an author, music writer and culture critic currently living in Brooklyn, New York. Her first book, LARGER THAN LIFE: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS was released in 2020. She has worked as a senior writer at Jezebel, managing editor at Gizmodo Media Group, senior correspondent at Fuse TV, and contributor at BuzzFeed Music. You may have seen her work at NPR and in Billboard, SPIN, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and many other quality publications. If she were in a boy band, she’d be the bad boy.
🚗 Current focus
I’d love to share some personal projects and creative ambitions here, but lately whenever I announce my lofty goals they tend not to happen – or, at least, not on my timeline. So instead: I’m working on becoming a less anxious driver. I went to driving school during the pandemic, post-lockdown, and quickly came to the conclusion that we teach teenagers to drive because they are categorically more resilient and less-risk averse than adults, and therefore aren’t terrified of other drivers. I didn’t realize how small my world was before learning to drive, and now I’m driving whenever I can. I’m still terrified, and my efforts are limited to situations where I’m not in New York, but I recently zigged and zagged my way around the mountains of southern Utah. We’re getting there. Or, at least, somewhere.
⏳ How time changes our understanding of history
News broke that Martin Phillipps of the Chills has died right as I sat down to write this, so he’s top of mind. I love the Chills, and the New Zealand/Dunedin sound they created. I consider Phillipps one of the greatest indiepop songwriters of all time, and loving indiepop is a core tenet of my identity. It is a major loss.
I often wonder how the legacy of an artist like Phillipps will be remembered, and how the passing of time changes our understanding of history. Genre is an interesting marker of this, how indiepop became indie pop, a space that symbolizes a huge divide between sound and ethos, or how “Midwest emo” refers to a math-y riff instead of a location on TikTok.
Anyway, if I had to plug one thing right now, I suppose it would be “Kaleidoscope World.”
📚 Highlighting under appreciated aspects of culture
I recently picked up But Will You Love Me Tomorrow? An Oral History of the ‘60s Girl Groups by Laura Flam and Emily Sieu Liebowitz. It’s extensive, and does the work to center these girls and women in their own stories, narratives often obscured to make room for the trope of a male genius producer, or manager, or whatever. I’m always interested in histories that course correct simply by existing, highlighting underserved and under appreciated aspects of culture.
🧚♀️ Building a life however you see fit
It’s not a new idea, but I often find myself returning to The Raincoats’ “Fairytale in the Supermarket,” when Anna da Silva declares “No one teaches you how to live,” brilliantly considered by Jenn Pelly in her 33 ⅓ book on self-titled 1979 album. I tend to think most of us are burdened by a curiosity of how other people function, if what we’re doing is the “right” or “normal” thing to do. But within the song and the great spirit of D.I.Y., it’s the ultimate freedom, the choice to build a life however you see fit.
I’ve got no shortage of heroes and mentors. Today, I’ll say Amanda Petrusich, my former professor and current staff writer at The New Yorker. She’s a generous and thoughtful editor, and one of the great music critics and essayists. Her analysis is so astute – I often find myself reading one of her profiles or features and sitting with a sentence for a while in an attempt to reverse engineer the observations that might’ve led there.
🇬🇧 Another Subculture newsletter
Next month, I’m traveling to London for the first time in 14 years. Travel is a great life-juice rejuvenator; I often feel most myself when I’m somewhere else, open and curious. I am endlessly interested in the ways in which geography informs creativity, and so I’m really excited to see music and friends I haven’t spoken to in years. I’m also a big fan of the Another Subculture newsletter, a London punk listing, so I’m looking forward to actively using their calendar, as opposed to just examining it with envy from 3500 miles away.
📖 The smell of ink on a page
Maybe this is an unimaginative answer, or one that quickly reveals me to be the big ol’ luddite that I am, but: I cannot live without physical books. Nothing against e-readers, if that works for you, but I had a Kindle for like two weeks and it is the most expensive paper weight I’ve ever purchased. (I’ve also found that if you are working on a big project that requires research, and sometimes that research is as simple as reading a long-out-of-print title that you can only acquire physically from a library in the U.K., or whatever, a Kindle doesn’t do you much good.) I worry this makes me an environmental nightmare, and promise that all of my anti-technology ideologies are centered on criticisms over the continued automation of jobs, but nothing beats the smell of ink on the page, right?
Follow Maria on Instagram & Linkedin check out her book here.
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