RJ on L.A.

RJ Smith wrote about rock music for the Village Voice and Spin before landing at the LA Weekly and, now, at Los Angeles magazine—where he is a senior editor and does most of the media reporting and criticism. In an interview posted at RockCritics.com, Smith remembers his days at the Michigan Daily with Ann Marie Lipinski of the Chicago Tribune, Richard Berke of the New York Times and Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly and talks about being a critic of L.A. media. Smith also explains his book on the musical history of African American Los Angeles, to be published this summer.

When did you start writing for Los Angeles magazine and what is it about writing about the media that moves you today like music writing once moved you?
RJ: After a number of years at the Voice, and at Spin after that, writing for audiences that you tend to feel already know the lay of the land you're writing about, and for whom you maybe don't have to flag every reference, after that I wanted to see if there was a way to keep some thread of what I had been doing while trying to reach an audience that had to be persuaded of whatever it was I was arguing. Opening up my writing, to a more general audience, just sort of flowed out of that.

Around the time I started thinking about opening up my writing, I got the opportunity to write and edit at LA Weekly. I thought I'd come to L.A. for a couple of years and be out, but this is such an amazing, information place, I haven't wanted to leave. There's still stuff I discover when I turn a corner a mile away from my house. I don't miss the grid of the NYC map or mind.

The editor of LA Weekly, Kit Rachlis, moved on eventually to Los Angeles magazine. He's a great editor, and his excitement about the city is palpable. The media is just something that I've always been obsessed with--and press criticism, too. Alexander Cockburn did it incredibly well at the Voice; Dave Carr wrote a great column for DC's City Pages. In Los Angeles half of what the media means comes down to the Los Angeles Times, it's a real monolith out here, and I have only started to wrap my brain around its content and influence. L.A. has seen little solid press criticism in the time I've been out here, since 1990. So it seemed like fertile ground for saying something.

You still write about music a little. You do the occasional review for Blender. Do you think Blender is the best of the music magazine out there today? Do you read the other ones?

RJ: I think in general music mags are suffering these days. I try to keep up, but I can't say I'm as regularly stoked as I was even a few years ago. Commercial pressures are bigger than ever. Look at Spin, where Jon Dolan, Will Hermes, Charles Aaron and the rest form a bench as talented and stylish as any mag has had in years. You just wouldn't know it from what comes out of the commercial process of putting a magazine together and trying to find an audience who'll pay for it. But damn, if you let those guys do their own magazine, it would be brilliant. I like working for Blender: they have a sense of humor....
You have been working on a book about African American Los Angeles in the 1940s. I believe it comes out this summer--The Great Black Way. Was it the culture and cultural influence on us today from that time and place that attracted you to the project?

RJ: What attracted me in the first place to write The Great Black Way (it comes out this June, Public Affairs Books is the publisher) was that I wanted to read a book about the musical history of African American L.A., which seems to have had a certain peak in the 1940s and early 1950s. At the time I started on it, in the late '90s, there really wasn't a solid book out there. Then, when I got going, I realized how limiting it would be to just focus on the music that came out of Central Avenue, black L.A.'s Main Street: Central Avenue had Mingus and Ornette and T-Bone Walker and young Ray Charles and on and on, but it also had a lot more--there was Chester Himes writing these amazing novels and short stories about L.A., and the great black vaudevillian Pigmeat Markham was here, not to mention an incredible, all but unremembered early chapter in the civil rights movement. L.A. was so segregated then that all these little worlds, music, art, organizing workers in the defense factories, were interconnected, and disconnected from the white part of town. So I learned how just writing about the music without looking at who was in the audience was missing the story--because there was so much interconnectedness here. I think enlarging the focus makes it a more interesting book, too.

Non-Angelenos circulate a clich� that we don't have a history. Actually, there are stories all over the place, and the history is fresher in a city younger than, say, New York. What we haven't always had are good storytellers. The world of Central Avenue in the 1940s had a huge influence on so much going on today: it informed the civil rights movement, influenced hip-hop, modern black comedy, it created a modern sensibility I call black noir. You just wouldn't know it because people haven't looked much at the subject. This all interested me.