"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” But that’s probably Elvis Costello underselling his own aptitude for imagistic prose, as many of his own song lyrics can be poetry. As with all writing, the best music journalism isn’t just about dropping adjectives, but the kind that somehow engages the auditory imagination. More powerful than verbs are nouns. Exhibit A: Metal, a variant of rock music so loud and dense it deserved its own particular metaphor. As a musician myself, I likewise detest the lazy pigeonholing of clearly diverse performers into a single umbrella term that absolutely has nothing to do with the music itself but by dumb connotation. Or what it is a soundtrack of, or its demographic: the world of culture teems with such terms. “Shoegaze” is one—as a post-punk genre with practitioners catatonically staring downward awash in swirls of dense guitar feedback. “Jukebox hit,” meanwhile, conjures tableaus..
