Matthew Perpetua Interview | Music Journalism Insider

Written by Todd L. Burns and published December 6th 2020 in the Music Journalism Insider newsletter.

I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. If you’re not familiar with the newsletter already, click here to find out more.

Matthew Perpetua is the owner and proprietor of Fluxblog, a long-running mp3 blog. Matthew started the site in 2002, and continues its formula of one post and one song to this day. More recently, however, Matthew has branched out: He’s put together a lot of excellent genre/era playlists, which—to my mind—is also a form of music journalism. He’s also just launched Fluxpod, a podcast version of the blog, which features Matthew in conversation with various folks about music.

How did you get to where you are today, professionally?

My career began in February of 2002 when I started Fluxblog, which at that point was a blog written with the intended audience of people I knew from message boards. I used the name Flux—which was based on the Pavement song “Flux = Rad”—and that’s how I arrived at the name. If I had any idea I was doing something that I’d be doing for most of my life, I would’ve probably chosen something else.

I started the site just a bit before graduating from art school, and it was basically a thing I did to fill up time while I was unemployed and adrift. I settled on the mp3 blog format fairly early on, inspired by some UK sites like Boom Selection, which hosted mashup mp3s. I was writing to a very small audience for a while, and just kept with it because I liked having a routine and enjoyed the hunt for cool and unknown music to cover.

The site started getting real attention at the end of 2003 when I posted the LCD Soundsystem song “Yeah,” and then over the next few years the site was covered in a lot of press about mp3 blogs. I started getting some offers to do freelance writing and some other things as a result of doing the site, and since I didn’t really have any other career options at the time I just rolled with it. From there I did stints with the Associated Press, MTV, New York Magazine, Pitchfork, Public Radio International, and I eventually had a full-time job at Rolling Stone. After I was laid off from Rolling Stone I was hired to launch a music section at BuzzFeed, but after a year or two I became more of a generalist writer there, and that mutated into being in charge of quiz content for five years.

And through all that time, I kept doing Fluxblog. No matter what I’m doing, I’m always doing Fluxblog.

Did you have any mentors along the way? What did they teach you?

Pretty early on in doing Fluxblog I was writing about my love of The Best Show on WFMU fairly often and interviewed Tom Scharpling. I wouldn’t say Tom was a formal mentor or anything, but he was very supportive of me and was a role model of someone who was doing his own thing on his own terms and had been doing that for a long time as he’d come up in zines and small labels. Tom remains a big inspiration to me.

Somewhere along the line I befriended Rob Sheffield, who was a very enthusiastic reader of the site. I’d been reading Rob’s work since I was a young teen, and his writing in the Spin Alternative Record Guide was especially formative for me. I’ve learned a lot from Rob—sometimes really practical things like how to write a book proposal or him just pushing me to consider writing a book in the first place, but I think he’s been most important to me as an example of a writer who engages with art in an open-minded, big-hearted way.

I think he and I are kindred spirits in that we tend to look at artists as people who know something and are trying to share something with their audience. I feel like a lot of arts criticism comes from a position of not fully respecting artists and assuming they’re idiots in some way. Having a background in art school and making my own art and music has made me an empathetic critic—I go into even a fairly negative piece hoping to understand what an artist is trying to communicate, which is the basis of critiques in art school.

I’ve never known Douglas Wolk well, but his encouragement always meant a lot to me and he’s similar to Rob in that I’ve been reading him since I was very young and his ethos of striving to make critical work that enhance the reader’s experience of the art has been very instructive to me. I also want to recognize Dan Kois and Doree Shafrir, who both gave me major career opportunities and were incredibly important in shaping me as a professional writer.

Walk me through a typical day-to-day for you right now.

These days I generally write four Fluxblog entries per week, and those generally take an hour or less depending on what I have to say. For the most part the posts that are longer usually are written faster than the ones that are very brief because the latter can sometimes be a case of me not knowing what to say. I’m always trying to find music to feature, and the site tends to become more difficult when I don’t have material that’s sparking inspiration in any way. I’ve made playlists a part of the project recently, and I’ve always got a few of those in the works either in a research or sequencing phase.

I’ve started working on the Fluxpod podcast in the past couple months, and now I’ve got this whole other process of recording those interviews and editing them. I have some experience with editing audio from having worked in radio for a little while, but I’m learning on the job as I do that. I feel like I’m competent in producing something that sounds a little above amateurish now, but my goal is to have a very professional sounding product before too long.

My main income in the past year or so has come mainly from consulting work based on my quiz expertise, and lately I’ve been working full hours four days a week on a project with a start up and doing other jobs as they come to me.

Oh, and I also maintain a blog of critical writing about X-Men comics, mainly the current run by Jonathan Hickman. That’s been a very fun project in writing about an entirely different artform. The schedule for that largely depends on when things are published.

Tell me all about the new podcast.

Fluxpod is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time as a lifelong radio fan and a fairly heavy podcast listener in the time when I don’t listen to music. The show will basically be me talking to a guest about music in some way—sometimes it’ll be music writers, sometimes musicians, sometimes music industry people, sometimes just interesting people from other fields who are also quite into music. The long term goal is to have it all add up to cover a very wide range of experiences with music, and to offer a sort of extemporaneous music criticism or music journalism. I also just want it to be entertaining, and to be something that can introduce people to songs and ideas.

I’m producing two episodes per week—one free, the other paywalled for Patreon subscribers. This is basically the same model as a lot of the left wing podcasts I follow, like Champagne Sharks and Chapo Trap House. I’m pretty serious about doing this, and as you can tell, I’m willing to keep doing a thing over and over and over for a long time. My hope is that enough people subscribe that I can phase out a lot of other work and just make this my primary living. This is basically the first time in nearly 19 years I’ve actually tried to make Fluxblog my actual job as opposed to something that I treat like a part time job. Maybe if Patreon had existed in the 2000s things would have been much different for me, but alas.

You’ve recently done a lot of playlists. Why have you gravitated to that?

The earliest version of this for me was the annual Fluxblog year-end survey mixes, which then turned into these huge research-heavy decade survey mixes. That stuff dates back to around 2010, so it was just a matter of slowly being won over by Spotify and Apple as platforms and realizing it was important to start giving people those projects in a form that was actually convenient to how people actually consume music today. Over this year I’ve started doing more specific curation projects and it’s just been a very fun and interesting thing to do that a good amount of people also enjoy. I see reframing the past as an important part of a critic’s job, and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some vanity in trying to shape people’s perception of the past. I’m always trying to make a point, and I’m always trying to get people to pay attention to things that they maybe wouldn’t pay attention to otherwise.

What does your media diet look like?

I listen to a lot of podcasts and internet radio. I listen to things waaaaaay more than I watch things, and I feel like my television and movie viewing has gone down a lot in the past few years. I like being able to listen to something and do other things at the same time either in my apartment or on the sort of super long walks I go on around New York City. It would be tedious to list off everything I listen to but the shows I have the most enthusiasm for these days are Time Crisis, Chapo, Street Fight, The Best Show, Double Threat, And Introducing, Broken Record, Champagne Sharks, Night Call, Song Exploder, The Content Mines, The Trap Set, You Must Remember This, Rivals, Revisionist History, and You’re Wrong About.

I read a lot of internet stuff but that’s mostly things that come across feeds now, though I do pay a lot of attention to New York-centric news and keep up with some food sites. I do make a point of regularly reading Stereogum, especially Tom Breihan’s The Number Ones column, which I love. I feel like Tom and I have a lot of overlap in both interests and writing style, and our perspectives are similar as we’re about the same age. There’s a lot of music writers I admire and I’ll hopefully have them all on my podcast over time, but he’s the one who I think inspires me the most now.

I also closely follow most things my friend Sean T. Collins writes, though not always the recaps he does of shows I don’t watch. I think Sean is one of the best critics in any field. I feel the same way about Gretchen Felker-Martin—she’s a genius and I don’t think anyone writes better negative criticism right now, though Lauren Oyler comes close in her book reviews. I’ll read anything they do, and the same goes for Craig Jenkins, Larry Fitzmaurice, and Heather Havrilesky. I’ve also been enjoying a newsletter called K-Pop Digest by Julie Bourne.

As for magazines, I subscribe to Tape Op, Rolling Stone, and New York Magazine, and I get free copies of The New Yorker from my neighbors who leave their copies in the “up for grabs” part of my building’s lobby. I collect a lot of old magazines too, and particularly love back issues of Rolling Stone and Spin, and the ‘70s arts magazine After Dark. I buy a fair amount of books, usually non-fiction or critical work, only occasionally literary fiction. I’ve been a regular comics reader for my entire life, so I have a regular pull list for that and my collection runs the gamut from mainstream Marvel/DC/Image product to a lot of indie and art comics.

How has your approach to your work changed over the past few years?

I’ve definitely become more interested in the past. As I get older I get more and more obsessed with trying to get a holistic understanding of the past, and I get really fixated on trying to understand the cultures of the adult world that existed prior to my own adulthood.

A lot of how I write or do anything is the result of me taking note of things I like or do not like in other people’s stuff and giving myself little rules to avoid doing it myself. That’s taken a lot of forms over the years—I’ve gone through phases of trying to limit references to artists as apparent influences, I’ve made a point of engaging with actual music as much as or more so than lyrics. I put a lot of focus on the emotional content of music.

Where do you see music journalism headed?

I think as the corporate media landscape gets worse, more writers are going back to making things for themselves, and I’ve basically been begging people to do this for years. While I know it is nice to be paid full time for this sort of work, I think ultimately this is something you do for you and for the culture. Independent media is important, now more than ever.

What would you like to see more of in music journalism right now?

More people doing their own independent projects. More voices, more perspectives, more exposure for artists who have no place in the corporate media because they don’t have fame and fan armies.

What would you like to see less of in music journalism right now?

I feel like this is a waning trend, but while I think political writing can mesh with music criticism pretty naturally, I do hate reading a thing and getting the impression the writer is just attaching their political ideas to music or some other form of pop culture as a sort of training wheels thing before they graduate to just plainly writing about politics.

What’s one tip that you’d give a music journalist starting out right now?

Start doing something even if you don’t feel like you’re good at it and just stick with it. Over time you’ll get better, and doing something on your own regardless of how large your audience is will show people that you can follow through and stick to a schedule. I’m pretty convinced a lot of work I got early on was in large part because I’d proven myself as a person who could regularly produce work with clean copy, as I was editing myself.

What artist or trend are you most interested in right now?

I realized recently that my coverage of R&B has gone up quite a bit in the past few years, and that was sort of unintentional but I think there’s just a lot of R&B and jazz-adjacent acts doing great work these days. I find myself very attracted to R&B and jazz approaches to harmony as I’ve gotten older, and I suppose it’s possible I’ve been tapping into a large zeitgeist driving a lot of musicians. It’s certainly a nice change of pace after feeling burned out on all sorts of minimalism. Similarly, I really like the anything goes maximalism that characterizes a lot of K-Pop.

What’s your favorite part of all this?

I’m grateful that when I was in my early 20s I basically created an engine in my life that makes it so that I always need to find and engage with new music. And besides that, virtually everything good in my adult life is a direct result of committing myself to Fluxblog.

What was the best track / video or film / book you’ve consumed in the past 12 months?

I would point people to my Fluxcaviar playlist on Spotify as the broader answer to this in terms of music, though I’d like to shout out Activity’s Unmask Whoever and Locate S,1’s Personalia as two excellent records that have meant a lot to me this year that I feel have been mostly ignored.

My favorite pop culture thing for the past year or so has been the X-Men comics by Jonathan Hickman, which have reinvented that franchise in brilliant ways and have kept me very excited about an ongoing unfolding macro-story in a time when I’m bored by most television and very much need a big story to focus on as a refuge from very bleak world events.

If you had to point folks to one piece of yours, what would it be and why?

My favorite thing I’ve written in the past couple years is a post on Fluxblog that approaches Lizzo from the perspective of the editorial philosophies that existed during my seven years at BuzzFeed. It’s about a concept called “cultural cartography” and I think it’s one of those ideas where once you’ve digested it you will figure out a lot of important things about how people relate to art and content, and it’s also something that once you know the “source code” you see it all around you.