Orbiting Punk: A New Newsletter
Jan. 9, 2022 - Orbiting Punk Issue 0.5
Thank you for reading Orbiting Punk! For questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to email me at orbitingpunk@gmail.com.
Introducing Orbiting Punk
Last year, I began Perfect Sound Whatever to get back into music journalism and sharpen my skills. I unintentionally backed myself into a corner by focusing on New Orleans music and local music news that at the time seemed like work I could reach and enjoy doing. As the year went on, I realized the purpose of the newsletter was becoming muddied by a need to be a local news source in a big city. I’m just one person and I couldn’t do it justice. I’ve found an outlet for that kind of writing with my work in OffBeat Music Magazine.
I’ve decided to change the direction of the newsletter and make it the start of a multimedia project that I’ve legitimately been excited to work on every week. So from here on out, Perfect Sound Whatever will become Orbiting Punk to sort of “rebrand” into something more aligned with my musical interests and convictions.
The idea for the name came from something Jeff Rosenstock told Noisey in 2015 about the Bomb the Music Industry album “Vacation” —
"Once I realized that we were orbiting punk in our own weird way, along with bands like Andrew Jackson Jihad and Good Luck and Laura Stevenson and the Cans and The Sidekicks, where we just kind of made records and weren’t thinking about if they were punk or indie or whatever, we were just making records. That made this record have a bit of a different tone. I got the courage to say, 'Fuck it, I’m going to make the record that I want to make.'"
Punk has often been my home genre. It’s the music I go back to and obsess over every year. I love the ethos of punk and the personal memories I have tied to it. But for a genre that prides itself in authenticity, it sometimes stifles creativity. I want to explore the music I love that feels more punk than anything Rancid or Black Flag ever wrote.
I’ve never kept it secret that Jeff Rosenstock is my favorite artist of all time and when he said “orbiting punk,” I felt as though he summed up my music taste so perfectly. I’ve never fully committed to being pigeon-held as a punk journalist because there is so much other music I love or fixate on like hip-hop, indie, country, emo and ska. But like Rosenstock, I want to say fuck it and cover what I want whether people label it “punk” or not. I want to show people the punk I hear in Killer Mike, Gil Scott Heron and Ernie K-Doe. And I also want to dive into punk adjacent music that’s innovating today, like Origami Angel, Turnstile and Catbite.
Dan Ozzi has been my role model for years but listening to what he says about the “creative process” has inspired me to build my own identity instead of prioritizing a traditional career trajectory.
Ozzi told Creative Independent—
“This is a strange thing to say as a writer, but there’s no byline that’s very enticing to me. I’ve written for places that are defunct, and you go to find your own work, and it’s just an HTML graveyard. The bigger priority was to build my own platform because I simply can’t rely on the stability of others.”
I’m turning 25 this year. Pursuing this career for over five years, I have seen my writing fall into HTML graveyards and I want to create a place that will provide me a home base or at least mummify my voice. Orbiting Punk feels right and I hope to branch it out beyond the newsletter into other mediums like podcasting and platforms like Youtube or TikTok. I joke that this all is my desperate quarter-life crisis, but I can’t imagine myself happy doing anything else with my life.
Next week on 1/17, I will be publishing another newsletter to really kickoff the content. Orbiting Punk will be a biweekly newsletter publishing every other week after the next issue. Follow the new socials to stay up-to-date!
Instagram: @orbitingpunk
Twitter: @soundwhatever
TikTok: @orbitingpunk
Support my work
I started a Patreon because Substack’s minimum subscription cost is way too much. There are personalized benefits and exclusives available. Pay what you can by emailing me daltonspangler25@gmail.com and I’ll send you a year’s subscription.
Patreon link: https://www.patreon.com/perfectsoundwhatever
Virtual Tip Jar via PayPal: @orbitingpunk
Big thanks to Brett Fountain and family members who have supported me so far!
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Let me hear from you!
Send me love, hate, music recommendations, story tips, musicians you want to see interviewed, shows you want to see promoted, etc. by emailing me at daltonspangler25@gmail.com
