Drug Music's Arielle Gordon Wants You to Let Go of Your Ego
(Courtesy of Arielle Gordon / Illustration by Malokul Industries)

Drug Music's Arielle Gordon Wants You to Let Go of Your Ego

The music journalist and zinemonger's nightlife recommendations include doing drugs and not.

Remember music journalism? Pardon the bong-rip thought, but I was talking to music journalist and friend-of-the-blog Arielle Gordon about how ironic it is that the media market decided it was done with music journalists at roughly the same moment that music journalists were starting to decide that we were done with being snobs—that we were really open-armed universalists rather than subculturalists. That was also when Gordon decided to create her print-only zine Drug Music, whose second issue is out now.

In the wake of some massive layoffs across multiple music writing outlets, Gordon thought that, in the era of streaming and disengaged TikTok critics, it was time to "bring fun back to music writing."

"Things were feeling really bleak at the time, and I don't think they feel much better nowadays," Gordon said. "So part of it was just creating a space for my peers to have fun with writing again—if they wanted to write fiction, poetry, they could."

As its name suggests, the zine is also about taking drugs, inspired by the conflict between the "universal beauty" often ascribed to music, and obstacles like the listener's ego or personal associations with a musician. Drugs often allow you to get past the latter, and so the first issue of Drug Music celebrated those moments of letting your ego go, including Gordon’s essay about the time molly opened her eyes to the redeemable qualities of Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off," a history of rappers talking about ecstasy by writer Jeff Weiss, and Hell Gate's own Katie Way on Doja Cat's "So High."

Drugs, Gordon said, "have allowed me to let go of a lot of the pretenses of my relationship to music as a music writer." 

"God, I sound so stoned," she added. To her surprise, the zine sold out of its first 100 copies in 24 hours. 

While drugs may open you up to things your sober mind refuses, there's danger in becoming open. So Gordon said the second issue of Drug Music, which became available for pre-order this weekend and ships in May, is themed around "close calls."

"When I was publishing Volume 1, there was some pushback that maybe it was glorifying drug use," Gordon told me. "But I think in this volume, there is a sense of the real danger of the world that you open yourself up to in the pursuit of a high." Examples in the second issue include an essay by Jimmy Iakovos, a pseudonymous writer incarcerated in federal prison, about planning a biker gang rally on meth and coke; and Weiss on "a crackpot journey he went on chasing the chef of the Grateful Dead."

"Because the first issue resonated with people," Gordon said, "I felt like I was able to actually say, 'Yes, this is the Drug Music philosophy, these are the themes I want to touch on, and you get it.' It’s really exciting that expanding it actually brought it closer to the original mission."

She invites you to go on your own crackpot journey with these event recommendations. But be careful.


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