Aside from being brilliant educators, Intelligentsia tutors have a variety of outside interests and pursuits, which we take great pleasure in highlighting here. In addition to teaching and tutoring, Bob Ryan is an essayist and co-editor of Hyped On Melancholy, a quarterly magazine that celebrates and examines the more somber side of music. We love the magazine and today we’re speaking with Bob all about Hyped, why essays are such a rich format, and much more.
Intelligentsia: We know you as a tutor, teacher, and curriculum-creator multi-hyphenate but who are you outside of education?
Bob Ryan: An expansive, tricky question! I think fundamentally the thing that unites my many hyphens -- and the person I am outside or alongside them -- is that I am someone who has always been really, really invested in art and literature (speaking broadly). Recently a family member asked me why I went to graduate school in the first place, and I didn't really have a great answer beyond "I was super interested in books and I felt like I couldn't learn it all on my own." As I worked my way through an MA and eventually PhD I had occasion to start writing more seriously and I became interested in writing in a lot of different forms and about a lot of different topics not strictly speaking "related" to my dissertation. One of the topics that clicked kind of immediately was music, in large part because it was something I had always had a special relationship to, whether it was playing in bands or seeing shows or just being a really enthusiastic fan. And so I started writing essays for the Los Angeles Review of Books about various musical concerns and became preoccupied with what it meant to write intelligent music criticism (and I’m not sure I’ve yet found an answer!).
Hyped On Melancholy seems like it may be a natural expansion of that last bit. How did the magazine come about?
Hyped grew out of an idea I'm sure was kicking around my head for years, but wasn’t given voice until I had a conversation with my dear friend Adam Southard (of the band 100% Black and Ithaca's wonderful record store Angry Mom Records). Adam and I had had the good fortune to see the reunion tour of a band called Neutral Milk Hotel somewhere around 2011 or 2012, and we both had a really meaningful connection to that music, and the show, as I remember it, was a somewhat emotional affair. And so time passed and I was living in Chicago doing a PhD and was talking to about Neutral Milk Hotel and texted Adam about a particular song -- “Holland 1945” -- and he immediately replied "Oh man that song gets me so hyped on melancholy!" If you knew Adam, you would know that he is prone to exactly this kind of compact burst of genius, but this particular phrase just stuck with me. It seemed like a really useful way to describe a whole category of music I was interested in, which is, put simply: sad songs that are counterintuitively fun or joyful to listen to. Or even more broadly, I was interested in the way pop music is so often predicated on heartbreak and frustration and anxiety and yet it’s such a joyous expression of those things. The contradiction seemed really dense and meaningful and I wanted to explore it. Shortly thereafter, I met my co-editor Sarah Osment for the first time in person (we had "met" on Twitter maybe a year before) and she seemed really smart, and really cool, and really perfect for the magazine (all things that proved to be 100% true) and so I pitched her the idea. She immediately was on board and so we wrote up a little description and asked some of our smart friends to write essays, and we wrote some essays and bought a domain name.
Why that format—essays, often quite personal?
I think because essays were what I knew! And I liked the idea of people being vulnerable and not terribly arch about their tastes. Our first issue has this incredible piece by David Hollingshead about Taking Back Sunday and male intimacy and some of the really terrible gender politics going on in the emo and pop punk of my generation's youth, and David was able to work through those contradictions in a really honest and rewarding way, and he did so with his own past on full display. I thought that was incredibly smart and brave and -- when done right -- extremely effective. I didn't want it to be a reviews site or like, a place for hot takes. I think the essay form allows you to work things out and be really thoughtful, to be personal but also intelligent. It's a very malleable form!
Speaking of youth, what would you say to someone who isn't able to see the "hyped" part of the equation just yet?
I liked the idea of “hyped” because it connotes excitement or interest rather than happiness. Music is a strange affective companion, and sometimes it just feels perversely good to dwell with the melancholic. I think moments of being "hyped" will happen to anyone who is sincerely invested in the music. Maybe it's hard to see in our especially turbulent moment, but I think the simple act of listening closely and taking music really seriously will eventually lead back to excitement, comfort, and moments of joy. It always has for me, at least!
In that way, it seems like sad music can not only run parallel to a “happy life,” but even help keep it on the tracks?
Yeah, I think it actually might even expose happiness as the wrong thing to be after. Happiness, after all, doesn't exist -- at least not as a static state. We have moments of happiness and moments of grief, moments of boredom and ennui, and so on. Paying attention to something like sad music (or the sad undercurrent in happy music) has always given me a sort of comfort, that the way I am feeling has been and is shared. It's kind of hokey, but being able to be excited about music with friends is one of life's great transient joys.
In your experience, does a song need to have sad lyrics to be sad?
It doesn't have to have lyrics at all! One of my very favorite bands is Explosions In The Sky, who make incredibly soaring and melancholy instrumental music. My favorite category though, is sad lyrics set to a kind of ebullient music.
You mentioned playing in bands. How does your musical background influence your writing and editorial voice now?
I grew up playing guitar and piano, but I'm not sure I was ever especially gifted at either. I never could hang around lessons very long. I would learn enough to get by and then go off and fiddle around on my own. I think the main thing playing in bands and writing music gave me was a more intimate sense of how songs work -- how verses and choruses work, how melodies can shift the affective weight of a song. The importance of a hook! It just helped me pay a kind of close attention to things.
What’s the best thing about collaborating with your co-editor, Sarah Osment?
She's so much smarter than me! Sarah is someone with an incredibly sensitive and intricate mind, especially in writing--she can see what an essay needs almost intuitively, and she has an extremely dialed-in sense of voice. She's also incredibly kind and generous as a person, and I've found that working with people you like is the single most important part of any undertaking.
The impossible ask—what's your favorite Hyped piece?
Depending on one's tastes there are a lot of lovely pieces: I think one that balances intelligence and graceful personal detail is Peter Kim's piece on Mitski. Sarah's piece on Wilson Phillips is extremely well-tuned along those lines as well. One for full-on tears is Jared O'Connor on bluegrass and his brother's passing.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also ask you for a perfect melancholy song recommendation.
On the turntable at this very moment is Nick Cave's "I Need You" from his record Skeleton Tree, but, man, that one is pretty dark. One of the songs that I find useful to think about a lot is "They'll Need a Crane" by They Might Be Giants. Oh, and all of In the Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra. A masterpiece of melancholy if there ever was one.
What's something you've learned from creating and editing a music magazine?
To be 2000% less precious about edits when I am on the other end. Editors have eyes that writers don't, and that is an important lesson in humility.
Finally, can you shout out an educator that was influential in your life?
In my master’s degree, William Spanos, who has now sadly passed, taught me Moby-Dick and changed my life forever in that he put on full display what it meant to be fully committed to a work of art. In undergrad, it was Jennifer Stoever, who taught a class on pop music and representation, and whose book on race and sound is endlessly useful. My best friend, James Fitz Gerald, though -- who I met during my MA -- has probably taught me the most over the years in wide-ranging and energizing conversations.
