About

I'm a music critic with bylines at Pitchfork, The Ringer, The A.V. Club, and other places, and, despite living in Long Beach, California, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Liverpool. My dissertation centers around how people imagine, create, and communicate identities through music and musical subculture. As a result, I'm very interested in the ways people make sense of the world and themselves, how music and culture help us to imagine who we might be able to become, and how comfortable we can or can't be as we try to become that new person.

We're perpetually sorting the world, categorizing things, trying to make sense of what we encounter by comparing it to what we've already experienced. My writing here will primarily be my attempt to sort through things and process them, which is the only way I can then begin to consider what those things might say about the person who chooses to identify with them. That's a very grad-school way of saying that I'm going to write about processing my understanding of new music, revising my understanding of old music, and trying to make sense of what it "means" to like this stuff. I may also write about Tottenham Hotspur, who can say.

For the first few months, Taxonomy will be a completely free platform; I want to see how consistently I'll hammer away at this thing before committing myself any further and asking you to commit any money to me whatsoever (though I should note that March 31 is Buy a Trans Girl a Pizza Day, DM me for my topping preferences).

I'll also be posting songs that I either can't stop listening to or just find interesting, monthly recaps of my listening, cute little jokes that I'm not going to waste on Twitter, and so forth.

Thanks for your time and attention, please feel free to email me to praise my trenchant analysis.

—s