J. Niimi

writer & arts journalist

Hi there!

My name’s J. I’m an arts journalist, cultural critic, and author based in Chicago. My friends call me “J.”

I contribute to SPIN, City Pages [Minneapolis], SF Weekly, Seattle Weekly, the Village Voice, Pitchfork Media, Dusted, Dallas Observer, Houston Press, Perfect Sound Forever, Time Out Chicago, New Times Broward Palm-Beach, and the New Zealand Listener, among other print and online publications.

I also cover music and arts each week for the Chicago Reader, the city's main alternative newsweekly. In 2005 I wrote 120+ pieces for the Reader, ranging from 125-word concert previews to 2,500-word essays. In 2006 I contributed about 150 pieces to the Reader. http://www.chicagoreader.com/

In 2004 I wrote a cover story for the Reader that was syndicated by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies: http://www.altweeklies.com/alternative/AltWeeklies/Story?oid=oid%3A137035

In 2005 I published my first book, Murmur, about R.E.M.’s debut album, as part of the 33 ⅓ book series.

Continuum International Publishing Group, New York/London, 2005.

http://www.continuumbooks.com/Books/detail.aspx?BookID=121835

Here are some readers' reviews of Murmur:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0826416721/102-6128146-9596920

My mailing address + contact info:

J. Niimi

5431 S. Harper Ave. #1W

Chicago IL 60615 USA

Phone: (773) 288-2796

E-mail: jniimi {at} gmail {dot} com

Links to some of my work:

Tear sheets available upon request

Chicago Reader weekly concert previews:

http://www.chicagoreader.com/listings/static/treatment.html

Only current week’s issue listed

Chicago Reader archive:

https://securesite.chireader.com/Archive/SearchForm3.html

Fee charged for full article retrieval

City Pages archive:

http://search.citypages.com/summary.asp?k=niimi&kwcid=&x=0&y=0

Seattle Weekly archive:

http://urlsnip.com/997666

SF Weekly archive:

http://www.sfweekly.com/search/results.php?author=3213

Village Voice archive:

http://urlsnip.com/585303

Village Voice 2004 Pazz & Jop Poll:

http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/pazznjop/04/critic.php?criticid=4781

Village Voice 2005 Pazz & Jop Poll:

http://www.villagevoice.com/pazzandjop05/index.php?page=ballots&cid=4781

SPIN archive:

http://www.google.com/custom?sitesearch=spin.com&domains=spin.com&q=niimi&sa=Search

Idolator.com 2006 Jackin’ Pop poll:

http://www.idolator.com/?op=jp_showpoll&user_id=44098

Chicago Reader 2006 Year-End Music Critics’ Issue:

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/criticspicks06/music/

Membership:

Association of Music Writers and Photographers:

http://www.webjillion.com/wp-content/portfolio/amwp.org/

Society of Midland Authors:

http://www.midlandauthors.com/

AvantGuild:

http://www.mediabistro.com/avantguild/

American MENSA:

http://www.us.mensa.org//AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home

Other online haunts:

The Cryptic Semaphore, my blog: http://home.uchicago.edu/~jniimi/

Crickets, the Chicago Reader music critics’ blog: http://blogs.chicagoreader.com/crickets/

Radio Zero, my weekly radio show: http://www.radiozero.blogspot.com/

Thursdays 10 am—noon on WHPK 88.5 FM Chicago, “The Pride of the South Side”: http://whpk.uchicago.edu/

ThisLine -aka- Hammer-On Showdown at Guattari Center, my group audio blog: http://www.evil-wire.org/~thisline/

with Dr. Sanders [http://www.suck.com/fish/contributors/sanders/] and Professor Rex [http://alex.golub.name/log/]

~

J. Niimi IFGA

Infrequently Given Answers

What I did before I became a rock critic:

September 4, 1970: Born Justin McKinley Niimi, Chicago, Illinois

1988-2000: Drummer/Guitarist/Bassist; numerous small-fry bands that never went anywhere and are not really worth bringing up

1990-2000: Anglophobe

Home four-track hobby. Instruments: thrift-store electric guitar through Marshall JMP800 half-stack at ¼-of-1% volume (I lived in a studio apt. in Wrigleyville); daytime television; Spanish-language daytime television; my shy voice; manual samples (i.e., real-time needle-dropping) of dollar-bin records; Rhinelander beer ($1.79/6-pk.); answering machine.

1991: Reviewer; Quimby’s catalogue

1991-1993: Fanzine Publisher/Editor/Writer; Nice Slacks

(http://www.rojaro.com/maginfo.php?mco=ncs)

1992-2000: Moron/Robot Recordings

My half-hearted label only ended up releasing a couple things: a 4-song Larry Cash, Jr. demo tape, a co-released Larry Cash, Jr. 7”, and the Anglophobe Dept. of Stairs cassette.

The imprint later became a very very small scale distro for indie releases, mostly of my own music and some Australian bands.

1993-1994: Archives Assistant; Center for Black Music Research, Chicago

(http://www.cbmr.org/)

1995-1999: Freelance Studio Engineer/Producer; various Chicago recording studios

1992-1994: Guitarist; Larry Cash, Jr.

This short-lived band featured me, future Pulsars members Dave and Harry Trumfio, and Mike Hagler, engineer and co-founder with Dave of the recording studio King Size Sound Labs. I started out playing the “Noise Generator,” a fucked-up old Arp synthesizer run thru signal processors, but soon switched to guitar. We built King Size and then rehearsed and recorded there, releasing a demo tape, two singles, some compilation tracks, and a cassingle (!) on Shrimper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrimper_Records; http://www.grunnenrocks.nl/label/s/shrimper.htm).

1992-2000: Drummer/Songwriter; Ashtray Boy

All Music Guide: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:k23ibkj9hak9~T00

Trouser Press: http://www.trouserpress.com/entry.php?a=cannanes

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtray_Boy

Band website: http://www.ashtrayboy.net/

I was the drummer and a founding member of this Australian-American indie rock band, but I also played guitar, bass, keyboards, alto sax, percussion, and pretty much every other common instrument you might find in a recording studio or rehearsal space. I also (co-)engineered and (co-)produced most of our studio work, especially toward the end of my tenure, and I booked all our tours myself. I co-wrote some of the later material with Randall, mostly writing lyrics. I moved to Sydney for a brief period in 1996 to tour and record, which was wild fun. I kept a journal while I was there, which is posted, very sloppily, here: http://www.ashtrayboy.net/jellyboy/jellyboy.stories.html. The band’s still together (I think) and has released a total of eight albums to date, all of which I appear on to varying degrees. We also released three 7”s and a slew of compilation tracks. We were associated with Ajax Records for a while; the label released albums # 2-4 on CD, and a vinyl LP version of album #4, most of the pressing of which currently lies beneath a landfill somewhere. There was a lot of interest in the band when we started out, because Liz Phair sang on our first album, before the release of Guyville and subsequent mega-stardom.

Video for “Vacuum Cleaner Salesman,” dir. Jeff Economy (1994): http://www.allmusicvideocodes.com/a/Ashtray%20Boy/Vacum%20Cleaner%20Salesman/index.html

1995-1999: Drummer/Guitarist; the John Huss Moderate Combo

All Music Guide: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:5ekbiklkbb29~T00

Centerstage Chicago: http://www.centerstage.net/music/whoswho/JohnHussModerateCombo.html

Started off as a trio with me on drums, later added Andrew Frost (formerly of Miracle Legion) on drums and I switched to lead guitar as the band became a quartet. We played out a lot, and in a lot of interesting places: at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art as part of artist Rirkrit Tiravanija’s multimedia installation; on a boat cruise in the middle of Lake Michigan; at an opening for the University of Illinois’s art gallery in Champaign-Urbana; live on Q101’s Local Music Showcase, WXRT’s Local Anesthetic, and WHPK’s Pure Hype; at National Public Radio’s headquarters in Washington for the NPR show Anthem (we also did some instrumentals that NPR taped as incidental music for the show Odyssey); improvising background music for a corporate cocktail function in a downtown office building; at Tribune Tower Plaza for the Rock the River concert (opening for the Smithereens); and other situations I’ve probably forgotten. We played with Jad Fair, Brave Combo, and Jonathan Richman, and once opened for Kurt Elling at the Goose Island Summer Festival—which landed us an extended engagement at the Brewery itself, playing there every week.

But my favorite show was one we did in Cambridge, MA in 1998. We played in-the-round, cabaret-style in this basement pub on Mass Ave. with the bands of our friends Pete Weiss (of Pete Weiss’s Rock Band) and Charlie Chesterman (of ‘80s alt-rock stars Scruffy the Cat)—and we did a “tag team” show, all of the bands’ collective gear set up on the floor in a big circle, rotating bands song-for-song the entire night. Towards the end we were running up and grabbing instruments, drunkenly pranking each other with unplanned cameos and ridiculous solos—Pete’s wife even got up and did a spot-on Patty Smith impersonation on a cover of “Gloria.” One of the Kennedys was there, in a leg cast from a ski accident, and he seemed to enjoy the show. Pete produced our album Lipchitz, available from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00000G0TY/sr=1-1/qid=1155773502) and CD Baby, where’s there’s also quite a lot more info about the band, including a discography, listener reviews, press quotes, and lyrics (http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/huss).

1996: Drummer; Holiday

All Music Guide: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=&sql=11:4f867ub070jg

TweeNet: http://www.twee.net/bands/holiday.html

The band broke up after touring for their second album but still had a bunch of newer, unrecorded songs they wanted to release. So I stepped in as drummer for their final album, Café Reggio (SpinArt).

1998: Guitarist; Aden

All Music Guide: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:ee2m967ofep7~T00

Teenbeat Records: http://www.teenbeatrecords.com/

In Spring of 1996 I recorded their self-titled debut (co-produced, I maintain, but the credits don’t say so.) The singer’s father, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), was campaigning for the presidency at the time. The following year I invited the band to be the opening act on Ashtray Boy’s mongo three-month tour of the U.S. and Canada. The year after that I became Aden’s touring lead guitarist—regular guitarist Kevin Barker was still in college and not old enough to get into bars. We did a short East Coast jaunt with Momus and the Magnetic Fields that was a lot of fun, and played a giant show in D.C. opening for Ivy, with our pal Mark Robinson from Unrest playing drums.

2002-2003: Music Editor; Bridge magazine

During my tenure contributors included Greil Marcus, Richard Meltzer, Rick Moody, Drew Daniel (of Matmos), Seth Sanders, and many talented others. I also turned down work from “name” writers that I thought sucked, and I have a feeling some grudges are still held about it. But, y’know, why are you submitting to a publication that doesn’t even pay its staff if you’re so great?

2002-today: Radio Zero on WHPK-FM

WHPK website: http://whpk.uchicago.edu/

Radio Zero website: http://www.radiozero.blogspot.com/

For almost four years now I’ve been doing a weekly rock show with my friend Mike O’Flaherty—political historian, sometime contributor to the Baffler (http://www.thebaffler.com/), and all-around good guy. We play both kinds—Gestalt Rock and Transgressive Pop. Our show still airs every Thursday morning, 10 am-noon on WHPK 88.5 FM Chicago, the radio station of the University of Chicago, and “The Pride of the South Side” (http://www.uchicago.edu/).

Hopefully we’ll be streaming online soon, and we also plan in the near future to set up a podcast website, where folks can download past shows (we have an archive of around a hundred-plus 80-minute discs.) Check out our cool flyer (http://home.uchicago.edu/~jniimi/RadioZeroflyerlarge.JPG), created for us by our pal DJ Chitty-Chitty Bling-Bling (http://www.albemuth.org/), and our “drive-time” 30-second promo spot (http://www.paraleisure.com/radiozero/radiozero.mp3), put together by our friends in the Paraleisural Uninsurance Temp Agency (http://www.paraleisure.com/).

Edumacation:

A.L.M., 2007 (expected), University of Chicago

Master of Liberal Arts program

Concentration: History of Ancient Civilizations

Thesis: pending

B.A., 1994, Columbia College Chicago

Major: Music Theory and History

Thesis: A History of Chance Operations in 20^th Century Music

At Columbia I studied composition with William Russo, and percussion with Hal Russell. Hal taught me the rudiments, and that heroin makes you play better. After Hal passed away, I studied percussion with Frank Donaldson, of Chicago funk legends Rasputin’s Stash! While attending Columbia I worked as an Archives Assistant at the Center for Black Music Research, one of the funnest jobs I’ve ever had. Martin Williams, the legendary Down Beat jazz critic and author of The Jazz Tradition, died in 1993, and he willed his entire record collection to the CBMR. I cut my jazz teeth listening to Williams’s original gatefold Impulse! albums with his notes scrawled in pencil next to the track listings. While still an undergrad, I became a T.A. for the Black Folklore and Black Folk Music History courses (both taught by the late African-American musicologist Dr. Lee Cloud), and was a paid guest lecturer on John Cage for the course 20^th Century Classical Music, taught by Dr. Kim McCarthy. During my final year at Columbia I was on the Dean’s List, and won first place in a Humanities Department paper competition—I banked $500 and presented the paper, “The Role of Ambiguity in the Arts,” in a panel with Humanities faculty. I also elected to take an Independent Study, for which I completed a senior thesis that included a scholarly paper, a bibliography of music scores, and recorded realizations of chance and aleatory compositions. My graduation ceremony was at the UIC Pavilion, where I first saw R.E.M. in 1986.

University of Illinois at Chicago (no degree)

Major: Psychology; Minor: Music

Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia (no degree)

Major: Psychology

Membership: Alpha Tau Omega

Diploma, 1988, Highland Park High School, Highland Park, Illinois

Rev. 4/3/07

H.F. 6/24/00

~END~