Rock critic Jessica Hopper is known for her fierce writing, fights against sexism and other forms of inequality, and fervent love of Chicago. She's the author of The Girls' Guide to Rocking and The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, and she just released an experimental memoir. It's called Night Moves, and it reads like a wry, deeply felt love letter to friends, bikes, and Chicago night air. In advance of her Sept. 23 event at Milkweed Books in Minneapolis, she shared a conversation with The Current's Cecilia Johnson.

First of all, happy release day!

Thank you!

How are you feeling?

I'm very well-caffeinated. I got up at — let's see, what time is it — I was sitting at my desk by 5:15 this morning, and I had a draft due for a story. I had a lot of coffee, and I haven't come down from it quite yet. It's really just all sparkles and rainbows, basically.

We can talk super fast, just like Gilmore Girls. It'll be great. You moved out of Minneapolis in the '90s, and it's obviously been some time since you've actually lived in the Twin Cities, but what did you see as the main differences between Chicago and the Twin Cities?

I think that Minneapolis, in both good and bad ways, is a little bit more of a cloister, just by virtue of being a smaller city and a smaller music scene, when I left, certainly. It's broadened a bit in the last 15 years, two decades, 20-some — it's been a while since I lived there. I lived there on-and-off at different points, sometimes for a few months at a time, and I came back for different reasons.

Minneapolis was the first city that I was really in love with. It's the city that is so close to my heart, and similar to Chicago, it's a city that I really fell in love with by biking through it. I would maybe still be living there if different opportunities had been available to me when I was younger. But you know, you graduate high school, you want to split; it's that sort of a deal. Chicago is sometimes a place that people move to and then leave. I feel like Minneapolis is really a place that people stay, and it has lifers.

I'm wondering if I'm going to be one of them. I'm like, oh boy, I'm in my twenties and I've been here forever.

Twenties is not forever.

Yeah, I know!

Eighties is forever.

That reminds me actually, in the introduction to Night Moves, you call yourself an "unwitting participant in gentrification." Living in the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul, I'd call myself a...half-witting participant in gentrification. Would you do anything differently if you were to be that participant again?

That space and time is where I found my friends. Those were the neighborhoods that, because the rent was so cheap, it really allowed me to become an artist. I think if I made different choices, I would've had to make different choices about my art and the things I wanted to do with my life. I think I would perhaps participate in those neighborhoods — be a resident — a little differently. Forty-year-old me can say that; I live in the suburbs now, I'm not gentrifying anything. So I guess that's my "do no harm" choice.

Each clip from the book is dated somewhere between 2004 and 2009. They read really compact — I'm assuming the timestamps are talking about when you actually wrote the piece?

Yeah.

But how much did you mess with them or edit them after the fact?

What you read in there is about 80% intact writing from that time. All I really did was contextualize — I took very little out. I anonymized some people and some things. I took out people's last names — except for one person. I accidentally left one person's last name in, which is funny.

Just certain things, at the time they were in fanzines that I published, or on a blog, sometimes there were things that had been added in, hypertext, pictures, that were illuminating a particular thing that didn't make sense when it was in the context of the book. It was pretty minimal.

One of my favorite sections from the book has to do with the time you saw an early-days show by Har Mar Superstar, aka Sean Tillman, with whom you played in a high school punk band.

Yeah, we had a band called Seaqwest.

First of all, can you tell me a little bit about the band, Seaqwest?

There is no other way to describe it other than we were a total Huggy Bear rip-off — a really bad one. We never played shows. We just eternally practiced. We had a tape, and I don't even think we made copies of it for anybody. He played drums, and that was pre-Calvin Krime, which was his first band. He was a pretty good drummer. Most of the time all of us, we were teenage kids who would get our hands on a solitary beer, cut loose in our friend's attic. It was a very special and fun time.

So you knew Sean, and then you saw him at the Har Mar show. Throughout the piece, I just kept laughing. You seemed mind-boggled at the randiness going on around you. Why is that?

I had seen Har Mar a bunch, and Sean co-edited my fanzine when we were in high school, and a little bit afterwards. He was doing something that people at the time, it was pretty weird; indie-rock people didn't expect it at all. I wasn't shocked at the randiness of it, because his shows could get kind of wild and lewd. After he had toured with the Strokes, he started to draw a really mainstream fan base, which were people who I wouldn't normally see at shows that I went to.

I know a bunch of people work in the music business because they love music and can't necessarily play it, but you've been in bands; you've been up on stage. Are you glad that you chose to pursue music writing?

Yeah. If anybody was calling me to join their band because they couldn't find somebody else to do it — I was no one's first call for a band. It was a pretty easy choice. I can't stress that enough. I'm a totally fine bass player. I'm a terrible drummer. That choice, in some ways made itself. I went on a couple really long tours that eventually — I got exhausted by the touring life. And yet here I am about do it again; apparently I wasn't not exhausted enough.

I was about to say, how are you gearing up for the book tour?

Let's see, today I'm doing some laundry. One of the great things about this tour is I'm doing so much of it driving, or certain legs of it driving, so I can bring friends with. My sister is coming with for part of it. That always helps.

You've got a book tour stop lined up on September 23 at Milkweed Books in Minneapolis, including a conversation led by [poet] Danez Smith. I'm so excited that they are the person to lead the discussion. Why is Danez a good pick?

Danez is a total rock star to me. I'm a big reader and consumer of poetry, and Danez, they were my number-one dream choice. I know a lot of people in Minneapolis still, and people had good suggestions, and then a friend connected me with Danez, and they said yes. I'm legit geeking. I'm just such a big fan of their work and their generosity of spirit, and so many things. I'm just really excited to be in conversation with them about literally anything. We could be having a discussion about our favorite foods at the State Fair, and I would just be delighted.

What about poetry is it that draws you in?

It's something that — I'm not a poet, I can't do that kind of writing. I never really read poetry until the late '90s. I really started to be a consumer of poetry once I found work that I connected with. It's just something that I find to be, as a writer, really revivifying, something that enriches both my reading life and my writing life, and my understanding of the world.

It's funny that you say that you don't write poetry, because doesn't the Hanif [Abdurraqib] blurb on the back of [Night Moves characterize it as poetry?] —

You know, Hanif is really interesting to me. Hanif has been joking that he's hoping for a mid-career turn to part-time poet. Him and some of my other friends basically joke that I'm deluding myself if [I think] this book doesn't have poetry in it. I kind of have to trust their interpretation. They were saying when we were having a conversation the other night at a Shake Shack after the Brooklyn Book Festival with Hanif and Eloisa Amezcua. I was like, part of my issue with poetry and writing is, when I've done it or tried it before, how do you know if it's good? How do you know if you've written a poem and it's done? When I'm writing a column or an essay or a review, I know the points that I have to check. Poetry's freedom, and the freedom in the forms it can take — and also there are certain forms that I'm like, what is this?

Like, technically?

Beause there are some technical parts of it where I'm just like, how do you drive this thing? That sounds like maybe I'm being woefully naive, but when poetry is done really well, it's just the same as watching someone play an insane drum solo, where I'm just like, how do you do that thing? And I just am basking in dumbfounded amazement. It just seems — not to say it's beyond me, but I'm not there. I'll just say I'm not there.

I've tried [writing poetry] as well, and I also struggle with, when do you know if it's done? How long should it be? But I was just reading something or other where Dessa was talking about her new book. She was like, "I don't believe in vulnerability for the sake of vulnerability." I was like, oh, that feels like something that could apply to poetry. Because if it's just there to be there, even if it's vulnerable, it's not doing anything.

I think everything has to have a purpose on the page. One of the things that I've learned over the years, and now editing two different collections of my work, is the only thing that really stands the test of time is when you're trying to nail down the truth. Anything that's there to impress or have a particular effect, it can ring hollow. It's different with writing. When I revisit my writing — and this is a little more true of some of the early pieces that are in the first collection of criticism — any time I was trying to stunt and be funny or trying to impress people with the scope of what I knew with music history, it's the first thing that I would cut going through the piece, or the things that I regret not cutting out of those pieces or refashioning. The stuff that still remains valuable is getting down to the truth of the matter.

That's really good. I noticed a Twitter interaction where some dude assumed that you just heard of Low, and you were like, "Not only have I seen their first Minneapolis —"

That poor guy.

That tweet has since been deleted.

He didn't know. He got schooled in his assumption. Not just by me, but then the 150 people that retweeted it. He got ratio-ed there. That poor boy.

Ok so you feel a little bad for him, but you had the best, "Not only did I see them at their first Minneapolis show," but also "I'm old AF, don't try me."

My friend Darcy told me that she was at a party in New York a few weeks ago and my name came up and somebody joked that I'm the Forrest Gump of music criticism. I was like, please explain this, because this could potentially be super insulting. But she said, "No, they meant it like you've — to an improbable degree — been different places first and [spotted] different important themes or moments in music history. That you were there ahead of the game." And Low was one of them. It's funny that that happened.

Part of the reason why I was tweeting was I have an interview with them that's running in the Guardian in the next couple days, and I got to go up to Duluth and interview them. It was really funny, because the last time I interviewed them I was 16. Both they and I laughed about it, because they very much remember being interviewed for — God, it must have been a full hour and a half, I didn't know what a drag on time that would be, as a teenager. Seeing this really long interview with them after that show, and yeah, I was like 15 years old, and they were babies as well, so to speak.

So from 15 to 40s —

I'm 42.

Yeah, 42. It's been a long time, but how old do you feel?

I don't know, like a jaunty 87?

I guess I'm curious because some people are like, "I'm young at heart." My grandma will always be like, "I'm super young at heart," and then some people are like, "No, I earned this maturity."

No, I've been geriatric at heart since I was old enough to drive.

[laughing] What do you mean?

I'm very old. I've been tired as long as I've been alive. [laughs] I don't know what 42 is supposed to feel like. I only know what I've been through, but I'm a big enthusiast of comfortable footwear. I love sleep. I love to stay inside my house. I have some real grandma-esque hallmarks to my life. So I would just say, I'm not an old soul, I'm an actual geriatric person at heart.

You are going to be visiting so many bookstores for this tour for Night Moves, but do you have a favorite bookstore in Chicago?

There are a lot of really good independent bookstores here. My number one favorite is Myopic, which is the big used bookstore, which shows up a few times in the book. My friend J.R. still works there. He worked there in the book; he still works there. It is a place where I've spent many hours. When I was a broke young writer, J.R. would sometimes be like, "We've got such-and-such book that you're looking for," and I would be like, "All right, cool, I've got four bucks. I'm heading to that bookstore." I wouldn't say it's a weakness of mine, but I have a forever-accumulating stack next to my bed. I really love that bookstore.

I'll also say, as far as new bookstores in Chicago, my other favorite is Women & Children First, because it is a historic worker-owned feminist bookstore. It's very important for me to support bookstores of that ilk, because they're fast-dwindling.

Have you been to Milkweed in Minneapolis?

I have not. But I've heard great things. I'm really excited, as always, to come back to Minneapolis and participate in the culture of the city.

Colleen Cowie assisted with transcription of this interview.

Related

• Rock and Roll Book Club: Jessica Hopper's 'Night Moves'
• The Current's Rock and Roll Book Club: Jessica Hopper's 'First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic'