For the Love of the Game: Mano Sundaresan Interview

Design by Mo Kreuger

By Christian Jones

Mano Sundaresan is currently the head of editorial content at Pitchfork and the founder of music blog No Bells. I talked to him about the state of music journalism in our current world, including but not limited to: physical vs. digital media, AI, genre labels, Sp*tify, starting No Bells, and what he sees for the future of Pitchfork.

Where did you end up going to school? 

Williams College in Western Mass.

And what did you study there? 

I studied philosophy and I almost double majored in math.

If you had any, what would be your earliest memory of music journalism?

I feel like my earliest memories of criticism weren’t so much reviews as they were lists. When I was like 10 or 11, I would type ‘best albums of the 2000s’ or something on Google and find a bunch of lists from various publications, including Pitchfork. I would end up writing for Passion of the Weiss, who had really thorough lists. It started there for me. Lists are still a really big love of mine, and not in a SEO, clickbait way, but in a real way—as a form of criticism that’s very generative and can put you on to a lot of cool stuff. I started to really pay attention to Pitchfork and other blogs during high school, which for me was 2011 or so to 2015. And I think that was because I felt as though my immediate friend group wasn’t very tapped in, and I had a curiosity about stuff that was happening, like many kids, beyond the surface. I was the kid that put everyone else on to Future and stuff. And five, four years later, they’re all obviously on it. But I was that type of kid for sure, like playing MF Doom when we’re all hanging out and stuff. A really visceral memory of music criticism was, I just remember looking at the very, early Anthony Fantano videos, when he had a black screen. 

Wow. 

He was just giving shit that I really liked bad scores and I was disagreeing with him. 

That’s the fun of it—when you read something where your like what the fuck? How could you say that?

I remember when he gave Dark Twisted Fantasy a 6. I was like, no way.

So would you say this was the time that you were consciously starting to listen to and discover music? More of a ‘I get to choose what I’m going to listen to’? 

Yeah, I would say so. I think before I even started reading, I was doing that. I did just say I didn’t have many tapped-in friends, but I did have some very tapped-in cousins and relatives. I had this one cousin who—I grew up in Mass, and he’s got probably five, six years on me—put me onto like Lil B and A$AP Rocky—some of the early cloud rap stuff that was subversive at the time and people were hating on it. He was wholly embracing it, and I kind of sided with him. I think I was on the path to figuring out my own taste from a young age and it certainly helped that my parents were very supportive, even if they were like ‘what the hell are you doing?’ They set me up. They got me an iPod and when I wanted to buy CDs, they were like, ‘why are you buying CDs?’ I had a weird audiophile phase in high school, so I was ripping CDs and stuff. They supported that even though they were like, ‘this guy’s kind of weird.’

That’s awesome. Have you put them on to anything that they unsuspectedly liked, like your parents really like A$AP Rocky or something like that? 

I don’t know about your parents, but my parents are never going to just sit down and listen to music. I feel like they’re not like those types of people. I feel like for my parents, music was never an active activity. An active thing, or passion. But I put my dad, especially, on to a lot of the stuff that he likes. He really likes Kendrick. I feel like I sort of reignited his interest in Steely Dan—he used to like Steely Dan and then I got into them irrespective of him.

So, was a lot of your early music discovery on streaming platforms or SoundCloud or was it also on non-digital channels?

I think Spotify only started to take over after I was, and I’m aging myself a lot, about to graduate from high school. Honestly, I feel very grateful for this. I lived in the last of the pre-streaming era, it was like The Last of the Mohicans. My brother, who’s five years younger than me, doesn’t remember life before streaming. And I fully do. Not only do I remember it, it’s still kind of wired into me a little. I have a very obsessive personality about organizing my music library, for instance. And I think that’s one of those things that, if you ask a kid, they’re like, ‘why would you waste your time doing that? You can just go on Spotify and it’s all organized for you. The metadata is all right.’ And I don’t have a good answer for that, but because I really value ownership, I had a really big offline music library that accumulated up until college, and streaming has sort of withered it away a little bit. But the one invaluable thing about that more than anything is it really made me know the music. I can tell because after streaming, my memory is starting to fail me a little bit—stuff like if this is the seventh track on this album. My memory for the core records of pre-streaming is just so strong, and I have a much closer relationship to music as a result.

Was your collection mostly like CDs or did you also like to collect vinyl or cassettes or anything like that?

It was mostly just MP3s. I mean just straight up files. I had a really good organization system for all my music on my hard drives and stuff and then I have a lot of CDs. That’s my main thing. So to this day I have hundreds of CDs. 

I have a bunch of CDs at home and I don’t bring them to school just because I don’t usually have enough time to sit down and put them on because I really try to be engaged when I’m listening to them. That’s another thing pre-streaming vs. post-streaming, there’s a tendency to just throw music on and not really pay as much attention. Whereas if you have the physical thing, it’s more of a ritual. It’s more of an act and that’s really special.

Totally, yeah.

You started No Bells in 2021, was that during college at all? 

I graduated at this point. I started it at my first job. I was working at NPR at the time, probably like a year into COVID. I was living in D.C. for my job at NPR. Then due to the pandemic, I thought it’d be best if I just went home to Massachusetts. I stayed with my parents to save some money, and you know, not get COVID. The work I was doing with NPR was extremely hard news. Every day the new COVID death toll was the headline. And I was like this is horrible. Even though it was important and a humongous opportunity for somebody in their early twenties, I needed an outlet for the thing I really love to do, which is writing about music. I wasn’t having the best luck getting my pitches accepted anywhere—I don’t think I really had the tools to properly pitch in hindsight. That’s a big part of what I’m trying to do at Pitchfork, bringing back mentorship in some way, at least as much as possible. But I didn’t have that around then. So instead, I just started my own blog and initially it was sort of an arc, like a place to sort of throw up stuff that I wasn’t getting accepted anywhere else, as well as some of my friends’ stuff that was lying on their hard drives, things that were shelved. Magazines were shuttering around this time, so people just had pieces sitting around. And then within six to eight months, I started to take it more seriously. And my close friend from high school Srikar—well, we sort of drifted apart, but he was still somebody I saw doing cool shit—stepped up to be a designer for the site. Then this sort of taste of the site started to take shape over the next few years. In the pandemic era, hyperpop was cool to us.

And is the name a reference to the phrase ‘no bells and whistles?’

One reference is that. I think I was trying to do a real galaxy brain thing with that. The actual inspo was the song “No Bells” by Cousin Stizz, who’s a Boston rapper.

And then how did you guys come to the purple design? Is there any story behind that? It’s just such a unique, cool choice.

Honestly, it’s my favorite color. And I’m doing a lot of galaxy brain here, but I had a radio show at Williams, which was called ‘The Purple Tape,’ which is a reference to Ray Quon’s debut album, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…, which was released in a cassette as a purple tape. It’s a really sick cassette. And the color purple was just in my head. Western mass has like a big aura of purple—I feel like there’s multiple colleges that use purple, like my own. In the blog era that I was in, when I was looking at the Substack universe, I felt like things were sort of designed very one-note. I don’t know, I just wanted to have a weird, random color that set us apart.

So you had a radio show in college, what was the pivot between philosophy and math to journalism, NPR? Job prospects? 

I’m not going to lie. I’m sure you felt this at times too, but I just didn’t really know what I was doing in college. I mean, I still love philosophy. I’m literally reading a book right now that I read in one of my cognitive science classes because I just think it’s so fascinating. I think I had aspirations at one point of being a lawyer. So philosophy, I argued in my brain, was a sort of precursor to that. As far as math, I don’t have as good of an answer. I think I just did well in one or two math classes at Williams and I was like, let me just keep taking them. Did not do well in the later ones, and that was burning me out. The thing about a school like that is that you don’t really get much career advice and—I mean, they have a career center—none of these courses shapes your actual life in a meaningful way. I think with philosophy, it always exists in the background of how I write about music, but it’s not like a thing I’m actively referencing all the time. So I’m not going to sit here and be like, oh, ‘I’m so grateful that I studied philosophy.’ I just did, and I’m more grateful that I had things like radio and I was in the jazz band. I learned a lot from that. And I probably should have just majored in music, but I was stubborn. And I also wanted to please my parents a little bit. I think they were like ‘what the hell are you doing through your life?’ So I was like, at least this will get me a consulting job, maybe. Why did I pivot, though? I took the LSAT in my senior year, and I studied for it and everything. I think I did okay actually, but I was in the middle of that session in a mini auditorium and I just felt this pang of what the hell am I doing with my life. From then on I was like I’m going to figure this music shit out one way or another. I obviously am not talented enough to play an instrument professionally, but I am pretty good at writing about it. And I think I’ve already started to carve out a niche there for myself. So I followed that instinct. I also was taking a course at Williams—I know I was just talking shit about Williams—but I was taking a one credit course called ‘Making Radio’ my senior year, which was really formative for me. It gave me the confidence to try and pursue radio out of college. I had a little portfolio from that. I had a lot of writing for this one blog, and then I just kind of used all that to get this internship at NPR.

That’s cool, you were like the Leibniz of Williams who writes music on the side. I love philosophy, too. I was actually going to ask you about your sources of inspiration outside of the music itself. First of all, what instrument did you play for a jazz band? 

I play piano. [Tilts camera down to reveal his laptop was seated atop his keyboard.]

I remember in your Groovy Steppin’ Shit review, you had this line about seventh chords that was just so specific. And I was like, okay, so this guy must play something.

Yeah, that’s a good catch. It pops out here and there.

What kind of philosophy do you like to read?

I studied a lot of philosophy of mind throughout college. I almost was a cognitive science concentrator, actually, but I didn’t do it. I think that stuff’s interesting to me because at the time I was very curious about AI—I know we’re in the thick of AI shit right now, but in the late 2010s thinking about AI was considered pretty, you know, it wasn’t like a real thing affecting us all the time. 

Right. It was kind of sci-fi. 

Yeah. I think a lot of the shit I was reading about philosophy of the mind was loosely introducing frameworks to think about AI. You start with the mind body stuff, but then it gets really interesting with whether consciousness can emerge from complex biological systems or if it’s something that’s wholly separate in substance from the biological. And that also makes you ask more questions, like, if a dog had consciousness, would it be the same kind of thing as ours? Or is it even possible to understand? That’s phenomenology stuff. But yeah, all this interests me because the early questions I was having were about AI. I was on that heavy in college. I think it just still fascinates me. The one I’m reading right now is by this guy Dan Dennett, who’s a really good philosopher of mind. I’ve read like four or five books by Fanon. And just in general, black radicalism is a really interesting framework for me.

Sick, Fanon’s phenomenology is great. So to pivot back to No Bells—I loved your interview with billy woods, you guys got really deep. There were a lot of really cool questions you asked that got a lot out of him. Do you have any advice for younger people who are interviewing musicians on how to make it good and deep?

Yeah. I don’t have a specific line of questions that I sort of apply to every artist or subject. But I think with the woods interview, and with a couple of others where I feel like I achieved a similar level of depth, there was a through line. With woods, he’s talked about his music so much, and I did my research and found out he comes from this worldly professorial background. His parents are intellectuals, and one of them, I’m pretty sure, is a political refugee. There was a lot of shit going on there. I think people ask about that political refugee aspect and all that, but they didn’t so much ask about all the good from that. All the literature he’s probably absorbed and all this like content that has surely shaped his worldview and his music. So I guess that was my way into that interview, was to use all this stuff that billy woods is into as a way to paint a picture of who he is. And I think that’s often how I approach a lot of interviews. I do a lot of research, I go Nardwaur. I try to find a nugget or something that kind of makes me go ‘huh, where did that come from?’ It might have been briefly touched on in some interview, but never elaborated on further. I try to make that the center of my line of questioning. Also I think the music will always be there. We’ll always get to it. These are the places I like to start because I think it throws the subject off a little bit, and it also opens them up in ways you wouldn’t have expected. I don’t think it’s fail-safe. I think there are some artists who genuinely can’t talk about much else besides music, and that’s fine. When I try to talk about things about myself besides writing I freeze up. So it’s tough, and not always successful, but I would say find an angle into the interview, meaning you did the research, but also you could maybe relate to that and have more to say about it and create more of a dialogue with the artist. In my case, I was asking about stuff I was reading about at the time. I’d read some James Baldwin, and I was like, it’s just so billy woods coded.

And you pulled the quote and he pulled the quote. 

Yeah, literally. That was cool. He was walking around his house and finding some shit to read out.

For No Bells, it’s mostly all digital, and it has been until there was a zine launch?

Yeah, I mean I would just call it a magazine. It was kind of the thing that we—me and Srikar, who had designed the whole thing, and a couple of my friends—had always wanted to do. I feel like the whole vibe of the site is almost physical. We’re trying to put you on to real scenes, and a lot of it was starting to get more into events and being outside. So we wanted to have a physical version of the blog. I love that magazine. I fully understand why nobody does it though. It’s so much work and there’s like no payoff. I mean, the payoff’s holding it in your hand, I guess, and everybody thinking it’s cool. But you don’t really make much money on it. It’s purely for the love of the game. You have to think of it like that, and that it’s going to be a lot of work and a lot of hell. If you accept all of that, then maybe it’ll be tolerable to work on it. 

You’ll have a relic.

You’ll have a relic. The worst thing, though, is it’s straight up incompatible with the speed of our current moment. We were publishing things in that magazine that we’d collected over the course of the year, so some of the pieces were already dated by the time we published it. One of the artists whose debut album we were talking about so much put out another album like three months later. I was like, oh my god.

When you say it’s for the love of the game, that’s definitely true—it comes through with every aspect of it. What was the team of No Bells like? 

It’s still going, by the way. I just kind of hang out and give the final word on certain things, but I mostly let Kieran Press-Reynolds steer the ship there. But when we put out this magazine last year, I would say the team was me, this guy Millan Verma, who’s from Atlanta, and he has his own blog now called Derange that’s really good. It’s more about politics and stuff. And then, my friend Srikar from high school—then another guy from my high school named Tyler. And we had Patty, who’s an editor at our resident advisor. She was helping edit. Kieran’s sort of like the editor-in-chief now, I would say. 

Kieran also writes at Pitchfork. 

Yes, Kieran’s a columnist at Pitchfork. When I took the reins at Pitchfork, I had to let go of the blog a little bit for conflict of interest reasons, but also because I didn’t have time. I still host a radio show every month and I help out here and there. But as far as the rest of the blog, there’s a bunch of writers, obviously, there’s a bunch of freelancers. They all skew like mad young. I thought it was going to slow down, but there’s somebody who emailed Kieran and I, and Mill—I think we published a few things by him. And I just found out two days ago that he’s 17. I’m like, what?!

Wow. 

He’s really good too. He’s from Ireland and he’s just going crazy. It makes me happy that people are still really tapped in and wanting to blog, you know?

What was the chain like, because you’re all in different places? I’m just looking for the nitty gritty.

Yeah, so with No Bells, it’s a tight operation. Everyone sort of checks the pieces at some point. But when I was really cooking there, when it was really my thing, I was editing most stuff that came through. I’d be fielding pitches, looking at my inbox, handling invoices, figuring out how much to pay each person, taking the copy, shaping it with the writer. I was trying to make these writers shine. One of the things about No Bells is that a lot of the copy that came in was kind of rough. These are writers who oftentimes don’t even have a byline. But they have, in whatever email or DM they sent, a real curiosity about music and a scene that nobody else is covering. That was a big signal for me when I wanted to green-light something was like, I’ve never seen like anything published on, for instance, the new wave of Cumbia in New York and L.A. Somebody pushed me that, and I don’t think the story was there at all, but I felt the breadth of knowledge there and the amount of art it covered—we had to run it after some edits because nobody else was going to do it. It all ties back to the love of the game thing and the urgency of needing to platform these scenes that have nothing. And it inadvertently benefited us because, for instance, nobody was writing about that Cumbia scene, so when this piece went live, it got so much love. All these communities of DJs and listeners and dancers who listen to Cumbia and go to Cumbia shows every weekend were sharing the piece and reading it. And pieces like this often get cited by major publications, which redirects traffic to us. This happened especially when Kieran was doing a lot of writing at No Bells. Kieran’s really good at hitting on an internet trend or phenomenon before it really takes over. Kieran wrote this piece called “This is corecore (we’re not kidding),” and it was the first writing about that, whatever that was on TikTok. Three months later, every public news outlet, even NBC was covering it. And then Kieran was interviewed on NBC about his No Bells piece. So it’s a bit of that—culture before it happens, you know?

Yeah, totally. And where was the money coming from? 

I had a Patreon, which was just purely ‘please give us money,’ and there were really no perks. We didn’t really know what we were doing. It started out with just me, so I didn’t have a mechanism for making money besides the Patreon, which surprisingly got a lot of love, enough to pay a writer at least. We had a partnership with the streaming platform Nina Protocol for a bit. They would pay us every month for writing a No Bells column. It was pretty good, but it was like $1,000. That went pretty far to pay our writers. If we were paying people around $100 and $200 per piece, we could run five, six, seven stories in a month. I was trying to get that number up, but I was also very transparent in everything we did, like ‘hey, this is how much you’re not going to make.’ We got paid from events, too. Not a lot. This one event we partnered with a distribution agency, a label, essentially, to put it on. Because we were the marketers or the promoters, they paid us a flat rate instead of doing ticketed. We found these kind of weird, creative ways to make money, but it wasn’t ever a lot. Certainly not enough to quit our jobs. But it kept the lights on, I guess. 

Well, most people who are coming to blogs like that are kind of doing it for the love of the game, aren’t they? Not necessarily for the money. 

Yeah.

So how did Pitchfork come into the picture? 

Last year, I was in Chicago visiting my girlfriend, who was living there at the time and I got an email from Will Welch one day. It was this vague email that was like, ‘big fan of your work, we’d love to talk about No Bells.’ Turns out he was basically like, ‘we need somebody to run Pitchfork, and if you’re interested, would love for you to apply.’ I didn’t even know there was an opening there. I wasn’t even thinking about my career at the time. It was crazy that people were even considering me for these types of roles. So I applied and went through the process and got it.

One of the things that you’re doing is the cover story zines. They’ve been both so timely and culturally spot on. How are you guys deciding what covers to do? How did that idea come to you?

When I got into the role, Will was obviously from the GQ universe. A big part of their editorial output is cover stories and these extremely premium, high-access stories about some of your favorite artists and celebrities. We started chatting about what Pitchfork cover stories look like. The initial angle was digital cover stories. He was like ‘that’s kind of what you guys have budget for, this makes sense for you guys.’ But I felt a little bit unsatisfied by that. I was looking at the way GQ does it and there’s such an interest in physical media right now. I thought even though we’re part of GQ, there’s very little similarity between the two brands. They’re about access and being in the face of celebrities and the important people in culture. Pitchfork is at more of an arm’s length, if not a whole yardstick’s length, seeing it all play out and offering our takes on it, being more critical. We can make enemies as much as we can make friends. So cover stories are inherently a little bit against the grain of Pitchfork. I envisioned our cover stories to be about showing you what the future of music’s going to be. If you’ve noticed, none of the cover stories this year have been with a pop star, like Sabrina Carpenter or Tame Impala. They don’t really need Pitchfork. We don’t really need them—we do actually for traffic, but we don’t need to show you that they’re good artists. Instead, I think the cover stories are somewhere between ‘let me put you onto this’ and the traditional cover story. I would like for someone to one day look at like the slate of cover stories—the physical zines—and see the next 10 years of music. I also think rarity is really important. I’d much rather go for artists who have that kind of rare aura to them versus artists who are doing a lot of press promoting an album. That’s why the first cover is with Bladee. He didn’t even have anything coming out. We were just like, ‘let’s pull up on Bladee and see what he’s doing.’ Nobody even knows what he’s up to in Sweden. Nobody knows where he lives. We’ve never seen the inside of his house before. I’m sure Bladee will do more covers—in fact, I’m pretty sure he has a real publicist now who’s trying to get him set up for that stuff, but we got him at this moment when he’s just so cult. He doesn’t really like to do interviews and he’s off in Sweden doing whatever, reading books and shit. We wanted to catch him at that moment. It’s also a good way to give the readers something that they really are craving. We do a lot of reviews, but a lot of artists don’t want to do interviews these days. They’d rather do a really big splashy story than 10 small interviews. So I think it’s a balancing act between all these different vectors.

And I think Oklou is even more perfectly in the middle because she’s mysterious and there’s new music coming out, whereas Bladee is this mythical figure in culture. You wrote a piece in 2021 on No Bells about how Pitchfork critics were getting heat for being critical.

I still feel that. Now that I’m at Pitchfork, obviously I’m thinking about that every day. One thing I’ve been trying to press is making sure that our freelancers are aware that they have to be super honest and rigorous. When we are scoring albums, really honoring the scoring guidelines, and if we don’t like something, we should not be giving it a seven. A seven means you liked it. If you don’t like something you give it a four. It makes for better journalism and people engage with the site more because we have more range and clearer opinions about things. It isn’t just a ‘let people enjoy things site.’ Though when you have a lot of freelancers, because everybody has their own taste and everybody’s pitching albums to us that they presumably like, you’re going to end up getting a lot of people just enjoying things on the site. So that’s something that I’ve been really careful about since I got here.

Was there a shift from ‘doing it for the love of the game’ and working in this more money-oriented mindset? 

The biggest shift is that you can’t just publish a piece because you feel like it. Everything has to have a weird justification. There’s a pressure to bow-tie everything. And it’s something that frankly is kind of dumb. At times I’m just like, ‘let’s just publish this.’

You mentioned this little snippet in a video for the Pitchfork staff September picks, and you were talking about Joanne Robertson’s Blurrr, which I actually just published a review of today. You threw out the term ‘cloud rock,’ which I had read on Nina Protocol. I’m not the biggest fan of the label because I don’t think it accurately describes this emerging web of ‘genres’ that is kind of nebulous. You have someone like Joanne Robertson who’s more on the folk side, but still has this tinny-sounding production, and is in the same realm as some of these other artists like Mk.gee, who is maybe closer to the term ‘cloud rock,’ but I wanted to see if you had anything to say on that term specifically or on the way of categorizing the music. 

Honestly, I kind of stood through that. I made that video and like such a whim. But it’s just the latest iteration of people seeing a thing happening and then trying to put a label on it. I think this one’s especially nebulous because A: not all these things are rock. And B: these artists won’t even know each other. There’s no through line in between—I mean, some of the artists do. Going back to hyperpop, when I was in the weeds of that whole scene, I remember the biggest complaint was that the newer artists in the scene coming from SoundCloud and making rap, were being called ‘hyperpop.’ They hadn’t even heard that term before, and Spotify put them on the same hyperpop playlist. I’m always wary of this. I probably should have said something else in the video, but I think it is a useful signifier for now. For example people who are into ML Buch and whatever else, Nourished by Time and shit—maybe this will be cool too. There is a connective tissue that’s maybe about the way it sounds, the malaise of it all maybe. But maybe the need to classify it is dictated by the weird era of capitalism we’re in. That’s my non-answer answer. 

How much freedom do you give your columnists? 

The columnists more or less have free reign. It’s sick, honestly. There are weeks where we’ll indulge them in a certain direction, case in point last week with Kieran. I don’t know if you read it, but it’s about Taylor Swift. Most of the time, I let Kieran cook. And Kieran comes from a Business Insider background, so he knows how to get people to read. He has a populism to his writing, I think, even though it’s so niche. He wants to reach people, and I trust that he will. I think with Alphonse’s column, it’s much more of whatever is on Alphonse’s mind, but dictated by the release cycle a little bit.

Do you have any websites, blogs, writers, anyone you want to platform right now for us to go to stay tapped in? 

Yeah. I really like this dude, my friend Tyler, has a blog called billdifferen.blogspot.com. It’s a great blog if you want to go back to lists. He’s super tapped into Jersey Club and Baile Funk and SoundCloud rap. I think criticism is like very much an autobiography—it’s almost more autobiography than it is about external subject matter. I get that a lot from his writing. I also really like Samuel Hyland, who’s a young writer. He writes for Pitchfork a little bit, but he has a really cool website called Sammy’s World. The design is crazy, and it’s really good writing. Insanely long reads. I feel like every day I find out about a new blog or a new website through my email. I’m honestly super off the whole Instagram music page thing. I am friends with some of those people, but I’m just so sick of Instagram creators asking people what their favorite album is and like it’s the same video on eight different pages. And the payola of all those sites—you’ll never catch me recommending any of those. I wish there was more of a means of getting good edits and having your writing shaped a little bit by someone older than you with a little bit more experience in the game. Right now everyone’s self-publishing and that’s great, but you can also clearly see what we’re losing in that when these writers try to pitch at Pitchfork or something. 

Do you guys get a lot of that?

Yeah, I do, actually. And we do publish some of them. Samuel Hyland’s a good example. I don’t think he was writing for anybody else by himself until he started to push for us. Generally, you need to have written something for sure, it doesn’t even matter where.