Deep Voices #106: Chris Richards

An interview with the Washington Post music critic and zine maker

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Chris Richards has been the Washington Post’s pop music critic for a decade and a half. In that time, he’s pushed the idea of what qualifies as “pop music” to its outer limits, writing often of the D.C. underground rap scene, of ambient music, of hardcore punk. But he is not an elitist or an obdurate ignorer of the mainstream. He writes, too, of Sabrina Carpenter and Vampire Weekend, bringing his spicy wit to music of all shapes. His writing is passionate and generous. When he’s writing about something he loves, you can imagine him sitting you down and turning on the stereo, forcing you to listen to this one song that is going to change your life. And it will. 

Six years ago, with more ideas and enthusiasm than he could fit into his day job, Chris started writing a zine, Debussy Ringtone, of which he’s just released his 20th and final issue. Each issue was 12 pages, with one story per page. Some stories were half-observations, others were deep meditations. Each story was numbered diplomatically, be it an elegy for a lost musician or a random thought on Raekwon. The zine has a cult following, partially because Chris is a very kind, likable person, but also because of its physical medium. The ideas in Debussy Ringtone could have been expressed on social media and, had they been, would likely have garnered Chris a sizable audience. But to read his one-page mind nuggets, you’ve gotta send him four dollars and wait for them to arrive in the mail. To choose to read Debussy Ringtone is to desire to be an active participant in a lively conversation. (Every issue of Debussy Ringtone remains in print—ordering information is available here.)

On the occasion of Debussy Ringtone’s shuttering, I asked Chris about his work on the zine, what it does or does not have in common with his writing for the Post, and what he learned from the zine. He also made a playlist featuring music covered in Debussy Ringtone. Listen to that above and read our interview below a brief message about supporting Deep Voices.

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Deep Voices is a weekly newsletter run by me, Matthew Schnipper. Each edition contains a one hour playlist with writing about music. In that writing, I try to open up a wider world in the way music opens one up for me. Once a month, Deep Voices is for paying subscribers only, with a playlist and notes about the music music released in the past month. Your support keeps this project going and supports my writing and searching. Subscribe below. Subscribers also get a discount on merchandise like these Deep Voices pocket tees.

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You’re a music critic with a prominent platform and relative editorial freedom. What did writing a zine provide for you that your role at the Post did not?

In a very practical sense, it gave me a place to write about weirdo stuff that might not sustain 800 words in the newspaper. But as the zine developed, I think it helped me enter different kinds of writer-reader relationships. Like, I’m writing my reader’s home address on a mailing envelope four times a year, I’m doing swaps with other zine people I’ve never met in 3D. It’s been this really intimate way to build (or rebuild) community, and it’s taken me back to where I got my start as a public writer in ways that feel really good. I think all the extra reps absolutely improved my writing in the newspaper, too.

Why did you start a paper zine and not a newsletter or start filming TikToks? Do you think you limited your audience? 

Limiting my audience was very much the point! It takes genuine effort to read something that doesn’t exist in digital space, so with any zine like mine, readers and writers are coming together for an encounter that feels mutually important. Don’t let anyone tell you this is snobbery or gatekeeping. The gate is open. Who’s gonna step through?

Why are you stopping publishing Debussy Ringtone now? 

Man, I really wanted to make it to fifty issues like HeartattaCk, but the boring truth is that I couldn’t keep up. I thought I’d built such an easy-to-fill container! The zine had a tight formula (12 pages, one piece per page, published quarterly), so all I needed to do was have one worthy idea a week. But I kept falling behind. Pretty soon, this awesome pleasure-thing was feeling like a lurking stress-thing. I know I’ll be making zines for the rest of my life, but no more scheduling them or announcing their existence until they’re ready to ship. (Aside from Remedial Hardcore, out this fall! Ha!)

Who is the ideal Chris Richards reader? Does that change from the Post to DR? 

I love this question so much. It’s like being asked who you hope to fall in love with, or who you hope your grandchildren will become. I know so well but I also have no idea. Like I said earlier, I know zine readers have made a serious effort to read me, so I love them as they are, each and every one. The bar for entry is lower for newspaper readers, but still kind of high in the grand scheme of things, and they might come to the encounter with certain expectations of arts criticism published in a paper of record—so I hope we might loosen those screws, and eventually get to thinking of each other as co-listeners, and maybe even reach some tacit agreement that music is life. I think writing about music in a newspaper is a way of reporting on both reality and imagination’s place in it. What a privilege. 

Aside from the collage on each cover, Debussy Ringtone contained no artwork. Why? 

That decision was pure impulse when I started the zine, but I was grateful for my instincts after doing a couple different zine fairs. People would pick up my zine, ask why there were no pictures, then ask what the writing was about. I’d say “mostly music” and their faces would scrunch like I’d just made them sniff the bottom of my sneakers. I was legit shocked. I’ve always thought of music zines as the quintessential fanzine form, but many of today’s zines are photo-illustration-graphic-art objects for people to collect. Fine. It shouldn’t be 1997 forever. But I still very much believe in fanzines as vessels for otherground culture and its histories, so I’m hoping that this proliferation of wordless zines ends up flowing into that information sluice in ways I can’t yet foresee. 

Your writing is always so enthusiastic. But in a piece about Pitchfork’s sort-of folding, you expressed some fear about the state of music journalism. How do you balance the love of writing about music with the shakiness of the industry that supports it? 

I’m so glad the enthusiasm comes through. That’s the fundamental thing for me: It’s a fanzine. It’s full of stuff I’m a fan of. Simple enough, right? I think other people basically understand this, too, so I’m not worried about zines disappearing anytime soon. But music criticism — the kind that has a wide, curious readership that wants relatively easy access to challenging opinions on new music — is definitely an endangered thing right now. Big media organizations are publishing less of it, so less people are reading it, which means they publish even less, and the snake keeps chomping its tail. I don’t have any answers here, just my faith that the pendulum swings back around. 

What did you learn from making Debussy Ringtone? 

I learned how grateful I am for any person who takes time out of their existence to read my words — that private, silent collaboration across space and time that threatens to wipe your brain clean if you think about it too much. Maybe a fanzine is a means of practicing gratitude foremost?

What zines would you recommend? What music publications in general? 

The final issue of DebRings actually starts with a huge thank-you list to all the zines I crossed psychic paths with over five-plus years, so can I narrow it down to current D.C.-based zines? Demystification, Probation Area, Brick Digest, Potion for Bad Dreams, Tendency, Outside the World and everything published by Shining Life, including the forthcoming Shining Life 2024 Zine Compilation (for which I wrote a one-pager about handmade emotional hardcore 7″ covers from the ’90s). As for music publications in general, I think I wish everything was a zine, so I’m not kidding when I say I’ve printed up digital newsletters by Natalie Weiner, Zach Lipez, Sam McPheeters, plus nearly everything on Matt Korvette’s YellowGreenRed site. Lastly — and don’t you dare edit this out, Schnipper! — I get to go to at least one unheard place in this life every week through Deep Voices, so please believe me when I say these questions make me feel something higher than honor. 

Your playlist here is all artists who were written about in DR. There’s some overlap with what you eventually wrote about in the Post, for example Elori Saxl. Someone was talking to me recently about “practicing” not being something you can do with writing. But did writing about something in DR help you solidify an idea or a subject for a story for a bigger audience? 

Oh, that’s interesting. I think I believe in that kind of “practice.” For me, keeping a journal and writing letters to friends feels like some kind of inadvertent preparation for my public writing. I also have docs upon docs that no other soul will ever lay eyes on, filled with capsule reviews of books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen. But either way, I’m happy you noticed a couple zines items mutating into newspaper pieces. It’s mostly a timing thing. The Washington Post gives me enormous freedom to write about whatever interests me at any given moment, and I’m unspeakably grateful for that — but I still want to respect the reader’s curiosity for what’s happening right now. I joke with my work friends that we’re making a newspaper, not an oldspaper! So with Elori Saxl, I found out about her music a year after her album dropped, so I decided to steer that experience into the zine. But when she put out that amazing new EP in July, it felt entirely appropriate to shout my love for her brand new music through the newspaper’s megaphone. 

The music in the zine and in the playlist are pretty varied in terms of genre. Do you feel pressure to be aware of what is happening in all corners of the music world, personally and/or professionally? And, because it’s clearly not genre, is there a throughline in the music that appeals to you? 

Okay, so I very much wanted this mix to unfold with the same sort of staccato, anti-flow of the zine — and then I wondered why Debussy Ringtone was like that in the first place. I think part of it is rooted in how our divided attention works in the digital age, and not wanting our media predicament to be a total defeat. Even if we are bumblebees flitting from flower to flower in an endless field, those fleeting experiences can still have significance and meaning. So no, I don’t feel pressure to know what’s happening in all corners of music (which is impossible) so long as I’m always bumblebeeing around, slowing down to immerse myself in certain musics when it feels right, and never staying exclusively in my corner. 

That leads to your second question. Where is my corner? I grew up near-then-in the D.C. hardcore scene, so those principles are always going to be in me: the idea of music as both a world-building and community-building force. So I think I might always be searching for one or the other in any music. Or else I’m searching for music that feels as singular as people are. Or else for music that moves the most like life. These aren’t great answers, but they point me toward a horizon I like squinting at. I’m deeply comforted to know I’ll spend the rest of my life searching for things that can’t be known.