Northern Exposure: How a UK-based music mag helps grassroots art endure

Leadbelly tore down stages so uniquely and fiercely that he was pardoned for murder and the Lomaxes hoisted him into the Library of Congress. Lester Bangs told us James Taylor was punk while writing himself—and a readership—out of a dark hole as he listened to Astral Weeks. As long as musicians have been plucking strings and singing tunes, writers have hung in and around the stages and saloons where they played, clinging to or sneering at every note and lyric and image with an urge to spit it back to the public through their lens.

There have been—and still are—ugly critics and opportunists out for blood or clout. But in its best form, music writing is Rock and Roll’s sidekick that elevates the mission and resistance of artists, exposes readers to new perspectives, and amplifies voices beyond local club walls. Northern Exposure, the UK-based rag at subject, has been contributing to this beautiful tradition since 2015. But what’s different about their approach and endurance is who is at the helm—women, who, despite a world telling them not to, say whatever the hell they want while lifting up the artists who need it most.

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Rachel Brown, the magazine’s founder, found herself backed against a wall. “Northern Exposure wasn’t the product of design, but of my outrage,” Brown begins. “I was sick of the magazine that I wrote for. Same names, same histories, same preened cool turned through gloss web-pages by the Ferris Wheel of descended authority. I wanted something different, something noisier.”

So Brown built what she wanted: a vehicle to not only support local artists, but house a voice for bands who fall short of institutional labels—or as she puts it, bands who “can’t be shoehorned into the industry’s neat slots.” Brown’s responses to my questions are both poetic and pugilistic, which confirms that the magazine is an extension of her ethos.

When pushed to punch, she and her staff are not afraid to lose readers with their stories; there are, of course, short essays, reviews of new singles, and other common music writing exercises, but those are coupled with criticisms of systemic corruption and reminders, or “raised noise,” of certain artists’ habitual behavior that some fans choose to overlook.

On the other hand, it’s important to note that the magazine is a women-run nonprofit dedicated to giving good, honest artists space. “We’re about something bigger than reach figures and looks,” Brown says. “We’ve made an album, thrown so many shows and festival stages around the country, helped raise funds for Sheffield Children’s Hospital and Help Musicians, even gotten ourselves invited to Parliament not for pomposity, but because we made noise where noise was essential.”  

In addition to causes, the team has curated international trips for multiple bands and hosted showcases abroad. Brown, who is also a photographer with credits in major publications including Nikon Magazine and The Guardian, states that “Northern Exposure isn’t just my publication, it’s my resistance. An archive in living color of all that’s brilliant, under-funded, thorn-tangled, and in-desperate-need-of-attention about art.”

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So where did this shit start? “Where do I even begin?” Brown laughs. “Music journalism has long handed the mic to the boys in favour of making space for the girls to lip-sync in silence, dance for approval. You’re not merely being requested to confirm your sense of perspective, you’re being requested to confirm the fact that your presence in the room isn’t by mistake.” And she’s right. Despite a long-running history of writing riding copilot to music, few women have been able to crack the canon. In Anwen Crawford’s New Yorker commentary, “The World Needs Female Rock Critics,” the author points out a cold truth: rock and roll has long celebrated male debauchery, which society not only accepts but glorifies. To be Rock and Roll is to be against the grain. Yet—according to longstanding patriarchal norms—to be a woman is to fall in line. Rock and Roll and women were institutionally incompatible, and while many women have (and continue) to beat that perspective to death, it’s rare to find women writing about rock from the same perch as Greil Marcus or the late Bangs.

“I’ve had my credibility called into question standing in the face of male peers less junior than me. I’ve seen gatekeepers smile in my direction, only to demand credentials. It isn’t overt misogyny, it’s structural, informal,” Brown explains. “It’s the assumption that a woman behind the lens, behind the pen, hungers for clout, not culture creation.”

Brown credits her nan, who worked in the music industry and dealt with much of the same, as well as other women around her who are survivors and advocates, for helping her stand her ground. “[their] conviction, their belief, keeps me steady.”

It’s worth noting that Crawford wrote her piece in 2015, the same year Brown started Northern Exposure. Perhaps the two were unknowingly talking to each other.

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It’s an odd thing, writing a piece about someone in their own publication. I’m in a tricky yet fortunate position—not only to be featured here, but to speak to the person who started the platform. It’s clear when talking to Brown that you’re getting her unbridled truth. Music, like love, is a ceaselessly discussed phenomenon that seizes on everyone differently. For Brown, it’s “an archive” and a tool. “Music has always been part of the resistance,” she says. “But resistance without courage is just branding. When thousands upon thousands are dying in Gaza and Palestine, and artists with the biggest stages and loudest mics say nothing, it’s more than disappointing, it’s disgraceful. A flag, a lyric, a statement these aren’t just symbols. They’re visibility. They’re solidarity. They’re interruption. And right now, interruption is necessary.”

Interruption, noise, whatever you want to call what Northern Exposure does, is effective and loud enough that it found me across the pond in Northern Virginia. It’s difficult to keep an independent magazine afloat, and yet, ten years in, here we are. There is a powerful music scene in Northwest England (I’ve covered a few artists from that region already), and Rachel Brown’s insightful, compassionate, disruptive, confrontational machine is at the center of it.

At its core, Northern Exposure is a magazine of the people for the people. Words from the UK that echo the sentiments of artists held down by institutional red tape, local noise abatements, or whatever other flavor of systemic quieting gets in the way.

“We have never ceased questioning of how we can better to serve the grassroots scenes that give birth to real culture. We’ve championed mental health. We’ve criticised passive exclusion of music spaces. And we’ll keep doing it.”

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I guess what I came to say is—know this, England: you have a champion of the voiceless, of music, of rock and roll, and of the people, in your corner. I’m left admiring this organization’s work from the United States, and am grateful for the glimpse into such productive and fierce grassroots scenes that mirror those I love close to my home. Something special is happening here, and the louder it gets the better off we’ll be.

When I ask Brown what she hopes to have accomplished, years from now, when looking back at her body of work, she says:

“Just wanted to give a heartfelt shoutout to Anne, my partner, my anchor, and truly one of the strongest people I know. I honestly don’t know how she does it and I’d not have made it through the past few years without her unwavering support. She and the team are absolutely smashing it, and I couldn’t be prouder of everything they’ve achieved. When I read backwards, I will not be reading to finish, I will be reading in hopes of flames. I need girls to read what I write and understand that they don’t need to censor themselves in hopes of fitting in. That they can take up space, get loud, write big, be soft all at the same time. That living and creating aren’t separate, they feed one another. And they don’t owe the world palatability. And I want the boys to get that too. Because the toughest of supports, the sharpest of watchers, the busiest of builders I’ve encountered are the kind of men that disrupt the systems they are a part of. The kind that constructs platforms alongside, not upon, of others. The kind that gets that the appearance of doing isn’t doing, that listening, taking risk, doing. The kind that gets that believing in the right guts of women to be equal isn’t weakness. It if there’s only one kid, no matter where they’re from, that can read something that I’ve written that they can be, I don’t need to water down my story. I can be me, I can be loud, I can make this mean something, then I’ll know that what I do has done what we wanted it to do. It wasn’t ever about pride. It was about nobody ever feeling they need to water down what they’re true about to be included in music despite the gatekeepers and snobs.”

Burn on, Northern Exposure.