About | Contact
Website for Justin Hopper, writer based in Pittsburgh, PA.
Includes published clips, as well as pages for new, unpublished writing, and perhaps, one day, for music-related work. My writing is most often related to the city of Pittsburgh, as well as more national and international perspectives on music, art and culture.
Other new stuff focuses on England and English history, tradition, music and folklore, as a way of exploring concepts of English identity.
Contact info:
juddy [dot] hopper [at] gmail [dot] com
…and a bunch’a bio stuff…
As a writer, for ten years I’ve made a career of writing about music, art, culture, a li’l bit o’ politics, and a lot o’ Pittsburgh. Besides four years as the first dedicated Music Editor at Pittsburgh City Paper, my work has appeared in publications including Paste, XLR8R, Poetry Foundation, Salon.com, Spin, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Pop City, and others. Many clips from these publications can be found on this blog. Inspired by writers such as Iain Sinclair, Mark Nowak, Peter Riley, Caroline Bergvall, Sukhdev Sandhu, W.G. Sebald, Tim Robinson, and others, my goal for 2010 is to move more into forms of documentary poetry, psychogeography, and other kinds of creative non-fiction and art-writing.
As a musician, I co-founded or worked with a number of Pittsburgh bands throughout the 1990s and 2000s, including ska-beat groups The B-3’s (singer/songwriter/guitarist), which released three CDs between 1996-2002, and The Skablins (singer/songwriter/guitarist), one of the founding groups of the Pittsburgh ska scene (despite its wonderfully inane name) and the primary reason for Mellinger’s Beer Distributor’s survival between 1991-1995. After a brief spell with the original acoustic incarnation of the bizarro Johnsons, I re-joined the band early this millennium as it became The Johnsons Big Band, which released a damn-fine album and, if I do say so myself, played some of the most intense live shows ever. No, like, seriously – it was a really f’ing good band. And until two years ago, I had the honor and the privilege of learning to play electric organ while fumbling around nervously onstage with The New Alcindors, a soul-funk instrumental combo made up of awesome musicians and great guys who almost never pointed out that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
As a DJ, I’ve helped concoct three of Pittsburgh’s most successful monthly parties: Soulcialism and its offspring, Vipers Soul Club, combined to spend more than half the past decade as the city’s premier showcases for Northern Soul and rare R&B music, while Pandemic began in 2006 as one of America’s first nights playing contemporary pan-global street sounds such as Balkan beat, baile funk, bhangra, gypsy wedding music, and more – an eccentric and eclectic approach to dance music that has since sprung up in club nights across Europe and the Americas.