Remembering music journalist James Hunter 1957–2025
When the writer James Hunter cold-called me in early 1985, I recognized his byline from The Village Voice and various music magazines. I was an editor at Star Hits, the American cousin of Smash Hits in the UK. Both glossies were products of the so-called Second British Invasion, covering video-friendly pop performers such as Duran Duran, Culture Club and so on. Both magazines also prided themselves on being eclectic; we covered crossover hip-hop and dance music when space and the zeitgeist permitted.
James pitched a brief review (the section was titled Short Cuts) of the upcoming debut by a emerging singer named Whitney Houston; I said “sure” and thought “we’ll see.” I admired his reviews in the Voice while suspecting he might be too cerebral for the Star Hits “party on every page” aesthetic. My fears turned out to be groundless.
Actually the submitted piece was a joint review by Jim and his (imaginary) dog Trevor. Who thumped his tail in approval. This was perfect: light-hearted yet not insubstantial, clever both in terms of content and embodiment of the Star Hits house style. Not to mention placing us way ahead of the curve on the soon-to-be superstar Whitney. Everyone else in the office approved, with one caveat. “This is wonderful but please, no more pet reviewers.” Of course dogs are so popular these days — such a thing — Trevor would no doubt be offered his own column. I don’t recall James Hunter’s byline ever appearing in Star Hits again, but our telephone friendship was up and running. We spoke regularly (and eventually met in person multiple times) over the next forty years.
First you’ll have to understand — or take my word — people maintained long-distance relationships during the time before cell phones. These audio-only bonds resembled online relationships, more or less. Landline ringers always sounded the same but seriously sometimes you just knew who it was before you picked up.
“Mark, it’s Jim.”
Our conversations focused on music and writing, though they also veered as wide and deep as our musical tastes did. We would occasionally reveal personal and autobiographical details, often with music as a springboard. For instance: when I mentioned that the Pet Shop Boys autumnal Behavior album pulled me through an extended mourning period for my mother in the early Nineties, Jim countered that the hit duet “Guilty” by Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb had served the same purpose when his father unexpectedly passed a decade previous. While music was our shared bond, the blood pumping through our veins, it wasn’t the only passion we shared.
Before constant social media chatter and the rapid-fire response of texting, freelance journalism could be one lonely occupation. During the Eighties and Nineties my time was split between on-site editorial jobs and extended periods of working from home. I maintained a small but deep network, consisting of other writers and a trusted handful of record company publicists who I enjoyed speaking with, beyond whoever they may have been hyping that day. At times the ringing phone could be annoying, not to mention a deadline interruption — that’s why God created answering machines. But more often than not, cooped up in a modest apartment with your word processor of choice and an ever-expanding vinyl collection, those landlines provided a lifeline to the so-called real world.
My calls with Jim — regular, epic, easily stretching beyond an hour — were special. We studied each other’s published articles closely, having read and appreciated each other’s work before we ever met. This predisposed us to be supportive: diplomatic dissent and measured criticism were always on offer, gradually accepted if not initially welcome. We respected each other. Naturally we weren’t above dishing various editors and business people we’d encountered along the way, as well as analyzing the articles and reviews that surrounded ours in various publications. Jim could be cutting and funny, but rarely nasty or gratuitous. I’ll never forget how he assessed a negative review by another critic that devolved into a personal attack on the artist in question. “He made a lousy record but I wouldn’t call for his death in the pages of The Village Voice.” Jim was generous at heart, and (pardon the expression) a true gentleman.
Jim Hunter exhibited catholic with a small “c” taste. He doesn’t deserve the latter-day label “poptimist” because he wasn’t at all calculating or self-conscious about what he liked. Top 40 radio singles, romantic R&B, pickup-truck-adjacent Nashville country: it all fit in his ears just as comfortably as rock and roll. He was more open to softer sounds than any other practicing rock critic of the time. That didn’t preclude his measured enthusiasm for some aggressive rock, underground or above. Jim wasn’t a knee-jerk punk, and that set him apart from his peers. Anyway, punking out would have been an affectation for the most effortlessly cosmopolitan dude in Charleston, West Virginia. After graduating from University of Kentucky with a bachelors degree in English, he went to University of Virginia, where he collected a master’s and endured a year of law school. Why would a promising literary scholar or attorney opt for a peripatetic freelancer’s life? Then as now, it’s a sacred calling, and/or a form of insanity.
As hard to believe as it may be today, in the late Seventies writing about pop music ranked somewhere below sports reporting and gardening coverage in the mainstream journalism hierarchy. It was niche to the hilt, which was frustrating but also liberating.
Jim embraced his considerable erudition, musical and otherwise, though he wielded it lightly. In his reviews, he carefully placed references to classical music and comparisons to avant-garde Belgian fashion designers, unexpected yet revelatory, as easily as he’d invented a sharp-earned canine for Star Hits. Well-versed in recording studio ways and means, Jim once referred to “sonic architecture” with regard to an elaborately produced record, and that term (for me) became the identifier of his entire critical approach. Think of him as the Ada Louise Huxtable of popular music criticism!
Another term he coined that didn’t catch on in the discourse but in my opinion should have was “techno soul” — a genre tag that aptly captured the synth-enhanced R&B practiced by Atlanta’s superb SOS Band and British acts such as Imagination, Lynx and the great Loose Ends. That group’s unjustly forgotten singer Jane Eugene was a Jim Hunter muse along the lines of Sade, who he’d championed early and often. If techno-soul sounds like the precursor to Janet Jackson’s stellar run with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, then you get what I’m talking and Jim was writing about.
He also wrote insightfully about Luther Vandross, devoting time and genuine understanding to the critically derided (or ignored) Quiet Storm R&B format. And just because he refused to flaunt punk bona fides doesn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate edgier rock. The Cure was a long-standing enthusiasm. “I’m a Curehead” he declared, repeatedly. And as Robert Smith kept layering and deepening his band’s sound though the Eighties into the Nineties, that embrace made perfect sense. Sonic Architecture.
In the Nineties, Jim came into his own, writing-wise. Or perhaps the direction of pop music verified some of his prescient instincts, as evidenced by the Atlanta rap and R&B scene breakout, alongside the contemporary country renaissance. Long a promoter of Randy Travis and George Strait, Jim doted on Wynona Judd and Kelly Willis from the start. He saw Garth Brooks’s crossover coming a mile away. “He got bored down there in Houston and decided to fuse George Strait with Journey.” And the rest, as they say, is history. That magic moment in 1991 when Nirvana, Garth Brooks, Metallica and En Vogue cozied up to each other in the Top Ten was the confirmation — the apotheosis — of everything Jim Hunter wrote during the Eighties.
During my fleeting and ultimately doomed tenure as record reviews editor at Rolling Stone in 1995, I assigned Jim several reviews that I thought he hit out of the park, including Michael Jackson’s bizarre HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I (speaking of doomed). At Jim’s request, he reviewed a catchy single by Take That, a proto-boy-band whose mere presence in the hallowed pages of Rolling Stone was later cited as proof of my ineptitude and a reason why I was fired. The mid-Nineties was a weird time for the music business: grunge faded while The Spice Girls and Britney Spears loomed on the horizon. Still it remained a fruitful period for James Hunter.
The New York Observer became a frequent and valued outlet for him in the later stage of his career. My favorite piece he published there was a book review of two poetry volumes: A Night Without Armor by the singer Jewel (riding high then) and a simultaneously released parody volume by the actor Beau Siu, A Night Without Armor II: The Revenge. Jim deftly dismissed the latter as slight while, without a trace of condescension or contrariness, insisted that Jewel’s volume of verse constituted “poetry, its big bad self” and as such was more worthwhile than then-current efforts by “coffeehouse bores” such as Maggie Estep and Henry Rollins. Instead of making huge claims for Jewel, he simply pointed out that, paraphrasing the rapper Rakim (another favorite), she wasn’t a joke.
The following list hopefully hints at his range and breadth. Rest assured one of Jim’s many other correspondents could produce a completely different lineup. Since these are albums Jim Hunter big-upped to me, it’s music I’ll always associate with him.
David + David — Boomtown
SOS Band — Sands of Time
Randy Travis — Storms of Life
Ryuichi Sakamoto — Neo Geo
Lonnie Mack — Roadhouses & Dancehalls
Johnny Mercer — The Capitol Collectors Series
Gil Evans — The Individualism of Gil Evans
Talk Talk — Spirit of Eden
Massive Attack — Mezzanine
Eric B & Rakim — Paid In Full
Sade — Stronger Than Pride
Wynonna Judd — Wynonna
Womack & Womack — Love Wars
Davitt Sigerson — Falling In Love Again
Ernie Isley — High Wire
PM Dawn — The Bliss Album
Tricky — Maxinquaye
Everything But The Girl — Amplified Heart
Djavan — Seduzir
Joi — The Pendulum Vibe
Deana Carter — Did I Shave My Legs For This?
Duncan Sheik — Duncan Sheik
Like many journalists (myself included), James Hunter was blindsided by the digital revolution. For writers covering popular music, the change was a double-whammy. Both magazine publishing and the music business were thrown into turmoil during the onset of the new century; by 2010 neither sphere was recognizable. Print publications and vinyl records or CDs became antiques, curios; treated as fetish items by curious young people.
We all struggled to keep up during the 2000s, or somehow reinvent ourselves at the exact mid-career point we should have been ruling the universe. I don’t recall Jim unduly complaining or sounding bitter but perhaps more than most, he seemed a bit lost in terms of inspiration. Pulling off a segue into writing books was a lot harder than it looked — put it that way. Jim floated various book ideas, some quite plausible (a Burt Bacharach biography), some possibly too ambitious (a biography of CIA co-founder Frank Wisner) but as far as I know he never got to the stage of writing a proposal.
As time passed Jim and I spoke less frequently, and the gaps between our conversations could stretch into months, eventually years. I don’t recall any kind of falling out; though we’d become good friends over time, our bond began and centered around a pursuit — writing about music — that we no longer practiced on a regular basis. I wrote non-fiction book reviews, unsuccessfully attempted to follow up my own book debut, happily allowed parenting to fill up more and more of my days. When Jim and I did speak again, catching up was almost always gratifying, and never awkward.
Once the Covid pandemic began receding, sometime in 2022, Jim and I started phoning each other on the regular again. Over the years he had lived in Nashville and Atlanta (where I’d visited him in 1993 or 94) but now he was back in the Charleston vicinity, where he’d spent much of his adult life. I’d wondered if his readers in The New York Times or LA Weekly realized the well-informed and stimulating piece of writing in front of them emanated from Red House, West Virginia. Not that it mattered, of course.
Anyway Jim seemed settled in and fairly content, as we discussed age-appropriate pursuits such as our exercise routines and recently imposed diet restrictions. When our conversations invariably turned to music and writing, however, I began to sense an unease than only grew during subsequent calls. He seemed to be stuck in the past, to put it bluntly, discussing subjects — people we’d known, publications we’d written for, situations we’d complained about — from the Nineties as if they were red-hot current.
By 2024 I grew concerned about Jim’s state of mind, worrying that he’d become isolated — which can happen to people our age living anywhere, by the way, including the major metropolis that I call home. The downside of a long-distance friendship: I felt powerless about acting on my concerns. It’s not as if I could bring them up with Jim and of course I had my own health and family to worry about too. The calendar pages flipped though 2025 without Jim or I calling each other, though I did think about him.
Ironically James Hunter never established any kind of significant social media presence, despite the fact that he maintained such a wide-ranging social network during the pre-digital decades. I was far from his only far-flung telephone friend. Given all that it was probably inevitable that I found out about Jim’s death though a friend of a friend on Facebook. Adding to the shock was the date of his passing: May 18 2025, more than a year before the social media post that delivered the devastating news to his many friends and former colleagues. Even at an age and stage of life where losing family members and friends has become ever more frequent, I remain in a state of shock, almost expecting to see his name appear on my iPhone and hear him say, unnecessarily, “Mark, it’s Jim.”
The recent passing of singer Duncan Sheik, at age 57, was a grim milestone for music fans of a certain vintage. Co-composer of the hit musical Spring Awakening, Duncan Sheik was also a highly accomplished singer/songwriter on his own. With his Ivy League education and literary pedigree, musical sophistication, dashing good looks and graceful ambition, Duncan Sheik could’ve been cloned in a laboratory, as an attempt to animate James Hunter’s tastes and aesthetic. Duncan Sheik’s obituary in The New York Times quoted the Rolling Stone review of his self-titled debut album. A nameless critic praised the mix of “groaning violas and nighttime suffering, acoustic guitars and tentative high spirits.” I didn’t need Google to remind me who wrote that review. Duncan Sheik and James Hunter RIP.
