When Max Brzezinski Ph.D.’07 DJs, he tells a story.
During his time at Duke, he was program director at student radio station WXDU. On the air, he would play tunes connected by threads deeper than genre. An English doctoral student at the time, his increasingly intellectualized relationship with culture permeated his lifelong passion for music. So he might have played a pop song and then a Granadan reggae number because the songs were connected by revolutionary themes, Brzezinski offers, even if they sounded nothing alike.
“There are so many ways to get into music,” he says. “It just adds another layer.”
Brzezinski has made music his life. He’s penned two books about it – “Vinyl Age: A Guide to Record Collecting Now” in 2020 and the new “Under Pressure,” about the 1981 David Bowie and Queen hit. Published in February by Duke University Press, “Under Pressure” digs deep into the song’s social and political meaning, specifically as a pop anthem.
As a child in Chicago, a young Brzezinski found music everywhere. He didn’t know that the city was a hotbed of house music and hip-hop – not yet – but he loved the rich and varied sounds on his radio dial. In middle school, his family moved to Dayton, Ohio, leaving that sonic diversity behind. Brzezinski was a little shocked at first, but eventually he found his scene: ’90s indie-rock, exemplified for him by bands like Guided by Voices, The Breeders and Brainiac.
Then came Grinnell College in Iowa and then Duke. Once here, Brzezinski never really left. After a few years as a visiting professor at Wake Forest University, he was able to combine his love of music with his English background. For close to eight years he was marketing director at Carolina Soul Records. Today, he runs communications for the freshly launched North Carolina Music Office. He has an exciting mission: delve into North Carolina’s sonic ecosystems and share what’s there. Brzezinski seems right at home as the conduit between area musicians and new listeners.
“What I’m trying to do is present the authentic stories,” Brzezinski says.
It’s a chilly March morning in Durham and Brzezinski sits outside the Lakewood Cocoa Cinnamon. It’s a bustling place, and during the interview at least one North Carolina musician stops in for caffeine, his van loaded with instruments. This illuminates the simultaneous joy and challenge of Brzezinski’s job: Music, in North Carolina, is everywhere. Complex as it is, he approaches the role with good-natured curiosity. According to one longstanding friend, it’s not a new trait.
One day in 2005, Nate Smith Ph.D.’12 stopped by WXDU with a bone to pick. He’d been listening to the station and wasn’t impressed. Thinking back, Smith laughs about it. He was just an arrogant kid, he says now.
“Max got done with his [DJ] shift and came down in the middle of me making my points about this,” Smith says. “He wasn’t dismissive of me or anything like that.”
Instead, Brzezinski offered Smith a DJ shift. Soon, Smith was reviewing new music so that he could have a hand in what songs were in rotation. What could have been a challenging argument instead launched 20 years of friendship.
The N.C. Music Office, with its skeleton-crew staff and statewide mandate, could challenge someone with a different mindset than Brzezinski’s. As he talks about N.C. musicians and regions, Brzezinski gets increasingly animated. He brings up Raleigh rapper J. Cole, mountain balladeers, coastal Gullah singers, MerleFest string bands and urban indie-rock. Brzezinski smiles as he brings up queer punk-metal band Babe Haven, which he particularly enjoyed profiling. Though based in Durham, the band met in Boone, a town more commonly known for its Doc Watson statue than for confrontational heavy metal. This is the kind of nuance and complexity that has drawn him to music ever since he was a child in Chicago. “If you have a stereotype of what people in North Carolina are like in certain regions, they will surprise you,” he says.