Tom Hull (critic)

Hull's first foray into music criticism began around 1974, after Malcolm had encouraged him to write. Hull read rock-centric magazines like Crawdaddy and Creem, finding encouragement to listen studiously to music and recover from the exhaustion of studying Marxism. "As I rebounded, I found pleasure in rock and a subject for my critical proclivites", he later explained.[5] At the time, Hull worked in a typesetting shop in St. Louis, one of whose clients was St. Louis Today, an alternative weekly newspaper that did not have a regular music columnist. Hull offered himself in the role to the newspaper, who agreed but went out of business before they could publish any of his writing.[3]

One of Hull's earliest writings was a review of The Village Voice critic Robert Christgau's 1973 essay collection Any Old Way You Choose It. In it, Hull asserted that anyone can write rock criticism, leading him to write "The Rekord Report", which imitated Christgau's popular "Consumer Guide" album-review column. Hull's reviews were published as a four-page insert in Don Malcolm's Overdose, a collection of Malcolm's columns for Washington University's student paper. Hull performed the collection's layout and typesetting in exchange.[3]

After Hull's friends encouraged him to send Christgau the Overdose insert, Christgau sent him back a letter offering a job to write at The Village Voice in New York under his editorship.[6] His first assignment was to review the 1975 Bachman–Turner Overdrive album Four Wheel Drive. "Unfortunately, the [album] was their worst to date, but Christgau and I had sort of a working class bond over the band", he recalls. While he says Christgau had "welcomed me to New York, and further extended my ears … by 1979 or so my desire to write rock crit was flagging, and everyday life was moving on", citing in part the limited workload afforded to him by the Voice.[3] He left the newspaper around 1980, but would later serve as a resource for Christgau's decade-encompassing "Consumer Guide" collection, Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s (1990).[7]

A Z80 processor board, similar to Hull's for his early software designs

Beginning in 1980, Hull worked in software engineering and design, which would earn him most of his life's income. He started by designing software that would execute operating systems for typesetting, first working on an Apple II computer, which he quickly traded for a S-100 bus with Zilog Z80 processor. In his first five years, Hull worked software jobs in New Jersey and Massachusetts, and eventually became the resident Unix systems specialist at a startup company that built a 3D modeling computer-aided design system intended for prepress and packaging design. His job there at various points entailed staff management and leadership of special projects.[3]

Hull also worked on free and open source software, such as Linux.[8] After more than 10 years at the startup company, he left to pursue his own business involving a free software program he had designed. However, the venture failed, and Hull returned to New Jersey to work at a Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) facility. There, he developed kernels for the UnixWare system. In 2000, after the dot-com bubble hurt SCO's value and marked the company's imminent end, Hull was laid off and moved back to Wichita to find a scarcity of good jobs. He considered website design, consulting, and starting a home automation business as potential pursuits, but ultimately wanted to write again.[3]

After his dismissal from SCO, Hull created an online database – tomhull.com. It features his past and contemporaneous writings and a catalog of primarily jazz-based records and reviews, which adopt the grading schema from Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s (2000).[9] The jazz focus originates from Hull's personal collection, gradually built from reading jazz critics Gary Giddins and Francis Davis in the 1970s and 1980s, and from more thorough research of the jazz canon when Hull lost interest in rock during the 1990s, citing the period's domination by grunge and gangsta rap.[3]

In 2001, Hull also created Christgau's website – robertchristgau.com – at the latter's apartment in New York, where Hull's trip from Wichita had been prolonged by the September 11 attacks and the death of his nephew's wife in the World Trade Center.[10] The website made the majority of Christgau's published writings and reviews freely available for public viewing.[8] The idea for the site was conceived by Hull and went into development after Christgau embraced it in mid 2001. Hull's background in software lent him the expertise to create the website, adhering to a minimalist aesthetic favoring text over graphics, similar to his own site.[3] After robertchristgau.com went online, Christgau called Hull "a computer genius as well as an excellent and very knowledgeable music critic", and said that "the design of the website, especially its high searchability and small interest in graphics, are his idea of what a useful music site should be."[8] Hull remained involved with the site as webmaster, a role which author and Oxford Brookes University music lecturer Dai Griffiths later applauded. "Anyone who studies Christgau is indebted to Tom Hull for his magisterial work on Christgau's website", Griffiths wrote in 2019 in the academic journal Rock Music Studies.[11]

Robert Christgau (pictured in 2010) – Hull's original mentor, longtime friend, and colleague

In 2003, Hull was enlisted by Rolling Stone editor Christian Hoard to contribute entries for The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004). In February of that year, Hull also began writing "Recycled Goods" – a "Consumer Guide"-style column on archival music releases and reissues – for the Chicago-based webzine Static Multimedia at the behest of its editor Michael Tatum. In 2005, Christgau asked Hull to replace Giddins, The Village Voice's longtime jazz columnist, who had quit. Although Christgau was dismissed from the Voice by new ownership the following year, Hull's "Jazz Consumer Guide" continued to be published in the paper for the next several years.[3] During this period, he also contributed to Seattle Weekly.[12]

Hull's "Consumer Guide" reviews encouraged him to survey more jazz records for his own website, which was later expanded as Tom Hull – on the Web to include blog writings on movies, politics, and books. As he explains in 2014, "I've written several million words since 2003, expanded the ratings database from about 10,000 records to 23,000. I've tried to write a bit about everything I've listened to since 2006, so I have at least 10,000 notes on records – some can be called reviews, and some don't quite rise to that level."[3] Christgau, who finds it personally difficult to review jazz in his own writing aesthetic, has since recommended Hull's website for readers seeking advice on jazz albums.[13] In a commentary of Hull's jazz album reviews, Patrick Jarenwattananon of NPR writes:

His picks reflect a remarkably eclectic sensibility, where the mainstream players (Houston Person, Randy Sandke) swim freely among with the modern progressive cats (Kenny Garrett, Donny McCaslin) and the post-modern rearrangers (Rudresh Mahanthappa, Nik Bartsch, Mostly Other People Do the Killing). Seeing as how jazz criticism has historically been dominated by people pushing agendas – e.g. the Down Beat writer who called John Coltrane "anti-jazz" in 1961 – it's nice to see a professional listener with tastes across the spectrum.[14]

Hull has written for NPR Music and worked with Francis Davis in compiling ballots for the project's annual jazz critics poll.[15] He has also voted in DownBeat's annual international critics poll.[16] Information and data from these polls are hosted on his website.[17]