Career[edit]

Arnold began writing about music as a college student. At UCLA she wrote for the Daily Bruin and at Berkeley she wrote for The Daily Californian. Following her graduation, she was hired as a stringer by the Palo Alto Times Tribune and the San Jose Mercury News. She later covered music for the Los Angeles Times, as well as several other daily papers. Arnold wrote regularly on alternative music and indie rock for Spin and Entertainment Weekly.^[3]


Her weekly column "Fools Rush In" debuted in the East Bay Express in 1991 and ran through 2001. From 1996 through 2002, she wrote a column for the Metro Silicon Valley named after The Replacements album All Shook Down. With commentary that included the assertions that The Rolling Stones were “ugly, lecherous and old” and that “the Replacements have influenced current music much more than the Stones have,” ^[4] Arnold's columns often strove to be contentious. In 2000, SF Weekly columnist Dan Strachota wrote that "Arnold's writing usually contains three main items: fuzzy data, oversimplification, and half-assed reasoning," stating that her interest in music ended in 1994, coinciding with Kurt Cobain's suicide."^[5]


In 1993, her book Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana was published by Bloomsbury Press; in 1997, St. Martin's Press published Kiss This: Punk In The Present Tense. Both books were controversial, and Kiss This received negative reviews, with ^[6]Publishers Weekly writing that when her "informal, personal style" was "applied to larger topics about the cultural relevance of punk, for instance, Arnold's careless prose grows tedious. If not for Arnold's access to such famous rockers as Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam and Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion, her book would be overwhelmed by her incoherent, self-contradictory arguments for and against contemporary punk."^[7]


In 1999, Arnold held a journalism fellowship at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Although she continued to write about music for periodicals through the early 2000s, Arnold subsequently focused on her academic career.^[2]


Arnold's Exile in Guyville was published in 2014. It was described as "an engaging and enlightening example of criticism in the post-critical age" by The Rumpus. In The Believer, Greil Marcus wrote: "Arnold is a wonderful writer: fearless, precise, full of doubt, never taking anything for granted."^[8][9] The New York Times described it as "charming and brave and unexpectedly moving."^[10][11][12]


Half A Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella was published by University of Iowa Press in November 2018. Based on her Stanford dissertation, the book explores the history of large music festivals and examines their impact on American culture.^[2][13]