He graduated from Colgate with a degree in philosophy following a senior thesis titled, "Showing the Fly The Way Out of the Fly Bottle," a comparison of Wittgensteinian language theory with the dialogic method of Freud, which brought together two sponsoring professors who hadn't spoken to one another in 10 years. He then received an MFA in Film from Columbia, where he studied under legendary film critic Andrew Sarris and made a now long-lost student feature, "Mystery Girls" (based on the New York Dolls song of the same name and starring a blow-up doll), which was praised by Hitchcock biographer Raymond Durgnat as "looking like a dog had directed it."

Trakin was also briefly the lead singer in the New York-based punk-rock group The Geeks, who played at CBGBs, broke up shortly after the Sex Pistols and have influenced everyone from the Plasmatics to the Beastie Boys and Marilyn Manson. During the influential mid-to-late ‘70s in New York, he served faithfully as Minister of Information for Marty Thau’s historic Red Star Records, where he took it to the street, doing guerilla marketing and publicity for the likes of Suicide, the Fleshtones, Real Kids and others.

Trakin also served as chief copywriter for the MTV Corporate Relations Dept., Director of Public Relations for the Recording Industry Association of America and Head of Promotion for AEI Music, a leading foreground music programmer now owned by Liberty Media.

Since 1986, Trakin has been a Senior Editor of HITS magazine, the music industry's influential trade magazine/tip sheet/money-laundering operation. Trakin has contributed to every rock magazine that ever mattered, but no longer exist, including Musician, BAM, Creem, Details, New York Rocker, Soho Weekly News, and several distinguished dailies such as the L.A. Times, L.A. Herald Examiner, Newsday, N.Y. Daily News and USA. Today. Other publications for which he’s written—both online and traditional hard copy—include the Village Voice, Grammy magazine, React, PopSmear, Addicted to Noise and Stuff. He is a voting member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the MTV Video Music Awards, part of the rocksbackpages.com music critics website as well as one of the writers asked to vote on Rolling Stone’s 50 Greatest Albums of All Time.

He has previously written the biographies Sting and the Police (Ballantine Books '84), Tom Hanks: Journey to Stardom (St. Martin's Press '95) and Jim Carrey Unmasked (St. Martin's Press '95). He also served as an editorial assistant on John Lennon Remembered: Strawberry Fields Forever (Bantam Books '80) with Vic Garbarini and Barbara Graustark. He penned Malcolm McLaren’s famed speech at the New Music Seminar in 1984, and has written speeches for the likes of Virgin’s Richard Branson.

Trakin also hosted the world's first online interactive pop music chat show/pickup area, "Rant & Roll," for Prodigy and America Online's L.A. Digital City (which USA Today called "one of the new wave of online talk shows.”)

For almost two years, he co-hosted the KLSX-FM L.A. music radio talk show, "C Notes" with E! Entertainment's David Adelson, where his guests have included everyone from Brian Wilson to Limp Bizkit, Randy Newman to Orgy, Mike Stoller and Earl Palmer to Alice Cooper and Al Martino.

In his spare time, he adopts the identity of Meshugge Knight to manage L.A. Magazine's “best Jewish rap duo,” M.O.T. (Members of the Tribe), featuring MCs/tummlers extraordinaire Ice Berg and Dr. Dreidle, whose critically acclaimed Sire/Warner Bros. album, "19.99," can be ordered from Amazon.com. They (and he) are available for weddings and bar mitzvahs. He has also been quoted extensively as a music and entertainment business expert on CNN, A&E, VH1 and MTV. He also was an on-air music correspondent for E! Entertainment and covered West Coast news stories as a segment producer for MTV.

As HITS Sr. Editor, he is currently responsible for putting together the Web site http://www.hitsdailydouble.com, cited as one of the most popular and influential music sites on the web and recently broke the exclusive jailhouse interview with imprisoned rap entrepreneur Suge Knight.