The Culture Journalist

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comAre algorithms actually making culture boring? It’s easy to point to the Spotifys and Instagrams the world and blame them for what we perceive to be stagnant cultural production, flattened tastes, and generally bad vibes. But, in a recent piece for the Atlantic titled “The Technology That Actually Runs Our World,” journalist T.M. Brown argues that the a…

Let’s take a step back in time to the halcyon days of late 2011, back when a little Swedish music app called Spotify landed in our app stores.Its arrival, alongside the rise of early smartphones and “public square” platforms like Twitter, seemed to herald the utopian ideals of a democratizing tech future just on the horizon. Here was an app that professed to level the playing field for music fans and artists alike via what Spotify imagined to be a “data-driven democracy”: For fans, it put pretty much any music you wanted at your fingertips, anytime. On the artist side, it promised to replace industry gatekeepers with a system where anyone who wrote a good enough song could land a viral hit — while also righting the compensatory wrongs of technological predecessors like Napster.That’s…. not exactly how it’s played out.Today, Spotify’s myth of meritocracy has been supplanted by a system where major labels make millions of dollars a day from streaming while artists make less than a penny per stream; where AI DJs do the choosing for you within an algorithmic echo chamber; and where “vibe”-oriented playlists are filled with music by ghost artists designed to keep you listening longer while paying attention less.How all of this came to pass — and its far-reaching ripple effects on everything from cultural taste and aesthetics to the very meaning of being an “independent” artist — is the subject of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, a new book by independent music journalist Liz Pelly. The work culminates a decade of dogged reporting covering Spotify’s rise from democratizing platform to corporate behemoth, and how, in the process, it has eroded the vast majority of artist’s ability to make a living off of their work.Liz joins us to discuss how independent artists got swept up in a system that was clearly never built with them in mind, and how it managed to devalue their work to almost nothing. We also get into Spotify’s flattening impact on music, in both an aesthetic and economic sense. And we break down the platform’s push towards “lean-back” listening — you know, beats to study and chill to — and how it’s reshaped the very meaning of being a fan.Follow Liz on Instagram.Get Mood Machine and check out more of Liz’s work here.Read an excerpt, "The Ghosts in the Machine," at Harper's This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

T.M. Brown, a journalist known for his incisive New York Times piece on the cultural significance of Zyn, delves into how these nicotine pouches have morphed into symbols of American masculinity. He discusses Zyn's unexpected appeal among young men and its rise as a political lightning rod, interwoven with social media influence and subcultural dynamics. Brown also touches on the contradictions within Zyn culture, balancing indulgence with health consciousness and exploring the evolving identity of nicotine consumption in contemporary society.

Catherine Liu, a professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine and author of "Virtue Hoarders," dissects the Democratic Party's ties to the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) following Kamala Harris's defeat. She explores how the PMC perpetuates class inequalities and critiques the party's disconnect from working-class issues. Liu also addresses the dangers of superficial branding in politics, data-driven strategies that neglect healthcare, and the necessity for the left to authentically engage with tangible voter concerns amidst rising economic insecurities.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comWhat’s it like when a song you wrote more than half a decade ago goes viral on TikTok? Well, that’s exactly what happened to Massachusetts indie band Vundabar with their 2015 track “Alien Blues”—to the tune of 83,000 TikTok videos and 600 million Spotify streams. This week, frontman Brandon Hagen joins us to talk about the experience of navigating a sud…

The Culture Journalist is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. After disappearing into a black hole of summertime sadness, inflationary headwinds, and soul searching in Eastern Europe, we are back with a fresh batch of episodes and bonus content, so buckle up.Also, this podcast recently turned four years old. To celebrate, between now and Friday, November 8, we are offering 50% off on all annual paid subscriptions.Paid subscribers get access to the entire CUJO Cinematic Universe, including 1-2 monthly bonus episodes, an invite to our private Discord server, and our eternal parasocial friendship. Sign up at The Culture Journalist. What is it about life in the 2020s that makes us feel so anxious about what tomorrow will bring? In her book The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, the writer, filmmaker, and organizer Astra Taylor looks at how insecurity — both as an emotional phenomenon and a material one — can help us make sense of the myriad stressors and challenges of modern life.It’s not just worrying about the election. It’s not just high prices and the difficulty so many people are having finding a stable job. It’s not just climate change, or how social media makes us feel like our skin isn’t smooth enough. These days, it seems like everyone feels insecure — even (maybe especially?) the billionaires. On this week’s episode, Astra joins us to talk about how insecurity differs from inequality, and how examining the psychic dimension of precarity can help us explain why things feel hard for so many people right now — even in the face of an ostensibly “strong” economy and labor market. We also get into the story of how the enclosure of the Commons in feudal England was the original sin that paved the way for our current “insecure” mode of capitalism. Finally, Astra tells us about her work as co-founder of the Debt Collective, the first union for debtors — and how returning to the ancient idea of the right to the Commons can help us organize in the face of decades of neoliberal austerity and a decaying social safety net.Follow Astra on XPurchase The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart.Watch Astra’s CBC Massey Lectures on the book. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comToday, we dive into the strange story of the California Journalism Preservation Act, a groundbreaking bill promising to making tech giants like Google and Facebook compensate news organizations with a small portion of the money they bring in when they host stories by California journalists on their platforms—and pointing to a potential path forward for a U.S. news industry on the brink of collapse. Today, Blood in the Machine author Brian Merchant joins us to discuss how a weird backroom meeting between Google, legislators, and major publishers transformed the legislation into a shadow of what it once was, including the proposed creation of a vague "AI accelerator." We dig into what this means for the future of the media industry, and how the deals publications have been striking with AI companies (and AI more generally) stand to impact journalists. Subscribe to The Culture Journalist to listen to the whole thing.Read Brian’s article, “How a bill meant to save journalism from big tech ended up boosting AI and bailing out Google instead”Order Blood in the Machine Subscribe to Brian’s Substack Follow Brian on X

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comWhat can electronic music tell us about our past, present, and future? Today, we take a walk through the annals of electronic music history with Simon Reynolds, one of our music critic heroes and author of a new book called Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today. Encompassing over two dozen essays and interviews, Futuromania offers a chronological narrative of machine-music spanning the 1970s to the present—with a special focus on music that, in its moment, seemed to presage the future, from Autotune and Giorgio Moroder to Amnesia Scanner and Jlin. You can think of it as a future-focused counterpart to Simon’s canonical 2011 book, Retromania, where he explored how pop culture and pop music had become addicted to its own past. We dig into the differences between retromania and Futuromania, the deeply human appeal of music that sounds distinctly inhuman and machine-like, and how music that sounds like “the future,” much like sci-fi, can help us process our complicated feelings about technology and the world. We also discuss the role of retrofuturism in the genre’s history, the cycling back into fashion of decades-old electronic music styles like gabber and hardcore techno, and the changing meaning of musical “newness” in a world where electronic music itself is now nearly half a century old.Get access to bonus episodes and the CUJOPLEX Discord server by becoming a paid subscriber.Grab a copy of Futuromania.Keep up with Simon and his writing on blissblogFollow Simon on X

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comIn the second installment of our Kim’s Video series, Emilie Friedlander reads a 2014 essay she wrote about her experiences working as a teenaged video clerk at the beloved film and music emporium’s Saint Mark’s location. In it, she explores the cultural significance of the figure of the “music snob” in the …

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comLiving in a city like New York is a constant exercise in seeing the things that you love go away. And for independent culture fans in the city, one of the most devastating losses of this century was that of Kim’s Video, a hybrid video and record store with a flagship location on Saint Marks Place in the East Village and clerks who were both revered and feared for their encyclopedic knowledge of film and music. Kim’s Video holds a special place in Emilie’s heart — she worked her first job out of high school there. And for many decades, it was home to one of the largest and most comprehensive video rental collections in the world, with a wealth of cinematic obscurities and hard-to-find gems that earned it a cult following among both local cinephiles and art-house legends like Quentin Tarantino, Chloë Sevigny, Jean-Luc Godard, and the Coen brothers. So when the shop’s enigmatic impresario, Mr. Kim, announced that Kim’s Video was closing up shop, and it came out that the store’s 55,000-work collection had ended up in a small Italian town called Salemi, a lot of people were understandably very upset and confused. Lucky for us, two filmmakers and Kim’s Video devotees — David Redmon and Ashley Sabin — decided to track down the collection. But when they arrived in Salemi and discovered the archives in a state of disarray, they found themselves in the middle of a cross-continental mystery that took them from Sicily, to South Korea, to Mr. Kim’s New Jersey home, and that ran much deeper than a simple case of streaming supplanting your local video rental place. That story, and the resulting fate of the Kim’s Video collection, are captured in David and Ashley’s fascinating and often baffling feature documentary, Kim’s Video. Today, David joins us to talk about the story of Kim’s Video and Yong-man Kim, who famously started selling videos out of a dry cleaning shop after emigrating to New York from South Korea. We also explore the particular era in underground culture, and in the history of the East Village, of which Kim’s was such an important part; what we lose when our consumption of media loses its connection to physical objects; and whether the current interest in the Kim’s collection, which the directors helped return to its current location at Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Manhattan, is symptomatic of a larger yearning for a more tangible experience of culture.PS. Later this month, we’ll be releasing a special subscriber-only bonus episode where Emilie reads an essay she wrote on her experiences working as a clerk. Sign up for a paid subscription to get it straight to your inbox.Watch Kim’s Video on Apple TV or Prime Video.Follow Kim's Video (the film) on Instagram.Follow Kim’s Video (the collection) on Instagram.Check out more of David and Ashley’s work at Carnivalesque Films.