The Culture Journalist

Andrea Hernández, a journalist and snack oracle behind Snaxshot, dives into the cultural dynamics of modern food consumption. She explores how groceries are transformed into status symbols through branding and social media. Discussing the differences in food relationships between Millennials and Gen Z, she addresses the resurgence of chain restaurants and their appeal. The conversation critiques superficial marketing in the wellness industry and highlights the complexities of food labeling, revealing the disconnect between consumer desires and modern food products.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comThis week, we’re traveling back in time to explore a facet of the pandemic-era crypto goldrush that all but entirely escaped the attention of the mainstream media: The rise of the “Marxist VC.” This was, if you’re unaware, the strange blip in recent history where a contingent of uber-capitalist investors, founders, and other Web3 evangelists leveraged pseudo-Marxist and pro-labor rhetoric (along with cogent critiques of Big Tech) to induct artists and leftists into the world of NFTs and DAOs. Technology and music journalist Eli Zeger, author of a recent essay called “Owner’s Remorse” for the publication Strange Matters, joins to discuss how the capitalist class hijacked the discussion around building a more democratically owned and governed internet, the plutocratic realities that buzzwords like “squad wealth” and “the ownership economy” obscure, and what it’s actually like to work for a DAO (Hint: In most cases, it’s more like working for Uber than a co-op). 

Hey pals. We’re back with the first of five new free episodes that we’ve cooked up for your listening pleasure. If you want to keep getting episodes whenever we take a pause from publishing the free stuff, you can sign up for a paid subscription, which gets you 1-2 paywalled episodes a month, whether or not we’re on break. Once you sign up, you’ll also get an invite to CUJOPLEX, a private Discord server and online hangout zone where folks who like talking about the evolving state of independent music, culture, and media can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day. To sweeten the deal, we’re also offering 30 percent off on annual subscriptions until June 13. That means you pay $35 instead of the usual $50. Today, we’re diving into The Living Wage for Musicians Act, a new bill circulating through Congress aimed at increasing the amount of money musicians make when fans stream their music online. Introduced in March by reps Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman and created in partnership with the United Musicians and Allied Workers, it proposes the creation of a new streaming royalty just for musicians, separate from what streamers are already paying out to labels and other rights holders. All of which is to say, the streaming industry, with its long-broken and winner-take-all system of compensation for artists, may finally be getting regulated. Among those leading the charge is UMAW organizer and former Galaxie 500 drummer Damon Krukowski, who you may know as one half of the psych-folk duo Damon & Naomi as well as the creator of the excellent Dada Drummer Almanach Substack. Damon joins us to give us a crash course in the history of digital music royalties, and why the current system makes it so incredibly difficult for most artists to see any meaningful revenue from their recorded music. We also get into what challenges the bill currently faces, its radical mechanism for redistributing wealth from the most popular streaming artists to their less-streamed counterparts, and whether we’re headed for a future where some independent musicians may choose to opt out of streaming altogether — Cindy Lee style.The song featured in today’s episode is “$$$” by Vundabar. Support them on Bandcamp.Learn more about the Living Wage for Musicians Act Follow UMAW on IGFollow Damon on XRead more by Damon “How are musicians supposed to survive on $0.00173 per stream?”“Anti-viral sounds”“Four hours of music: Taylor Swift and Cindy Lee”“Musicking” 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.comThis week, we are joined by music journalist Kieran Press-Reynolds, author of a recent Pitchfork feature about a current in music he is calling “Shitpost Modernism,” emblematized by auteurist hip-hip absurdists like RXK Nephew and TisaKorean, bathroom humor-loving jazz ensembles like Spilly Cave, various SpongeBob-imitating MCs, and, of course, 100 Gecs…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comHey pals. The 23rd edition of Coachalla wrapped up last weekend, and you know what that means: It’s time for The Culture Journalist’s annual Coachella Report, where co-host Andrea Domanick returns from Indio, CA ready to dish on all the trends in fashion, music, and media she spotted on the ground. You can think of it as a little capsule review of the 2…

The problem with talking about hipsterism is that the term is almost impossible to define. Hipsters, whether they can still be said to exist as a subculture at all at this point, famously like denying that they are hipsters. And while you could say that the figure of the hipster has become a sort of nebulous catch-all for everything we love to hate about the 21st century, liberal-arts educated, neighborhood-gentrifying creative class (see: Brad Troemel’s excellent “Hipster Report” for more on that tip), you can’t really study a group that doesn’t identify as such. That’s part of why Alessandro Gerosa, a researcher in cultural sociology at the University of Milan, wrote a book examining hipsterism from a different, potentially more use angle. It’s called The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism, and it’s a fascinating (and open source!) look at hipsterism as an economic phenomenon — one oriented around the consumption and production of cultural goods that stand out for their authenticity and distinctiveness, and in the process, sort of magically endow their owner with those same qualities.Far from being “over,” he argues, the “hipster economy” has become dominant “aesthetic regime of consumption” in our time. But the book also goes deeper, drawing on Alessandro’s study of cocktail bar owners, food truck restaurateurs, and other neo-craft entrepreneurs to show how at bottom, the hipster economy is driven by a centuries-old impulse to carve out spaces of autonomy and self-determination within industrial capitalism. He joins us from Milan to discuss the surprisingly long history of our cultural obsession with the idea of authenticity, and how hipster taste is a complex interplay between authenticity and kitsch. We also get into how the hipster economy grew out of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, the impact of the hipster economy on cities, and how hipsterism isn’t just a reaction to the dominant culture, but also a reaction to the state of work.   This podcast was edited by Ben Newman.Download The Hipster Economy for free via UCL Press. (But also, if you are in Europe, you can pre-order a hard copy. U.S. readers will be able purchase the book starting in August, via The University of Chicago Press.Follow Alessandro on Instagram and the platform formerly known as Twitter. Read more by Alessandro on his website. 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

What do Ticketmaster price gouging and widespread journalism layoffs and have in common? They’re both downstream consequences, at least in part, of lax antitrust enforcement. If that sounds obtuse, consider this: antitrust law — the legislation that aims to prevent monopolies from forming and keep business competition healthy — directly impacts how power is being consolidated across American society as a whole. That includes how big a given company is allowed to become, and the types of business tactics it is allowed to use.In a world where artists’ livelihoods have become increasingly intertwined with the actions of a handful of giant tech and entertainment companies, antitrust is a useful lens for understanding why so many things feel broken and inequitable. And 2024, for all its flaws, is actually an exciting time to be talking about this. Lina Khan, the 35-year-old legal scholar currently serving as chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, is on a mission to change the way we think about, and implement, antitrust law. And since she took office in 2021, she’s been updating our understanding of antitrust for the business landscape of the present, expanding beyond a decades-old focus on consumer-facing price to consider how anticompetitive practices also harm workers, communities, diversity, and the environment. Accordingly, she’s already brought big cases against some of the tech giants we regularly talk about on this show, including Amazon and Meta. A lot of this stuff impacts creative workers, so we’ve invited on Kevin Erickson, Director of the Future of Music Coalition, to put together a little primer for us. Founded in 2000, the Future of Music Coalition is a Washington DC-based nonprofit bringing together musicians, artist advocates, technologists, and legal experts dedicated to, as they put it, “supporting a musical ecosystem where artists flourish and are compensated fairly and transparently for their work.” We discuss why many of the problems we ascribe to the actions of private companies are actually policy problems, and why those issues aren’t a larger part of the conversation. We also dig into some of the current big policy fights that stand to materially impact the lives of creatives like journalists to musicians — including the Journalism Conservation and Preservation Act and what’s happening with Ticketmaster and other brokers right now.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.You can also follow The Culture Journalist on X and IG. 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 week, we’re re-upping our episode with writer Cord Jefferson, who just won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction, which he also directed. American Fiction was adapted from the 2001 novel Erasure, by writer Percival Everett. And since Sunday night, the film, and Cord’s comments about it, have been provoking a lot of interesting conversation about Black representation in Hollywood and the publishing industry—which also happens to be the subject of the film itself, and which we encourage you to dig into.  Cord, as you may know, is a former journalist and Gawker editor with very strong opinions about the economics of cultural production. Which is why we weren’t surprised when he used his acceptance speech to offer a pretty candid take about risk aversion in Hollywood—and the need for executives to take more chances on independent filmmakers. “I understand that this is a risk-averse industry. I get it. But $200 million dollar movies are also a risk,” he said. “Instead of making one $200 million dollar movie, try making twenty $10 million dollar movies, or fifty $4 million dollar movies.”   It wasn’t the first time we’d heard Cord talking about this stuff. In fact, this was one of the topics we went long on with him when we had him on the show in 2021 to mark the start of Succession’s third season. Cord was a writer for season two, in addition to working on series like The Good Place, Station Eleven, and Watchmen, for which he won an Emmy. What started as a conversation about Succession’s Roy family—and Cord’s experiences transitioning from a career in media to a career in TV and film—evolved into a deeper meditation on the struggles writers in both fields are facing in a creative economy where culture is evaluated based on numbers, where pre-visibility and remakes trump original ideas, and where what executives believe is “good for business” feels increasingly incompatible with artistic risk-taking.  We recorded this conversation long before last year’s Writer’s Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes, not to mention American Fiction itself, but the issues we discuss have become only more relevant with time. You can think of it as an extended riff on the argument he made on national TV this week—and it’s also a great look into where Cord comes from, the moral dilemmas that result when we allow algorithms to evaluate art, and perhaps some of the seeds of thoughts that inspired American Fiction. Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.You can also follow The Culture Journalist on X and IG. 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.comNote: If you are a media worker who has lost work or been laid off, email us at theculturejournalist@substack.com and we'll send you the full episode for free.This week, we explore why 2024 has been such a terrible year for journalists, with so many publications announcing cuts or closures—and in such quick succession—that we can barely keep track of the carnage. Did VICE, Pitchfork, The Messenger, Sports Illustrated, Complex, Buzzfeed, Insider, and The Los Angeles Times, to give just a sample of the companies that have put writers and editors out of work, just happen to all feel the pinch at the time? Or are there wider structural forces afoot, including even a touch of media executive groupthink, that can explain what’s going on here? On this week’s episode, which we like to think of as a sequel to a similar conversation we had last year with Ben Dietz, Semafor media reporter extraordinaire Max Tani joins us to discuss why this particular layoff season is different than others, what the future of the media biz might look like, and what it’s like to be the guy who every journalist follows to find out if they’re losing their job.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.You can also follow The Culture Journalist on X and IG.

The podcast discusses the shocking news of Pitchfork's merge with GQ, questioning the future of music journalism. It explores industry challenges, gender stereotypes, and the impact of financialization on media. The hosts delve into the intersection of music journalism, capitalism, and gender biases, while also touching on dystopian realities in the crypto world. Furthermore, they analyze evolving dynamics in the music industry, criticism, and navigate the future of music journalism.