The Culture Journalist

Flower crowns. Culturally appropriative costumes. Dead-eyed influencers snapping selfies in front of branded activations. If you have never been to Coachella, you probably think of it as a sum of the memes that have circulated about it online — or, at the very least, as an avatar for American youth culture at its most extravagant and, well, capitalist. Today, we’re going to advance the somewhat controversial thesis that Coachella is actually one of the most thought-provoking cultural happenings of the year. And we’re right on time, because Coachella just wrapped its first edition since the start of the pandemic, making it one of the first major music festivals to return in its wake. Andrea was on-site to experience it, joined by her good friend Katie Bain, a longtime music reporter and critic and currently the director of Billboard Dance.Today, Katie joins us to discuss how the festival has changed — or not changed — and what this year’s edition tells us about where we’re at. We also discuss Coachella’s roots in alternative music and rave culture, its tangled relationship with influencer culture, and the surreality, and joy, of reuniting at Coachella after two years of hunkering down at home.  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

Former music journalist Yancey Strickler explores the idea of artists collaborating through Metalabel. They discuss the shift towards collective creativity, the impact of metalabels on societal applications, challenges in the creator economy, and the evolution of group identities online.

Especially in the internet age, it’s hard to say who an artist’s story belongs to. Musicians can communicate with audiences directly, fan armies rise up to defend their faves against narratives they don’t agree with, and even if we haven’t met the artist in person, we all have tales of the ways their music has touched our lives. But when veteran music journalist Paul Cantor set out to write a biography of the late, great rapper Mac Miller, an artist whose generosity and infectious kindness were as palpable on record as they were in his day-to-day life, he came up against this question in the starkest way possible. After the artist’s tragic passing from an accidental drug overdose in 2018, at the age of 26, Paul secured the participation of a number of Mac’s closest friends and collaborators. But the musician’s family was wary about a writer with no direct personal connection to Mac writing a book about him. In fact, they circulated a statement on social media telling people not to talk to Paul: “To artists, management, & friends: There is a writer doing a Mac Miller biography that some you have been approached about or will be,” they wrote on Instagram. “This book is not authorized/approved by Mac’s family or Estate. We are not participating and prefer you don’t either if you personally knew Malcolm.” In time, the family made it clear that they would be supporting a competing biography instead: The Book of Mac: Remembering Mac Miller, by journalist Donna-Claire Chesman, which they designated as the only authorized biography of two. But after years of research, hundreds of hours of interviews, and what Cantor’s publicist described to us as a “massive bullying campaign” that included death threats (you can read his article about the experience here), his book, Most Dope: The Extraordinary Life of Mac Miller, finally hit bookstores this year. It’s an exhaustive, strikingly intimate account at the places, people, societal forces, and personal challenges that shaped Mac’s singular view of the world — even down to the history of the neighborhood in Pittsburgh where he grew up. On today’s episode, we discuss the controversy’s impact on Paul’s experiences reporting and writing the book, and the role of the biographer in a world where artists have unprecedented control over their own narrative. We also take a look at what Mac’s story can tell us about the fraught relationship between mental health and music, and how Mac’s evolution as an artist and public figure reflected wider changes in technology, the music industry, and public discourse in the late aughts and the tens.  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

Is it possible to imagine a future where the platforms that circumscribe every aspect of our online lives *aren’t* owned by the same handful of for-profit behemoths — companies that have come under fire time and time again for prioritizing shareholder interests and exponential growth over the economic and psychological well being of their users? Could we ever live in a world where these tools, from the public square of social media to streaming services and vacation rental apps, are collectively owned and governed by the people who use them? Our guest — James Muldoon, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Exeter in the UK and head of digital research at the thinktank Autonomy — says yes. And he’s written a fascinating new book, Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech, that outlines what such a future might look like, from the formation of small-scale alternatives (think: local rideshare cooperatives instead of Uber), to users democratically voting on the algorithms that shape our experience on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. “Whoever controls the platforms, controls the future,” he writes. “The simple proposition of this book is that it should be us.” In today’s conversation, which we recorded before the Bandcamp news, we go deep with James on why existing proposals for curbing the enormous power and influence of big tech, such as “breaking up Facebook,” fail to address the root of the problem. We also discuss how even free-to-use platforms extract value from their users; the pitfalls of heralding cryptocurrency and Web3 as the only alternative to the “rentier” relations of Web2; and why we urgently need to widen the Overton window when it comes to imagining what the internet of the future could look like so we can know which changes to agitate for in the present.  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

Welcome to season three of The Culture Journalist, a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. We’re excited to kick things off today with an episode that feels pretty damn perfect for these darkest days of winter. Think: neo-Gothic architecture, darkened libraries full of dusty old books, putting on your smartest blue blazer and rushing across a misty university quad at dawn.Friends, we’re talking about Dark Academia, a Gen Z-centric fashion aesthetic and online subculture that centers a love of educational pursuits, classical literature, and threads that look straight out of Oxford or Cambridge in 1922. Like Cottagecore, you could chalk it up to young people eschewing the pressures of digital life to embrace a slower, more analog existence — though it’s less about sourdough starters and baby chicks, and more about yearning for a time when students dressed like characters out of Dead Poets Society and school administrators still trumpeted the virtues of learning for the sake of learning. Is Dark Academia a rejection of a world that compels us to constantly perform on social media, even if posting about your vintage book collection is part of the point? Is it a response to the decline of the liberal arts? A return to the hipster fascination with elite knowledge?Today, we are thrilled to dive deep into the “why” of Dark Academia with writer and fashion theory wiz Biz Sherbert, co-host of the podcast Nymphet Alumni and the brain behind the popular instagram account @markfisherquotes. Along the way, we’ll discuss a few other examples of the “trad” becoming alt — such as the growing popularity of Catholic imagery in fashion and among art-school kids — the increased generational metabolism for consuming past trends, and the rise of the "aesthetic" as an organizing principle for contemporary life. 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

We know we said that we were taking a pause from publishing as we cook up Season 3 of The Culture Journalist, but we couldn’t resist jumping back in for a quick one-off about a topic we just can’t shake: Neil Young (et al.) vs. Spotify. The TL;DR is that Young, on the heels of an open letter by a cadre of scientists, medical professionals, and academics, threatened to pull his catalog from the streaming giant last week if it didn’t do more to curtail the spread of misinformation surrounding COVID-19 and vaccines. He pointedly called for the removal of one of the platform’s biggest (and most lucrative) sources of said questionable material, The Joe Rogan Experience, writing in a letter to his team: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.” After Spotify chose to stand by Rogan, Young made good on his word (though he since deleted the above post from his Times-Contrarian website) and has since been directing his fans to check out his tunes on Spotify competitors like Amazon and Apple. Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, and Graham Nash pulled their music as well, and the hashtag #cancelspotify enjoyed a day or two of virality. The situation is still unfolding, and it’s unclear what impact it will have on Spotify beyond a temporary stock price dip and anecdotal reports of users canceling their subscriptions. But the saga — shocker — proved to be a particularly spicy morsel of catnip for the culture wars, sparking arguments around free speech, censorship, and corporate responsibility that feel all the more vertiginous at a time when conservatives are attempting to ban books from school curricula and libraries across the country.All of which is to say, we’re pretty fired up. After years of observing how Spotify and its peers have impacted the lives of artists and the music industry as a whole, it feels vindicating to finally see the company receive a bit of (mainstream) scrutiny for its controversial business practices. But it’s also been frustrating to watch the reckoning play out in this particular way — like we’re seeing society collectively fixate on the symptoms of the problem and not the fundamental brokenness of a streaming economy that reduces everything it touches to a widget in its unstoppable quest for profit and growth. Join us as we contemplate how the fiasco feels like such a perfect storm of internet-era attentional dynamics, how crying “Ivermectin” on a podcast isn’t really that different from crying “fire” in a theater, and whether it’s time to revisit the notion that all the music in the world needs to be free and accessible to everyone, all the time. (At least, if we’re going to rely on for-profit companies to build the architecture that makes it possible). 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

Back in September, Sotheby’s announced it was auctioning off one of 13 surviving original copies of the U.S. constitution. Given the rarity and historic significance of the document, it wasn’t surprising that it would make some headlines. But the news was quickly overshadowed by the revelation that 17,000 people on the internet were teaming up to bid on it. They did this through forming something called a DAO, or Decentralized Autonomous Organization—basically, a kind of non-hierarchical, self-governing community that uses blockchain technology to fundraise, coordinate, and make decisions.The operation, which came together in just a few weeks, was not particularly well thought out. Given the document’s racist legacy, a lot of people understandably found it pretty offensive that the group had chosen to rally around the Constitution at all. The energy costs associated with the crowdfund (and eventual refund) were enormous, with many small-dollar donors seeing their entire contribution wiped out by Ethereum gas fees—and there were a few too many references to the Nicholas Cage movie National Treasure for our comfort. After collectively raising more than 40 million dollars, ConstitutionDAO almost succeeded in its goal, though they lost out to a hedge fund owner and Republican donor named Ken Griffin. Even with all the project’s baggage, it was pretty exciting to watch the auction itself go down. For one thing, there was the GameStop-era thrill of seeing a wave of pseudonymous avatars descend on the Sotheby’s live chat with exhortations of “GM.” It was though these people were staking a claim for blockchain-enabled community organizing as a tool that could be used to build a world with new rules, by purchasing the rules of the old one—or at least, that’s how friends-of-the-pod Drew Millard and Kevin Munger, who you may remember from last season, described it in a recent essay called “Imperfect Union: How ConstitutionDAO Lost Its Way.” Writing for Friends with Benefits—another decentralized autonomous organization that happens to count Emilie as a member of its editorial team—Drew and Kevin set out to examine how ConstitutionDAO happened, where it went wrong, and why, despite bringing so many people together and raising such a jaw-dropping amount of money, it was never really able to transcend its status as a meme. We brought them back on the show to discuss why the whole saga feels so emblematic of the post-Biden zeitgeist and some of the hard lessons we learned this year about financial flash mobs and networked protest movements. We also talk about whether it feels accurate to describe the NFT and meme-stonk delirium of current moment, as some pundits have done, as the new “Roaring Twenties.” 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

Get ready to hide under a napkin with a fried song bird while shouting “f**k off” in a thick Scottish accent, because this week we’re talking about HBO’s Succession. The third season of the acclaimed media family drama kicked off last month, and from the acting, to the writing, to the plot-twist momentum, it’s shaping up to be the series’ best yet. Part of Succession’s pitch-perfect rendering of the brutal inner workings of media comes down to the fact that its creators hire people who know what they’re talking about. One of those people, on the series’ second season, was Cord Jefferson, a longtime journalist and former editor and writer at Gawker who left the media industry seven years ago to try his hand at TV writing. Since then, he’s been one of the brains behind thought-provoking fan favorites like The Good Place, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, and Watchmen—the latter of which earned him an Emmy for his work alongside co-writer Damon Lindelof. Along the way, Cord has carved out a name for himself as an advocate for journalists looking to cross into the entertainment industry, most recently teaming up with the Writer’s Guild of America to launch the Susan M. Haas Fellowship, which offers financial support and creative mentorship to journalists interested in TV writing. He’s also working on a show about the rise and fall of Gawker Media, which we can’t wait to see when it finally makes it to the screen.To celebrate Succession’s third season, Cord joins us to discuss his experiences in the media industry and how they’ve informed his work on fictional portrayals like Succession and the Gawker series. We discuss the ways that Hollywood gets journalism right—and also sometimes terribly wrong—along with the struggles writers in both fields are facing in a creative economy increasingly governed by algorithms, risk aversion, and Waystar RoyCo-esque monoliths obsessed with growth at any cost. 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

It’s 2021, which means that us millennials are in for a parade of 20-year anniversaries of things that informed our understanding of culture and the world. Y2K. September 11th. The Strokes’ Is this It?. There’s even a festival happening called Just Like Heaven, which basically packs the entire history of 2000s indie music into a single day.Part of that strange nostalgia train includes a film we haven't been able to stop texting our friends about: Woodstock ’99: Peace, Love, and Rage. The first installment in a Bill Simmons-produced HBO series called Music Box, it’s a polarizing new documentary about a festival 22 years ago that descended into a cavalcade of horrors, including rioting, vandalism, widespread dehydration, an infernal blaze, and reports of sexual assault. All in all, the documentary makes a pretty convincing case for Woodstock ’99 being one of the most egregious examples in pop music history of toxic white masculinity gone too far. But there was something that grated us about it: As riveting as it was as a Fyre Fest-style play-by-play—soundtracked by the testosterone-fueled hard rock of the era—we didn’t come away with much of a sense of why young people gravitated to this music in the first place, or the larger cultural context that gave rise to it. But then Craig Jenkins—music critic at Vulture, Pulitzer finalist, and an old colleague of ours from VICE—published a piece that pretty perfectly summed up our grievances, especially when it comes to the film’s depiction of a period of music and cultural history that we lived through as teens. It’s called “We’re Still Getting Woodstock ’99 Wrong,” and it thoughtfully nails the challenges and blindspots of how we retell and preserve cultural narratives in the era of streaming and clickbait. “Peace, Love, and Rage is pointed in attributing blame for the carnival of horrors the weekend would entail, but light on why the dehydrated revelers wanted to go in the first place,” he writes. “Woodstock 99 attempts to trace the tributaries drizzling fuel on the festival’s inferno, but it’s more notable for being the rare music documentary that doesn’t really seem to care for much of the music it’s covering.”Lucky for us, Craig was down to join us to discuss the documentary, the trainwreck that was Woodstock ’99, and his own memories of what he argues is a very misunderstood chapter in musical and cultural history.  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

On this week's episode of The Culture Journalist, we talk about collab houses: The McMansion-sized influencer incubators where young social media celebrities shack up to shoot TikTok videos, churn out brand deliverables, and generally lead glamorous lives for the sake of turning those experiences into content. Just when we thought we couldn’t read another take on the phenomenon, a contributing editor for Harper's named Barrett Swanson dropped a mammoth work of culture journalism about these Black Mirror-esque abodes. “The Anxiety of Influencers: Educating the TikTok Generation” transports readers to a wildfire-engulfed Los Angeles, where he spends five days shadowing a crew of "well-complected," college-aged collab house residents as they seek fame and fortune in the wilds of the American influencer industry. Barrett's is the best piece we've read about the phenomenon—and not just because of its pitch-perfect detailing of a world where your every word, White Claw bender, and Macarena-simple dance move becomes a vector for hundreds of thousands of views. More than a work of cultural anthropology, it's a searing indictment of for-profit social media, one that connects the worlds of influencing, higher education, and journalism to excavate the existential anguish we all face as we negotiate how much of ourselves we want to share with the world. That is, to the extent that it is even possible to conceive of a self at all beyond the one we project for others online: Though "the angle of our pose may be different," he writes, "all of us bow unfailingly at the altar of the algorithm."Join us for a conversation about life in a TikTok mansion, navigating a world that asks us "to create [ourselves] in full view of the public," and Barrett's new book of essays, Lost in Summerland. Much like the piece, it’s an exploration of the collapse of the grand narrative in American culture and the bizarre fascinations and ideologies that are sweeping society in its wake.  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