The Culture Journalist

Has music journalism lost its way? Earlier this week, the debate bubbled up on music Twitter after a user named @cllnsmith posted a viral joke about Pitchfork that (understandably) made a lot of people in the music journo community pretty mad. The timing, for our own opportunistic purposes, was perfect, because we happened to be putting the finishing touches on an episode with veteran music journalist and NPR music critic Ann Powers, inspired by a Facebook post she published that offered a refreshingly nuanced take on the forces beleaguering the field. "Here's something I think music writers might want to think/talk about," she wrote. "The rise of the quick react/hot take colliding with the unmanageable proliferation of accessible music releases and streaming platforms'  algorithmic favoritism of the very few have combined to enforce media focus on pop's 1 per cent to the extreme."Noting the extent to which underground and mid-level artists appear to have been crowded out of the conversation, she raises a thought-provoking question: "Is this a correlation to the rise of the one per cent in other aspects of the culture?”Lucky for us, Ann was kind enough to join us to talk about how we got here. And as someone who has been chronicling American pop music and youth culture on the ground for nearly four decades, from the scrappy alt weekly scene of 1980s of San Francisco to the august halls of the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, she seemed like the perfect person to help us make sense of the shifting role of the music journalist, along with the economic, technological, and wider cultural forces that have shaped it. What is the point of music journalism and criticism? Why did we need it in the first place? What remains—even in the era of streaming and social media—that makes it still important to have now? Join Emilie and Andrea as we go long on these questions with Ann and compare notes on our respective journeys through the field.  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'll be digging into a phenomenon that has been on our mind a lot lately: The rise of the so-called "creator" economy, and the possibilities and perils of a model of cultural patronage grounded in a very specific type of relationship between producers and fans. Friends, we're talking about parasocial interaction, the phenomenon whereby a cultural producer fosters a kind of illusory, (mostly) one-sided intimacy with fans—sometimes for pay on the internet. Parasocial interaction isn't a new concept, but it's par for the course in a world where it's pretty much impossible to build a career as a creative person without sharing a constant stream of thoughts, intimate confessions, and images from your life. On this episode of The Culture Journalist, we argue that this underexplored facet of the creative economy represents a seismic shift in what it means to be a creative person. Is this new parasocial landscape a great leveling of the playing field, a genuine step in the direction of more democratized culture? Or is it a system where a small number of producers will rise to the top while others perform a lot of free or under-compensated labor? Come join us—parasocial style—as we air our hopes, fears and grievances. Full disclosure: We'll be sharing a bit about our experiences with Substack, and our thoughts on the platform, too.  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

While scrolling on Doordash one night last year, co-host Emilie Friedlander made a strange discovery: She stumbled upon a listing for a restaurant called F*cking Good Pizza. Only, as far as she could tell, it didn't seem to actually exist. Her recent long read for VICE, “The Mysterious Case of the F*cking Good Pizza,” chronicles her months-long investigation of a ring of mysterious restaurants with uncanny photos and attention-baiting names — a microcosm of the fast-growing trend of virtual restaurants, or online-only brands that prepare food for delivery only. We won’t spoil what she uncovered—we want you to listen to this week’s podcast!—but we'll just say that her research kept leading her back to CloudKitchens, the new company from Uber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick. Along the way, she spoke to restaurant owners in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Chicago, and Los Angeles about their experiences cooking for these virtual brands (hint: the pandemic is a major protagonist in this story) and came across an essay by a writer who had fallen down a similar rabbit hole, 3,000 miles away: Emma Kemp, an artist and designer who teaches at the Otis College of Art and Design in L.A.Published by Bakersfield—the research studio she founded with the filmmaker Matthew Altman Vega—“Ghost ops: Counterfeit Kitchens in the pandemic age” is a fascinating meditation on the systems of social signaling embedded in the design of these virtual brands, the phenomenon’s ties to broader trends in visual culture and advertising, and how its emphasis on "style over substance" can feel very of a piece with what it feels like to live in L.A. in this cultural moment. On this week's show, Emma and Emilie compare their findings and join Andrea for a conversation on the dizzying world of online-only restaurants, ghost kitchens, and Big Tech’s encroachment upon what we eat.  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 does the unfolding NFT craze mean for the future of music—and particularly, for independent artists? To help us make sense of this strange new chapter in the cultural economy, we enlisted Mat Dryhurst, a Berlin-based artist, technologist, and teacher who you’ve probably seen commenting on such brain-bending matters on Twitter—and who co-hosts the fantastic Interdependence podcast with Holly Herndon. He’s been exploring the possibilities of blockchain technology in his work for some time, and is a firm believer that it has the potential to rewire the economics of independent music from the ground up—just not in the way that you might expect, judging from the recent hullabaloo.We spoke to Mat about how NFTs work, how cryptocurrency may represent a potential antidote to streaming's devaluation of musical value, and why the boom-and-bust speculation market we're seeing right now is only just the "GeoCities era" of this technology's potential.  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

Hey everyone. We’re excited to kick off our second season today with a conversation on a subject that is near and dear to hearts: counterculture.It's a term that has been used to describe pretty much every major, music-adjacent youth movement of the 20th century, from the Beats and the hippies, to 70s hip-hop and punk, to the darkened warehouses in Detroit where techno was born. For some of us, counterculture conjures memories of specific spaces, like the smelly basement where you took in your first college noise show. For others it speaks more to the abstract idea of carving out a safer, utopian alternative to the messy, exploitative, inequitable reality we live in every day.But is counterculture—and underground culture as a whole—even possible in the era of the Internet? Today, we'll be talking about what counterculture is, what it means, and whether it can even exist at a time when pretty much every interpersonal interaction we have takes place on social media, for everyone to see. To guide us, we've enlisted the powerful brain of Caroline Busta, a Berlin-based writer and editor and co-founder of the media aggregator and podcast New Models, which is always a source of intriguing food-for-thought on the intersection of art, cultural production, and technology. At the top of the year, Carly published an essay on Document Journal that tapped into a feeling we'd been turning over for a long time: "To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to above all betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self," she writes. Whether you're a life-long weird music head, or a Marxist art theory nerd, or somebody who is simply having a hard time finding community inside the 280-character confines of Web 2.0, you'll probably find something to chew on in the piece, which is called "The Internet Didn't Kills Counterculture—You Just Won't Find It On Instagram." Either way, we hope you'll enjoy our conversation with Carly.  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

Hello there. Welcome to the last installment of our first season. From musicians adjusting to an industry that has moved entirely online, to journalists fighting for increased workplace protections and newsroom diversity, to independent venue operators banding together to petition Congress for federal relief—it’s hard to avoid the fact that creative workers have spent this year asking American society at large, and the economic and government powers that be, to simply recognize the value of the work that they do. No one wants to live in a world without art and music. But, as we discuss in part one of this week’s episode, the events of 2020 have been a startling reminder of how far America has to go when it comes to recognizing that creative work is, well, work. In part two, we speak with Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, a member of Providence punk band Downtown Boys, about his work with the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, a new coalition of artists and music professionals that has spent the past six months confronting labor challenges within the music industry. Their latest action, Justice at Spotify, which has 19,000 signatures and counting, puts a very specific premium on the work musicians do: Faced with a loss of touring revenue during the pandemic—the biggest income source for most musicians—they are asking for a penny every time someone streams their music.We hope you enjoy the show, and thank you for joining us this season. If you have any feedback to share—or want to suggest a topic—kindly drop us a line here.  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’s missive, our ninth, is the last you’ll be hearing from us before Election Day 2020. And because it’s pretty hard to think about anything other than the brain-melting insanity of American political discourse right now, we thought we’d bring on one of our favorite culture writers—someone who also happens to be an intrepid labor reporter and newsroom union organizer—to discuss just that.Philly-based freelance writer Kim Kelly is a columnist at Teen Vogue, the former metal editor at Noisey, and the author of Fight Like Hell, a forthcoming book on the history of the American labor movement. She’s also one the few journalists we know who identifies openly as an anarchist and anti-fascist. This makes her the perfect person to help us wrap our mind around how those fringe utopian movements, or some misguided, fact-agnostic conception of them, ended up in the crosshairs of the American culture war this year—“terrorist” designations, “anarchist jurisdictions” and all.We spoke to Kim about some of the basic facts that the Trump administration and the mainstream media alike are getting wrong about these movements and their activities, the challenges of being a journalist as well as an activist, and why objectivity in journalism is a false construct in the first place. She also opened up to us about the book she’s writing—and why she believes that every story is a labor story. 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

Earlier this season, we examined the live music industry’s fight for survival in a pandemic that has put concerts indefinitely on hold. This week, we’re taking a look at what this year has been like for musicians — especially when it comes to navigating an industry that has moved almost entirely online.Faced with a sudden loss of touring income, far and away the biggest revenue source for most musicians, artists are contending with a host of novel challenges when it comes to making a living from their music, from figuring out how to record professional-sounding music at home, to adapting to a live-stream economy that isn’t exactly lucrative for most artists. When you factor in a broken streaming revenue model and the unspoken mandate to maintain a constant presence on social media, it’s easy to see why some musicians feel like they are doing more work than ever before — for increasingly diminishing returns.On this episode of The Culture Journalist, we discuss the pain points and possibilities of the digital hustle with two artists who are living it firsthand. New York-via-Miami DJ Jubilee, who also happens to be one of the funniest people we know on Twitter, shares what it was like to go from bringing her eclectic sensibility as a selector to festivals around the world to playing parties on Instagram and Twitch. Eventually, she decided to start her own record label, Magic City — partly out of a desire to support other musicians through this difficult time.Los Angeles composer Shruti Kumar, host of Dublab’s Let’s Shake on It radio show, discusses how a canceled recording session at the beginning of the pandemic prompted her to team up with some friends and launch a new social network called Sound Travels. Originally a job board for out-of-work musicians, Sound Travels has since evolved into a space where artists can swap home-recording resources and connect in the fight for a more equitable music industry.Along the way, we discuss how this nightmarish year has also been a time of great community-building and innovation—and how as pandemic brings to light long-standing racial, gender, and economic disparities in the industry, there is probably no better time to rip it up and start again. 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

Confused about what’s going on with TikTok? So are we. But it’s probably the most “2020” story of 2020 — a perfect storm of geopolitics, national security, social media, pop music, and of course, Donald Trump. In August, Trump issued an executive order promising to ban the platform from operating in the U.S. if its Chinese parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell the platform to an American bidder by November.It’s not implausible that the President’s distaste for TikTok began when a group of K-Pop-loving teens used it to sabotage his rally in Tulsa in June. But he’s also been framing the platform as a vehicle for Chinese espionage and propaganda — much to the chagrin of free-speech advocates and the platform’s own users, who argue that banning TikTok constitutes a violation of the First Amendment, on par with social media censorship in China.Just this past Sunday, a Federal judge overturned Trump’s order to halt downloads in U.S. app stores. But even if conversations with prospective American buyers like Oracle and Walmart do materialize in a sale by the November 12 deadline, we’re probably going to be talking about the political ramifications of the Gen Z-focused juggernaut for some time—simply by dint of the fact that TikTok is a massively popular social media platform, with 850 million monthly active users and counting. And massively popular social media platforms tend to give rise to new forms of political behavior.On TikTok, we’re already seeing Black Lives Matter protest memes vying for attention with output from Ted Kaczynski-obsessed anarcho-primitivists, far-right “hype houses,” and self-styled “cults.” Given this, the platform certainly appears to be a more powerful tool for political communication than millennial-generation skeptics would suspect. But is TikTok the cultural propaganda machine that conservatives are making it out to be? We hit up friend-of-the-pod Kevin Munger, an assistant professor of political science and data analytics at Penn State, to find out.Kevin, who studies how social media and other technologies are changing political communication, recently teamed up with some colleagues to produce the first large-scale quantitative descriptive analysis of “TikTok Politics,” examining user behavior across 712,193 political TikToks from 5,295 accounts. On this episode of The Culture Journalist, we discuss why TikTok’s unusually information-dense interface—one where users consume a rapid stream of televisual information while responding with home-made videos of their own—makes it such an ideological force-multiplier. We also discuss the social signifiers embedded within its “embodied memes,” how songs like Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” drive conversations both inside and across ideological lines, and the app’s role in incubating extremely niche subcultures like “Zoomer Marxists Who Hate Golf.” Many thanks to journalist Drew Millard for coming along for the ride. 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 on The Culture Journalist, we’re taking a break from 2020—who doesn’t need one?—and traveling back to a time in music and culture that we’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic for. We’re talking about the halcyon days of 2013, a year that was full-to-bursting with exciting sounds from the underground, including DJ Rashad's Double Cup, Arca's mixtape &&&&&, and Deafheaven's Sunbather. It also felt like an unending onslaught of unprecedented Big Pop Moments, from Kanye West dismantling the avant-garde/pop divide with Yeezus, to Miley Cyrus sparking conversations about cultural appropriation with her hip-hop-inspired Bangerz, to Beyoncé reinventing the album cycle with the surprise-drop of her self-titled record in December. 2013 feels like another universe today (this was, after all, just the start of Obama's second term), but it also marked a sea change for the industry and music culture as a whole—one that this week's guest, veteran music journalist Larry Fitzmaurice, has been spending the past few months teasing apart in "The Year that Everything Changed," a serialized essay series for his excellent Last Donut of the Night Substack. We reflect on 2013 as a year that the Internet would transform every aspect of music as we knew it, from the way it sounded, to how it was released, to the media’s role in covering it. 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