The Culture Journalist

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

For independent artists who rely on touring as their primary source of income, the pandemic has been financially devastating. For independent venues who host them when they come to town, it’s an extinction-level threat. Part of the problem is that nobody knows when it’ll be safe to open for business again, mostly because nobody knows when we’ll finally have access to a vaccine. But the live music industry runs on razor-thin margins to begin with, and even with no money coming through the door, the bills for mortgage, rent, utilities, and other operating expenses are still coming due.On this week’s episode, James Moody, owner of beloved Austin venue The Mohawk, takes us behind the scenes to describe what the past six months have been like for the people who work tirelessly to bring music to our cities every night of the week. We also talk with Audrey Fix Schaefer, director of communications at NIVA and Washington D.C.’s iconic 9:30 Club, about why the fate of live music in this country rests in part on an upcoming vote in Congress regarding two pieces of legislation, the RESTART Act and the Save Our Stages Act—and how the crisis has brought a notoriously competitive corner of the music industry together. 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

Los Angeles native Jeff Weiss is no stranger to the heartbreak of watching the newspaper the shaped your understanding of the city where you grew up, and the people and institutions within it that are worth fighting for, become a shell of its former self. Three years ago, when a group of Republican-donor investors purchased the LA Weekly and laid off almost the entirety of its editorial staff, the writer and editor was so rattled by the gutting of his favorite alternative weekly that he organized a boycott of the publication. Then he teamed up with a group of local journalists and editors—many of them, like Jeff himself, former contributors of the alternative culture bible—to start a print magazine called The LAnd.Focused on telling local culture and politics stories from a distinctively Los Angeles perspective, the publication is celebrating the release of its third issue this summer. Fittingly with the events that birthed it, the theme this go-around is the future of Los Angeles. Jeff, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, wrote over 6,000 words about how a corrupt and racist police force, vampiric real-estate developers, and a bloated and ineffectual local bureaucracy prevent the city for actually living up to his reputation as one of the most progressive cities in the world; The Culture Journalist’s Andrea Domanick, another former LA Weekly contributor, reported a series of interviews with local venue owners about what a post-pandemic Los Angeles nightlife might look like. And there’s also a great piece about the future of the city’s dim sum scene.Over the past 15 years, Jeff has developed something of a cult following for his imagistic writing style and tireless advocacy of indigenous Los Angeles culture—both through his rap-centric POW site, which he has expanded to include a record label since he started it in 2005, and through writing for places like the Washington Post, Los Angeles Magazine, and The Ringer. On this week’s episode, we talk about the stories that don’t get told when local media disappears, Weiss’ ongoing coverage of rapper Drakeo the Ruler’s legal battle, and why the place where you live will always be a much better source of meaning and inspiration than the Internet. 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 April, The New York Times reported that an estimated 36,000 U.S. media workers had been laid off or furloughed—or taken pay cuts—in the first month of the pandemic alone. One of them was this week’s guest and friend-of-the-pod Drew Millard, a North Carolina-born journalist who got his start writing about hip-hop at VICE’s Noisey and has spent the past few years writing about things like golf, politics, and Hustler founder Larry Flynt.Drew was working as a features editor at The Outline until early April, when he logged in to a Friday-morning meeting and received the news that the beloved tech, politics, and culture site was ceasing publication immediately—less than three-and-a-half-years into its existence, and a year after its acquisition by Bustle Media. (Read Jeremy Gordon’s heartfelt post-mortem here). That day, Drew joined the ranks of hundreds of independent journalists and critics—our co-hosts Andrea Domanick and Emilie Friedlander included—faced with charting a meaningful path forward within a culture media landscape that, even before the coronavirus hit, seemed to be teetering on the brink of financial collapse.This week’s episode of The Culture Journalist hits extremely close to home—not least because Drew indulged our request to walk us through what it was like to lose his job in the middle of a pandemic, triggering memories of our own lay-off experiences (are you really a journalist if you haven’t been laid off?). Mostly, though, we chew over some of the tricker, more existential questions that are coming up for us as we navigate this strange new chapter in culture journalism: How do we maintain our passion for reporting stories and writing criticism when it feels like the industry is crumbling around us? What even is the role of a culture journalist in this moment of economic and political turmoil—and when the artists and industries we cover are struggling for survival themselves? And is Drew playing too much online poker? 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 Summer, The Culture Journalist’s Emilie Friedlander and independent journalist Joy Crane published a 10,000-word investigation about a self-proclaimed “cult” that emerged out of the irony-obsessed Weird Facebook scene of the mid-00s. The piece, titled “Inside the Social Media Cult that Convinces Young People to Give Up Everything,” follows the story of a musician named Matthew who meets two strangers on the Internet during his sophomore year in college, then leaves his life behind to join them in building an online spiritual community called Tumple.What seems at first like a utopian art project rooted in themes of racial and economic justice devolves over time into a tangled web of financial, emotional, and sexual control—especially after the organization evolves into a roving live-in community called the DayLife Army, which conscripts a small group of idealistic young people into a life of homelessness, punishing content and revenue quotas, and total personal sacrifice.It’s a story that is as heavy as it is multi-layered, at once a harrowing look at life inside a high-control group and an examination of the strange new forms these relational systems can take within the specific context of millennial Internet culture. On this episode, we go behind the scenes with Emilie and Joy to discuss the year they spent reporting this story together; the group’s complicated relationship with social media, influencer culture, and contemporary social justice movements; and the challenges of navigating investigative reporting projects as a freelancer. 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’re kicking off the pod this week with VICE senior writer Kristin Corry, a New York-based culture journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of music and race. When protests against police violence and institutional racism erupted across the country earlier this Spring, Kristin wrote a powerful essay called “The Music Industry Fails Black People Every Day,” dissecting the ways in which majority-white institutions profit off of Black culture while under-compensating Black creatives and “valuing us as entertainment instead of people.” We spoke to Kristin about the overt and covert ways that systemic racism makes itself felt across the industry, the role of music in the protest movement, and how underrepresentation in newsrooms has shaped her approach to covering Black music. 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 The Culture Journalist, a podcast about the wild west of culture, counterculture, and the media in the year 2020. Think of it as your guide to understanding the arts, politics, and the anxieties of everyday life through the lens of culture reporting—hosted by Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick, two freelance journalists from opposite sides of the country.Culture doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are the artists who create it, and then there are the people who help us find it, love it, and make meaning of it. If you've ever loved a song or a novel, how did you find out about it? That's where culture journalists come in—the critics, reporters, and storytellers who help parse the content on your feed, unearth stories, and take a first pass at history. We’re living history right now: Over the past few months, venues and movie theaters and record stores have shuttered across the country, leaving thousands of creative workers out of a job. Young people have been taking the streets in cities across the United States, demanding justice for victims of racist police violence and a more equitable future for all. Technology is producing sweeping shifts in the production and distribution of creative work, and the cultural conversation is evolving faster than we can keep up. But as publications fold and journalists are laid off in record numbers, it can feel like our little corner of the media industry is collapsing at the very moment when America needs it the most. So we started this podcast to spotlight the people that are helping us make sense of where culture and counterculture are going—and, in a way, since art is a reflection of life, where the world is going too.On each episode of The Culture Journalist, we’ll be bringing you conversations with our favorite reporters and critics—as well as artists, academics, creatives, and organizers—about their lives, their work, and the stories that we can't stop thinking about. Be sure to stick around until the end, when we answer questions from listeners seeking advice or a second opinion on all things culture journalism-related—you can email us one, too. The Culture Journalist is an independent journalism project that relies on word-of-mouth and is entirely self-funded. To help us get this project off the ground and assist us in covering production, music, and labor costs, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. For a small monthly contribution, you'll get access to episodes in full after the first two months, a shout-out on the podcast, and other bonus goodies. If you can’t chip in but like what you’re hearing, we hope you’ll tell a couple of friends about it. Talk soon,Emilie and AndreaSpecial thanks to Mark Donica of S U R V I V E for composing our theme music. 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