The Culture Journalist

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Today, 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.

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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

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com

What 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.

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Grab a copy of Futuromania.

Keep up with Simon and his writing on blissblog

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Can Brat memes propel Kamala to a victory in November? In this week’s episode, we dig into the groundswell of online enthusiasm surrounding Kamala Harris’ campaign announcement — and how a viral endorsement from Charli xcx, who cheekily dubbed the vice president “Brat,” unexpectedly transformed this year’s presidential race into an exercise in meme warfare. This week, we’re joined by cyberethnographer and designer Ruby Justice Thelot, along with culture writer and boyfriend-of-the-pod Drew Millard, who have both written thought-provoking articles on all this — Ruby on his Substack, and Drew on his new internet culture blog Media Events.

We discuss the history of font memes in music (and the role of the Charlie’s vomit-green Brat marketing campaign within in it), the strange incongruence between Kamala’s public image and Brat’s distinctly messy brand of femme empowerment, and why conflating the meme-ification of a candidate with actual voter sentiment shows a misunderstanding of how memes actually work (and how Gen Z relate to them).

Join us on Substack as we uncover the economic and technological forces percolating beneath the surface of contemporary culture.

Follow Drew on X, and pay a dollar to read his font meme piece on Media Events

Follow Ruby on IG, and subscribe to being-on-line

Recommended Reading

“On ‘Brat’ and the phenomenon of font memes” by Drew Millard

“Can memes win an election?” by Ruby Justice Thelot (available on IG here)

“The crisis of legibility” by Ruby Justice Thelot

Can jokes bring down governments? by Metahaven

The image: A guide to pseudo events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin

The new typography by Jan Tschichold

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.com

In 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.com

Living 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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com

Like most people on the internet, we here at the CuJo love a good food-centric social media account. But our arguable favorite at the moment is Snaxshot, a Substack, Instagram, and online community run by journalist and snack oracle Andrea Hernández. 

Through analyzing products like Graza olive oil and adaptogenic cookie dough and the bold colors and chunky fonts that make every new food brand look vaguely the same, Andrea probes the vast culinary zeitgeist in search of what it tells us about both our generation and this moment in culture. 

This week, she joins us to crack open the fascinating and often disorienting cultural politics of what she calls “gentrification food.” We get into the culinary and aesthetic hallmarks of this genre of food and beverage, what we millennials are broadcasting about ourselves when we consume it, and how our consumption choices became a form of status signaling in the first place.  

We also talk about the differences between how Millennials and Gen-Z relate to food (and how it’s marketed to them accordingly); how artisanality became a mass-market concept; and why chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Cheesecake Factory are having a moment among young people. 

Join us as we uncover the economic and technological forces percolating beneath the surface of contemporary culture.

Subscribe to Snaxshot on Substack 

Follow Snaxshot on IG

Recommended reads by Andrea

“American Snaxboi” 

“Millennial Metamucil”

“For the love of chains”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com

This 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 IG

Follow Damon on X

Read 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.com

This 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.com

Hey 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…