The Culture Journalist

From tariffs on foreign goods to scaling back on US military and humanitarian aid abroad, it’s clear that Trump is intent on moving the country in a more protectionist direction. But what does that look like for pop culture? Think: Kendrick’s “Not Like Us” as an anthem for our time, versus Drake collaborating with lesser-known grime and Afro-house producers during the Obama years. Critic Jaime Bro...

In his new book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis , writer Malcom Harris examines what is probably our most pressing existential paradox: Both individually and as a society, we’re all so caught up in the struggle to survive under capitalism that we’ve become incapable of taking decisive action to reduce our reliance on carbon and ensure our collective survival. Fortunately, as...

During the pandemic, it seemed like the internet, and specifically TikTok, was coughing up one fringe aesthetic after the next: Cottagecore! Trad Cath Coquette! Old Money! Coastal Grandmother! And of course, our personal fave, Dark Academia. We even did a whole episode on it , as part of a larger examinatin of post-pandemic aesthetics. Fast forward to today, and the churn of social media-born aest...

Franchises, reboots, crossovers, live-action remakes, interpolations… Why does the entertainment industry keep churning out content that is derivative of something that came before, like Nicki Minaj rapping over “Barbie Girl” at the end of the Barbie movie on an endless loop? According to Andrew deWaard , a professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, it’s because of Wall Street. In his...

Since Trump took office in January, you may have picked up on a certain, shall we say, visual vibe. Think: AI slop memes, gilded neoclassical decor, men clad in dark suits and red ties, women decked out in high heels and flowing hair—not to mention an ambiguous blend of plastic surgery and contoured make-up that the Hollywood Reporter recently dubbed “ Mar-A-Lago Face .” If you’ve noticed some of...

Today we explore how many of the habits and customs we associate with American bourgeois life — religiously reading the Sunday Times , buying organic produce, building your entire identify around excelling at a career you love, etc. — stem from one generation in particular. Friends, we’re talking about the yuppies, that notoriously status-obsessed, hyper-educated cohort of young urban professional...

The Culture Journalist is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including bonus episodes and our eternal parasocial friendship — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers also get access to CUJOPLEX, a private Discord server and online hangout zone where independent culture fans who like talkin...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com From AI song generators like SUNO and Udio to “knob-free,” browser-based DAWs like BandLab, a rash of new music production apps and software is wooing creators with the promise of shortcutting the time and elbow grease it traditionally takes to make music. But is quicker and more effortless necessarily...

Folks, it finally happened. After years of trying to “optimize” nearly every aspect of everyday life, from work to fitness to music, Silicon Valley has finally set its sights on the federal government. If you missed the bombshell story in Wired , Elon Musk is currently leading a platoon of quirked up zoomer web developers as they sift through institutional data and use AI to weed out inefficiencie...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com Are algorithms actually making culture boring? It’s easy to point to the Spotifys and Instagrams the world and blame them for what we perceive to be stagnant cultural production, flattened tastes, and generally bad vibes. But, in a recent piece for the Atlantic titled “ The Technology That Actually Runs...

Let’s take a step back in time to the halcyon days of late 2011, back when a little Swedish music app called Spotify landed in our app stores. Its arrival, alongside the rise of early smartphones and “public square” platforms like Twitter, seemed to herald the utopian ideals of a democratizing tech future just on the horizon. Here was an app that professed to level the playing field for music fans...

On the surface, Zyn seems like just another post-cigarette nicotine push from Big Tobacco. But look a little closer, and you’ll find that these little white nicotine pouches have taken on an entire life and culture of their own, complete with political connotations, subcultural slang, and even social media “Zynfluencers.” You can count Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and even “Joe Rogan of the Left” Ha...

By now, you’ve all already heard the news: After coming in hot with Brat memes and aligning itself with Wall Street and Liz Cheney, the Kamala Harris campaign suffered a historic and existentially unsettling defeat—delivering America straight into the hands of what the Democrats warned us was the worst outcome possible, which was another four years of Donald Trump. Here to help us make sense of it...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com What’s it like when a song you wrote more than half a decade ago goes viral on TikTok? Well, that’s exactly what happened to Massachusetts indie band Vundabar with their 2015 track “Alien Blues” —to the tune of 83,000 TikTok videos and 600 million Spotify streams. This week, frontman Brandon Hagen joins...

The Culture Journalist is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. After disappearing into a black hole of summertime sadness, inflationary headwinds, and soul searching in Eastern Europe, we are back with a fresh batch of episodes and bonus content, so buckle up. Also, this podcast recently turned four years old. To celebrate, between now and Friday, November 8, we are offering 50% off on...

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

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 narrativ...

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...

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 th...

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 lo...

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 investor...

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...

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 , var...

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...

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, ne...