Earlier this year, having transitioned out of a job I’d held for nearly a decade, I returned to music writing for the first time since 2018—contributing to this paper, as well as relaunching a long-lapsed North Carolina hip-hop-focused outlet called Super Empty.
In the past six months, we’ve published a variety of pieces on regional artists: interviews, album and song reviews, event recaps, and more. For the most part, these are thoroughly researched, humanizing stories that train a spotlight on one or two acts at a time—the kind of publicity that, since time immemorial, has been highly sought after by up-and-coming artists.
But a few months ago, when I created a Super Empty playlist on Apple Music, it became abundantly clear that some long-standing paradigms around exposure had been turned on their head. For months, we’d run considered, long-form pieces on music from around the state, but it wasn’t until the creation of a simple, straightforward playlist that the fire emojis and email submissions really started to flow in. Clearly, it wasn’t 2018 anymore.
I’d returned to music writing with a hazy understanding that things would probably be different, I just wasn’t sure how. The playlist situation sharpened the focus: in 2024, a solo blurb or even full write-up is nice, but the real currency is being on a playlist, sardined between 30 other artists—no analysis, no backstory, no context.
I was genuinely glad with the response to our nascent playlist. But given the way playlist supremacy (or at least the root forces behind it) seemed interconnected with ailments across the music ecosystem, I also viewed the developments with as much skepticism as I did satisfaction. It seemed like an illustration of not just how far we’d come but what we’d lost along the way.
When I first started writing about music, it felt like the tail end of a golden era of music culture on the internet, one that today a certain subset of misty-eyed, 30-something music fans have come to refer to as “the Blog Era.” Eulogizing the phenomenon four years ago in Complex, blogger Tim Larew placed a historical marker at 2015, describing pre-2015 as a time when music journalism was still defined by “compelling stories and creative music videos being the center of attention” and post-2015 as the onset of “all-out meme culture, where sensational, viral content is usually the primary driver of views.”
My experience in Durham in late 2015 bore that out: with the broader algorithmic content machine not fully revved up yet, artists still viewed deep-dive storytelling and criticism as the best avenues to discovery. Within weeks of creating Super Empty, I was inundated with requests for written coverage of any kind. The reasoning wasn’t some sentimental, Spotlight-based affinity for the journalism industry (only in my dreams), it was pure pragmatism: though it was beginning to wane, these were still the places fans looked to for new artists and music to enjoy.
Quaint and anachronistic as it may sound today, online blogging and local arts writing were once, even in the not-so-distant past, highly influential. Those mid-2010s songs in my inbox would often turn into positive public reviews, but on the occasions when the feedback was less than glowing, online recriminations and shit-talking could quickly commence—conflicts that wouldn’t exist if no one thought the reviews in question mattered.
It’s true that at least part of the reason blogs and alt-weeklies had that audience—pure music discovery—has (mostly) been replicated by social media accounts and playlists. To put it mildly, ours is not a time in which people have suddenly lost the experience of being put on to new music (or old music they’ve never heard), or in which the art of curation has been lost.
These things do exist, though often at the hands of massive platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, whose business models demand that metrics like “hours listened” be prioritized over any kind of relationship or intimacy with what it is we’re listening to. With the framing, interrogation, and perspective that good criticism affords in shorter and shorter supply, music begins to feel more and more like a commodity, whittled down to a vibe rather than a full story.
I don’t mean to argue for the artistic merits of criticism itself—among many other defenses of the form, Hua Hsu’s 2016 New Yorker tribute to Village Voice columnist Greg Tate (and his ability to “theorize outward from his encounters with genius and his brushes with banality—to telescope between moments of artistic inspiration and the giant structures within which those moments were produced”) should be evidence enough. My motivations are more pragmatic, provoked by the undesirable downstream conditions emerging from our anodyne, overly optimized relationship with the art we should instead be messily and colorfully debating among ourselves.
Tangible examples of the real-world consequences are plain to see: a drop in attendance to local and regional live shows at venues already suffering from a pandemic slowdown; a loss of history, which, as the recent mass deletion of MTV News demonstrates, the internet’s infinite haystack will not save us from; and a loss of connectedness to our regions and communities—with cultural waymarks like Kyesha Jennings’s Hip-Hop 50 piece for INDY last year, or Lawrence Burney’s True Laurels project in the DMV, happening less and less often.
So what are we to do? We might start by soberly identifying arts journalism as yet another 21st-century tragedy of the commons—maybe another casualty of the increasingly atomized self-care era, one in which it’s hard to see the long-term value of anything that isn’t immediately gratifying. A robust culture of criticism may benefit some more directly than others, but it serves all of us in one way or another—and as such, we all have a role to play in bringing it back.
For their part, artists have to supplement their promotional posts on social media—many of which, algorithms today being what they are, won’t reach many of their followers anyway—with outreach to the editors and writers of the legacy publications that still remain, as well as the upstart ones that have emerged to fill in the gaps.
Fans need to forcibly detach themselves, at least for an hour at a time, from the content deluge of social media and sit with considered analysis of artists—work that may champion or challenge, but will always result in a deeper relationship to the material.
And maybe most importantly, those interested in contributing to the cultural conversation in ways that a playlist never could—adding their voices to the rollicking, raucous din alongside Tate and Hsu, Burney and Jennings—get involved! Reach out to a paper (like this one), or a website (like mine) and make it known that you’ve got something to say. If you have a passion for what you’re writing about and have your own way of saying it, I’m almost certain you won’t be turned away.
And in the meantime, we can all keep enjoying the playlists we love, just as long as we slip in some full albums in between. Which reminds me: I need to wrap this up—I need to refresh the Super Empty playlist in time for next week.
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