Birthday dispatch: an end of a music writing era

Reflections on my music journalism career so far and why this is the first time I can develop my own taste outside of it.

Dear subscriber,

It’s been a couple of months since my last Interlude dispatch to you. Amid the chaos of my open browser tabs, I found a half-written draft for this newsletter that I started in June about songs that get stuck in your head and what they can say about your subconscious. It was a good idea, but I clearly wasn’t confident enough to develop and finish it.¹ Inadvertently, a lot has shifted—both about my music writing career and my music listening habits—since I began writing that blog post. And now on the eve of my birthday, as I reflect on my past year, I feel inclined to summarize how my relationship to music, writing, and music writing has changed—so that I locate what next year’s direction will be. 

1. My career stopped dictating what music I needed to be interested in

Since I began working in music media at the ripe age of 19, I’ve felt a sense of responsibility to pay attention to things that I would not have otherwise never cared about. On its face, this is a really good thing, and I think that part of me will always be curious to check out music that’s beyond my scope—otherwise, how else would expand your taste? In the beginning, I was young and felt a dire need to catch up on the music media landscape so that my taste wasn’t basic and so I wouldn’t seem dumb. Freelancing for The FADER and staff writing for Pitchfork was a crash course in developing the air that I’m “cultured.” But later in my career, I was expected to keep up with everything that was mainstream and trending in order to serve an audience, and that started to feel more like a trapping. While I’ve always had music that I’ve listened to “just for me,” it’s inarguable that working in corporate media has been the largest, most consistent informant of my music taste in my adult life. 

A lot of my early assignments felt like I was expected to be a Gen Z whisperer who could explain how internet trends worked to older people

I came up as a writer during the mid 2010s, a time that many might consider “peak poptimism” in music media—or at least it felt that way because the industry was painfully self-aware about it. Pitchfork had been recently acquired by Condé Nast and was expanding its coverage to review mainstream albums and news in order to get the clicks it needed to meet the demands of its new corporate parent. I was somewhat of a lifelong poptimist, one who grew up on mainstream radio in order to absorb the American music and culture that my parents couldn’t teach me about and found a sense of inclusion when I knew all the hits to dance and sing along to with my classmates. So since I was familiar with it, and it also seemed like an easy niche I could fit into as a femme-presenting East Asian person, I started writing mostly about pop, R&B, and rap music—things that were making numbers online in a pre-TikTok era.

Like some of the other stuff I reviewed at Pitchfork, Queen Key was raunchy and unfiltered. This music video from 2017 has almost 17 million views now.

In the beginning I was writing reviews of Bhad Babie and Queen Key and then I worked my way up to Beyoncé, Ariana, Taylor, Charli. (There was a tangible sense of self-affirmation I received when I was trusted by my editors to handle the Charli self-titled review.) A lot of the early assignments felt like I was expected to be a Gen Z whisperer who could explain how internet trends worked to older people, and also as a queer person of color, actually rigorously engage with some sex-positive music that was becoming more mainstream with the rise of Black women in rap music. The bigger the names were of the artists I wrote about, the more I felt like I could be free of some of those expectations of needing to explain “young people shit.” But with that shift came even more pressure because more eyes were on my reviews, and more stans were tweeting at me. 

I resented the idea of being pigeonholed, but it was already too late. I think I organically had “taste” and an ability to identify rising artists before they blew up; I remember I was the first person to introduce Megan thee Stallion to a rap editor at Pitchfork, and I pitched artists like Shygirl and Charlotte Adigery before they got bigger. But looking back, I don’t think I fully got to figure out what my music taste actually is without the pressure of needing to write in a way that would be of service to a corporate media entity. 

My portfolio has expanded since then. At Them, I wrote a lot about queer artists, I’ve freelanced for an Asian media startup, and I’ve written artist bios for younger, TikTok viral artists who don’t adhere to genres in the same way that their millennial counterparts do. While I was going through my Korean language journey and became freelance, I took it upon myself to become a K-pop expert and ended up interviewing three members of BTS and the group ATEEZ. I contributed to a newsletter that identified up-and-coming artists through online statistics like TikTok views and Spotify plays, so I learned a lot about the kind of music that blows up on the internet these days. I’ve written a ton of bios for artists of all types. 

I still wanted to be admired for my good music taste and sharp critical analysis … but … I started to realize that those characteristics wouldn’t be what would truly make me feel like a good and worthy person

Then, this year, I stopped needing to do as much freelance music writing. I realized that publications’ budgets were drying up around this time last year, so I got a part-time job as a copy editor in the spring. After doing the ATEEZ story for GQ in April, I felt like I had exhausted my ambition to do artist profiles and interviews, which became my bread-and-butter in the Them era. One of the most alluring things about interviews to me was learning about the artist’s life story and process, because I felt like I needed life guidance and insight from the people I looked up to (likely due to a lack of true mentors in my life). This year, I didn’t need other peoples’ perspectives as much, because my frontal lobe developed and I now possess a greater sense of security in my own path. An inner conflict emerged: I still wanted to be admired for my good music taste and sharp critical analysis of rising trends, but I didn’t exactly know why anymore, because I started to realize that those characteristics wouldn’t be what would truly make me feel like a good and worthy person. 

Some really good ambient techno from producer Bot1500 I discovered today off a recommendation from the shoegaze band untitled (halo).

I haven’t worked on a freelance music story for a big big music publication since May and I stopped contributing to that creative agency newsletter in July. In that time, I believe, for the first time in my life, I’ve been able to purely engage with music as just an appreciator and not as someone who needs to check something out to gain an edge in my work. It’s not that my taste has drastically changed—lately I’ve been listening to the new Cure album, LSDXOXO, aespa, San Soucis, Massive Attack, Shinichiro Yokota, Theo Parrish, f5ve, Fontaines DC, Bot1500—but my orientation towards discovery and appreciation has expanded and thrived without the need for commodification. Plus, something else happened to me in July and that’s…

2. I became a club rat while going through what my friend calls “my reverse 20s”

I had been in hibernation until a trip with friends to Fire Island reignited my desire to go out this summer. There were a couple reasons why I was been cooped up inside for most of my mid-20s; I was dating someone and we became homebodies together in the pandemic, then we broke up and I was crushingly depressed, and then I realized I had long covid and thought that my time with “outside” was over forever. Even before then, I rushed through my “going out” phase at NYU, when I would go to shows at Baby’s All Right and Bushwick Public House where my classmates were playing. By age 20, I promptly decided that it was uncool of me to keep trying to get into bars with my fake ID after a bouncer made fun of me at a Ryan Hemsworth show at Palisades; plus, I had already began working at Pitchfork by my second semester senior year. I put everything into my career way too early, so I never truly got a chance to be truly inhibited. Despite that, I remember some fun nights at Papi Juice, GHE20G0TH1K, and one life changing Fade to Mind party at Good Room. I started learning how to DJ in 2019 and even played a couple of gigs (one at H0l0, another at a friend’s show at Wonderville, and some at a hotel in DC), the pandemic soon crushed my nightlife dreams. 

All it took was a group of gay men to get me back on the dancefloor. Fire Island is a place made just for them to fuck and get fucked up, and me, without the pressures of having to find someone to hook up with, didn’t have to act a certain way while partying. I had racked up social anxiety from the pandemic, but this was the quick shock of resocialization to the system I needed. Soon after coming back to the city after four days on the island, we went to Soul Summit at Fort Greene park, where every inch of my body got soaked in strangers’ sweat, and I felt completely rewired. Since this is the first time in a while that I’m not entirely focused on my career aspirations while making a somewhat stable income, I’ve been emboldened to let loose a little bit. (Also, after a long day of writing horrific headlines and consuming hard news, there’s nothing I want to do more than shake my ass; some say trauma is stored in the hips, so the two are correlated.) I think I’ve gone out every weekend since July except for maybe two, and there will be plenty more to share on those experiences on a new piece I’m working on right now. 

My electro teacher Singa shared this sick 2014 electro track from a German duo called the Exaltics on his Instagram story.

Obviously, I am now listening to a lot more electronic music than I did previously and doing it a lot more in the presence of other people, instead of just in my headphones. I’m listening to more mixes, discovering DJ/producers in person, and digging for random remixes on SoundCloud and Bandcamp. But when I think about my writing career, I hesitate to make this my new “brand” like I did with K-pop and I’m wary of being pigeonholed again. So right now, I’m gaining a lot of knowledge and experiences that I’m not exactly sure will be useful just yet, but I hope will be in the future.

3. I started training in dance again and dancers are secretly the best music tastemakers

In tandem with all this, I started earnestly training in dance in August. Earlier this summer, I was heartbroken over a succession of bad dating experiences. My self-esteem had reached new lows. My childhood friend told me: “You know when you were the most confident? When you were on the high school dance team. You should start dancing again.” I’ve now made it my mission to train in as many dance styles as possible in order to find and build my “true” style, and hopefully get good enough to do some performances and enter a battle. I’ve taken classes in tutting, popping, animation/robot, waving, waacking, house, contemporary, lines and shapes, electro, krumping, and choreography making. Each class is a new opportunity for me to unlock a new part of myself that I haven’t been introduced to yet, but also get to know some fire music curated by people who live and breathe music, because they are ones internalizing and reinterpreting it through movement. I watch dance videos to learn at home, and I find some crazy good shit—from Brazilian funk to Afro-house.

I stumbled upon a tutting choreo video uploaded by a well-known South Korean dance studio to this Brazilian funk song by DJ Kennedy.

My music writing career isn’t exactly over, but I do think I’ve now arrived at an inflection point where I can redefine what I write about and how I want to write about it. I’m sure I’ll be writing stuff to keep paying the bills, so to speak, and I’m continuing to do artist bios. But I now have less ambition to prove myself in my writing or my career, and more ambition to somehow push culture forward (whatever that means) and find a way to return the energy I’ve gotten from these local parties and DJs that I’ve encountered in the last few months. I have this urge to finally make my big project, instead of continuing to do things that I know I’m good at or useful for (I think I say this every birthday though), and I know that the past few months have been an incubator for what I will accomplish in my 28th year. I also want to keep this Substack alive, and I want to find new ways to use this platform that makes sense to me, without feeling like it’s another brand I have to tend to. 

Thank you for reading, listening, and following my movements. 

And a special word of appreciation to Interlude readers who have purchased subscriptions, whether that’s monthly or annual. I didn’t launch this newsletter intending to make money, but it truly heartens me that some of you want to show support in this way. For the time being, I don’t want to ask for paid subscriptions or offer exclusive content, because I don’t want to necessarily worry about building or maintaining an audience, but I certainly will not stop you if you want to support. If you have any thoughts on this dispatch or things you’re curious to hear more about, my inbox is always open at meeshkakim@gmail.com. 

1.  I was trying to figure out a philosophical way to explain how listening to music that’s depressing, for instance, can signal to you that you’re depressed before even you realize it, and that the songs you listen to “on repeat” are an expression of your subconscious trying to process a emotion that you may not have externalized consciously yet.