I'm More than Just a Little Justified
What am I doing here? And why does it matter?
I stumbled into journalism by accident.
In July of last year, I emailed the editors of a very small film website in the hopes of getting the opportunity to write about a television show that I held close to my heart. I had no plan of making a career path out of writing; my only ambition was to express some thoughts on the show in question in a longer form that could help me parse out why I felt so affected by the material at hand, and maybe give some stray reader a recommendation that would help them see what I saw. Little did I know, however, that I’d receive an acceptance in less than six hours.
It was also during that month that I had offhandedly applied for a mentee role in the inaugural Zenith Cooperative mentorship program, again expecting very little of the results. After all, I had precious little credentials to my name—in my application, I mentioned that my high school journalism program had done little to advance my understanding of the field in the real world, as someone who was already heavily invested in independently seeking out and reading long-form journalism and criticism from a variety of outlets and media. My expectations were to receive a polite denial, but I had convinced myself that, on the off-chance someone saw my application and took an interest in it, I didn’t have anything to lose by applying. After all, I did need some help learning how to efficiently pitch editors, find a coherent “beat” of topics and perspectives that interested me, and, with all hope, potentially have my work appear in an outlet that someone who isn’t a journalist would be able to recognize if it popped up in their Google feed.
Once again, my low expectations proved incorrect—after about a month, less than a week after my first official byline was published, I received an email from Zenith co-founder Mary Retta confirming that I had been accepted as a Zenith mentee. I was elated at the prospect of getting to collaborate with journalists that I had admired for some time, but daunted by the reality that such a challenge required me to publish more work. I’ve always been a voracious reader, and an opinionated one at that, but did I really have the knowledge and perspective required to repeatedly excavate my thoughts for a sustainable career in an increasingly insecure, fractured field?
Well, as it turns out, yes and no, hence the creation of this newsletter. In the time that has elapsed between my Zenith acceptance and the publication of this post, I can say with confidence that I have achieved my goal in being published in outlets that an outsider would recognize, having acquired bylines in sites like i-D, Slate, Paste, and Little White Lies, as well as a roster of smaller publications that have nonetheless provided exciting collaborative experiences. I’ve reached a point in my career at which I can confidently state that I will not publish my writing with any outside sources if not given a minimum amount of financial compensation for my work, which I certainly wouldn’t have been able to claim this time last year. I’ve been introduced to a variety of challenging subjects that have expanded my notions of what I like to write about, and with that, of course, comes a more well-rounded understanding of the artistic mediums that encompass the majority of my work.
Yet, in having collaborated with such a diverse roster of editors and websites, I’ve often had to compromise my vision of what I would like to write for the sake of fitting into someone else’s freelance budget. The first piece of mine that really garnered a genuine flood of attention from the Internet is easily one of my least favorite articles I’ve written, not in the least because I had to scrap a literal half of the essay I had planned to write in favor of making my editor’s job easier. I don’t blame any of my peers or editors for having to conduct their careers in this current landscape of artistic coverage. The state of contemporary journalism is a decaying, fraudulent husk of what it proclaims itself to be, relying on the insights of freelancers while cheating them of the compensation to which they are entitled for their work. Online coverage of several different artistic mediums prioritizes a dozen half-baked hot takes over a genuinely thoughtful, structured interrogation of whatever subject matter is in question, sacrificing that which is challenging or different in order to remain accessible to the broadest swath of fleeting engagement—I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told my language is too “academic” when in the editing process of an article, despite the fact that I’ve never even attended college.
Maybe this is a case of my being affected by the adjacent “NYC brain” of so many of my peers (I live in Georgia and have since childhood) that views their insular perspective on popular culture as the inherent consensus, but it seems as if so many of my colleagues in this field view film, television, and music—the culture we are supposedly employed to critique—as “content” to be “consumed,” as if every piece of art exists not as a malleable experience to enjoy and interact with as a viewer with a unique perspective, but a source of gruel meant to satiate what little free time we have with a fleeting high that only exists to make the viewer in question more in-touch with the current discourses on that which saturates our media landscape. Of course, the language used to articulate our understanding is symptomatic of the landscape in which our popular culture is created, rather than being a factor in its decline, but I can’t help but feel frustrated that the immediate response from so many people who base their livelihoods on analyzing the art that fills our lives is to regard it with such apathy, to treat that which has the power to illuminate truths about the human condition as mere instantly-gratifying slop from the churn of streaming executives.
All of these factors have pushed me to consider the alternative of self-publishing for quite some time. I certainly haven’t been totally keen on the idea from day one; despite my frustrations with my language being categorized as too impenetrable, I will readily admit that I am a long-winded writer who could use some editing help to more succinctly express what’s on my mind. My real concern was that self-publishing wouldn’t be as financially viable as the traditional freelance path—a hilarious comparison to make, given that I know several freelance writers who can barely make rent—which, despite its numerous shortcomings, at least provides a sense of security in transparently knowing how much I could make for an article at a given website. Yet the caveat that continually brought me back to seriously considering the idea was my knowledge that some of my favorite entertainment writers have been able to successfully expand their authorial reach by being given an outlet that allows them to publish specific, serious work that other publications might not want to publish due to risky subject matter. For one very fun example, Sydney Urbanek, a literal music video scholar, has used her newsletter Mononym Mythology to examine the extensive amount of artistic control required for musicians to create a persona in the digital age, a passion that has allowed her to express her capacity for long-form work, which has led to her obtaining an editor position at the similarly insightful film website Bright Wall/Dark Room. Even the aforementioned Mary Retta, who went on to co-found an entire mentorship program, gained a significant amount of her current following as a result of her now-defunct close but not quite newsletter, which is how I first encountered her (excellent) work.
My focus is nowhere as concrete as Urbanek’s, who has devoted a significant amount of time to scholarly examinations of music video artistry outside of the newsletter boom. My musings are nowhere as… genre-bending, for lack of a better word, as those which Retta published in her newsletter; if I were to significantly tweak my angles, I could reasonably pitch several of the pieces I will likely publish here to other outlets, whereas Retta’s writing was often so stream-of-conscious that the pandemic newsletter boom aided her artful work in a very specific way that likely couldn’t have found as much success elsewhere. I’ll still be freelancing with other websites on a regular basis, in part because not everything I have to write is so unique to my perspective that leveraging the already existing audience of a large website wouldn’t help to attract new readers to my work. Yet when I have the time, the ambition, and the pitches that have not yet been accepted, I plan on publishing my longer, more sprawling work here, in an outlet that will allow me the space and forethought to take as a much time as I need to properly shape and organize my more ambitious pieces to be the most thoughtful versions of themselves I can make them. My goal here is to demonstrate my capacity for longer work with as much insight and curiosity as any one of my freelance pieces would, in keeping with the motto my newsletter name promises by probing my topics with an unexpected lens divorced from the hot take industrial complex.
You may notice that this post is titled after the titular refrain of the Kacey Musgraves song “justified,” the lead single from her most recent album star-crossed, a conceptual break-up album in three acts that straddled pop and country, and, as a result, had no real obvious singles (Musgraves performed the album overture, a song that has no hook, at the 2021 Video Music Awards, with her ostentatious set design lending the song most of its live gravitas—that should tell you how difficult that album likely was to market). I’ve been a Kacey Musgraves fan for years, and, unfortunately, of the four studio albums she has to her name, star-crossed is easily my least favorite—in taking the logical step from the album’s even dreamier predecessor Golden Hour (an album I love), which introduced her to her largest pop crossover audience yet, the album sands her more eclectic edges into a comfortable pop sheen that, while pleasant, doesn’t highlight her greatest strengths as a singer or as a writer, the latter of which is what initially enamored me to her 2013 modern classic Same Trailer, Different Park.
Why mention this at all? Well, being such a fan of hers, I also know the context behind star-crossed, which was released in the wake of her divorce from fellow country singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly, the muse behind the lovestruck Golden Hour, easily her most straightforwardly happy album. What many critics who ostensibly adored Golden Hour—to the point that it was hailed by numerous critics as the best country album of that year… in March—tend to ignore about its creation is that Ruston Kelly also released an album that year, Dying Star, which also drew a substantial amount of its inspiration from his relationship with Musgraves, albeit within a much more morose, almost disbelieving framework. Those of us who listened to Dying Star were keen to the reality that there was likely more discord in the relationship than the blissful tranquility of Golden Hour suggested—go listen to “Mockingbird” and tell me I’m wrong. That Kelly, the subject of so much regret in star-crossed, was expressing his doubts about the relationship in his own art as early as the same year during which Golden Hour was released implies that the eventual divorce was much more complicating than even the relatively even-handed framing of star-crossed suggests, which, though definitely understandable in its hurt, still paints Musgraves as the subservient victim to her ex-husband’s controlling, domineering nature (see: “breadwinner”).
star-crossed is an album of compromised ambition, one that, in an attempt to capture the magnitude of its creator’s heartbreak, sacrifices the quality of its actual music in favor of a grandiose film that accompanies the album, with all its off-kilter reference points (complete with an homage to The Stepford Wives, which… okay) and country sensibilities that render it a profoundly strange artistic statement. Musgraves had already been subtly blacklisted from country’s mainstream as a result of her refusal to play by the industry’s well-documented sexist double standards, and with a swath of influences that span various decades and genres, she had nothing to lose in pivoting towards her more psychedelic inclinations, which, in turn, led her to develop an appreciation for the craftsmanship required to make truly compelling pop music. Yet in having attracted a pop crossover fanbase who wouldn’t know the first thing about so many of her country forebearers after releasing Golden Hour, she was likely nudged in an artistic direction that didn’t play to her strengths in order to satiate her voluminous but comparatively shallow fanbase, losing some of the nuance in her depiction of her relationship in order to have enough material to pad her conceptual framework for the resultant album.
“justified” is nowhere close to my favorite song from star-crossed (that title belongs to “cherry blossom”), but it is one with which I feel a certain kinship, having seen my own ambition to create something both accessible and thought-provoking be damaged by the half-measures required to succeed in the industry that created it. Perhaps this newsletter will only house a few articles; I can’t predict how sustainable this practice will be within my current schedule, but I’d like to think that the scale of my vision will ultimately come to fruition in due time. It’s a challenge and an opportunity, an act of vengeance but also one of agency, and I can only be excited in my hope for the best.
And hey, maybe I will write that essay about The Sensual World, the best Kate Bush album. Someday.