POPaganda!

My grand Substack re-launch: Writings on pop and politics

Hello dear readers.

It’s been so long.

I owe you an explanation.

This newsletter — where I posted my musings on pop music, algorithms and politics — got a surprisingly sweet amount of attention 2 years ago when I hit my stride. Nothing huge, but enough that some editors saw it and felt confident enough to accept my messy pitches.

Some of those stories did quite well and after a few different happenstances I became a Contributing Writer for PAPER, which was exciting, but quite overwhelming, so I stopped writing here. (If you want to catch up on what I’ve written about, I’d suggest my profiles of Camila Cabello or Parvati Shallow or Doechii).

My Substack-pause was needed, but sad, because I loved writing here, where I could feel free to flex 2,000 words on the aesthetics of Beberhexa. I needed some time to focus and read and make coffee and bop around the world, but as we descend into a period of history I can only describe as somewhere between TBD and Hell, I feel a calling to think out loud with you all.

And to reflect a little bit on what I’ve learned these past two years in Media and Music.

My life has changed so much, but my takeaways are fuzzy.

I sometimes wonder if half-reviewing the 10-30 albums sent to me a day makes me more aware of market trends. I sometimes wonder if interviewing scores of musicians has given me any novel insight into how one should conduct their life in the arts, or an understanding of the invisible string that binds all creative processes. I sometimes wonder if hammering my head against a keyboard in exasperated confusion, trying to find a new adjective to describe “frenetic” music (a bad-habit-adjective of mine) really has resulted in any improved writerly muscles.

Or if all of these acts, done over and over again, have resulted in a sort of zen tedium.

Music is music.

Writing is writing.

Emails are emails.

Copy is copy.

hello dear

The act of doing all over and over again isn’t an excercise in reaching nirvana, but is rather more akin to rote muscle memorization. When it’s boring, it’s lifeless and heart breaking. When you’re in the zone, it’s like the best day of mowing the lawn: satisfying and green and fresh and thoughtless.

The truth is: I wish I was a romantic. I wish I could cower at the altar of craft and weep.

But, if anything, I’m a propagandist, interested in billboards and magazine covers and neon signs that etch into your brain forever.

Maybe it’s because I love pop culture more than I love writing. Maybe it’s because I’m ultimately interested in a politics of the masses more than an individualized, Liberal quest for solitary enlightenment. Maybe it’s because I have a politics inspired by Pop hegemony. Yes. Maybe it’s because I want my writing to speak in the language of pop music, which is to say the broad strokes of mass appeal.

To me, writing transcends mere lettering when it can tap into the cosmic blood lust of pop.

gay chungus, Los Angeles, 2017

I think it’s because I’m from Los Angeles. My iron was forged in that spotlit crucible. I remember being 17, bleary, gay, sweaty, self-hating, and seeing Frank Ocean in a crowd of depressives under a warm California sky. To me, there was a supersized intimacy, a sort of smallness to Ocean’s music (blond and its lush, lush bedrot) that, when transposed to a crowd of tens of thousands, became as powerful as any mass movement. Except it was dreamier and ambient … like every human on earth had one day dunked their head inside aquarium waters, seen the fish and dolphins up close and then had to silently keep living their lives, never to mention it again.

I guess I’m talking on the level of vast, vast feelings and mass, mass scale and to me, in an age of mass, mass crisis, that’s the only thing worth talking about?

I’m not saying that a Sabrina Carpenter will move us out of neoliberalism, or authoritarian descent, or even trite party politics. But I am saying that pop music in its anthemic splendor has a rare ability to express the deep pathos of our time, in all of its contradictory scope.

Maybe that’s what I’ll do here. Stare at pop until it gives me some profound revelation.

Read if you want 2,000 words on Oklou, divinity and algorithmic capitalism.

Read if you desire 100 thoughts on KATSEYE.

On pop music in a time of joyless decline and infinite feelings.

I’ll try to make it worth your while.

More soon.

Tobias Hess