About

I remember sitting in a label conference room when I was about 25, listening to a senior A&R guy explain why a particular artist wasn't ready for a push. He had a lot of reasons. None of them were the real reason. The real reason was that he'd missed signing her the previous year and wasn't interested in being publicly wrong about it. Everyone in the room knew this. Nobody said it. I went home and wrote four pages about it that nobody was ever going to read.

That's more or less how I got into this.

I grew up around the entertainment industry without being in it. My mother did wardrobe on television sets, which means I spent a lot of time in places where the machinery of a thing was fully visible while the product was supposed to look effortless. That's a hard perspective to unknow. I am genuinely interested in culture — music, film, celebrity, the whole apparatus — and I am also constitutionally unable to take the official version of it at face value.

The label job lasted three years. Long enough to understand how decisions actually get made, which is mostly useful for knowing when the press release is lying. I've been writing about pop culture since, for audiences who want something more than a recap and less than a dissertation.

I have strong opinions about what's worth paying attention to and I'm not particularly shy about them. That gets me in trouble occasionally. I consider this acceptable.

Based in Los Angeles, which is either the best or worst place to do this job depending on the week.