#0: Not Me Writing a Newsletter About K Pop

Why I'm writing about music here.

Dear friends,

It's been a while since I've written about music anywhere that was not Twitter. Like years since. Before I started my extended break from music journalism, I was an editor at MTV Hive (RIP), Paper Thin Walls (RIP) and Pitchfork, and a writer at Stereogum and CMJ (RIP). I left music journalism to work at a startup making playlists, and somehow spent the next seven years working at Google and YouTube.

I'm coming back to music writing because of k-pop. K-pop is directly responsible for many of my recent decisions, good, bad, or confusing. It's music that brings me the same joy and excitement (and same exhaustion, actually!) that I felt when I ran Pitchfork's tracks reviews section. I feel compelled to share this with everyone I can. But we live in world where music journalism looks like this:

... a niche field that never got a significant audience and went downhill after I left during season 5.

I can't think of a place to write about new tracks that I want to share, so I made one up — this newsletter, right here. I'll dig through comebacks and debuts and surface the tracks that a casual fan or a solo stan may have missed. I also want to make a safe space to talk about new k-pop casually, so basically like Twitter without being Twitter. I won't talk about Seventeen more than 5% of the time but I also won't talk about Seventeen less than 5% of the time. What can I say? They live rent-free in my head and there's 13 of them, so they hate it.