Doreen St. Félix

EO

I’ve been thinking about this line, “We were authentically nothing,” from Danzy Senna’s introduction in the reissue of Fran Ross’s 1974 novel, Oreo, which you told me about years ago. She’s alluding to the politics of Black subjectivity in Fort Greene, Brooklyn in the 1990s as an alternative reality where mere existence is itself radical. It reminded me of the last line in your viral piece “The Prosperity Gospel of Rihanna,” where you say, “To be a Black woman and genius is to be perpetually owed.” While Oreo didn’t reach a wide audience when it first debuted, its experimentality and conceptual rigor isn’t lost on many of us.

DSF

I’m not the best scholar of Fran’s but that’s funny. I think that piece on Rihanna was probably the first I ever published “professionally.” It was the first piece I ever published after school. I was 23 years old. I remember I was in Chicago at a queer organizing conference, INCITE! People of Color Against Violence, and this editor, Jessica Hopper, messaged me and said, “Oh, do you want to write about ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ for very little money for Pitchfork.” I just remember being in a fugue state because I had just spent a number of years in an institutional space, Brown University, where the feedback that I got was that I wasn’t writing criticism because I was writing about race. Within that world and at that time, people were really behind in the ways they thought about race and performance. They saw it as purely sociological.

EO

When was this?

DSF

I wrote “The Prosperity Gospel of Rihanna” in 2015, and I graduated in 2014. So a lot of this negative feedback I received was in the early 2010s.

EO

Yes, during the late Obama years.

DSF

Yes, at the time everyone was really drunk on looking at the semiotics of race and performance, but it didn’t yet crossover to the education system. These liberal arts institutions were very much behind. And there were a few practitioners who weren’t like older white thinkers who hadn’t been weaned on Harper’s and The New Yorker and these kinds of magazines. I think often when you’re doing criticism, sometimes you’re hijacking the subject to make a point.

EO

Did something happen at the conference to cause this fugue state?

DSF

It was purely coincidental more than anything else. I remember being in the hotel room and thinking, “Okay, I have to be scandalous and exciting and different because this is my one chance.” At that point I felt like I wasn’t a good critic or I wasn’t a critic at all. [Laughs.] Because there were no stakes in some ways, I gave myself all the stakes and decided to do a reading of not only Rihanna but of the figure of the Black woman rapper as it has expanded over the past one or two generations (I don’t want to use the word evolved). So that’s what that essay is about more than anything else. It just happens to use this “Bitch Better Have My Money” moment as its launchpad.

EO

But it was weirdly prophetic because she eventually became a renowned businesswoman.

DSF

Right. I think there’s a line in that essay that says that she’ll likely be the first Black woman billionaire to come from entertainment, excluding Oprah.

EO

It’s a different feat though because Rihanna is an entertainer and Oprah is a media personality.

DSF

And because historically the Black woman entertainer has been entered into bad record deals. And Rihanna had money taken from her by her accountant. And that’s what that song is about. It’s not just about Rihanna. It’s about like the scores of Black women entertainers who have died in destitution because their voices were not seen as theirs. There’s this paradox where their talent and their gift is seen as divine, and therefore anyone can own it. They’re just like vessels. This was true not just for women. Look at Elvis, for example.

EO

In pop music and culture, both right now and historically, the market and innovation has always been driven and performed by women. The most adventitious and effective cultural moments have almost been exclusively shaped by women.

DSF

Yes, even Elvis ventriloquizing “Hound Dog” involves him putting himself in the space of the upset female, the female who’s talking from a place of complaint. That kind of gender transformation, when you look at how that song is a cover and most people don’t even know that. I think it’s really such a microcosm of how the idea of the pop star is a feminist idea, whether or not men decide to hijack that space.

EO

Well exactly, it’s something to project desire onto. That context is gender. You’re expected to be pretty and perform and…

DSF

And available. Like a cipher.

EO

So you wrote this viral piece. Who were you before and after?

DSF

Of course in retrospect you can narrativize and say everything changed.

EO

[Laughs.] But that’s the point.

DSF

For me, a critical difference was that I realized that venue was not what made the writing. I had always had in my head that criticism becomes criticism once it’s published. Once it enters the magazine, once it enters the book. And the fact of the matter is that I had been practicing it, but in very, very casual spaces. I was totally one of those people who spent so much time on the internet. I was tweeting thoughts that were actually just the germs of what would become a lot of the essays that I published after the fact.

EO

And when did you learn that?

DSF

I think on the fly. And I was very lucky. I had people reach out to me as I was starting to publish these little short essays in music magazines. Greg Tate really wonderfully emailed me out of nowhere. And he was just like, “I see what you’re doing, sis.” After being contacted by him, I learned about his archive. Then I learned about Hilton Als’ archive. And I learned about The Village Voice.

EO

So these people weren’t on your mind in college?

DSF

No.

EO

What was on your mind in college?

DSF

I just didn’t have access to them in college. When I started college I was studying science. I had no idea that you could make a living doing criticism. I don’t think there was one Black critic that I ever had to read in college at Brown. I did end up majoring in what you would call criticism. It had a different name, but it was essentially that.

EO

What was it called?

DSF

Creative nonfiction. Mostly I was reading Black feminist theorists in college. bell hooks. Patricia Hill Collins. Even the person who ran our Africana Studies Department, Professor Tricia Rose, who brought hip-hop studies into academia. But I wasn’t reading magazine essays.

EO

So what was driving the criticality?

DSF

It’s such an unsatisfying answer, but I would say that I grew up in the church, and in the church, a huge part of being faithful is to interact with the text, right? [Laughs.] That is to say that it was always there. I always had it as a kid. I was just very introverted. In some years, barely even verbal. I would save my notebooks after the end of each year. During the school year, I would write in really small handwriting. I would have all these extra pages left over in these marble composition notebooks, and I would just write. But it wasn’t something I was ever trying to emulate. If anything, it was an escape from feeling like I didn’t have the skills to interact with the world that most other people had. It wasn’t exposure that led me to doing this. It was just how I interacted with the world.

EO

Now to return to the before and after question: what was the timeline of your entrance with the Rihanna piece?

DSF

I think what changed was that I realized I could make it. I was living with my parents at the time, so I wasn’t paying rent. They lived very far in South Brooklyn. But I started freelancing. I freelanced for Pitchfork. I freelanced a bit for The New York Times, and for other places that don’t even exist anymore. Other places I can’t remember. That first year I just had so much enthusiasm because I had a place within this practice, and that there was a history behind me having a place. This came from reading about Jamaica Kincaid or learning more deeply about Zora Neale Hurston. Like obviously you read Their Eyes Were Watching God, but you don’t learn that she was an ethnographer and a filmmaker. Or even learning about Toni Morrison’s role as a book editor at Random House prior to writing.

EO

[Laughs.] And working with Angela Davis and others.

DSF

And Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara. I also think that Toni Morrison has written, to me, one of the most foundational pieces of American literary criticism, Playing in the Dark, which is taken from lectures she gave at Harvard. During that first year of freelancing, I set myself off on a second education.

EO

Last week, I was rewatching her Nobel Laureate speech. It’s a manifesto. I was reading the text and pulled up the video of her reading to follow along in real time. It’s strange that we don’t know the literal voices of most of the great literary authors. Toni Morrison was a prophet and architect of her time and craft. I didn’t expect to encounter a text that was so piercing, formal, yet deeply structured. You can tell that she’s thinking about its future. This epiphany made me realize that style and language were fundamentally important to her. She wasn’t like a vessel. Her thought wasn’t something that was just passing through her. She did like musing, though.

DSF

Yes, I think it’s both.

EO

So through this second education you realized you had a place within this culture, but it must have felt like a unique position given the context of the moment. I mean, it was right as Twitter and Instagram were sort of taking off.

DSF

Yeah, it’s true. X, formerly known as Twitter was fundamental. I can imagine a younger person hearing that Twitter was essential to the development of my critical voice and thinking that I’m unwell. [Laughs.] But there was just a feeling of needing to confess and think. It was like a repository for that thinking. And it was a place to read other people’s thoughts too.

EO

It was a place to read people intimately and widely. But what were the conditions that led to that feeling and that desire to reveal and confess?

DSF

I think it arose because everybody else was doing it. You could have looked at social media in the early 2010s as like a water cooler environment where people were just casually talking about what happened in music, film, or TV that week. But I think the deeper, more serious way of looking at it is to consider that it was certain kinds of people who were giving their opinions, who in their diversity, their generosity, their antiqueness, their willingness to be irreverent created an incredible landscape of criticality. Basically, they were not the people that you would typically read in a magazine. There was an environment of like tweeting something and then having six people message you saying they agree and that they’d been thinking about the same thing too. And then suddenly you start rapping with each other. It kind of felt like barbershop talk, but about theory and shit. It was almost analogous to salon culture. And I don’t think that we have that now.

EO

Yeah. It doesn’t exist anywhere.

DSF

There’s atomization.

EO

Yeah. I feel like the desire to speak about an opinion is now confined to the realm of work.

DSF

Right. Because of course what happens is you grow up a little bit and you need a job. A lot of minds are brought into institutions where you have to work within the structure of the magazine, for example. The magazine only has so many pages and only so many editors. When you’re working in a professional context, the jouissance feeling, the feeling of excitement that comes from encountering an idea can get stamped out.

EO

So your early foray into criticism was within online spaces, particularly Lenny Letter? You worked within an infrastructure of blog culture, which then transformed into being an actual career?

DSF

Well, I was a little behind the initial architects. For example, think about Jezebel, which I wasn’t actually a part of. I don’t think people understand how influential that one community of writers was at the time. Lenny Letter was very much indebted to what Jezebel had done especially in terms of the notion of the pink ghetto or the notion of women’s writing. And these places, Jezebel in particular, were shaking that up and finding power and saying that it didn’t have to be a form of ghettoization to write within this form.

There’s certain knowledge that I think is better thumbed or explored within the space of a women’s magazine. With Lenny, that wasn’t our primary identity. We weren’t a feminist website per se. It was embedded within the way that we operated and what we published, but it wasn’t our tagline. It was a very small team. I think we all knew that we had this albatross leading us. Nevertheless, people were saying it was unserious. There was a lot of, I think, understandable criticism about the idea of a celebrity newsletter. People were nervous about the idea that celebrity alone earned someone an automatic editorial vision. But Lena’s smart. She’s well read and has good taste. You can not like her work, you can and should present critiques of privilege, but I don’t think that’s all it was about. Even cool, chill women reject the artist who deals with the abject. There’s an aversion to that. I kind of came after the fact and people would side eye it, but I didn’t start working at Lenny with the same chip on my shoulder that a young white woman might have. I’m not from that world and I didn’t feel faced with a mirror.

EO

Yeah. How old were you?

DSF

I was 23 or 24 years old. So I was really young. I was 23 when the Rihanna piece came out and then I think I started working at Lenny later that year, but I don’t remember exactly. I was young and it was just exciting because it was a job and I got to work with two fabulous editors, Jessica Grose and Laia Garcia. There wasn’t anything too meta about working there at the time.

EO

The technology and culture itself was in its very becoming that there wasn’t a compass or standard. It was all just happening in real time and at once.

DSF

Yes, initially we were just an email newsletter. And then the articles and the emails started getting aggregated in other women’s magazines, like Elle. That introduced a new audience to what we were doing. But I remember that often we would get submissions from people who couldn’t get their pieces published anywhere else. It taught me a lot about rejection, about how it doesn’t necessarily mean a piece isn’t good. There are so many logistical reasons that warrant or lead to rejection. Sometimes those pieces that writers said had been cast offs ended up being the pieces that did really well after they were edited and brought into the idiom of the newsletter. But I only stayed at Lenny for less than a year, because then I got a job at MTV.

MTV News has, historically, overhauled their staff like every two years. There’s always a change of management and everyone gets fired. They reorganize and decide that they need to change the formula for some reason. The formula is never good enough. The employees are never good enough. Hanif Abdurraqib, Carvell Wallace, Molly Lambert, and I were brought in because they decided that they wanted to go into longform journalism. This was at a time when there was a fetish for longform pieces. It was well founded most of the time. But there was this idea that we needed to protect what fell under the aegis of longform because web writing was going to ruin the well considered magazine essay.

People who had been at Grantland were hired by MTV News, including editors. The editor, Dan Fierman, messaged me and was like, “Come here, I’m going to pay you what you deserve and you’ll be able to write whatever you want.” And that is basically what happened. We certainly had to deal with the absurd situation of Viacom being interested in long form criticism and also having stakes in artists and performances and the VMAs and shit at the same time. This meant they definitely wanted to censor whatever didn’t feed into whatever profit-driven narrative they wanted out there. We had to contend with that. But there was so much energy and we were willing to be combative. Not everyone was biologically young, but there was a lot of youthful energy.

EO

Everyone was hungry and excited.

DSF

Yeah. And doing shit that people really responded to. There was a sense that MTV News was figuring out a space to publish pieces that wouldn’t get published in other magazines. That’s where I really honed my voice as a critic because writing for them allowed me to focus on just one medium, which was music. To this day I think that some of the best writing ever published was in there. But now we can’t even read it because they deleted the archive.

EO

How long were you there?

DSF

Like a year. Not that long. Those two jobs went by very fast.

EO

So in some ways it’s probably hard to contend with how important these places were as launchpads because these moments were so fleeting. It was still a career defining moment, no? Do you think your audience was larger then because there were so few people doing what you were doing at that moment in time?

DSF

I don’t know if that’s true. But I do think it’s true that people probably identify me more with those places than they identify me with The New Yorker. I think there was an immediacy. I think that there was less of a filter when a piece was published at MTV News. People were more willing to just engage with the writing on the writing level. There wasn’t as much of a meta conversation about what it means for this person and this writing to be published within this publication.

EO

What came next?

DSF

I started working with The New Yorker.

EO

What was that transition like?

DSF

MTV News was imploding. Everyone was getting fired and I needed another job. I freelanced on one piece for them. So it was the logical next step, it just felt like a job. I don’t know if that’s satisfying to hear.

EO

Did the transition change your writing? Have you ever thought about your writing in terms of context or platform?

DSF

Honestly, because I didn’t grow up reading The New Yorker, I didn’t really consider it too much. Also I was hired alongside a lot of my peers in the web space. Jia [Tolentino] was there, Vinson [Cunningham] was there, Amanda [Petrusich] was there, Hua [Hsu] was there. This younger generation was being brought in and we all knew each other. There was even a sense of camaraderie with our colleagues who had been there much longer. But I don’t think that the things that I wrote about really changed because I was writing for the website. It kind of was the same, but with less of a focus on music. I started to get more into political pieces and cultural criticism. But it’s been seven years, so my relationship with it as a transition is a bit distant.

EO

What was that time like for you in terms of writing? How did you research or get into the space of pieces?

DSF

MTV News was really rigorous, so it wasn’t like I was suddenly learning more. The New Yorker is more of a rubricked place, meaning that there are conceptions about where certain pieces should live. So I was learning about the ecosystem of a magazine. The most significant difference was what editing means there. Editing is a process that is protected. And I had an editor who completely changed my life. It was the most intense relationship of my 20s.

EO

You’re only as good as your editor.

DSF

I think there’s some truth to that. I also learned so much about drafting. I had been suspicious of drafting before and I’d seen it as a space where you were unnecessarily vulnerable. I thought that the piece should only hit oxygen when it was fully done. But with that editor, we really developed a language around mistakes and half thoughts, and we embraced that part of the thinking. It made the writing more difficult in some ways, but also easier because I was just thinking harder.

I also think I developed a much deeper cultural diet. I became a lot more interested in other forms of media. Previously I had been mostly a music critic. And then all of a sudden I could write about film or sports or presidential politics. I became disavowed of the idea that expertise is immovable and that it only stays within one medium. I became more interested in the idea of the critic as someone who moves around and is kind of crude and makes things interesting. I would much rather read an interesting piece about any subject than a piece that fits all the expertise boxes. I love the idea of following one mind as it bobs and weaves around. I also try to build this interest for myself by keeping things local. If I have a longer project across multiple pieces I like to transfer a small picture of my life and what the people around me care about—what they’re watching, listening to, how they’re thinking.

EO

I like that. How did your work change your life in terms of how you build your social life?

DSF

That’s interesting. I think people talk about the media world with the idea that it’s self-obsessed, and therefore inadvertently or subconsciously only produces work about things that people in the media world care about. And I certainly have many colleagues and people that I admire in the media. But being from New York, my real world is just very different and actually out there. It’s not insular.

EO

Is that something you carry with you?

DSF

Definitely. I’ve always navigated multiple worlds in New York. I grew up in Canarsie. I grew up in a Black neighborhood. I remember once someone sent me something and they were like, “Oh yeah, she probably grew up wealthy in Haiti or something like that.” I grew up solidly middle class in Canarsie, Brooklyn. I’m used to code switching. I always knew what to do based on where I was. And so I didn’t have much of an existential crisis with starting to work at a bastion of historically predominantly White writing. But also I think people undercut how many incredible Black writers have been publishing there. Jamaica Kincaid, Jervis Anderson, and Hilton Als, who is obviously a North Star. So there was certainly some maneuvering I had to do, but we’re maneuvering all the time. At any publication or wherever. Earlier this year, I was part of this consortium done in honor of Greg Tate at Columbia University. There I talked with some really amazing Black women critics and journalists who were talking about how they had to navigate being women trying to write about hip hop in these music magazines in the 1990s. There are so many permutations. After a certain point I think you kind of just have to not care. That can’t be where you place all of your energy. And besides, it’s not really what I came to do.

EO

Well, what did you come to do?

DSF

To think, to confess, to turn things over. My state when it comes to criticism is very solitary and driven.

EO

What does that mean?

DSF

I write because I have a thought that I need to work out.

EO

How do you navigate between your solitary vocation and your social life? In terms of the community that you keep, you said that you don't necessarily defer to the media world as anchors. Who makes up your life?

DSF

When I’m writing or thinking I can be very alone, but my friends are kind of a mix of everybody. I also have a ton of family in New York, so I spend a lot of time with them. Most of whom were born in Haiti or grew up in very Haitian neighborhoods in New York and are nurses or tutors or retail workers. I certainly have my group of Black artists and thinkers and curators and writers that I’ve gotten close to, but I can’t say that I made most of my friends through my work in media.

EO

How do you know when to investigate a thought?

DSF

Yeah, like when do I know when an idea has crossed over into being a movie? Those thoughts?

EO

Can you pinpoint the moments when you and your friends were chatting about something and you decided to take it on in writing? What’s that process like?

DSF

I remember us having a lot of ambivalence around the sloganeering of the Black Lives Matter era, things like “Black Girl Magic” or “Black Boy Joy” emerging into the lingua franca in a sort of melancholic response. I remember often feeling frustrated by it. I felt like we were trapped in this vat where we were trying to work through this impossible situation of wanting to have life while also being bombarded with images and videos and the events themselves.

EO

I was in a fugue state myself while in graduate school at the time. Tina Campt talks about this in Listening to Images. She writes, “How do we create an alternative future by living both the future we want to see while inhabiting its potential foreclosure at the same time?”

DSF

That’s amazing. I think there was an interior division that we were all kind of working toward. And I think there were a number of pieces that dealt with this. It was an argument that I was working out over a few pieces, one of which was even before The New Yorker. I wrote this piece on what “Black Boy Joy” did and could mean. I was looking at it as a kind of affective posture. I also wrote about this Black female politician who very much wanted to be the saintly, mammy hero figure in the context of one election. I was just working through what might be called the Obama hangover.

EO

What was it like working in those years immediately after Obama’s presidency?

DSF

I think the Obama years felt like we were on the precipice of something but we didn’t know what it was. And after he left office, I think there was a feeling of having been lied to. I remember being 15 years old when he won, and being so excited. But then it’s interesting to think of coming into adulthood towards the end of his presidency and thinking of it as a loss of innocence in terms of politics.

EO

I don’t know if that’s really what it was like for most people, you know? I agree though, Obama’s presidency sort of woke us up. Like a Black man winning certainly changed the scope and trajectory of things. I feel like a lot of us were able to get our foot in the door afterwards, though. It was a very structural shift, to an extent. There was an established pipeline that became widely recognized, Black people were able to inhabit institutions in new ways. But we are grappling and suffering with what has become known as a sort of temporary political posturing and scaffolding, as an aftermath of the politicking of the pandemic and post-George Floyd movement. There was a formal pipeline that set out what it meant to be Black and rigorous.

DSF

Yeah. I mean, that’s so out of my world. My family’s not African American, so that’s not really something I can speak to. But I think I can speak to the way it caused a kind of crisis of representation. I think what was laundered through Obama was the idea that if you had Black people within certain institutions, progress would naturally follow. That was something I obviously believed because I was at such an impressionable age when he was elected. As I got older and started college and started protesting against police brutality, and against the commissioner Raymond Kelly coming to our school to do a talk on stop and frisk, we realized the fallacy inherent in an emphasis on representation.

EO

There was a gridlock of representation. We couldn’t really see the nuance in the politics of representation, couldn’t see the forest from the trees type of situation.

DSF

Yes, exactly. There was just a kind of hysteria. There was a lack of desire to talk about representation as a complicated thing. As we went through the years of the presidency, we were able to see this symbolic thing degrade in real time. I think that’s why so many people in my cohort are obsessed with representation. What I love about Vinson’s [Cunningham] book, Great Expectations: A Novel, is that he never mentions Obama by name. He’s just called “The candidate.” That’s exactly what it was. All of a sudden this singular human became so big that he didn’t have boundaries. There was no periphery, there were no parameters, and there was no limit. He just meant everything at once to everyone. My position is as the Black critic and I can speak of her relationship to the Black president, but I think that the idea of race and representation was generally altered by this 10 year period and its aftermath. I also think that the unlearning could only have occurred through this hope. Everything he symbolized was atrophying or curdling into what became the crisis that launched Black Lives Matter. So I think my age group stands in such a funny niche.

EO

I think it comes down to the fallacies of language. Like what does his slogan of ‘hope’ mean now? It just feels misguided.

DSF

There’s like a sort of policing aspect to it. Hope isn’t allowed to be a container for joy or sadness.

EO

How has your mentality about writing changed with age?

DSF

I’m 32 now. The main thing is that I just don’t think about it as much. I kind of just do it. I can’t not write. Also, at this point in my practice, I don’t really write about personal things. Then again, I never did it. I’ve never been ready to do it. But I think I will at some point.

EO

You did a lot in your twenties. You worked intensely. What has the transition into your thirties been like in that regard?

DSF

I think the intensity came from the recognition that I was lucky to be able to be doing this type of work and getting paid for it. But I also think that there was an emphasis on speed that pulsed through the media world.

EO

I would largely attribute that to the actual infrastructure of the Internet, which has completely changed our relationship to time.

DSF

Absolutely. There was an idea that if something happened in the morning, an essay about it should exist by night. I think there actually is value to that, to thinking fast. But I just felt burnt out. So I switched to writing a weekly television column. But then that burned me out too. So this past year I’ve been doing quieter, longer stories, which has made me realize that I do kind of miss having the space to be responsive. I think another thing that I’m desperate to move away from is the way that we talk and think about young writers. I’m so tired of being talked about in that way or having to answer for my age or the idea that your youth is definitive for the things that you do. In my twenties I also felt like experience was experience, but I don’t have that relationship to writing anymore. I want to be the person who dictates how I work. Obviously I’m still working with amazing people and I love feedback and editing. But the notion of getting better is less in my framework now. I want to think more deeply or spend more time with my thoughts and with other people’s thoughts. When I was in a cycle of publishing a couple of times a week, there wasn’t much space or energy to function that way. It wasn’t as much of an intellectual project in my mind.

EO

Does it always have to be?

DSF

It doesn’t have to be. It’s good to move between modes. You really can’t be precious about that type of thing. It’s good to stay nimble.

EO

It’s a bummer that burnout can happen if you stay on the same beat for a while.

DSF

Yeah. Even just writing pieces that are the same length can get tiresome. If you have a column, the pieces are basically always going to be the same length. Overall, I think that in my twenties I was more interested in certainty and making pronouncements and judgements. Now I feel that there’s a certain release that happens when I’m in the mentality of thinking on the page rather than having done the thinking and then putting it out on the page.

EO

Where are you in that process now?

DSF

I don’t know. It takes longer, but the subjects are not as predictable. I’m also reading a lot more. I have more time because I’m not having to write a few pieces a week. From that, my references have gotten deeper. You can always tell when a writer really reads. The things they bring into a piece are always surprising and interesting because it reflects their personal taste. I think my work has gotten a little richer because I’ve lived a little bit more. I have more to bring to it.

EO

Are you thinking about the future at all?

DSF

I can’t talk about the far future. I only think like a couple of weeks ahead. I want to write an essay about this little known literary movement called Spiralism and its relation to what’s happening in Haiti right now. I kind of love these questions because they’re making me realize that I’m not thinking professionally as much anymore. It’s less about what I need to do for my career. I think I have an aversion to the way a lot of young Black writers were narrativized in the media in the 2010s. It was never about the writing. It was just about the fact that they made it and were publishing wherever. I want to be known for my thinking and I want people I admire to also be known for their thinking.

EO

How has that thinking changed over time? What were the ideas that you worked through in the beginning and what are the ideas you gravitate towards now?

DSF

I think I’m a little less interested in celebrity.

EO

But you’ve written on it so well! How has celebrity changed over the years? What makes you want to move away from it?

DSF

I think celebrity has become less sealed. It’s more readily available to people. Like anyone can make themselves into a celebrity today. It’s not necessarily a reflection of uniqueness now. Historically, celebrities rose to the top because they were able to do something no one else could or they looked like no one else. Now, celebrity is more interested in relatability. But sometimes I think celebrity is over-indexed in cultural criticism. It’s an easy topic. You can access it without having to do a ton of work. I’m interested in laboring, in working. There’s a world in which I could write a book about seven Black famous women. But I just have no desire to do that anymore. At the same time, I think celebrity is a really good subject to hone your critical skills with because it’s like a mirror of the time. What I’m realizing is that as you get older, your tastes and what you’re drawn to continues to shift. And for right now, I don’t want to always just write about pop culture.

EO

But you started out by writing about pop music. What’s it like watching what’s going on in that landscape but not having the urge to respond to and define it?

DSF

Seeing these critical archives, these websites, these magazines get killed, tells me that we’re at an odd junction point and that the future is sort of unknown. One can read a lot of despair out of what’s happening, which is funny because pop has never really been about authenticity. When people talk about how TikTok is making songs a certain length, I want to remind them that the advent of radio did the same thing.

I never want to condemn certain cultural changes too quickly, you know. I’m a lot more interested in how things are changing in the world in such a way that it feels like there’s darkness in front of us and we don’t know what’s going to come out of it. I just feel like there’s so much volubility and volatility that is happening within the music space and world right now. I don’t even know how to begin to theorize it.