So you wanna be a critic...

what is the most unhinged thing that you sincerely believe i think shade room is a sigh of oh i think i think it's a sigh of you're like somebody wanted to divide us fight with your friends fight with your mother that's i just wanted to be honest we've all heard the phrase everyone's a critic but it takes more than a quippy one-liner on letterboxd to really be an arbiter of taste that brings me to my guest today lovia jache lovia is currently a culture editor at hammer and hope a magazine dedicated to black culture and politics but she spent a lot of her career researching reflecting and writing about the films artists and celebrities we've come to love today on the show we're going to be talking about a magazine dedicated to black culture and politics but she spent a lot of her career researching reflecting and writing about the films artists and celebrities we've come to love today on the show we're going to be talking about a magazine dedicated to black culture and the show lovia joins me to articulate what it means to be a critic why it seems like no one wants to think these days and how our lack of a cohesive political education has led us to define ourselves by what we consume lovia welcome to it's been a minute i'm so happy to have you oh my god i'm so happy to be here people don't even know hello hello i'm britney loose and you're some like authoritarian arbiter of taste right like i'm not here to be like what you like is terrible and here's why you know you're dumb for liking it no i think that we're more custodians of the culture right we're here to facilitate conversation about the things that we enjoy we're here to make connections between um cultural objects or cultural productions um we're not here to tell you what to do we're here to sort of like push you to think which seems to be an unpopular thing these days no shade you said it all you said it all you said it all what do you think is making people uncomfortable with that with that proposition that you're bringing up right like being pushed to think yeah i've been thinking about this question a lot i think we're really in an interesting time with culture right because so much of what we rally behind becomes a testament to our values and i think when people criticize you know an album that you like or an artist that you're a fan of it feels like they're criticizing your values and i sort of want to really impress upon people to say like why do you feel like culture is exclusively the arena to you know form your politics right it feels like people are lacking spaces for political education and that's why they're like oh if i like charlie xcx it means that i stand for xyz right because the culture has become a stand-in for what they believe and i don't think that's inherently a bad thing but i sort of always reference james baldwin in this case criticism is ultimately an act of love right um and i think that that's a kind of important message for us to internalize right you don't spend time thinking about um an album or a book or a song or an artist um because you exclusively hate them they obviously you know they're either triggering something in you or they're forcing you to think in some way and so i mean this is sort of also to go back to your earlier question i think that i wish more people knew that criticism was also a kind of an act of a sustained attention right which is like kind of radical in this moment where we're being asked to um divide our attention and to scroll right endlessly right the the idea of spending time with a painting or um a book or a song and really considering what elements of it you favor what elements of it you might not agree with what elements are rubbing you the wrong way um it's such a gift and you know and i think that's like actually an act of love but i don't know maybe people don't like tension let's lean into that tension is good i mean well it's interesting because like tension is what drives story tension is what makes the even the most base pop music good is yeah expansion and contraction that tension that makes you get to the chorus and want to jump on top of a table yeah that is all about tension even thinking about like romantic tension you know what i'm saying you like it in story you like it in real life like yeah yeah and that discomfort i think is an invitation right and i wish more people kind of saw it like that i think one thing i'm negotiating right now a lot in my own life is like i'm not going to be able to do it right now i'm not going to be able to do it right now i'm not going to be able to do it right now i'm not going to be able to do it right now practice both like a critical practice and also the work i do at hammer and hope is using culture as an on-ramp um to other conversations so earlier when i was mentioning i felt like people are using cultural products as a stand-in for their politics or their values what i think would be more interesting is to use it as an entry point you know hammered hope magazine of black politics and culture and i think sometimes people who care deeply about one over the other all politics all the time are all culture all the time yeah the people who are in that mindset think that those two should always remain separate or by nature are naturally separate yeah um what do you think is behind this impulse and what's your argument for considering one alongside the other yeah i don't know why people think politics and culture are separate that's very silly to me um yeah i don't know when that's ever been true and so i think when people are really trying to stake their flag in that issue um it doesn't really track for me um for me they're incredibly complimentary right like it's not either or it's both and and a lot of times that's because like i was saying earlier culture is an on-ramp for politics right i can only use myself as an example but when i was younger and i you know was listening to rap music for the first time or thinking about hip-hop those there are deep political questions embedded in that experience of listening right especially as i got older and i felt like maybe some of the artists that i was listening to i was like oh well okay do you respect women question mark that's like an early introduction to feminist politics particularly black feminist politics for me right so i don't see politics and culture as separate entities i actually think that if we thought of them more as complements um we could get a lot further in in engaging particularly young people i'm particularly interested in engaging young people young black people especially who feel like um there isn't anything out there for them right there's not a space for them to think about these broader questions that um they might be encountering um as they get older right or that their um values or needs aren't represented like that that's the audience i always try i'm thinking about um and i think for that audience particularly culture is a way into politics right and the politics also influences the cultural consumption um and we have to take that relationship seriously i think that all cultural production has politics braided somewhere in there right intentionally and also unintentionally yeah um how do you read something how do you read read a piece of culture or media for its politics like what are the questions that you ask yourself when you're taking something in to give you a sense of what's what's going on in that respect yeah that's a really good question i mean i think i'll for this i'll go back to my years at the hollywood reporter so before i joined hammer and hope i was a film critic um at the hollywood reporter and that's more of a trade so you know that means that i'm often writing with an eye towards the industry folks who are planning to buy films or i think about distribution of films um and and so it's a more insider audience but i my goal there right what became kind of part of my intellectual question there was how do i write for someone like me um right who who maybe knows a little bit about a lot of things um and is curious about film but maybe doesn't care so much about the numbers or it's oscar viability but like kind of wants to consider um how should i think about this film and i think that's a really good model of this is a piece that i wrote um while i was there about a trend that i felt like i had noticed and it was the year that um uh raven um jackson's all dirt roads taste of salt yeah earth mama by savannah leaf and a thousand and one all of those films had come out at the same time so i'm like wow okay all of these films are about like black motherhood in in a lot of ways um but they are countering what i felt like was a mainstream notion of black motherhood um and so the first question i asked myself because i really think that there are antecedents for everything right we're not in a time of original thought like it's gonna be hard for us to come up with original thinking and that's okay so my first question was like has anyone done this before oh my gosh i just want to pause for a second that is a question that could solve so many discussions if people right has anyone done this before it's such an important first place to start yes and what do i mean by has anyone done this before i'm thinking both about the narrative structure of these films um and i'm also thinking about um the production right like so all dirt roads taste of salt is told in a really like elliptical manner um you know it's it's a really fragmented portrait of motherhood which made me think about julie dash right so then i'm like okay i'm gonna go back to the 90s and who else was creating in the time of julie dash and then you know i encountered bush mama by hayley garima and so now i'm thinking okay so we're not doing something new but we are doing something different and i want to and it's significant so what's the difference between what these contemporary filmmakers are doing and responding to and what their predecessors were doing and responding to the piece ended up being kind of for me an exploration of how do you represent black motherhood and how do you represent black motherhood and how do you represent black mothers on screen as autonomous actors as agents of their own lives right which is what i felt like um those three films were doing and they were experimenting with kind of um surrealist or elliptical modes of storytelling to do that um and yeah so then i was like okay that's like a political question about black motherhood how black mothers are represented on tv how we're used to seeing them represented on um in film and in tv or in books um and so i'm thinking about that um and and you know in this corner of film these three directors are doing something different and we should pay attention and that can be the beginning middle and end of a piece right like and i hope that it like lives out there and that it contributes most importantly to someone who's also maybe curious about this question like maybe in 10 years there'll be another set of films that are trying to figure out um or trying to explore the same theme maybe someone will revisit that piece and not have to do it again and so i'm thinking about that and i'm thinking about all of that work and so i i like i also see cultural criticism as part of a lineage right like we're we're um we're part of a an archive and so it's not really just about the now right it's about who's come before us and also who will hopefully come after us should the earth survive fingers crossed love that i love that we're gonna take a quick break but first if you're a long time listener or brand new to it's been a minute be sure to come back every monday tuesday wednesday and friday for brand new episodes and did you know you can make it even easier to get new episodes by hitting the follow or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app whether you're a new friend or a loyal bestie join the team by subscribing today coming up after the break if you're interviewed by a friend or you're on a podcast where you know the person like there there's not a lot of friction there you're not really going to be confronted with anything that you don't want to be confronted with and that doesn't i think push you as a person that doesn't really offer the audience the reader anything stick around you have covered entertainment for years okay you do this for real you do this for real but increasingly artists celebrities and public figures more broadly are yeah you know kind of just like doing away with the interview or a real profile where you're spending time with someone having multiple conversations maybe showing up to their sound check interviewing their co-workers right um they are doing away with that because they want to do a chat with a friend uh or a chummy appearance on a podcast or red carpet hosted by influencers with no background in critique or journalism basically often not always but often people who have not done the sort of work that you're talking about right of considering and going back in the archives and reading and thinking and watching um and building up this sort of like mental understanding of of what they're looking at right this really a glossary or a dictionary uh of terms to understand what they're taking in what do you make of this turn in culture coverage what do you make of this yeah okay so one thing i want to respond to is something you said earlier about like everyone is capable of doing this and i and i really want to reinforce that because what we see now oddly right is a a public um disdain for criticism right but i i would say more criticism now not more than ever you know people are engaging in criticism everywhere all the time you know like letterboxd goodreads etc um and it might not be the same rigor right as someone who's like kind of that's their full-time job but you are engaging in minor forms of thinking i'm like okay y'all hate critics but everyone wants to be one interesting i think it's really sad i think it's really sad and i and it really breaks my heart because i i read a lot of profiles obviously for for my job and and you can just tell that you're like okay wow this person had no access and was not able to ask any real questions was not able to actually get to know the subject and that's really robbing us the readers right because regardless of what you feel about celebrity journalism or profile writing in general like more specifically having that interlocutor stand in for the public is really important having your ideas um confronted in a meaningful way right both as the artist or the subject um is really important the conversation is really important and i think it's really important to have that important and i think what we're seeing is um is a kind of desire to embrace more frictionless settings right so like if you're interviewed by a friend or you're on a podcast where you know the person like there there's not a lot of friction there you're not really going to be confronted with anything that you don't want to be confronted with and that doesn't i think push you as a person that doesn't really offer the audience the reader anything you recently wrote a great profile of yaya abdul-mateen oh yeah thank you uh for the cut it was it was great um and you know and to your point profiles are tricky right you have to capture the subject's essence in a perspective challenge it at times you also have to remain kind of dispassionate enough to view them within a larger context um even though you are spending time with them and chatting with them and getting to know them like you you didn't simply present abdul-mateen as a movie star on the rise but like i felt like i got to know him and i got to know him and i got to know him and i got to know him i got to know him and i got to know him and i got to know him and i got to know him and i got to know you know you you didn't simply present abdul-mateen as a movie star on the rise but like i felt like i got to know him as like a would-be architect as you know as a man who's still weighing grief as you know a black american man who grew up in an interfaith household in oakland and and i got a full picture how do you approach thinking through or even just writing a great profile and what does it mean to see someone beyond what they're trying to tell us about themselves or how they want to market themselves to us yeah that's a really good question first of all thank you for reading that profile it was a lot of fun to do um i'll have to say i know you did an activity with him you took him to a museum i was like we did an activity here we gotta do an activity you know i mean i first i have to say like great editors um really help facilitate great storytelling i'm not saying that because i'm also an editor but i'm saying that because my editor at the cut was just like a thought partner in a lot of ways to this so for that profile you know we went to see a gallery show at jack shaneman um by um they were showing lynette yitian watch's paintings um then we went to prospect park and walked his dog and and then we talked on the phone right and maybe it was a collective like five hours together which for a 20 listen people aren't getting that we don't get no five hours with anybody anymore they said 45 minutes in and out you know what i'm saying yeah so one it was great that i got to spend so many hours with him the first thing that i do with profiles is i try to read and watch everything that the person has done before because they're gonna repeat stories right they're gonna have stories that they like to bits that kind of work like they've they've gotten their story um down pat so i read previous profiles that he'd sat down for um i listened to podcasts um interviews that he had done in addition to watching his previous work and so by the time that i met him i knew a lot about him but it means that i was able to ask different questions and i could also spend a lot of time just like observing him and and thinking about how he like moved to the space of the gallery and you know how kind he was to everyone and um how people even people who recognize him on the street would like pretend not to recognize him or how he talks about certain things i think that's the other thing that you don't really get um in in profiles these days it's just like how is someone behaving right they can say a lot of things but how are they saying those things um yeah and is that an invitation for me to to dig a little deeper so you know i noticed that he would bring up his dad a lot and so we left a lot of space to talk about his father and how good grief informs um some of the work that he's done or like how he wants to shape his life in particular right um i was like who are your friends you know who do you talk to like who's in your group text and those don't seem like questions that have um i guess they're not like weighted they're not like oh what do you want to what do you want to do as an actor like what is your but they but they reveal so much because if you ask those to any i know if i was asked those questions like who do you talk to every day well then it's like okay well first of all let's go back to 2001 you know what i mean like that it's like then you you have such a foundational even just for the group text example you have a foundational idea of who this person considers to be closest to them how they founded or nurture those relationships exactly and what they find funny or what they're focused on outside of their work right and so much of that informs their work right especially if yaya's style is so interior right and so what i wanted to understand about him was just what his day-to-day looked like because i was curious if that would tell me a little bit more about how he's able to play these characters with you know for lack of a better term like so much soul um and so yeah i think a lot of why that profile ended up being the way that it was was because i did a ton of research and then when i spent a lot of time with him i wasn't just trying to get the biographical information right i was able to kind of like go one step deeper you know being a critic is a job right um or at least a discipline that you maybe can grow into or train into but critical thinking critical thinking that's available to all of us um what are some questions we should be asking ourselves when taking in a piece of art or culture so that we can read it a bit more clearly hmm this is a really good question um because it's a question that i ask my students a lot right um because a lot of my students aren't going to necessarily become critics right they're journalism students but i think criticism can make you a better journalist because one you know sustained active sustained attention very important to be able to focus on one thing and let it reveal itself to you um but two also approaching things with a healthy skepticism right like i might like this but why do i like this um i don't like it why don't i like it right uh i think some questions i like to ask myself particularly when i'm engaging with something is i just start with my feelings right why do i like this why am i bored why am i not paying attention um why am i on my phone um why do i feel a need to defend this so deeply or so intensely why don't i want to defend it right like those are really interesting questions um and i think they can kind of yield answers that in again invite you to think more deeply about something what is something a piece of art or culture that is lighting you up right now like like anything that you've read or seen or experienced um that you cannot stop thinking about that's a really really great question so i just saw clarissa which is an adaptation of mrs dalloway uh the virginia wolf novel um and the film is directed by these two nigerian brothers chuko and aria siri and i've been thinking about that film a lot because one the mrs dalloway is is a novel that was really thinking about the post-war moment and the fragmentation of the site the british psyche after world war and what these series have done is they've transposed this very british book into a nigerian context contemporary nigeria and it's so elegant right like they've changed a few things and i i'm really interested in works of literary adaptation um i was similarly arrested by nickel boys which came out a few years ago which was an adaptation of colson whitehead and clarissa is just yeah it's really great i think it also um it's it's structured with this elliptical narrative it's fragmentary um it's thinking about um contemporary nigerian culture it's also incredible performances um um iowa debris's in it she's fabulous it's it's a true piece of piece of art and i and i just hope a lot of people get to see it you know but i'm thinking about it because i'm thinking a lot about pan-africanism right now um and wanting to write something sort of a little bit bigger about that see my black star shirt um and so i'm it's sort of for me like another notch in an idea that i've been kind of letting i love that yeah it's all kind of like um it seems like part of the critic brain is like is patterns like being comfortable seeing patterns and also being comfortable with kind of following your own patterns and and noticing what you need to work i think that's beautiful yeah oh thanks it has been an absolute pleasure to bask in your brilliance thank you so much oh my gosh bernie it's been so fun that was lovia jache a culture editor at hammer and hope you this episode of it's been a minute was produced by alexis williams this episode was edited by nina potthug our supervising producer is share vincent our executive producer is barton girdwood our vp of programming is yolanda sanguini all right that's all for this episode of it's been a minute from npr i'm britney loose talk soon