Why Bulletproof Soul Exists
Culture is Dissipating Before Our Very Eyes, At The Hands of Capital Owners
Playboy magazine’s death in 2020 was the beginning of something inevitable. Playboy was a cultural apex. The most influential artists, models, celebrities, activists and more contribute to a magazine with some of the best journalism the world has ever seen. It was extremely progressive and also allowed women to express themselves however they liked, in a patriarchal society. MTV was another example of this in the early 2000s and before; exuding widely diverse content, music videos platforming a whole generation of Black artists, and MTV News reporting often from a progressive perspective. Now all MTV consists of is 24/7 fever dream reruns of Rob Dyrdek’s Ridiculousness.
Then capitalism decided that physical media was too expensive. DVDs, CDs, vinyl, cassettes, magazines, and books are a fraction of their old selves. Some of those are entirely dead. Innovation has led us to streaming, audiobooks, or platforms like Playboy Plus. We were told ad nauseum from 2010 to 2020 that print media was dying. It was true.
After not even four years, as costs soar it doesn’t seem like digital media is doing much better, especially for entertainment industries. Streaming platforms had content halted due to the longest Writer’s Guild strike since 1960. Streaming platforms are also constantly cutting vital cultural content like Sesame Street, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and Looney Tunes. At one point, much of this content was widely available public access for low-income families, and at the highest point of inflation, we have them behind paywalls.
Access to content is now increasingly being put behind paywalls. Now this includes the popular music publication Pitchfork. The music world was shocked this week with news that Pitchfork was being absorbed into GQ, a men’s style publication mind you. We’re not exactly carrying on Playboy’s cultural legacy, are we? Roughly half of the staff at Pitchfork has been laid off according to our sources.
Pitchfork was one of the few places of culture left making it possible for emerging artists to receive coverage and also for fans to indulge themselves in music culture. Now it will be behind a paywall, similar to Rolling Stone. We don’t know what to expect under GQ and with layoffs, it is likely to be a shell of its former self.
Soundcloud and Bandcamp have also cut costs and/or prioritized ways in which to make profit in recent years. Soundcloud’s introduction of Repost Exchange and destroying their organic algorithm meant that a thriving “Soundcloud era” had died. Now, there isn’t a way to break the improbability and market saturation for artists. There are 11 million artists on Spotify alone. The odds are stacked against everyone at an impossible rate, and there are no systemic guardrails that keep corporations and capital owners in check. These are constant themes across industries, but especially in entertainment industries.
So, what do we have left? Music databases like rateyourmusic or film databases like IMDb are thankfully alive and well, for now. They play a crucial part in maintaining encyclopedic cultural information, helping keep people informed and entertained. However, they are still at the behest of capital and could inevitably face cost-cutting that sees data and information scrubbed, or potentially complete oblivion. Corporate cost-cutting threatens the very existence and legacy of our culture.
The only place not threatened by this is Wikipedia. This is because Wikipedia is donor-based. It cannot be bought, it cannot be sold, it cannot be merged, nor cut. It is voluntarily maintained by editors and moderators, keeping a sanctity of information across industries. It is however rather gatekept for emerging artists and relies upon media coverage to maintain artist information via those sources. So the only thing that may remain, still relies upon corporate structures in digital media, that are dying, to maintain its information, meaning it is still precarious.
It is vital that in a system without industry guardrails, lacking strong unions, equity, and labor rights, that we create safe spaces to create and promote culture. It is equally important that we advocate for a healthy system to keep culture alive. This is why Bulletproof Soul was born and we want to always live on as bulletproof for culture and artists to embrace community, because the culture is dying before our very eyes, at the hands of capital owners.
Stay tuned for upcoming content from Bulletproof Soul. For more from the Bulletproof Soul gang, stream Nyyjerya, SLWJMZ, Lofty305, DJ Sabrina, Angela Davis, Amouranth, Alek Oni, Elektrip, TWENTYN9NE, JACOB SONGS, Ali Wisdom, Kengeta, and Austin.