This week on The Culture Journalist, we’re taking a break from 2020—who doesn’t need one?—and traveling back to a time in music and culture that we’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic for. We’re talking about the halcyon days of 2013, a year that was full-to-bursting with exciting sounds from the underground, including DJ Rashad's Double Cup, Arca's mixtape &&&&&, and Deafheaven's Sunbather. It also felt like an unending onslaught of unprecedented Big Pop Moments, from Kanye West dismantling the avant-garde/pop divide with Yeezus, to Miley Cyrus sparking conversations about cultural appropriation with her hip-hop-inspired Bangerz, to Beyoncé reinventing the album cycle with the surprise-drop of her self-titled record in December.

2013 feels like another universe today (this was, after all, just the start of Obama's second term), but it also marked a sea change for the industry and music culture as a whole—one that this week's guest, veteran music journalist Larry Fitzmaurice, has been spending the past few months teasing apart in "The Year that Everything Changed," a serialized essay series for his excellent Last Donut of the Night Substack.

We reflect on 2013 as a year that the Internet would transform every aspect of music as we knew it, from the way it sounded, to how it was released, to the media’s role in covering it.

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How 2013 changed music forever

The Culture Journalist

How 2013 changed music forever