The Monday Meeting
Cutting through the noise. Something new to sip on as you start your week.
Hello and happy Monday,
Welcome to the first Monday Meeting. I’m Laura, your Substack editor. Each Monday, we’re going to start trying something new. We’re going to guide you — a little more explicitly — through the last seven days in music, both in terms of what’s happening and our perspective on it. The art — and the industry — moves quickly, but hopefully we can be a helpful hand keeping you in the know. I’ve started these small editor’s notes as another means to that end. In them, you’ll get a bit of a take on something I’ve been thinking about from the week as well as a selection of curated links to industry news, cool interviews, and other miscellaneous bits you might have missed that are worth checking out and knowing. Think of it as a framing for the week ahead: A Monday Meeting!
To this end, I guess, then, a good place to start is a bit of a wider angle. At Best Fit, we see ourselves as, yes, a compliment to a broad and varied network of music media that makes up the modern music press landscape. But we also see ourselves as something of a contrast to it as well.
There is a growing chasm in the music press between music media and music journalism, and I think this is an important point to hone in on.
Last week, as you should know unless you were living under a rock, was Glastonbury. It’s where everyone who’s anyone and also everyone who’s not stepped out, together, in the mud for a weekend of the year’s best music. Watching from afar, the vast majority of Glasto content that I came across was quick-take short form (mostly homogenous, though shoutout to Dazed) interviews and relatively mild performance overviews. And yet one piece from The Observer stood out as a cut above the rest. Rather than simply asking a laundry list of TikTok-ified questions for stans, the author instead probes what Glasto means today in a world where indie venues shutter and struggle, and how a once-left field hippie fest transforms when it becomes one of the biggest, most established cultural experiences in the world.
That The Observer’s piece was one of only a few of its kind from the weekend is not really a surprise to me, even if I find it slightly maddening and slightly sad. Yes, sure, I could bemoan the fact that our attention spans are not what they once were, ad revenues are down, newsrooms are shuttering, social content is king, so on and so forth.
But that sort of misses the point. What I’m after, and what I think still deserves its day in the sun, is music content that has teeth. And I don’t only mean 10,000-word longform investigations. I just mean any content that takes a point of view or a deeper look under the hood in any form at all. A great example of my point, though not a music one, is Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me. Sundberg is able to write a pithy, short, fun product that fits with the content trends of the day without sacrificing its editorial POV and rigorous commitment to questioning and analyzing. We need more of that in music.
We seem slightly allergic in our day to genuine criticism and genuine reportage. To be a champion of “critics” and “criticism” often feels like turning oneself into a martyr. That’s not my goal here. What I’m simply hoping to point out, and to advocate for, is that as music fans, we’re actually missing out by not engaging in thorough thought and critique the way that we once did.
Think, for example, about the press campaign for a typical blockbuster album these days. The vast majority of content coming out about a record or an artist isn’t so much massive covers with key outlets (though there are some… looking at you, Amanda Petrusich and your article on Phish) but instead a series of lifestyle podcast / social outlet appearances and TikTok show cameos. Some of this is genuinely great and adopts the ethos I’m advocating for — special shoutout to Perfectly Imperfect, which I truly adore and think is making the Internet a nice place to be again — but it at other times feels like a sugar high. Yes, sure, it’s fun to hear my fav talk about why they got really into buttered noodles during the pandemic, but I often find myself wanting more. Real, rich storytelling. Compelling points of view. Good journalism.
On top of this, genuine criticism often gets shut-down and hated on by superfans. I think often about the Shaad D’Souza / Halsey incident from last fall, when D’Souza released a less-than-glowing review of Halsey’s latest record. Halsey responded in kind with a pointed, mocking graphic. Fans descended upon D’Souza mercilessly after Halsey’s post dropped. This happens a lot in the modern era. It’s not unheard of for critics of big-time records to get death threats. And yet, there’s an argument to be made that criticism and journalism are in many ways the Hegelian lifeblood of art and music. On this point, I read A. O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism earlier this year, and it pretty much rocked my world. Criticism at its best — not the kind of way that just rips an artist to shreds on an unjustified power trip, because that definitely does suck — can be a tool to help us connect with the records and artists and shows we love even deeper than we otherwise would have. It can help us find frameworks to understand why we love what we love; it can unlock the broader meaning behind what we’re into, unfurling a record’s references like a puzzle; it can illuminate where what we’re consuming fits into our current culture, which, unfortunately, has become so often devoid of context.
The ultimate aim of my rambling here isn’t to be some kind of “takedown” of short form content or lifestyle music media. As I’ve already said, that stuff is fun and I love it, too. But what I am saying is that I hope sometime soon our music consumption culture gets a refresh, one dedicated to understanding as much as stanning (because I think there’s a difference), and one that takes as much pleasure deep-dives as viral clips. If anything, I think early trend bellwethers are on my side. Think about, for example, the number of culture and music outlets that are going back to print these days. Iconic Magazines is currently one of New York’s hottest destinations. That, to me, is as good an example as any that people are wanting some heft in their music media diet after all. I also don’t think any of this has to replace the new styles of content we’ve come to know and love. What I do think is that we’d be remiss to totally get rid of the longer, the technical, the thoughtful, and the critical in the rush. Let’s not let music journalism become an extinct species.
Maybe all of this is making me sound like a luddite nostalgic for a bygone era. But also maybe not.
Oh, also, if you have any thoughts about anything I’ve said today or anything about our Substack in general, feel free to email at laura@thelineofbestfit.com.
Anyway, that’s it for the first edition of The Monday Meeting. I hope it was an interesting way to start your week. Here are a few other things I’ve been mulling over and loving:
Vulture released a great piece on Romy Mars and nepo babies. They’re soooo in.
Lorde sat on the Fashion Neurosis couch. It was honestly really cool. I told you I still love lifestyle content!
Warner is starting mass layoffs. This is obviously not one of the things I loved, but it’s worth knowing about. Wishing the best for our friends at Warner. Great music doesn’t get out without great people.
There’s an avalanche of mid-year “Best of 2025” lists coming out right now. One that I think is particularly worth your time is Loud And Quiet’s. I also liked Stereogum’s playlist — it puts a good cross section of stuff from the last 6 months in one central place.
Yasi Salek reported live from the Oasis reunion.
Naomi Fry and the Critics At Large team talked about divas. Required listening.
A really weird AI soft rock band called Velvet Sundown went viral. It was off putting and also a little silly. Rolling Stone got the inside scoop.
A note on this: Emily White, who we had on Desk Notes recently, wrote an essay about AI slop in music this week. It’s a good companion to help you frame your thinking around the Velvet Sundown debacle.