What I wrote/did in 2024

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It’s time again for the “everything I wrote/major accomplishments for the year” posts, and here’s mine! 

2024 is the 15th year of Its Her Factory’s existence: I started over on Blogger, migrated to my own domain, and now I also mirror on a Substack. To celebrate, I put together a zine that includes some of my favorite/most impactful posts and some new commentary from me on those old posts. You can buy the zine here. 

I signed TWO book contracts of my own:

  • GOOD VIBES ONLY: PHENOMENOLOGY, ALGORITHMS, & LEGITIMATING BIOPOWER will be out with Duke UP in likely 2026. I just sent them the full manuscript. Here is a draft of the intro.
  • RESILIENCE & MELANCHOLY: POP MUSIC, FEMINISM, NEOLIBERALISM SECOND EDITION will be out with The University of Michigan Press…sometime 2027ish. This includes a new introduction and a fifth chapter on Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and Charli. (Since Zero is effectively dead, they were willing to give me the rights to take to another publisher.)

I published a piece in JPMS’s “From the Vault” section where someone reflects on an old (10+ years) article from the journal. My piece was “Indie Rock’s Undead: Re-Animating Keith Harris’s ‘Did New York Kill Indie Rock?’” and I argue that Harris’s original notes the beginning of some massive shifts in political ontology and political economy in the aughts which have completely remade our reality. The mass capitalist record industry, rockism, radio, all of the things which defined the stakes of “independent” music in the late 70s and 80s, these aren’t features of our current reality; we have instead streaming, algorithms, personalization, girlboss pop, and so on. The sounds of indie persist, but in a different reality than their origin.

I also gave a talk at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on “What Was The Modern Rock 500?” The video of my talk is not yet posted on this website, but it will be!

2024 has kind of been a year without pitches for me – especially when it comes to music criticism, there’s like nowhere to pitch this sort of content anymore. Media has contracted so much that pitching seems like a futile task when I could just publish something on my website. Sure, a paycheck and a real human editor would be fantastic, but those are slim pickins these days. I am fortunate to have a day job where I don’t have to rely on pitching to eat. That said, editors, if you want me to write about music or tech or politics I am always eager.

On the blog, some of my favorite posts this year are:

At work I won two awards: the “Early Adopter” award in the Books group, which recognizes staff who make use of new formats, tools, technologies, etc., and the “Content Hero” in the Research Publishing Awards, which recognizes staff for innovating the kinds of content and formats we publish. I’m honored to be recognized by my colleagues for my hard work!

I also published some cool stuff this year at Palgrave, including this audio production textbook with over 200 embedded audio examples, The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Music Industry Studies, this short book on TV game show theme music, and rhetorician Patricia Roberts-Miller’s latest book.  

2025 is, at least on the work front, mainly going to be about getting the second edition of R&M together, working on a special issue of American Music on “Alt Rock to Alt Right”, and making final revisions to Good Vibes Only. I would LOVE to schedule some campus talks on any of those topics/books. 

I am also going to try to get more reading in; finishing up the vibes book had me narrowly working on that, and my “to be read” pile is huge.
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