Ivie Ani on Taking Career Risks, Afrobeats Coverage, and Late Stage Social Media
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I've been a big fan of Ivie Ani's work across the years, and those who have read the newsletter for a while know that I love to pull in writers here now and then to discuss how they built the career they have, as well as how they've adapted in the ever-changing landscape of media. We hopped on the phone last fall to talk it all out, and it was the best kind of conversation—one that revealed new things to me about what we both do for a living as well as about the world at large, another reason why I think her perspective when it comes to culture and media is essential to draw from. Check it out:
Walk me through your origin story as a writer.
Oh, I knew for a very long time that I was going to be a writer—I just didn't know what I would be doing practically as an adult. But when I was in elementary school, I always had teachers that believed in me and complemented my work and intellect. They were very motivational for me, even though I saw them not being the most motivational for other students—we're talking about the public school system in New York City in the early 2000s. Language, history, English, those were the subjects I did the best in. I was not the best at math, so I knew my brain functioned in a way that preferred words over numbers. [Writing] was something that was easy for me to do, but it was still stimulating for me.
It started with me reading a lot, obviously. I used to go to day care, and I remember looking at a bookshelf and read every book on that shelf—and wondering when they were going to re-up on the books, because I'd read all the books on the shelf. My mother taught me how to read and write before I even started school, so I got an early start—and English isn't even her first language. She's from Nigeria, so her native language is Ishan, but they also speak English there because of the education system.
In elementary school, I was a good writer. Middle school and high school is when teachers really started telling me, "You're really a good writer." When I went through the process of trying to choose colleges, I didn't have a major in mind, but I knew it would be centered around writing. I went to NYU, and my sophomore year, I figured I'd do journalism because it's the only field that's practical for a writer—no offense to every writer. I remember thinking to myself at 18 or 19, "Am I gonna be a novelist? Am I gonna be an English teacher? What am I gonna do?" So I picked journalism, because I thought it was the most expansive field I could be in as a writer. And you can incorporate creative writing into journalism, you can go on to do on-air, you can do broadcast. It made sense. Then I double-majored in Africana Studies, so it's like a little history degree with social and cultural analysis. The degree that I got is exactly what I used to write and report and do all the things that I do now.
My first job out of college was at BET doing production assistant work on TV. I started freelancing and—I wouldn't say I fell into it, it was very calculated, but I did get a lot of good opportunities early. I started freelancing for the New York Times' Women in the World section in 2015, a year after I graduated from college. I had a little bit of a following on Twitter, online, and on Tumblr, and I think that translated into me getting opportunities as well. So I'd been writing a little bit. I wasn't doing a lot of underground freelance writing as much, but the bigger opportunities started coming to me as my online platform started growing.
My first on-air segment was in 2014 while I was working at BET. I was actually booking people to come speak on the show, and then my producer asked me to speak on the show. I don't know why to this day, but that was my first on-air segment, and they put me on after Barack Obama, which was a big deal when I was 22. I'd never spoken on-air on camera before, and that is actually more of what I do now than writing.
In terms of what you were reading when you were younger, anything specific you were immersing yourself in? Any magazines?
Funny enough, I wasn't a magazine kid. I was really reading novels, which is funny, because I don't read fiction like that anymore. But when I was a kid, I was reading novels and looking at newspapers all the time. Back then—early 2000s—when you walked into a store or a bodega, you just see the newspapers before you see anything. I remember even saving clippings from, like, 2002. But I didn't really pick up magazines—my mother didn't buy magazines. The only magazines I remember seeing was the tabloid magazines that'd be in the supermarket. There was a time in middle school where I'd just look through magazines for aspirational reasons—like, "Oh my God, look at this nice house. Look at this fragrance ad." But I wasn't reading them.
Tell me about majoring in Africana Studies and how you've applied that to your work as a writer and journalist.
I'm very thankful for my college experience. I know a lot of people have different feelings and musings about higher education. I'm a very traditional African when I say education is the most important thing. I had a very good college experience, even though it wasn't traditional because I grew up in the city and I went to NYU. I didn't experience a college campus, or anything that we associate with going to university.
I knew I wanted to pursue writing, but the double major in Africana Studies was a very late decision for me—and NYU makes you double major if you major in journalism, because the idea is that you're supposed to have a beat. I remember switching my second major three times. I initially was going to do linguistics because I've always been interested in language. So I started taking linguistic classes, but I didn't like my instructor and I wasn't absorbing the info, even though I was interested in it. Then I chose music composition as a second major, because I used to play classical clarinet as a kid, and I was really into it.
Nice, I did too.
Oh yeah?
Yeah, I actually did the Saturday program at Manhattan School of Music for a few years.
No doubt. That's so crazy. Yeah, I used to play classical clarinet, back when they had music programs in school. I knew how to read sheet music, so I thought music composition would be good. I took a few classes, and it wasn't sticking with me. I remember going to a wing of NYU and seeing a pamphlet for Africana Studies, and I was like, "The study of Black people around the world—that can be interesting." It's just rooted in history, and I love history. I took a few classes and I loved what I was learning. It was so generative for me, coming into myself as a writer and academic. So I thought, "Okay, this is it, I'm going to do social and cultural analysis, and I'm going to learn how to write in a way that isn't just the way I'm learning how to write in my journalism courses. I'm going to be able to write in a way that's informative and a little bit creative and add that to my reporting style."
I felt like I was more interested in my Africana Studies courses than my journalism courses, but my journalism courses were great. No regrets, I loved it. I had an amazing experience.
I went to NYU as well. As someone from Northern New Jersey, I did appreciate the non-traditional campus thing. I'd already had some experience coming back and forth to the city, but I appreciated being thrown into the deep end. It made me prepared for this business a little more than I maybe would have been otherwise.
Yep. Even though I grew up in the city, it was in the bronx—very different from Manhattan and downtown. I wasn't used to that type of environment, so it was new to me too. Being a teenager, this was the era where you didn't even go to other boroughs, depending on what borough you lived in. So being downtown was a whole new world for me, and I appreciated that aspect of it as well. I didn't care that we didn't have a campus. I dormed for literally two months in my freshman year, but other than that I was just commuting for my entire college experience, going back and forth to the Bronx and working on top of that. It was a lot of moving around, but I appreciated it. It was like real life, you know?
Tell me about the opportunities that helped you early on in your career. There's this feeling early on where at some point you're like, "I want to have a plan here, but for some reason I can't—so I hope this works." It leads to moments of self-doubt.
Now that I think about it, every single job in media that I've had in my career, I have been let go from, laid off from, or the contract ended. I just got used to the volatility of the industry. I don't know if that particularly discouraged me, but I just thought that's the way it was. I thought the industry was very fleeting, and that you're supposed to keep moving and going with the flow. I haven't even had that many jobs in media, to be honest. I feel like I've freelanced for longer than I've had jobs.
I do think I was discouraged during those earlier years because I wasn't making enough money. I don't have a wealthy or middle-class family to fall back on. If something went wrong, it's not like I could go back to a house in the suburbs and chill for a little bit. I can't do that. My entire life was and is in the city. My family is here. I was working two jobs—BET and retail, and retail was paying me more than BET. I had a degree from a prestigious university, and I'm sitting here still working at Forever 21 in Times Square while working at a major network. It wasn't adding up for me.
2017 was kind of rough, too. That was a year where I was freelancing. I'd just ended my fellowship at the Village Voice, which was shutting down around that time, I was like, "Okay, what am I going to do? The freelance gigs are not really coming in like that." That was a rough year where I felt a little bit discouraged, but I got used to the volatility of the industry. I remember having a meeting with Joe Levy, who used to be my editor at the Voice. He was like, "If it's any consolation, the industry has always been volatile." That's what made me sit with the fact that there's never going to be the stability I'm looking for in the industry. There's only going to be stability in the career that I build for myself—with or without the industry.
Yeah, "It's always been like this" is what I was telling younger people for a while, but as time has gone on I'm actually not sure about that. I saw you tweet about less gigs being out there in general, and I'm curious to hear you talk more about that. There is this increasingly palpable feeling that, for those of us who have been doing this for a while, the opportunities really aren't what they used to be.
I don't know anyone who has a job in media anymore. I remember that era when we all had jobs—but now there are a handful of people, or less, who are staffed at publications. And these are the best and the brightest that don't have jobs. I wonder what it feels like to be 21, entering the industry, and seeing that the people you used to read in high school and college don't have jobs in the industry you're trying to enter into.
I get a lot of emails and messages that I don't have the bandwidth to respond to from younger writers—and writers who are the same age as me—who are just getting started and asking for advice on how to get into and stay in the industry. Right now, it's predominantly people asking me, "how are you still functioning in the industry?"
I do think that there are a lack of jobs and opportunities, but I think it's relegated to specific types of media workers, because clearly we still see people working and getting opportunities, and we still see certain demographics of people who are not getting opportunities. I'm more interested right now in generating opportunities for myself rather than chasing them. I'm not in the mode of chasing bylines for publications. I'm not even chasing stories. Pitching doesn't even get you anywhere in the way that it used to, because everything is kept in-house to staff writers. Unless an editor reaches out to you with an assignment, it's very difficult to even pitch stories. So I'm just navigating it by not chasing anything.
It might be a very sobering reality to a lot of people in media—a lot of writers specifically—about how the industry is operating. But I look at it in a very positive way, because this is an opportunity to really reshape things for all of us who are existing on the periphery now when we used to be in the center of it. If you look back on your career and you feel happy with what you've done—the work, and its impact—I really feel like you have nothing to worry about. If you look back and feel like you never really found your footing or got the opportunities you deserve, then I think it would be a little bit more depressing. But part of me feels good with the idea of just moving on, because my career shouldn't look the way it looked five or ten years ago. It should be transforming.
The only way to have longevity in this industry is if you are able to adapt and transform. It's not even about staying relevant or chasing a news cycle, or chasing violence. It's thinking about different ways to communicate in different mediums, being ahead of the curve, spotting trends before they come, and having your finger on how the industry is moving—what's working, and what's not.
Let's talk about the scope of coverage across your career as a journalist. You've done music coverage, but you've also written about subjects like media suppression in Nigeria for CJR. What factors have played a role in evolving your beat?
My beat has definitely always been expansive to me, but most people would classify me as a music or culture journalist. I consider myself a culture journalist because of how I started and the things I was covering in the beginning—what I majored in, where my interests lie. Yes, I was at BET, but I wasn't writing. I was doing production work. But I started out writing about extrajudicial cop killings and police exonerations. Music came a little bit later.
But music was also just always a part of my life, because I played an instrument and I love music from an experiential approach. I always use music as a medium to talk about bigger themes, issues, and concepts. So my work has always been rooted in social and cultural analysis, and music is just what grasps people's attention the most. I remember writing about Nigerian theater for the Village Voice, interviewing local New York politicians, writing about tech. I was always writing about everything, but people started paying more attention to me because of my music writing.
When it comes to 2018-2019 to now, people look back at my music writing and see how much I was writing about African cultural productions—specifically Afrobeats—before it became mainstream. I actually remember being too ahead, because this was when publications were not paying attention to Wizkid or Burna Boy. I remember pitching those covers for a long time and editors would say no, or they wouldn't respond. Now, when do you not see Burna or Wizkid on a Billboard cover, on Rolling Stone, Vogue, Essence. I was early on that because that's obviously my culture, so I was aware of it.
But I also knew that the music was going to become mainstream sooner than later, and I thought that we owed this new type of music the responsibility of good documentation in real time. That's the issue that Afrobeats in particular has had—proper documentation. Even with the mainstream coverage, a lot of it hasn't been accurate, but nobody wants to talk about it. I could go on for days about it. They're not getting the right people to cover these artists.
There is something regarding U.S. media where, especially when the publication is run by whites, when they engage with anything that's not white, whether the publications are going to commit to covering it thoroughly is always up in the air. The coverage changes and evolves, sometimes, but it also tends to be more uninformed as a result.
I mean, I'm going to ruffle some feathers when I say this, but it's not just the white publications, or white writers and editors, that have been not doing the best job with Afrobeats coverage and the different modern genres coming out of the continent—and I know Nigerians and Africans are going to look at me like, "Finally, somebody's saying it." But I really, truly feel that Western media— American media—has not done a great job in documenting Afrobeats and African music, regardless of whether the publication is white, whether the writer is white or Black.
I feel that the people have been tasked with doing this coverage do not understand the music and culture. They haven't added much to the storytelling, and they have contributed to some of the coverage not being accurate—for the sake of just getting coverage. And it's not their fault. I think sometimes publications have tasked writers whose beat is a different genre, but because they're Black or African, they'll get tasked with covering an African artist or genre that they may not be well-versed in. We're not monolithic to begin with, and not everybody listens to these genres, and not everybody has paid close enough attention to these genres.
I think that publications have gotten better with sourcing writers from the continent for freelance assignments, but it took a very long time to get there because some of us in America were willing to do that, but we weren't getting the opportunities to in the beginning. I think it's getting better now, especially as the genres are getting bigger and people are becoming more vocal, but people tend to just relegate it to, "Okay, the white publications and white writers are not doing it right," when it's really a cultural thing about having an American lens, regardless of race, when you're talking about specific cultural movements or productions.
You mentioned doing on-camera work before. One thing I've noticed about your career is that you've really diversified in terms of what you do. Tell me about taking risks in terms of doing new things while working in media.
I'm a Gemini in four placements, for the astrology people. So I can never just do one thing—I have so many interests. I want the information, I want to learn something, then I want to communicate it and reassess it. I feel like I have so many skills, and I'd be doing myself a disservice if I didn't utilize every talent and skill that I was given and have owned over the years, deliberately or accidentally.
What I always say is, I'm going to write until I'm 100 years old, but am I always going to be on camera? I don't know. Am I always going to be doing panels and moderating conversations and doing live events? I don't know. Am I always going to be modeling or doing brand campaigns? I don't know, but I'm young now, so I'm going to do all these things while I can and try my best to tell stories and communicate and translate through whichever medium public needs or wants.
I was thrust into on-air work 10 years ago when my producer Suzette Brown—shout out Suzette Brown—gave me the opportunity to speak, and it worked for me and I was good at it. I was never a great public speaker when I was younger, but overnight I became good at it, because I felt like I wasn't going to get anything out of life if I was shy and quiet and afraid to speak. I'm just not afraid of the camera, live radio, live events—I'm not afraid of an audience. If you can try as many mediums as possible, and it works, then do it.
But I would not recommend that everyone do what I'm doing, because I don't think it works for everyone. I don't think a lot of writers have the temperament to be on camera. We're known to be hermits, reclusive and introverted people—and I think that's a generalization that's usually accurate. A lot of writers feel the pressure of having to be branded figures or content creators. If that's not you, then don't do it—but I can do it, so I'm doing it.
I saw you tweet about how it feels like we're in late stage social media right now. Expand on that a bit for me.
That tweet went viral, and I wasn't expecting it to. It's never the ones you expect. It wasn't a gripe from my end, it was more of an observation. A lot of people didn't have the language to describe how they were feeling about engaging with social media. It was an actual running joke between me and my friend Karlie Hustle for the last couple years—we'd share posts with each other via text and be like, "Wow, we're really in late stage social media," as an allusion to late stage capitalism. This is very bleak times on the internet.
But if you're Gen Z or a younger millennial—or even an older millennial—you grew up with social media, you've seen it from all angles. It makes you wonder: Have we seen all we have to see on the internet? When can you not log on to social media and see misinformation or disinformation being sold to you? There was an amazing piece in Jezebel by Alex Green on being in this era of the conversation industrial complex—the inertia of this constant dialogue. Like, what are we really
talking about? We're just talking to talk, and I feel like social media has helped push that empty conversation. But on top of that, it's just a lot of conversation or no conversation—just people talking at each other, or brands pushing product to you, or people feeling the need to turn their entire life into sellable product. It's a constant loop of things we already talked about five or ten years ago coming back again. And that's not to say that social media cannot change, because we've always seen new iterations. But when we get to the point where each major app is borrowing features from the other major apps, what are we really looking at?
I'm not going to completely discount social media because I think that it's helped people stay connected. It's helped push movements online and offline. It's helped educate people from time to time. It's helped unite people. But we've also
seen the downside to social media—the scientific effects it has on our bodies and minds, especially young people and kids. I think we're still at the early stages of
figuring out how to have a relationship with social media, and it also feels like we're late-stage with it.
You know, people have responded to that tweet and done videos analyzing it, agreeing with it, and diving deep into the phrase. I'm glad people are talking about it. I think critical thinking and deep thinking are two different things. But I'm glad that making comments about the state of the world around us gets people to think critically about things and talk about them in new ways.
I'm always glad when people are talking and commenting, especially in response to an article we do. I think we've veered into territory of just clapping for people whenever they get a gig or a byline, without even engaging with the work—and I've fallen victim to this, too. But I feel like if we get back to looking at commentary and people's thoughts and conversations as metrics outside of likes, emojis, comments, and congratulations, I think the work will actually get better.