Abe Beame, lover and discusser of all things pop culture.
The Follow is an interview series I plan on putting out occasionally, or frequently, or maybe never again, in which I basically just talk to the people I enjoy following online who are willing to talk to me for a while. It will be about what they come to Twitter for, how they cultivate their online personas, the things they feel passionate enough to contribute to the infinite discourse on this app, and why they feel the need to do it. And on a basic level, it will be two people on Zoom shooting the shit.
The Wire teaches us that it is not the individual that changes the institution, but the institution that changes the individual. The idea is these looming, entrenched, bureaucratic nightmare machines can’t be reformed. They either press you into the ill-fitting position you’re meant to conform to, or they chew you up and spit you out, leaving a vacancy for the next wad of pliable flesh, more willing to play by the rules than you were.
But the tenure of Frazier Tharpe II, the senior entertainment editor at GQ magazine, as hallowed and tony an institution as there is, suggests an alternative possibility. For younger readers, when I was a kid, GQ had a quintessential aura of inaccessibility. It was fat and gorgeous, with its assortment of glue-pressed cologne ads produced by brands we couldn’t afford; it literally smelled like money. It was beyond the interest or intellect of my very middle class, middlebrow family (myself very much included) who raised my sister and I on a steady diet of Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and (for me) The Source.
When I got online a few years ago, I was surprised to start seeing both subjects, and writers I wouldn’t have expected to see gracing GQ’s pages, both print and digital. Suddenly, there were in-depth profiles of cult rap figures, they were tackling topics on pop culture from surprising and idiosyncratic angles, and these pieces were all written either by writers who I thought were just on my radar as up and coming talents, or older Gods I had grown up revering but would’ve never expected to see in the magazine’s iconic black and gold. More often than not, the posts promoting the pieces would tag the same person, who I was randomly mutuals with @The_SummerMan.
Backed by an adventurous, curious editorial staff, he is rapidly changing our conception of what a GQ story is, who a GQ subject is, and who a GQ writer can be. He does a job that requires vision, courage, and imagination, and using those tools, is doing an inspiring job remaking the popular conception of what his employer is capable of.
As writers, especially in the soul killing arena of freelance, I think we have a tendency to pit ourselves against what we perceive as the bosses, the gatekeepers and glass ceiling tenders that swat our brilliant pitches that we are sure only need a bit of air and sunlight to thrive. Revisit a few of your old sent emails and you may find your ideas are rarely as good as you believe them to be. The challenge of an editor is discerning this: To say no, and when you find the right idea and the right person, being willing to say yes.
The wartorn and bombed out media landscape has put pressure on all sides. There was a time, for the price of a cheap weeknight ticket to S.O.B.’s, or Santos’, to take in a midlevel act you believe in, you could get a byline in an alt weekly based on your attention to detail and ability alone. But the alt weeklies are largely gone, and the major publications largely no longer accept concert reviews, or record reviews, or “take essays”. With the minor league teams either retracted or left as defunded husks, all that’s left are incredibly high bars of entry, which entail access to brand name artists in an era where those artists only really want to talk to their official unofficial mouth pieces.
This makes the historically impossible job of writing more impossible than it’s ever been, but it’s also resulted in an exponential degree of difficulty increase on the editor. Without anything resembling an actual writing or support staff, they suddenly have to cobble together content from a barren slate every week, composed of 10-12 needles plucked from denser and denser bales of hay. This can push many editors into a face blind paralysis, leaning on their go-to safety crutches to churn out reliable content in the vacuum they’ve created for themselves – that they can defend to their analytics obsessed bosses, like precinct lieutenants hiding behind their juked stats. Or it can become a thrown gauntlet, a mother of invention.
It all makes Frazier’s work, pushing for interesting and inventive features from both new and GOATed writers even more impressive. Once you get inside the game, what you realize is that being an editor is a job like any other, some are good, some are bad, some are indifferent. What editors rarely get is the opportunity to explain their jobs, what they want to accomplish and what they have to accomplish to satisfy their bosses. So I wanted to do that with Frazier, because I sensed his work was both inventive and important, and I found our conversation to both confirm that suspicion, and teach me a lot.
But Frazier’s job is only a piece of the puzzle when it comes to why he is such a compelling follow. He’s an accessible critic, a schmoozer, a consummate pop culture glutton like myself, very much here to post the discourse and jump in the fray, so of course after a very heady and interesting conversation about his 9-5, I got into a trademark chaotic back and forth about his passions, the ephemera of culture. There’s no chance you’ll enjoy this conversation as much as I did, but hopefully you’ll come close.
(Author’s Note: This interview has been edited and condensed to make me sound like less of an asshole)
But the point I was hoping to make is so far, your tenure at GQ is emblematic to me of a shift in coverage. It’s always been this prestigious and well reported glossy, but in the last few years, particularly in its coverage of sports, along with Tyler and with rap, both in the subjects and the writers that are covering them, I see a kind of modern era being ushered in. You’re obviously not working alone, but you always seem to have your fingerprints on these pieces that, to me, represent a new era at the magazine. So feel free to poke holes in this lazy projection of mine. But how would you respond to it?
I think GQ has a kind of- not stodgy reputation- but just a more formal connotation going back in the days. And he is all about what he likes to call new masculinity. And I think it’s definitely all one big wave that he’s on and he has a clear directive in mind that we’re all just really happy to contribute to, and I’m really happy to have the space to contribute to. So I don’t know that I could have done some of the things that I’ve assigned, or some of the people that we’ve covered with a GQ umbrella that wasn’t under him.
Paul bodied this top to bottom of course but the first two grafs… man knew a story on Mach would be a doozy, did not expect it to open with a Tarantino side-character @paulxt https://t.co/rcsDnSgwtA
— Frazier Tharpe II (@The_SummerMan) December 9, 2021
a massive thanks to @The_SummerMan for bringing me on for this
— yerba matt (@mkrwrt) May 17, 2022
So I’m always really excited when I go find someone like Matt and it works out really well with the first swing. It’s literally just reading shit and making a mental note about a byline that I liked and then reading some more shit just to get a sense of a particular writer. If I see some interesting commentary from people a mutual RTs, they come on the radar, and I think I’d seen his name a bunch of times before.
Then, this goes into the other part of the thing, which is that Ben is an extremely specific person. That is to say he likes things a certain way. He doesn’t like to settle for things. He doesn’t like to do the basic thing, and we do not do reviews. So when a big album like Kendrick comes out, or just any album, it’s always the challenge for me. And again, being a one person team, it’s just me talking to myself, asking, “What are our ways into this that are not obvious?”
Driving back from Harlem… think I’ll just stay in the whip and do the rare Car Test first listen for Kendrick
— Frazier Tharpe II (@The_SummerMan) May 13, 2022
So the album is out, we did one post about it, and then it’s just saying, all right. So tell me what your thoughts are about the album? And it’s the day of, so I probably sat with it twice tops, and it’s just rattling a barrage of thoughts that I had, even though I’m not the one writing it or reviewing it myself. And I start thinking about how much he talks about his partner on the album in relation to past things where I’ve been in group chats with people that didn’t realize who I meant when I said that’s Whitney on the cover, you know? And these are people you would expect to know that. So that’s something I’m always really conscious of too. And I can be a snob coming from Complex where we were always tapped into what was going on.
And a lot of people wanted the context, and I had read something Matt did for Pitchfork elsewhere about the album and was like, all right, this guy looks like he can string sentences together in a thoughtful way. Let’s give it a shot. And that actually ended up being like a really well searched thing, which again is not always the end all be all, but it was just a nice case of the instincts being right and everything coming together.
They’ve “graduated” and gotten the “important” corporate job in the industry. They never got the chance to write that splashy prestige cover for a “mainstream” outlet. And it’s just so great to me that Elliot got the opportunity to do that. I really appreciated it.
He told me, “I like what you’re doing. I’ve actually been thinking about writing again. And I think coming to GQ under what you’re doing would really be a moment.” And going back to what I said before, I ran that by Will and he was super into it. And then it’s just about waiting in the wings and finding the right moment. And that Future thing was the perfect moment. And that was a big moment for me because it’s the first cover story I worked from inception to finish.
J. Cole don't exist? Hov? Nas? Young Thug? Nicki? Meg? Drake? Lil Uzi? Big Sean? Benny The Butcher? Rick Ross? Doja Cat even? Kodak Black?????????!?!?!?!?! pic.twitter.com/IdyPlvjewg
— Baby Yoda (@Kamxwow) April 20, 2022
Chisel this text exchange on my headstone. pic.twitter.com/3tTA6fOpP7
— (@TheFakeAbeBeame) February 12, 2022
Shouts to @The_SummerMan thanks for asking me to contribute to @GQMagazine good lookin out..
— ROB KENNER (@RobertJKenner) February 17, 2021
But Lil Baby in 2018, it just wouldn’t have worked the same way. And that’s what I’ve kind of been figuring out is that, you know, the people that we are tapped into who are grinding and shining and shit, there’s a level of making sure the average GQ reader knows about them, but then making sure they are ready for their “GQ moment”. And so I think it goes back to what you said about the, the way you phrased “refining”- I don’t know what you said, it was slick (Laughs), but just that idea of shaping the piece into some unexpected shit where, a generic Cash Cobain Q&A wouldn’t have worked. It wouldn’t have done anything. And not just for us traffic wise, I don’t think it would’ve done anything for Cash, because again, the people who read GQ probably have no idea who Cash Cobain is.
Like the, the majority of that is finding that hook and making it really interesting. It’s finding a device to tell his story and figuring out a clever way to tell his story, and the story of the sample drill movement, which he embodied.
I wrote about Friends and reunions and the deeply awkward poignancy of going home again.
(Thanks for having me over, @GQMagazine & @The_SummerMan!)https://t.co/su4anUa5DL— Kelsey Miller (@mskelseymiller) May 28, 2021
I think you get a lot of writers who don’t really understand the art of pitching. Like you have sent me full pieces and shit, you know? I’ll say Wale is an example. He’s the first person that popped into mind, this isn’t how Buford covered Wale for us, but imagine someone just said, “Oh, Wale has a new album out, I would love to talk to him.” You know, I’ll go again to someone like Ben, who is just the most dry, sarcastic, who gives a shit person you’ve ever met. And he is like, “Okay? And?” You know, (Laughs) dude, great. Receiving a bunch of great pitches would make my job easier. Because I come into every week with the goal of publishing two things a day. Which is kind of a lot, sometimes on a dry week, you know?
So something like the Kendrick album where it’s like, there’s a mountain of shit we could do around this. But it’s only on me to think about it. I would love to have some help in that regard. But you get some pitches where people just clearly are not reading the site or taking the wrong lessons. Like, I’m sure someone could read the Cash Cobain piece and think, “Hey, maybe a Shawny Bin Laden piece would work”.
Thanks to @The_SummerMan for the greenlight
— comme des eamõn (@eamonologues) October 29, 2021
But I’m happy to explain to them, here’s why it wouldn’t. The Cash Cobain piece worked largely because of the angle. So it’s a matter of learning the “right” lessons. But generally I just feel like people aren’t even trying to clock what we’re doing and build on it.
But there was a writer/editor here who I watched. I was looking at a guy like Sam Schube, who was the style editor and is now the deputy editor under Ben. And we kind of have the same workload, but he always made time to take the shots that he wanted to take, and the stories that he was really invested in. So I came into 2022 not wanting to feel like I was just thinking of a cool story and then assigning it to someone else. It has been going really well, but I’m ready to take the next month off, unless we get a Jay Z cover (Laughs).
I have one in next week’s Hype. And it’s one that I really wanted to write and had been pushing through for a year now. The top edits haven’t come down yet, but I’m already really proud of it. I think it’s going to be cool. And I think it’s going to be a good one to just relax for a few weeks off of. This run of Lakeith, Pusha, this one coming up, and then even something that was more low key, but talking to Steven Glover for an hour about all things Atlanta, those were really worth the extra time that they took, to me.
So why not start with Jurassic Park: The Lost World.
not gonna let y'all drag The Lost World thru the mud off this reboot mid pack… the RV scene alone is Spielberg in his bag, Jeff Goldblum inexplicably had a Black daughter that worked the raptors w gymnastics, what is there to hate, shut up
— Frazier Tharpe II (@The_SummerMan) June 8, 2022
I ended the year writing about Jack Harlow for my dude @The_SummerMan. Once upon a time I got to edit him but now we've switched roles. It's a positive development. https://t.co/rKwclG01rB
— Ross Scarano (@RossScarano) December 30, 2020
First couple eps of The Twilight Zone are out now. They weren't hitting for me, to say the least
Jordan Peele's New 'Twilight Zone' Gets Off to a Terrible Start https://t.co/BGscLdfTPh pic.twitter.com/ZAHr4ck6SJ
— Frazier Tharpe II (@The_SummerMan) April 2, 2019
Jerrod Carmichael season begins
— Frazier Tharpe II (@The_SummerMan) April 2, 2022
Who’s trying to see On the Count of 3, it’s been a long rough week, an incredibly bleak film is just what I need to lift my spirits
— Frazier Tharpe II (@The_SummerMan) May 13, 2022
I've seen The Black Album being talked about on here in rap Twitter circles and it is my time to remind you all that it is the worst out of the pre-''retirement'' Jay-Z albums. Yes, the Blueprint 2 is better than it as well.
— Jayson Buford (@jaysonbuford) August 23, 2021
ran thru Eminem's first 3 albums this morning… crack is crack
— Frazier Tharpe II (@The_SummerMan) May 19, 2022
I think… I’m going to get nice on some coquito and watch Phantom Thread
— Frazier Tharpe II (@The_SummerMan) December 31, 2020
My son Sam Raimi showed out baby, most fun I’ve had in an MCU movie in years
— Frazier Tharpe II (@The_SummerMan) May 3, 2022
It might be Dr. Strange. I was tickled. I knew it would happen too, because it’s just how these things happen. But I was tickled that it was so divisive, when sometimes I see like a lot of these other releases have a more tepid reaction. Like Spider-Man: No Way Home was trash bro. It’s not trash. I’m being OD just to make my point. I’m being hyperbolic. But they’re getting to a point where just doing the stunt casting is all they need to get people on board with it. It’s like, all right, you convinced Toby McGuire to get off Leo’s yacht for two weeks. But to what end? It’s still not a good movie. Dr. Strange, the plot is paper thin. Yeah, it’s stupid. But it has a lot of life in it. And I was just really entertained the whole time watching it.
All praise to @The_SummerMan
— (@TheFakeAbeBeame) February 11, 2022