If someone had come up to me ten years ago and told me that I'd wind up working as an independent labor journalist and that my first book would be a history of marginalized workers, I wouldn't have been upset, but I certainly would have been very surprised. In 2012, I was spending my days in a tour van, my nights slinging T-shirts to drunk heavy metal fans, and my late nights frantically knocking out album reviews and artist interviews for various music publications before snatching a few hours of sleep. It was the best possible setup for a twenty-four-year-old hellion with dreams of making it as a music journalist, and eventually landed me an actual, sit-down job as Vice's heavy metal editor, a wholly invented position that was spirited out of the ether expressly for me. If my coworkers and I had not decided to unionize with the...
How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Heavy Metal and Love Labor Journalism
KIM KELLY is an independent journalist, author, and organizer based in Philadelphia. She has been a regular labor columnist for Teen Vogue since 2018, and her writing on labor, class, politics, and culture has appeared in the New Republic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Baffler, The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Esquire. Kelly has also worked as a video correspondent for More Perfect Union, the Real News Network, and Means TV. Her first book, Fight like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, is out now via One Signal / Simon & Schuster.
Kim Kelly; How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Heavy Metal and Love Labor Journalism. Labor 1 September 2022; 19 (3): 95–98. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-9795054
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