the story of "horseglue"
Heyyy, it's Jael from Ekko Astral. This is the story of our new song “horseglue” ... and how I used to be a piece of beltway media shit.
I want to preface this by just saying I know it’s often considered bad form to go deep into detail about a song’s meaning.
It’s also worth saying, it's incredibly gauche to write a song about writing. Most of the time.
But I think people need to hear the story here, because I think it helps explain some unfortunate truths about our country today, including why among other things The New York Times is struggling to describe fecal matter accurately.
So here’s how we got to “horseglue”. My first week of employment in the mass media business was the week of Trump’s first inauguration, and I watched the whole Trump and Biden political era up close. The failure to repeal Obamacare. The slashing of the corporate tax rate. The resignations of men, forgotten by history. Paul Ryan. Al Franken. Anthony Scaramucci. Byzantine structures from our perspective today. I worked alongside a lot of people you’d recognize from talking on TV. Attractive talkers.
Through it all I walked among the flock, turning from scrum to aimless scrum. It was a life through which I, for a while, I found a calling.
You see, I did actually want to fight injustice with The Truth. Yes, people like Glenn Thrush were being imitated on SNL, but some of it wasn’t fluff either. There’s a reason I found heroes in reporters who combed public records to discover, for example, that the first Trump administration was hiding potentially cancerous chemical contamination across the country. Or the people who tracked flights and receipts to reveal the government abuses of Scott Pruitt, a coal industry stooge Trump put in charge of the EPA. This led to my “career” in Newsland focusing around “energy and environment issues,” a blanket way media types like to describe anything that powers society and/or pollutes it. And I rallied to the cause of fighting climate change because – and it’s hard to remember this now – the global scientific community said we had preciously little time to do so if we wanted to avert catastrophic consequences. What is a bigger story than “the world is ending”? There isn’t anything. You aren’t anything compared to feet of sea level rise.
So I went for it. I had my own little moment in the hot sun. I broke stories, too, and they were important. Alleged flagrant corruption. Threats to national security. Each time one of those SCOOP tweets would pop off, one after another, I’d excitedly tell the people in my life stuff like, “Did you know The Washington Post cited my story?”
And I’d yip like a dumb little puppy.
There’s a raw dopamine involved with feeling like you mattered because you did something nerdy. But it was hollow. Every victory felt fleeting. I’d reveal someone in power was doing some apparent cover-up, and they’d just keep their job. The nomination would pass, the bill would move. Information, whatever was left of its value, was a declining currency.
Over the years, as I watched the influence of journalism wane within the Beltway, a startling degree of hypocrisy also became apparent. I honestly couldn’t tell you how much fossil fuel money is sloshing around the Washington media ecosystem because none of it is really all that transparent and it's not my job to track it. But a lot of the “energy and environment” writing in D.C. is paid for with the assistance of oil companies. Like, the most popular D.C. energy podcast is proudly “presented” by Chevron. Punchbowl News, a hyper-niche Congress news site widely popular in D.C., has enjoyed oil sponsorships at the top of its tip sheet emails for years, and held an ExxonMobil-sponsored event at the last Democratic National Convention. Even now, the American Petroleum Institute is funnelling seven figures into podcasts like The New York Times’ “The Daily” to beg lawmakers for faster government permits.
That’s how we wind up with “horseglue,” a song that in the end is about why I quit my job as a journalist covering Congress, something I’d been doing since 2017. It’s a song about how I looked inside Newstopia and saw that the historically low trust people have in the industry I love is, in some cases, warranted.
I hope it’s a rallying cry. I want to hope it can be.
I’ve heard many people opine on why the current iteration of the American press corps isn’t rising to the moment of Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo Boys or whatever. Some of it is, they’re tired. And it’s easy to explain it away as exhaustion from the firehose news faucet, because people are just “trying their best” or whatever. Some people still rock. I maintain a few friendships with reporters from back when because a handful of spirits aren’t broken. But it really is the case that many of the people who work in D.C. media today are afraid to offend the eradicators.
The lyrics on “horseglue” were written in the basement tunnels of the U.S. Senate, on my iPhone notes app, starting in the early spring of 2024. It’s the little tid bits I’d pick up after being trapped in a “walk and talk” with a senator for five minutes with a throng of dead-eyed reporters who cared more about some Truth Social post from Donald Trump than whether millions of Americans struggle with food insecurity. The lyrics to “horseglue” began shortly after October 7, 2023 when one day I overheard a reporter – Melanie Zanona, then with CNN – ask one of the only Muslim members of Congress if the only Palestinian member of Congress was an ”anti-semite” for criticizing the Israeli government.
At that moment, I thought about how every day on my way into work at the U.S. Capitol, I’d have to pass through a highly militarized checkpoint. “Why am I so close to automatic rifles?” That’s where the beginning comes from.
Everything on the song is there to give you the sensations I felt in those moments. The tip-tap-typing of a keyboard in a discordant rhythm. Dissonance so blaring it makes you wonder where you even are. A darkness bellowing beneath you, crying for blood. Writing the lyrics to “horseglue” was for months a form of therapy for me because it was a sacred place I could retreat to while I dissociated through another round of very out-of-touch questions from very well-paid people in suits and dresses.
I quit my job as a Congress reporter last summer. As I wrote at the time, I quit my job for Axios after reporters I knew at various news outlets on the Hill botched the story of an LGBTQ+ services center in Philadelphia, regurgitating a bunk conspiracy spread by LibsOfTikTok that the facility hosted sex parties when it had a public policy against doing so. I’m out as a trans woman, and it was really hard to watch people who welcomed me in a personal capacity fail my community so intentionally in a professional setting.
“I know the reason it upsets me so much: people in D.C. will write about alleged sex parties but won’t write anything on the people trying to take away my health care,” I wrote. “It would be a profound mistake to think the reason I’m leaving is because I was offended by news coverage. No, this is about the cognitive dissonance of working around people who should be asking decision-makers about the tug-of-war over trans people, and know it, but aren’t doing so.”
These days, the last sentence feels like it applies to a lot of things besides trans stuff. Like the rampant escalation of federal police aggression against black and brown people in the United States, complete with kidnapping and constant surveillance. Like the demolition of the nation’s first climate law. Like the degradation of disability rights and diversity protections.
A massive shock to me, for example, has been the beltway media’s silence about attacks on the First Amendment.
Over the weekend, the sitting president of the U.S. over the weekend posted an AI-generated video of himself dressed in royal garb dropping feces on protestors at a high enough velocity to harm or even kill them. At least so far, few major media outlets have even described what is quite obviously poop as anything other than “brown liquid.”
I don’t remember hearing many D.C. journalists saying anything about this, nary bat an eye. It made me think of how only one week earlier, ICE officers abused a TV journalist in Chicago covering a protest outside of a detention center. There was little after that, too. What the fuck are we doing.
The freedom of assembly is a bedrock protection under the same First Amendment that grants us freedom of the press. An attack on one column of the First is an attack on everything.
“horseglue” is a screeching call for moral clarity. Anything short of courage against the rise of The New Authoritaria is complicity. It is important to focus on how integral the Messengers really are, and that some of them are the 1% too. They are rich and they are happy without consequence, as a vast majority of us suffer in the shadows of the unknown.
With that, I’d like to leave on something an old friend of mine who worked along side me in the Capitol once said:
“Do you know how it feels to have longed for a job all your life, the job of your dreams, and then get it only to discover it’s actually what’s ruining everything?”
xoxo jael or whatever
