Astor Chambers Distinguishes “Culture” And “The Culture” On New Podcast
Astor Chambers opens every episode of his podcast, Culture Raises US, by asking his guests what “culture” means to them. In our conversation, he was intentional about specifying that he did not mean “the culture,” which has been colloquially attached to several things the Black community loves and holds dear.
Chambers has held several roles throughout his career that could be easily aligned with “the culture,” namely at Nike, Adidas, Billionaire Boys Club, and even VIBE. These companies and their employees have been impactful to “the culture” at large, but he wants to go a bit deeper. How do they establish their own cultures? What do the people who enter, and eventually leave, gain from the cultural makeup of these entities? Through conversations with the likes of Kenny Burns, DJ Clark Kent, Joe Freshgoods, Swin Cash, and more, the multi-hyphenate is able to gain a better understanding of how other people view culture.
“[Culture is] probably one of the most impactful things in our society and our lives,” he said. “It’s literally the heartbeat and the pulse of everything. Everything has a culture.” Culture is why he took time to speak with VIBE on a trip to New York about the road to debuting his show, the biggest lessons he’s learned in podcasting, and what sparks his interest in culture overall.
VIBE: You started Culture Raises US podcast this year and just hit month five. How’s that experience been for you?
Astor Chambers: Magical. Just watching the growth of the content, the community, and more importantly, the impact. It’s funny, when you work on things like this—and in all the industries I’ve worked in—you’re always working on things far ahead of time. You think that everybody has a line of sight to everything that you’ve done already, when really they haven’t. Once we rolled out the first couple episodes and I started to see the reactions from people, I went, ‘Oh, you haven’t been seeing this all this time. This was only myself and the team.’ So to get that immediate gratification and that validation of, ‘Yo, this was so inspiring. I felt so good after listening, it was so informational,’ all these different things, you’re like, ‘Oh, and it’s doing the thing that we felt exactly when we were creating it in terms of the why.’ So it’s just been great.
Looking back on everything that you’ve done, do you feel like this show and concept was always brewing within you?
My two business partners were the ones that were on my neck like, ‘This is what you need to be doing. You have to do this. You have the stories, you have the credibility, you have the charisma, you have the relationships. You have all the things where a podcast would not just succeed, it’s going to flourish.’ And it’s needed. The way in which you can position all this is so needed, from a standpoint of we’re not going to glamorize celebrities like, ‘Great project that you did’ and ‘We’ve watched your journey.’ It’s like, no, let’s talk to these celebrities about their journey of how they got here and the things that they now want to do and they want to see in the market and in our world. So I think it’s definitely a combination of all the things within a skillset that I’ve definitely had from day one–just applying it now to a platform that’s very relevant for today.
I want to go back to your childhood. How was your charisma developed?
I was motivated by the good old Cosby Show. I just knew I was going to be on the Cosby Show one day. That did not happen, so I guess these are my Cosby Show moments. If I take it back a step further, both of my parents are Jamaican and came over here together in the early ’70s, so I’m a first-generation American. They instilled in me a level of confidence and self-worth because they came over here thinking, ‘Oh, we’re going to come over here and have the best life ever and do the things that we’ve always dreamt or aspired to do because this is the land of opportunities.’ They weren’t raised here with the segregation burden, implications of slavery and all that weight. They were brought here with the optimism of what’s possible. That was instilled in me very early.
In being confident about being yourself there’s an ability to interact with people on a level where you’re not fearful. You’re not concerned about how people don’t perceive you. You’re just being your natural self. So, early in my years, I’d get the, ‘Why do you talk like a white person?’
Oh, I hated that.
Oh, man. But all it was, was a cry out from individuals saying that we’re very articulate. And the perception was that only white people could be that. Now, you don’t even hear that nowadays. Nobody even mentions anything like that. I think that’s where it came from. It definitely started with those early seeds of my parents and obviously wanting to be on the Cosby Show at a very early age.
What’s the thing that you’ve learned about podcasting that maybe you didn’t know going into it?
Firstly, what I learned quickly was there was a reason why God made now the right time[…] You look at podcasts from the outside, you’re like, ‘Oh, anybody could do that.’ You have no idea the levels of work that goes into this from a production side, content development side, booking of talent. Then when you have the talent, what are the questions you want to drive? How do you want to drive them? What are the things you want to stay away from? All right, how are we going to chop up this content? Where are the clips that we’re going to use? There are multitudes of things that I never would’ve been able to do on my own, ever. So while I’ve been told for years, ‘You need to be doing podcasts,’ there was a reason why God did not put me in that lane, because there was no way I was going to be able to do it on my own. And that’s not a knock against me at all, that’s just the reality. There are things in life that you’re not supposed to do alone. That’s why I know this is going to be super impactful because everything was aligned in terms of the partners, the abilities that they brought to the table to complement what it was that I was doing, but also supplement all the things that I was super deficient in.
You started your episode with DJ Clark Kent by asking him, “What is culture?” It’s such a simple question, but it’s something that we rarely try to define. When did you first start thinking about the culture in-depth?
The nuance that you’re talking about, you and I can both probably feel and attest to this. So I don’t do ‘the culture,’ I do culture.
Because ‘the culture,’ as you’re insinuating, especially within our culture, community is a thing. And even that has different nuances to it. So that’s an element within it. But I’m talking culture, all-encompassing. Why? Because it’s probably one of the most impactful things in our society and our lives. It’s literally the heartbeat and the pulse of everything. Everything has a culture. And I started to realize that throughout my professional career. Having the benefit of working for very prominent culturally-relevant brands– Nike to VIBE to Billionaire Boys Club, back to Nike, Adidas, Apple—every one of these places has very distinct cultures within their walls and cultures they create and speak to within the marketplace.
I started to have a fond appreciation for being in these different corporations and these different boardrooms and having these different views and initiatives that were pertaining to consumers that look like me. And then I realized, ‘Hold up, we created a culture that actually made this brand what it is today. I was part of creating a culture. I’m now working in these very powerful cultures and I’m seeing the beauty and the curses of them inside these buildings.’ And that then had that light bulb go off in my head to say, ‘I need to create a platform where we talk about this.’ If I can shine a light or create a platform to highlight this, this can be a tool that we can help use to punch through all the darkness that’s in our current society because we’re definitely in a super dark time.
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