About Us — Err, I mean
Peter A. Berry. Me.
The Last Word Bender

Combining hyper-active pop culture imagination with the technical mastery to tell Shakespearean stories about it, Peter A. Berry is the last writer you will ever need to hire. For anything. He’s confident enough to write sentences like those unironically. He’s not quite rich enough to pay someone to write that about him. He’s fun enough to break the fourth wall and let you know he’s writing about himself. He’s not quite nervous enough about meandering and whether you take him seriously. All of that’s fine, he thinks. What matters is that he’s done basically everything there is to do in the worlds of culture journalism and marketing writing.

As a member of the XXL staff from 2018 to 2021, where he worked as a News Editor and Associate Features Editor, Peter helped choose XXL Freshman Classes that included Jack Harlow, J.I.D, Rico Nasty, Megan Thee Stallion, Trippie Redd and more. He also wrote and project managed the definitive oral history of Jeezy’s debut album, Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101. As a freelance journalist, he’s profiled Chance The Rapper, Skrilla, Benny The Butcher, YFN Lucci, Juvenile and countless others while becoming COMPLEX and Stereogum’s go-to rap columnist.

On the marketing end of things, he helped launch Netflix’s TUDUM as one of its first staff writers before working through the ranks at Third Bridge Creative’s team of all-star writers and editors. He earned the trust of that group and was hired to be a full-time manager, acting as Third Bridge Creative’s editorial project manager and senior editor handling the writing and editing of thousands of titles for multiple major video and music streaming services. In the world of press writing, he’s written for Sony Music, Warner Music, Atlantic Records, Interscope and more. He currently works as Okayplayer’s contracted Newsletter Manager and Senior Editor.

In a career that stretches 11 years now, Peter’s broken national news stories, launched editorial franchises, defined brand rollouts for emerging artists, identified future rap superstars, dissected trends, written scripts for a Webby Award-winning podcast, provided surgical cultural analysis for national brands and honestly, probably much more than that.

If he were less humble, he’d say he’s as masterful as he is versatile and that he interviews as well as the best interviewers, critiques as well as the best critics and edits as well as the best editors. He’d say his interminable stream of writing and editing work across brands like Bloomberg, COMPLEX, XXL, Stereogum, Rolling Stone, SPIN, Pitchfork, HipHopDX, Okayplayer, Type.Set.Brooklyn, Brooklyn Magazine, Pigeons & Planes, Alternative Press, MARVIN and a bunch of other really cool-sounding websites is implicit existential proof of his irrepressible talent. For those who still care about numbers: his articles have generated tens of millions of pageviews. More importantly, though, he's earned an embarrassingly long list of informal accolades.

A former Los Angeles Times editor has called him a brilliant interviewer. A national music reporter once called him very articulate (and not in the implicitly racist way; they were genuinely that impressed). A former high-ranking Pitchfork editor has called him one of the best rap writers in the industry. Menace II Society co-director Allen Hughes once stopped him mid-interview so he could write down what Peter had just said in order to make reference to it later. Multiple former Editors-in-Chief and national award-winning journalists and publicists have come to him for editorial advice. At least one legendary music publicist has said he’s so cute. He’s done nearly all of this concurrently: since February 2015, he’s never gone a month without a new article published on the web.

But most impressively of all: he once rapped for Wiki outside a MIKE party, and Wiki gave him a genuine nod of approval before disappearing into the night.

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