Roblog

The singer Lizzo is in the news at the moment, for less-than-savoury reasons. Every time I see her mentioned I’m reminded of this great post from 2019, by Matthew Perpetua who was then at BuzzFeed.

His thesis is that content that goes viral is often content that fulfils a specific need in its audience’s lives. Sometimes that’s a happy accident, a pleasant side-effect of authentic content made with integrity. But sometimes, when people become aware of the mechanisms of this virality, it’s a more cynical creation, the result of “cultural cartography”, a process of mapping out people’s needs and desires and working backwards from there:

“Lizzo’s music is perfectly engineered for all of this, to the point that it can seem like it’s already gone through extensive A/B testing and optimization. It’s glossy and immediately accessible, but signals some degree of authenticity and soulfulness. It’s aggressively sincere and every song is clearly about a particular statement or relatable situation. It’s all geared towards feelings of empowerment, and given how many ads, shows, and movies want to sell that feeling, her songs are extremely effective and valuable…

“I can’t hear Lizzo’s music without recognizing her cultural cartography savvy. A lot of music can achieve these goals without contrivance, often just as a natural side effect of an artist intuitively making resonant work, but Lizzo’s songs all sound very calculated to me… Lizzo has a good voice, and her songs range from ‘pretty good’ to ‘undeniable banger’ but I have mixed feelings about all of it because I know the game being played rather well, and because I’m uncomfortable with this self-consciously audience-pleasing approach to content creation becoming the primary mode of pop culture. I appreciate the value of empowering art… but fear mainstream culture further devolving into nothing but shallow exclamations of self-affirmation. We’re more than halfway there already.”

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Alex Murrell perfectly joins the dots on so many threads of modern culture, and why they’re all so… samey.

“So, there you have it. The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.”

Murrell’s argument is that, in an increasingly homogeneous world, there’s a greater opportunity than ever to do something different – greater returns to distinctiveness, if you will. But I wonder whether that’s really the case. The bland world Murrell describes is one of our own making: algorithms serve us content, and we engage with the blandest bits; market research firms ask us our opinions, and they turn out to be pretty bland too; Airbnb offers us the world and we choose to stay in identikit apartments. Does the world really cry out for distinctiveness and diversity? Or is that only the predilection of art directors and aesthetes? #

Dan Hancox expertly captures the vibe of Facebook’s boomer nostalgia groups, that yearn for a vague and unspecified time period when men were men, health and safety legislation didn’t exist, and you had to ask your parents for permission to leave the table after your tea. On the face of it, they’re quaint and a little absurd, but they reveal quite a lot of what’s rotten in the English collective psyche:

“When we talk about the past, we always reveal something about the present. It is hard to imagine a more intriguing or overlooked body of evidence for assessing recent British social history than these Facebook groups: they have given us something like a more chaotic, 21st-century version of Mass Observation. They may not be ‘representative’ in any quantifiable way, but the sample size is vast, and these memes are a canvas for a whole range of contemporary insecurities and collective memories. History is written by the winners, but anyone can share a post on Facebook.”

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Wesley Morris celebrates a type of art that America used to specialise in, but has stopped making: trash.

“I was 11 when Nuts came out, and it helped lead me into a committed relationship with a certain category of movie. The people in them seemed loonier, lustier, louder than we’re supposed to be. Their eyes were wild; their makeup ran. They had hair we were meant to know was a wig, because it was impossible hair. The paint chips for these movies might read: ‘wanton,’ ‘lust,’ ‘paramedic,’ ‘weak bladder,’ ‘mattress,’ ‘steamy,’ ‘do not cross,’ ‘pilot light,’ ‘them drawls,’ ‘brazen,’ ‘lit cig,’ ‘urinal cake,’ ‘Crisco,’ ‘bust.’ In being honest about this volatile, unkempt, uncouth, indecorous, obnoxious, senseless, malicious, unhinged and therefore utterly uninhibited side of ourselves, a certain kind of movie can make an X-ray of what else it is besides a story about some characters. It can identify the mess.”

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Toby Shorin with a superb long essay, the product of six years’ work, that’s both an eerily accurate summary of the last decade of culture and a vision of the future that it’s hard not to be depressed by.

Shorin characterises the 2010s as the era of “lifestyle”:

“The 2010s is what I want to call the era of Lifestyle. You know what it felt like, because you lived through it. And I did too. Since 2014 I have lived in New York, inside the machine where Lifestyle is made. Spending my waking moments moving through these branded experiences, I felt they they pointed to something I could say but not name.”

Now coming to an end, what replaces it? Shorin argues that brands will begin to manufacture and shape culture far more directly, rather than merely reflecting it:

“The Lifestyle era was not about creating culture; it was about attaching brands onto existing cultural contexts. It was not about shaping people; it was about sorting consumer demographics into niche categories. The new order we are entering into reverses this. For some organizations, culture has become the product itself, and products have become secondary, auxiliary, to the production of culture.”

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Netflix’s new series Hype House follows the lives of ten-or-so young content creators, living together in an absurdly ostentatious LA house and producing content for TikTok. It sounds predictably numbing:

“Hype House isn’t as deliberate with mental health messages as The D’Amelio Show, which is bookended by content warnings and resource lists and witnesses both girls have panic attacks. But it’s an effectively depressing portrait of one’s life as a voracious business. No one appears to be having a good time. The kids are constantly stressed out by the prospect of getting canceled (ie a scandal which prompts a flood of hate messages and sponsorship cancellations) and the lashings of toxic fans (such as when possessive female fans of heartthrob Vinnie Hacker, 18, post death threats for a girl whom he kissed as part of a prank video.)”

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An interesting history of the American tradition of “mischief night”:

“Mischief Night, in my Pennsylvania suburb and in the New Jersey towns of several people I spoke to, involved mild pranks committed on October 30. The perpetrators – typically those who had just aged out of trick-or-treating, so early teenagers – would throw rolls of toilet paper over houses and trees, maybe ring a neighbour’s doorbell and sprint away before the door was opened, maybe throw some eggs at a window.”

Interestingly, the tradition is highly localised to Pennsylvania and part of New Jersey, but it started as a May Day tradition in Northern England, before mutating over time and distance to become the night-before-Halloween tradition it is now:

“Mischief Night, or neet, appears to have been most popular in Northern England, particularly in the counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire. According to Allen, though, it was not originally associated with Halloween, but rather with May Day, a very old festival signalling the beginning of summer. There is already, by the early 1800s, some public panic about the rebellious nature of Mischief Night, which seems to have been (or seen as, by adults) a time for both vandalism and sexual encounters.”

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James Poniewozik writes of a cultural shift, particularly on TV and within that particularly in comedies, from a sort of detached irony – exemplified by The Office – to a sincerity and warmth.

I’ve certainly found myself recognising this, falling deeply for shows like Schitt’s Creek, Detectorists and – the example that Poniewozik uses – Ted Lasso. They’re shows that are warm, character driven, full of heart. I don’t think it’s about a rejection of irony per se, and certainly not a return to old ways of doing things. These shows aren’t naïve or earnest. I think it’s more of a synthesis of two eras, something that only could have happened now – but I like it a lot. #

The word “naff”, uniquely British, is hard to explain or define – one of those concepts that you know when you see it. Sean Wyer has a good go, in an effort to explain something fundamental about us Brits:

“So if hygge can tell us something important about Denmark, and about tensions between actual and imagined Denmarks, what, I wondered, might naffness reveal about Britain and its culture?”

He doesn’t perfectly nail a definition, but it’s a subject worth chewing over. #

The Library of Congress holds literally millions of items, many of which have been digitised. But how to approach such a huge collection? LOC Serendipity is one amazing answer: surface content at random, and allow people to follow whatever rabbit holes they find interesting.

Even just the randomly selected titles are great, like some sort of Oblique Strategies prompt:

Miscellaneous studies in prose
Politics and pen pictures at home and abroad
Virginia in the making of Illinois
Interest tables used by the Mutual life insurance company of New York for the calculation of interest and prices of stocks and bonds for investment
La dame aux perles
Elements of logick
Elisa von der Recke
The present world situation
Military character, habit, deportment, courtesy and discipline
Memorial of Mrs. Agnes Renton
Vade mecum
Ballot box and battle field

I’m particularly fond of the “Infinite 78RPM Records” section, which throws up a never-ending stream of old, public-domain records – mostly ’20s and ’30s jazz but also some scratchy gospel, bluegrass, and folk and ancient stand-up comedy. #