Inside The Disney Channel Popstar Industrial Complex

Today, Miley Cyrus released her highly anticipated album Plastic Hearts, the latest highlight from a 13 year music career that emerged from the zenith of Disney Channel’s star-making formula—requiring all of its teen idols to dominate every facet of the entertainment world. It was piloted by Lizzie McGuire star Hilary Duff and quickly proved to be a remunerative recipe. Cyrus herself recently credited Lizzie McGuire with sparking her own Disney aspirations, so I think it’s the perfect moment to dig into the Disney Channel Popstar Industrial Complex.

Miley Cyrus said Lizzie McGuire was her favorite show growing up and was the reason she wanted to be on Disney Channel pic.twitter.com/DVIvixWhiH

— Lizzie McGuire (@ImLizzieM) October 17, 2020

In a span of 10 years, Disney established itself as the Motown of teen idols, turning sitcom starlets into chart toppers and vice versa. The stars’ total saturation of teen media during their tenure on Disney Channel and subsequent popstar statuses are a result of the Machiavellian machination I’ve dubbed the Disney Channel Popstar Industrial Complex. After Hilary Duff established the blueprint in 2003, every Disney teen that could 1) even remotely act and 2) even remotely carry a tune has been relentlessly funneled through Disney’s movie, TV, and music industries.

The careers that meet my personal criteria for this Complex are those that fall between 2003-2013. Though Disney stars continued to record music through Disney’s Hollywood Records label after 2013, these are the years I identify as the peak of this phenomenon. Not because it was objectively a better era (which, for the record, I do in fact think) but because these are the years in which stars were consistently shuffled between each arm of the apparatus and saw astounding success in multiple fields. To understand why Disney so forcefully made its talent interdisciplinary, we’ve got to go back to one of Disney’s greatest traumas.

The year is 1994, and Disney decides to cancel The All New Mickey Mouse Club—a decision that would reverberate throughout the 21st century. The Mickey Mouse Club was a variety show full of clean cut, wide eyed showbiz kids who acted, danced, and inexplicably covered Jodeci songs at age 14. Cast members included future superstars Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and JC Chasez, who were all promptly left out to dry when the show was cancelled.

Cut to: the year 2003, and four of the Mouse Club’s alums are among the biggest pop stars in the world, dominating MTV’s monoculture. At the time, Christina Aguilera had four No. 1 singles, two Grammys, and a Latin Grammy. Britney Spears had broken the records for highest debut sales by a solo artist, scored three No. 1 albums, and was a six-time Grammy nominee (she finally won a Grammy the following year). Justin Timberlake and JC Chasez’s little venture, *NSYNC, had set a record for first week sales with 2.4 million albums sold (a record they would hold for 15 years), and scored eight Grammy nominations in four years. Timberlake alone nabbed two Grammys for his debut solo album released in 2002. The impact of the former Mouseketeers on pop culture and music industry consumerism cannot be understated. And Disney, their former employer, didn’t see a dime.

We may never know what the Disney Execs did or said in response to this devastating loss, but I imagine a scene straight out of Austin Powers in which then-CEO Michael Eisner pressed a red button to eject the chair of whoever cancelled The Mickey Mouse Club, and proclaimed “never again!” Never again would Disney let even one ounce of child talent go untapped. Enter: the Disney Channel sitcom-to-movies-to-popstar pipeline.

Disney’s Hollywood Records had been functioning for years but mostly handled movie soundtracks and had never produced chart toppers—until 2003. Crucially, 2003 was when the teen pop wave that dominated the world since 1997 was on its last breath. The genre had grown into such a commercial behemoth that by 1999, record labels were burning insane amounts of cash to keep the trend alive, but this quickly led to promotional oversaturation. Boy bands and pop princess were crawling out of the woodwork by the thousands as record labels desperately tried to replicate the gold that Britney, Christina, and *NSYNC had struck.

Inevitably, this oversaturation led to public disdain, and teen pop was largely condemned for being too contrived, inauthentic, and overproduced, and the teen base aging up left the genre’s future uncertain. By 2003, *NSYNC had gone on an indefinite hiatus, Britney and Christina were very publicly proclaiming that they were all grown up, and the influx of post-9/11 conservative sentiments into pop culture fueled a desire for a more innocent avatar of apple pie Americana. Enter: Hilary Duff.

That feeling when you’ve just changed the course of entertainment history. Image via

In 2001, Duff began her journey towards becoming the prototype for the now tried and true Disney It Girl model when she was cast as Lizzie McGuire in the well received sitcom of the same name. The show followed the struggles of middle school in an empathetic, down-to-Earth way, and Duff quickly became a relatable teen icon. In 2002, she starred as Cadet Kelly in the Disney Channel Original Movie of the same name, which became the most watched program in the channel’s history. Later that year, she released a Christmas album through Walt Disney Records, which just barely cracked into the Billboard 200.

And then 2003 hit. The clouds parted, the angels sang, and Michael Eisner’s eyes rolled with dollar signs. In 2003, 15-year-old Hilary Duff starred in the theatrically released Lizzie McGuire Movie, which was number 2 at the box office and became an instant Disney classic. Later that year she released the aptly named album Metamorphosis—a true transformation from kid show starlet into a verifiable triple threat—which beat out Mary J. Blige to reach the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 100 after debuting at No. 2.

Metamorphosis still holds up as a really solid piece of pop rock, very obviously worked on by the writer/producer team The Matrix that also shaped the sound of the then-chart topping Next Big Thing Avril Lavigne. It does have a distinctly sweet, poppy gloss to assure the general public that there would be none of Avril’s signature heavy, smokey-to-the-point-of-burnt eyeliner on this parent-friendly teen idol. The “Disney star” label stamped across her career’s metaphorical forehead provided extra parental assurance.

The flawless formula of genuinely fun music + a SFW image + multimedia star presence + utilization of the pop production trends of the time = Metamorphosis, one of the top 10 best selling albums of 2003. And thus began the Disney Channel Popstar Industrial Complex, a formula that churned out Disney-brand hits like clockwork.

The first wave saw Duff joined by Raven-Symoné and sister act Aly & AJ Michalka. Between 2003-2008, Raven-Symoné starred in the TV show That’s So Raven, two Cheetah Girls movies, and released two albums and four soundtracks under the Disney Music Group umbrella. Between 2004-2007, Aly & AJ released three albums, starred in the movie Cow Belles, and Aly starred in the sitcom Phil of the Future. Their last Disney-recorded album peaked at #15 on the Billboard 100.

And those were just the frontwomen. Any Disney star, best friend, or recurring character had a movie soundtrack album feature at the very least, like Kim Possible’s Christy Carlson Romano’s “Let’s Bounce” for The Princess Diaries II and That’s So Raven sidekick Annelise Van Der Pol’s “Over It” for Stuck in the Suburbs. And they all gathered to remind you of the network’s pop cultural dominance for Disney Channel Circle of Stars, a supergroup event featuring the Stars covering a classic Disney track. Disney employed a proto-Marvel Cinematic Universe strategy in their relentless quest for synergy, using crossovers to get their roster of stars together, beginning with That’s So Suite Life of Hannah Montana in 2006.

By 2008, Duff, Symoné, and the Michalka sisters had all walked away, but by that point Disney doubled down hard on their Popstar Pipeline 2.0. High School Musical’s Ashley Tisdale, Corbin Bleu, and Vanessa Hudgens all forayed into the music scene with varying success, with albums reaching #5, #14, and #24, respectively, on the Billboard 200. But they were comparatively flashes in the pan, as four House of Mouse acts emerged to change the face of youth media and cap off this era of Disney dominance.

Between 2007 and 2013, Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez, and the Jonas Brothers collectively had 16 Hollywood Records albums break into the Billboard Top 10, with 6 of them hitting No. 1. They each starred in their own sitcoms and at least two movies while touring the world, pumping insane amounts of money into Disney. A kinder, gentler Brat Pack of sorts, they carried the teen magazine industry’s twilight years as we followed their various hookups, breakups, makeups, and friendship dramas with rapt attention.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, from L-R: Joe Jonas, Selena Gomez, Kevin Jonas, Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, and Nick Jonas. Image via

Following the Duff blueprint, they all “graduated” from Disney approximately five years into their tenure. Their era was one of the last great cable TV dynasties, as the streaming age demolished ratings and album sales and and scattered pop culture across the World Wide Web. Before the rapid decline of traditional media, Disney milked every last dollar out of this masterclass in corporate synergy.

I suppose the moral of this story boils down to a tale as old as time: you don’t know what you’ve got til its gone. But if you’re a multibillion dollar entity with the objective—and the means—to dominate the entire tween media landscape like Disney, you don’t have to sit around and hope for another chance at striking gold.

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Why I'm Obsessed with Beabadoobee

Sitting at my desk, staring at Canvas as my three papers due next week hang over my head, while election-induced anxiety still hasn’t faded away and I’m perpetually on 6 hours of sleep, all I want to do is jump around my room and scream in unbridled, raging teenage angst. That’s where Bea Kristi comes in — or better known as beabadoobee, her stage name now but, once upon a time, merely her finsta handle — singing about everything I feel, but can never describe. She wrote her first ever song “Coffee” in 2017 which went viral in practically a few days, despite the fact that she only posted it online for her boyfriend to hear, and that she only learned to play the guitar in that same year. Now signed with Dirty Hit since 2018 alongside the likes of Pale Waves, she has been recognised by nearly every major magazine brand and publication, and is on billboards all across London; Matt Healy himself called her “the most exciting thing in rock music” while presenting her an NME Radar Award. Here are some of the reasons why I’m utterly obsessed with her, and why you will be too:

Her music

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There are too many songs to fawn over. Her first EP “Patched Up” feels like falling in love at 17, and the next one “Loveworm” is a hazy, bedroom pop tribute to her boyfriend Soren (with many great songs to feel emo to as you stare out of the window at a windy, bleak Hyde Park). “Space Cadet” shows her transition towards indie rock, breaking out of her bedroom walls and into the studio. To me, “Fake It Flowers”, her debut album, is by far the most alluring of her releases; appealing to every angle of adolescence, it truly is the closest thing I have heard to a soundtrack to growing up. Beabadoobee dances along a really beautiful line between bitter, I-don’t-give-a-flying-f*** energy (in “Care” and “Dye It Red”) and resigned disappointment and hurt (“Sorry” and “Further Away”) before accepting a peaceful forfeit to her feelings, still learning to not be scared of loving and trusting (“Horen Sarrison” and “How Was Your Day”). The album ends in a triumphant celebration of how, despite how being young is horrendously painful, it’s also the best time she will ever have; she looks forward with the rose-coloured glasses of being in love in “Together” and “Yoshimi, Forest, Magdalene”. With Bea, you’ll scream and dance, and you’ll break down and cry, but you have each other every step of the way.

Her fashion

I didn’t know that Bea made music back in 2017, but I was a fan of her social media presence and style. Those of you who are fans of Unif might remember this photo from their Instagram account way back when:

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When she isn’t wearing Unif (or the occasional Brandy Melville hoodie: even she can’t stay away!!!), Bea wears outfits comprised almost entirely of vintage pieces, mostly from Depop, it seems. She collaborates extremely often with Depop user @notjusttrash, who provides her with what she calls “fairy” and “manic pixie” tops that are to be paired with baggy combat trousers or a mini skirt with argyle tights underneath that are more torn up than they are not. Finally, don’t forget the bubblegum pink grommet belt and trainers that I can only describe as either “hiking grandfather” or “10-year-old in a skatepark in the 90s” style: there is no in-between. Her blend of textures is amazing, like pairing a sequinned Aftershock camisole layered over a long-sleeved knit jumper with a silk midi skirt, black socks and black Buffaloes… yeah, just trust me, she makes it look good. She is also very much on board with the beaded necklace trend, sporting her favourite @ugly_accessories pieces, another Depop brand, on the daily.

Let’s not forget that she also starred in the campaign for Marc Jacobs’ Heaven collection, alongside Iris Law, Eileen Kelly and other “misfit creatives”. To top it all off… in her “Sorry” music video (directed by Soren and his team, Bedroom, who direct all of Bea’s music videos and also directed the video for “Me and You Together Song”) she wore a vintage Jean Paul Gaultier dress with gigantic black platform boots (seen below). Iconic, if you ask me.

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Her look

Perhaps the most noticeable feature of Bea’s look (other than her hair, which was once red and blue, but now is a more subtle bleach-blonde) is her signature heavily-winged and heavy-handed, smoked out black eyeliner, which she pairs with extreme fluttery eyelash extensions, or flared-out falsies. She also wears the most bottom-lash mascara I have ever seen someone wear. Additionally, she has multiple tattoos, spread far apart in a doodling-style, the way Pinterest and Tik Tok are currently drawn to. One, an “ugly face” on her forearm, was a stick-and-poke by Mac DeMarco in a karaoke bar in Dublin. Another set of two is above her kneecaps, “ELIJAH ROCKS”, written by her younger brother Elijah. She has many others, but perhaps the most cool of them all is a 4-frame Peanuts comic down the inside of her forearm. Looking at her tattoos, you’re bound to want one as unapologetic and unique.

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Her relatability

What really stands out about Beabadoobee, and explains her appeal well, is that she is really not so different to you and me. Born in the Philippines, her parents moved to London when she was 3 and raised her in North London. She has talked about how she felt like an outsider, not fitting in to the “rich, white” demographic of her all-girls school. Expelled from that institution, she learned to play the guitar, and focussed on her career in her final year of high school, to the point of receiving A Level grades she called “terrible”. The notion of a celebrity is changing, probably due to the popularity and variety of social media, and the appeal of a “perfect” celebrity is dwindling away (in the Western world, at least). She became a sensation from her bedroom! Bea’s story is a comforting one, especially for UChicago overachievers, since it has made me redefine the idea of “success” as someone who, like her, was pressured to excel academically at all times.

She may be friends with Matt Healy now but, only a few years ago, she had his face as her phone background. Dreams do come true!

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Album Review: songs

There are few voices in the indie music sphere right now more captivating than Adrianne Lenker’s. 

If the name doesn’t ring a bell, maybe you’ve heard of her band, Big Thief, the Brooklyn-based quartet who broke onto the scene in 2016 with their critically-acclaimed debut album Masterpiece. Since then, the group has released three full-length LPs— Capacity in 2017 and U.F.O.F and Two Hands in 2019— and Lenker has put out two solo albums of her own— abysskiss (2018) and songs (2020). (So it’s safe to say she’s been busy.)

Adrianne Lenker, photo by Genesis Báez

Lenker recorded songs in the spring of this year, in a one-room cabin in the woods of Western Massachusetts during the early days of the pandemic. She had escaped to the woods seeking a safe haven where she could recover from various disappointments that had recently arisen in her personal life, such as a canceled tour and a broken heart.

songs’s beauty lies in its ability to perfectly encapsulate the nuanced intricacies of human emotion in such a bare-bones, simple fashion. Lenker wrote nine of the eleven songs on the spot, and recorded the entire album using only her voice and an acoustic guitar. Most of the songs’ intros and outros are characterized by the soft strum of guitar strings and the occasional hollow pitter patter of rainfall or rustling of leaves in the background. The ambient nature sounds carefully layered over simple, almost austere melodies grant the listener a fully immersive auditory experience without drawing attention away from the rawness or intensity of Lenker’s lyricism. Its understated transitions make for a progression that feels remarkably fluid and natural yet unwaveringly intentional; each track seamlessly ties into and expands upon the themes of its predecessor without ever feeling repetitive or unnecessary. 

The opening track, “two reverse,” is like a gut punch and a warm embrace all at once. Lenker manages to tackle sadness, longing, nostalgia, intimacy, isolation, introspection, and the search for beauty and purpose where there appears to be none— all in the span of a mere 64 words. The second track, “Ingydar,” feels more like a sort of patchwork quilt in song form— fragments of memories haphazardly stitched together to compose a singular cohesive whole. Lenker’s lyrical mastery truly shines in the verses & pre-chorus as she explores and reckons with the cyclical nature of life and death:

Fragilely, gradually and surrounding

The horse lies naked in the shed

Evergreen anodyne decompounding

Flies draw sugar from his head
—

His eyes are blueberries, video screens

Minneapolis schemes and the dried flowers

From books half-read

The juice of dark cherries cover his chin

The dog walks in and the crow lies in his

Jaw like lead

The song comes to a head at the chorus, a couplet which echoes the overarching sentiment of its verses: “Everything eats and is eaten / Time is fed”. The ensuing track, “anything,” follows a similar lyrical trajectory as Lenker continues to flex her dexterity with turn of phrase via lines like, "Staring down the barrel of the hot sun / Shining with the sheen of a shotgun.” Despite being a breakup song, “anything” is actually one of the rarer more upbeat moments on the record. The track stands out due to its discernible pickup in tempo and uncharacteristic levity in tone: 

I don’t wanna be the owner of your fantasy

I just wanna be a part of your family

— 

And I don’t wanna talk about anything

I don’t wanna talk about anything

I wanna kiss kiss your eyes again

Wanna witness your eyes lookin

“anything” is Lenker’s personal recount of her recent breakup, followed by “forwards beckon rebound” and “heavy focus,” which reveal the emotional turmoil Lenker experienced in the aftermath of said breakup. The sixth track, “half return,” follows Lenker as she returns to her hometown only to discover that it no longer feels like home: 

Minneapolis soft white snow

35 bridge, hometown

Half return, half return

-

Standing in the yard, dressed like a kid

The house is white and the lawn is dead

The lawn is dead, the lawn is dead

“half return” is a personal favorite of mine; I think it appeals to me because mourning the loss of youth, romanticizing the past, and longing to return to a place that no longer really even exists anymore— at least not in same the way that it once did— are all part of the universal experience of growing up, a process I’m currently undergoing right now.

The next track, “come,” is a poignant glimpse into Lenker’s mind as she seeks to reconcile herself to the concept of her own mortality. And if “come” is a reckoning with death, then “zombie girl,“ “not a lot, just forever,” and “dragon eyes” are all celebrations of life and love, with Lenker looking back fondly on past relationships and experiences and meditating over the ways in which they’ve shaped her. The closing track, “my angel,” is a decisively satisfying conclusion to the 39 minute rollercoaster that is songs; “my angel” is Lenker’s ode to hope and optimism and rebirth and nature and beauty and acceptance and divine justice and and finding purpose and finally coming into one’s self. 

Ironically enough, songs doesn’t feel like a collection of eleven separate songs. Rather, the LP feels like one long song, almost a manifestation of Lenker’s stream of consciousness as she attempts to navigate through the trials and tribulations of life during unprecedented times— something pretty much everyone alive in 2020 can relate to. Songs is a tale of hardship and sorrow and grief and loss, yes, but it is also a testament to the human capacity for resilience and growth in the face of all possible odds, which is truly a beautiful thing. 

Recipes from Obaachan: Red Bean Buns

Growing up in a Japanese household in America, I always considered both America and Japan to be my home. Whether it be in code-switching or family gatherings, I was always “mixed” - and food was no exception. Our pantry was always stocked with soy sauce and hot sauce, and meals were always served with fluffy white rice and southern sweet tea. But as my mom was Japanese, my food preferences ultimately ended up Japanese, and Japanese food came to symbolize “home”.

Indeed, going back to Japan was always a much-anticipated culinary treat - my grandmother, the best cook I know, would make endless plates of home-cooked Japanese cuisine that would be perfectly complemented with locally-made mochi. When I took a bite out of saikyo-tsuke grilled fish or chirashizushi, I knew I was right where I belonged.

Now that I’m living away from home and have more time due to quarantine, I decided to embrace cooking as a way to stay connected to my roots and feel closer to home an ocean away. I named this series in honor of my grandmother, or obaachan, who always has a smile and a recipe to share.

This is the first of a series of recipes, so stay tuned!

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Red bean buns are actually a Sino-Japanese dish. This style of buns are very common across Japan as street food, and it’s especially popular during the colder winter months. The filling is made from red beans, a classic Japanese dessert filling. In this recipe I opted to use home-made red bean paste, but you can just as easily use pre-made as well. I also used chunky paste, but creamy red bean paste works just as well - it’s all up to preference!

This is a super easy recipe, so I’d definitely recommend trying it out!

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Red Bean Buns

Makes 8 medium-sized buns・ Time: 1 hr

Ingredients

For the bun

• ⅓ cup (50 g) baking flour

• 1 ⅓ cup (150 g) cake flour* (you can use normal all purpose flour as well, but for best results use cake flour)

• ½ tbsp. (5g) Yeast

• ½ tbsp. (5g) Baking powder

• ¼ cup (30g) sugar

• ½ tbsp. (6g) vegetable oil

• A pinch of salt

• A little over ½ cup (100 ml) water

For the filling

• 1 1/3 cup (150g) red bean paste, either chunky or smooth

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Steps

1. Mix all of the bun ingredients together in a bowl. Knead the ingredients together until it makes a smooth ball. (Don’t knead it too much, because we want to keep it fluffy.) Cover with a paper towel and let rest for 20 minutes at room temperature.

2. In the meantime, boil some water in a pot that has a lid. Once the water has boiled, line a steaming tray with parchment paper and place it into the pot. You want to make sure that the water is just barely touching the surface of the tray. Adjust the water accordingly.

3. Take out the dough and cut it into 8 pieces. It should be nice and fluffy at this point. Gently roll the dough into a circle that’s around 1/8 inch, or about 0.5 cm, thick.

4. Take a scoop of red bean paste and place it in the middle into a ball. The amount of red bean paste here is up to you - just be careful not to overstuff! Fold the edges into the middle and pinch the dough where they meet. The traditional shape is a swirl at the top, but I just make them into a volcano-like shape.

5. Place the buns into the steamer basket, leaving about 2 inches (4 cm) between each - they will expand! Cover the pot and let steam for around 15-20 minutes.

6. Take them out and enjoy!

A Visual History of Vampires

Vampires are one of the most popular folklore characters of all time. From beginnings in traditional tales across the globe that told of monsters who sucked blood from humans, they now carry a reputation of untouchable coolness, sensuality, and allure. Though their rise in popularity has been documented, their visual development from grotesque monsters to shimmering young adults is less often discussed. To track this dramatic shift in portrayal, let us start with one of the earliest mentions of vampire-esque beings.

“Empusa.” Image via

Greco-Roman Mythology

One of the earliest portrayals of vampires comes from Ancient Greece and Rome. Both cultures described deities and figures with vampiric traits.

One was Empusa, daughter of the Goddess Hecate, who seduced men and then drank their blood while they slept. She was described as being tall and having the legs of an ox or other animals, but she shape-shifted into an attractive young woman in order to seduce her victims.

There were also the striges, described as having the bodies of crows and fed on the flesh and blood of adults and children.

“The Striges”. Image via

Medieval Europe

During the 1100’s, English historians Walter Map and William of Newburgh recorded the earliest European accounts of vampire-like creatures, which they called revenants.

Revenants are corpses that become animated and come back to life to haunt the living. These early folklores vampires were depicted as repulsive and corpse-like monsters, and bore little resemblance to the vampires we know and love today.

Revenant. Image via

Peter Blagojevic

Early Modern Europe

The 18th century saw a mass vampire-hysteria take over Europe after a series of vampire sightings in Eastern Europe, specifically in Tranyslvania. Even government officials were involved in hunting and staking those accused of being vampires.

The first two officially recorded vampire cases occurred in Serbia during thi time, furthering the vampire frenzy. which is now called the “18th-Century Vampire Controversy.” One of these cases involved Petar Blagojevic (pictured above), who was thought to have become a vampire after his death. His case was widely published and was one of the most sensationalized remnants of this vampire hysteria.

Though they were still portrayed as monsters, this age saw the beginning of the transition to the our current-day idea of vampires, as they were depicted with more human-like qualities.

Carmilla. Image via

The 1800’s

This period saw an explosion of vampires in popular culture, with some of the most famous works of vampire literature published during these years. These works included The Vampyre by Polidori, Carmilla by Sheridan le Feu and perhaps the most famous work of vampire fiction of all time, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

This new image of the vampire—refined, of high status, alluring, sensual— was partly the work of the period’s Gothic authors, who found the vampire to be an effective and now well-received character.

Pictured is Actor Sir Henry Irving, a friend of Bram Stoker and one of his inspirations for the character of Dracula.

These works began to establish the modern image of the vampire. Dracula was described as being exceedingly pale and thin, dressed in all black, and having sharp teeth and ears. Carmilla was described as being unearthly beautiful and seductive, and having the ability to shapeshifter similarly to Dracula.

The 1900’s

Over the course of the 20th century, vampires remained a central focus of literature, as well as cinema. The first half of the 20th century saw a rise of vampires in science fiction, while the second half saw a shift in vampires being portrayed as more heroic, tragic, and romantic protagonists.

Early notable examples of vampire-centric media include the 1922 film Nosferatu and the 1960 Italian Gothic film Black Sunday.

In the late 1900’s, two films came out that left a significant impact on the present-day image of vampires: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Interview With the Vampire.

A shot from the 1994 film, Interview With the Vampire. Image via

The 21st Century

The most recent depiction of vampires have retained many of the characteristics of those from the late 1900’s; they are mysterious, alluring, seductive, pale, and refined.

Over the past few years, vampires have been favored in media for young adults, which has affected their visual portrayal. Vampires in hit series such as The Twilight Saga and The Vampire Diaries have a distinctly youthful feel compared to those of the 20th century. Along with their refinement is a dominating sense of angst and rebelliousness, which has made these characters even more beloved than ever before.

Whether you’re more of a fan of Dracula or Edward, there’s no denying that vampires are here to stay. What will come next in their aesthetic development? Only time will tell.

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Album Review: Love Goes

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In 2012, the English electronic music duo Disclosure dropped their hit single “Latch,” which featured the vocals of the at-the-time-unknown Sam Smith. Its complex harmonic structure and production, coupled with the pearly treble of Smith’s uniquely stunning vocal, had many hoping for Smith to continue their career down similarly eclectic and groundbreaking avenues. Yet, Smith’s first two albums, In the Lonely Hour and The Thrill of It All, were anything but — catering to legions of high school freshmen getting over their crushes, the albums’ banal ballads took our hopes for something as revelatory as “Latch” and drowned it in gallons of self-piteous treacle.

The beginning of Smith’s new album Love Goes — originally scheduled for a June 2020 release under the name To Die For, before COVID-19 drove them to change both — flashes promise, much like “Latch” did. In the opening song “Young,” Smith takes a heavy breath, as if they were long tired of public pressure weighing them down, before proclaiming, “I want to be wild and young.” Smith’s poignantly delicate vocal, swaddled within layers of Messina-tuned electronic harmonies, reminiscent of Bon Iver or Cashmere Cat, fuses beautifully with the exquisite production of Steve Mac (who had earlier collaborated with Smith on the single “Fire on Fire,” which reappears as one of the album’s six bonus tracks). “Young,” like “Latch,” takes full advantage of Smith’s unique musical gifts to deliver an electrifyingly heartrending track that pushes the boundaries of their sound.

Unfortunately, “Young,” along with a few of the tracks in the album’s first half, is as good as the album gets before it, much like Smith’s post-”Latch” career, torpedoes into a mess of melodramatic pop. Although its opening lines ostensibly signal Smith’s desire to cast aside the handcuffs of convention in favor of reckless hedonism, the declaration that immediately follows encapsulates the album’s shortcomings: “But they’re watching me, judging me / Making me feel so used / Can’t you see that all I wanna do / Is get a little wild.” Smith, frightened by those who are “watching” and “judging,” succumbs to the pressure and avoids getting too “wild.” Love Goes is cursed by restraint and caution — it frustratingly teeters on the precipice of artistic revelation, swiping at the next new page of Smith’s career, but its petulant attachment to the safe and shmaltzy stylings Smith is known for ultimately smothers its promising flashes.

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Smith dazzles in front of more electronically-influenced, modern backdrops; luckily, the first six tracks of the album’s eleven make full use of this complementary pairing. Right after the haunting ambience of “Young” comes the Shellback-produced “Diamonds,” which opens with more synth vocals, subtly panning inwards while swelling into an abrupt cutoff to give way to Smith’s vulnerable confessions. The pulse of the syncopated bass line drives the track’s club-like groove, painting a vivid image of a sweaty, sinister dance floor packed with heartbroken people looking to forget their troubles and make some bad decisions for the night. Smith’s voice, with its cataract force, crackles with nuanced emotional force as it delivers lines such as “You dream of glitter and gold / My hеart’s already been sold.”

The rest of the album’s first half also proves to be solid and engaging, constantly finding refreshing ways to twist and contort Smith’s voice and wring out every last drop of musical marvel it has to offer. The simultaneously confident and bitter “Another One,” with its liberal use of side-chained 808 drums, evokes the nostalgic dance-pop soundscape of Avicii or David Guetta. “My Oasis” viscerally imparts feelings of yearning through clever songwriting — Smith repeats, “My oa-” in the chorus, but the lead vocal never finishes the word — and Burna Boy’s smoky vocals pair nicely with Smith’s lyrical tenor. The disco/house-esque “Dance (’Til You Love Someone Else)” — which, along with “Another One,” was produced with Guy Lawrence of Disclosure — takes us back once again to that dark and dingy club floor, and Smith’s voice is distorted, modulated, and flanged in a maddeningly magnificent spectacle paralleling the track’s titular dance.

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Much like the hangover one may experience after a night-long bender on the dance floor, the second half of Love Goes jerks us back to reality, reminding us that the album’s transcendent first half is but a temporary fling. The flashing lights and synths suddenly vanish and are replaced by a piano sullied with too much reverb in the opening of “For The Lover That I Lost,” which hearkens back to Smith’s earlier oeuvre in the worst ways possible. Its histrionic and uninspired lyrics, such as “Think about your lips and the way they kiss / There’s so much I really miss about you,” could have been just as easily written by a middle schooler in their bedroom. Just when they had us believing that they had finally given up on the sappy violin-and-piano-ballad schtick, they had to shift gears in reverse.

To Smith’s credit, the final two songs on the album at least attempt to salvage their musical regression, but it is perhaps too little, too late — or, in the case of the album’s title track, too much, too late. “Love Goes” opens with a baroque melody that sounds like a pastiche of the Minuet in G major. Right when the song begins to feel like a nightmarish loop of a childhood piano lesson, the beat drops and triumphant horns break out in a fanfare. Smith and the featured Labrinth go from dull crooning to full-force gospel as a trap beat materializes underneath. It is certainly an exciting and welcome development, but it also makes no sense whatsoever in the context of the album, and it feels compensatory for the monotony of the previous tracks. And immediately following “Love Goes” is the closing track “Kids Again,” which sounds closer to country music than anything else on the album. Neither of these tracks are as flagrantly dreadful as the album’s piano ballads, but they hurt its overall cohesiveness. To fall from electronic heaven to ballad hell, and then amble into a strange purgatory combining classical music and country, is far too disorienting and only contributes to the album’s undoing.

Much like they did after “Latch,” Smith squanders their album’s promising start and surrenders to making saccharine radio pop instead; their voice, a singular and special entity, is once again imprisoned in a cage and forced to entertain the masses. The saddest part is that Smith seems to be becoming more and more aware of this — the brazen first half of Love Goes is proof enough that they are making conscious efforts to branch out and utilize the full potential of their instrument and musicality. At the end of the day, however, their fear of being too outside-the-box ultimately drives them back towards safer melodramatic ballads. And so we must wait yet again for Smith to seize their next opportunity and come out swinging; until then, we can cope by dancing the night away to the album’s first half, without a care in the world for the hangover looming dead ahead.

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Fall Is for Foreign TV

For most of us, TV has become a welcome escape from the realities of pandemic life. Netflix subscriptions soared in the last 6 months. At the height of lockdown, the average American household was watching over 66 hours of content per week.

But what happens when TV itself becomes another pandemic casualty?

As cases continue to surge across the country, fall lineups lag beneath the weight of months without on-set production. Cable networks and streaming giants are united in their struggles to churn out new content. But the demands of our peak TV world stop for nothing and no one, not even a pandemic. 

The solution to Covid’s production wipeout? A surge in TV imports. American broadcasters and streaming platforms have picked up an arsenal of foreign TV shows to fill the void left by our time in lockdown. Here are a few of the most noteworthy foreign arrivals to hit our screens this fall. 

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Borgen 

Think The West Wing meets House of Cards. Except it’s all in Danish. This Scandinavian drama follows Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Knudsen) and her foray into the Danish political arena, chronicling her rise from relative obscurity to her position as Denmark’s first female prime minister. 

Borgen offers unique insight into the strengths and shortcomings of centrism. Nyborg, an outspoken moderate, embodies her party’s centrist ideals. While navigating shadowy political underworlds and an increasingly tumultuous home life, she attempts to rein in a country caught between warring extremes. Armed with speechwriter, media consultant, and general “spin doctor” Kasper Juul (Game of Thrones star Pilou Asbæk), Nyborg clings fervently to her authority and her idealism, while political enemies on all sides attempt to strip her of both.     

From an American perspective, Borgen affords all the gritty pleasures of a D.C. knife fight, and none of the heartburn from watching our own political systems implode. What’s not to enjoy?

Borgen first debuted in 2010 to critical acclaim abroad. On September 1st, it was released for streaming on Netflix, where a fourth season revival is expected in 2022. 

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Transplant 

In the forgotten world of cable programming, no fall series has made more of a stir than Transplant. The understated hit first premiered on Canadian networks in March, and is now raking in views during its primetime rerun on NBC.

Creating a medical drama that avoids the pitfalls and cliches of its expansive genre is no easy feat. Transplant shines because it tells a story its predecessors have shied away from- one that centers the experiences of an immigrant and person of color.  

Actor Hamza Haq stars as Bashir  “Bash” Hamed, a trauma doctor and Syrian refugee who stumbles upon the chance to rebuild his medical career in Toronto. In something of a Cinderella story, Bash finds himself with a prestigious new residency after saving the life of a local hospital’s Chief of Medicine. The familiar struggles of residency take on a new dimension when layered with Bash’s struggles to provide for his younger sister, his ongoing battle with PTSD, and the weighty questions of legal status that haunt his community. Beneath a barrage of innovative medical procedures lies a gripping story of resilience. Transplant sets a gold standard for hospital dramas in the years to come. 

Catch new episodes of NBC’s Transplant at 10 pm EST on Tuesday nights.  

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Gomorrah

Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah is a Narcos or Sopranos stripped bare of all but the violent framework. This crime drama pulls no punches. The series initially premiered in Italy in 2014, where a cult following developed around its bleak depictions of mobster violence. Within the first five minutes of episode one, we’ve already seen combatants Ciro (Marco D’Amore) and Attilio (Antonio Milo) nearly burn a rival mobster and his aging grandmother alive.      

There is, of course, a plot churning beneath all the bloodshed. Based on Saviano’s book of the same name, the show submerges viewers in the shadowy dealings of the Savastano clan, a fictional Neapolitan crime family. Like its genre predecessors, Gomorrah champions the age-old story of the anti-hero. As the show progresses, it becomes nearly impossible to identify a character with a moral compass that’s still intact.

As viewers, we can’t help but appreciate the deft displays of criminal genius holding together the Savastano enterprise. Scattered amidst the grime of city streets are stills of red and gold finery that would make anyone jealous. But in this world, riches are fleeting. Glamour is temporary. There’s a sharp honesty to the way the show presents mob violence. And Saviano never fails to remind us of the consequences of such arbitrary brutality. For a tense 45 minutes, we must imagine what it’s like to live with eyes in the back of our heads. 

Gomorrah was released for streaming on HBO this October. Seasons 1 & 2 are currently available, with seasons 3 & 4 forthcoming.

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Album Reflection: Positions

Some albums deserve to be given extra time to soak in. In the three weeks since its release, I have made every effort to give Positions a thorough and fair listen. While the first track politely asks critics to “shut up”, here’s my take on Ariana Grande’s latest album:

The last two projects from Ariana Grande have been fantastic on their own merit, but they were particularly striking given the challenging two years in which they were created. No one would have faulted Ariana for taking a several-year hiatus, but instead, she chose to make lemonade out of lemons. Now that her life has mellowed out, at least in comparison to the chaotic state that the world has plunged into, it seems fitting that Positions would be filled with laid back melodies and beautiful layers of strings. 

The aforementioned opening track showcases the most beautiful way to tell someone off, with Ariana’s “maybe you should shut up” bouncing against some staccato strings. It is a sparkling and self-assured start to the album, ensuring every listener knows that she is happy with the album she has delivered.

From this point forward, it is clear that this project not a product of pain or desire to please anyone, but an overview of Ariana’s current life. With most tracks being under three minutes, drowned in either sultry or all-out sexual lyrics, Ariana gives her most positive yet mid-tempo tracklist so far in her career.

“34 + 35”s candid and high sexualized lyrics are as entertaining as they are blush-inducing. Here the pop-R&B mix Ariana has previously dipped her toes into is all out on display as she asks her lover to, “stay up all night.” Its sister track in theme and quality appears later in the form of “nasty”. Another song like “obvious” echoes a similar sensual pop-R&B-trap concoction that Ariana has mastered (or as I will discuss later—worn out). While the theme of sex is not new to Ariana or the genres she is pulling from, it is still refreshing to hear the honesty she employs, even if the lyrics fail to reach much depth.

Tracks like “six thirty” or “west side” do nothing wrong but also fall deeper into the safe formula Ariana constructed with Thank u, next without any particular innovation. Her collaboration with The Weekend is an emotional take where Arina wonders if she’ll “ever love somebody like the way I did you,” Beautifully arranged and sultry, it is an adequate follow up to their previous collaboration “Love Me Harder”. Similarly, the title track is neither a showstopper nor Ariana’s most interesting lead single, but it remains a fun track to return to now and then (with a promptly themed music video.) 

In this way, Positions never falters completely, displaying a diverse breadth of catchy songs. Ari’s vocals are crisp, layered, and as stunning as ever. The long-awaited Doja Cat collaboration “motive”, as well as the quirky “love language”, are fun changes of pace. The latter continuing the lavish use of strings throughout the project.

Moments like “my hair” are even more invigorating as Ariana trends towards a jazzier sound, with whistle notes that stop you in your tracks without feeling showboating. “safety net” is without a doubt one of the most notable moments of the record, and Ty Dolla $ign’s performance that pulls the track together (as have his other recent features). While “pov” does not hit a climax as high as other of Ariana’s closers, it’s a sublime track with some of Ariana’s most endearing lyricism. 

In retrospect, Positions should not be all that surprising. Ariana’s work for the Charlie’s Angels reboot soundtrack was a solid ‘okay’, and she has not taken a substantial break from music in recent memory to allow for a great shift in her sound. Notably, the songwriting team that helped Ariana craft Thank u, next is almost entirely back for this project.

The saying, “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” appears apt for Ariana’s approach to this album. It is consistently straightforward, honest, and filled with some of Arina’s most well-crafted harmonies. Fans will rightly enjoy hearing that she is moving on from the pain of the last several years, and casual listeners can find something to return to now and again. Suffice to say, there’s not really a sure skip on the record, but at the same time, it is all too easy for none of the songs to be particularly memorable. To a certain extent, it feels harsh to critique something as harmless and personal as this record. Regardless, for all that Positions does right, it still manages to never quite move Ariana forward as her previous projects have, and in a time when the world is changing so drastically, it is hard to not notice when things stay the same.

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Holiday: Lil Nas X's Merry Return

Lil Nas X. My absolute king in the world of music and on Twitter. On Friday, he dropped a new song titled “Holiday” along with a decked-out music video, and I can surely say that he dropped it with a bang.

Let’s start with the song: firstly, I just want to warn you, this is not a song you should be playing at the Christmas dinner table with your grandmother. It’s not necessarily, shall we say, “family-oriented.” It also doesn’t have that Christmas-vibe I was expecting and isn’t anything particularly new from the singer—it very much sounds exactly like his low-toned, simple-yet-groovy beat style and he didn’t seem to take many risks with it. Nevertheless, it is a BANGER—not everything has to be groundbreaking like “Old Town Road.” I appreciate the man just wanting to spread a little Xmas cheer.

The song is his burgeoning confidence in who he is as a person and as an artist in the music industry: he has reached what some may call a peak in his career (although I hope that he keeps rising!) and thus every day, for him, feels like a “Holiday.” He’s recently embraced his sexuality publicly, has challenged gender norms by expressing it, and, of course, his music has smashed its way through the top charts.

 Favorite line of the song: “Hee hee I’m as bad as Michael Jackson.”

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Where I would say he lacked in creativity for the music, he made up for in the video. Lil Nas X has a tendency to go for sci-fi looks, and this time around he did not disappoint. Set on Christmas Eve in the year 2220, Lil Nas X plays multiple different characters. First, he appears as a futuristic Santa Claus, decked out in metallic pants with matching suspenders overtop a glittery shirt. His elves are actually robots, and I find the funniest part of the video to be where an elf is working on a PS5, the new console that everyone in the year 2020 has been raving about.

Imagine getting some sort of random 200-year-old gaming device as a Christmas present. Whoever is getting that must have been put on the naughty list!

The scene changes to Lil Nas X as some sort of larger, Transformer-esque robot. I’m not quite sure if he’s supposed to be a toy, as the character wakes up in a box on a conveyor belt, but before I have time to think further, he switches characters again.

Next, he’s a different toy driving a toy car. He wears yet another metallic outfit, this time sporting a more emo look with spiked shoulder pads and a mohawk. His makeup is incredible: his face looks like it has been lit ablaze with black fire as the swift marks are highlighted with bits of frosty white to make the look pop.

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As the car races along, another version of Lil Nas X stops the car. He is life-sized, so I’m going to assume he is not a toy. Instead, due to his ears and boots, I assume he is an elf—one of the only non-robotic ones, I guess? Again he dresses in a metallic fashion, this time in the form of a vest, a pleated skirt, and striped leggings. His silver hair adds to the entire look, as do the orange eye makeup and colored contacts (which freak me out, by the way).

While we break into a second chorus with a dance choreography from these four different characters, we have Santa Lil Nas X leave his office to get ready for his big night out. As he descends an elevator, he somehow emerges with his metallic Santa hat and overcoat. He hops into his sleigh, which is actually a sports car. Who knew. It’s no surprise at this point that his reindeer are, you guessed it, robots.

The part I laughed out loud at was when Santa’s workshop is revealed to be behind a Mount Rushmore version of Lil Nas X and his previous music video characters. Like I said, this song is about him celebrating himself.

Overall video review: the visuals are out of this world. It amazes me that this man can even come up with these kinds of concepts. The level of detail in the video is insane. Just look at each shot and admire the trinkets in the background, or each character’s outfits. Not a thing was missed.

I hope to see more from Lil Nas X in 2021 as he continues to push boundaries in music, fashion, entertainment, and society as a whole. Catch me continuing to be a part of the Nasarati nation for years to come.

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Album Reflection: Clementine

Between the recent releases of albums such as Ariana Grande’s Positions and LANY’s Mama’s Boy, it feels as though I’ve been treated to a never-ending stream of new music from long-time favorite artists. However, my most anticipated release of the season was Grant Klein’s debut album Clementine. I discovered Klein through his band {Parentheses}, which fortuitously appeared in my Spotify recommendations in the spring. {Parentheses} quickly became one of my favorite bands due to their uniquely vibrant sound. Many of their songs, especially “It’s Always Sunny With You” and “Jackson Pollock,” have been on repeat the past six months. As such, I had high expectations for Klein’s first solo album, and Clementine did not disappoint.

Clementine, released October 30, features indie rock and pop influences. Given Klein’s piano expertise, it’s no surprise that the album relies heavily on instrumentals, with upbeat piano melodies being given center stage. While providing a unique musical sound of its own, Clementine also possesses a nostalgia-inducing familiarity. This is particularly evident in opener “Notes,” my personal favorite song from the album. While Clementine as a whole is quite energetic, “Notes” features a relaxing beat reminiscent of the background music featured in childhood favorite video games like Wii Sports Resort or Mario Kart. While Klein’s vocals certainly elevate the song from these classic video game soundtracks, this familiarity evokes cheerful memories of peaceful days long past.

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There is a uniquely youthful energy present in Clementine, which is conveyed through the songs’ high energy. Rock number “Melted” continually grows more and more fast-paced, conveying an appropriate sense of urgency as Klein worries that he is “melting through the cracks.” “Melted” is one of many songs on the album that demonstrates Klein’s skill in crafting an exquisite harmony between his vocals and the background instrumentals. Klein also proves a mastery of multiple genres of music. Slow-paced instrumental number “Hiding in Hydrangeas” is, in many ways, the opposite of “Melted.” Even so, it is just as well-educated, and despite a lack of lyrics, Klein is able to portray a youthful sense of wonder about the world. It’s a deeply beautiful piece, and Klein’s ability to navigate such a diverse range of music styles within his debut album is quite impressive.

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Ideas of nostalgia and youth are present not only in Clementine’s sound but also in its lyrics. “Annie” is a fun and lighthearted love song in which Klein declares “you make me stupid” to the titular Annie. He jokes about continually misplacing his belongings and forgetting important information because of the space that she occupies in his mind, noting that his “brain is filled with Annie.” This theme of youth is also present in “Cherry Tree,” the album’s lead single and most popular track. Accompanied by an incredibly addicting piano tune, Klein sings, “I’m stuck here without you, baby. And I’m learning that the truth will never change a thing.” Throughout the song, he muses on the lessons that heartbreak and the passage of time have brought him.

Clementine is a masterful debut album that signifies that beginning of an exciting and highly promising solo career for Grant Klein. Available on all streaming services, the album is highly worth the listen. Marked by a fresh and memorable sound, Clementine has a wide range of songs to suit all your musical needs, from study music to the perfect soundtrack for dancing alone in your room.

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Intrinsic Care (and Why the Makeup Stain on Your Mask Should Please You)

It was such a relief at first! Barely leaving the house under the requirements of the mandatory quarantine, I was left alone with my most innate self. Even if I did leave, the good-old glasses disguise of Superman had reincarnated into its new form - masks, making me almost unrecognizable outside.

There was no need to set my alarm for 30 minutes earlier to dress up, put makeup on. The solution to a bad hair day was as simple as a “Stop the Video” button on the left hand corner of the Zoom. My cozy, home-like portrait was squashed into a rectangular frame: A well-groomed body on the upper half and a pair of legs snuggled by a pyjamas on the bottom, referencing myself to a centaur was inevitable. 

Soon the mist of comfiness cleared up, unveiling my extrinsic motivations to take care of myself, which disappeared as soon as my ties with the external drifted apart. 24-hours of leggings and t-shirts, messy buns, and especially a me, who stopped looking at the mirror, not caring what to see on it, were not the synonyms of comfort.

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According to a research conducted by L’Oréal, involvement with makeup products rises as the interaction with other people increases. This research “found that some 34% of Chinese women wore makeup in February, during the peak of the lockdown - this figure has now increased to 68% in late June to early July,” when life turned back to its so-called normal state. The Youtube views of the fitness Youtuber Chloe Ting, who,as the movement of the quarantine, rose sharply in May, identified with the hopes of “glowing-up after quarantine” (Glowing to whom? Yes, the same question...), and slowly decreased to its pre-virus state as people realized that this situation is longer than a “21-day challenge.” A full circle, back to snack-fed bellies that we can hide under the frame of Zoom…

Even though I was relieved by learning I was not the only one who got motivated by her surroundings, this meant that there are even more people who perceive the process of “adornment” as something that is done for others. 

How one looks is a representation of self. Our characters are not solid; They are fluids that change and adapt, depending on the situations and people we interact with. Reminded of something? Yes, just like our fits. My location was the indoors of my home. The person I interacted with the most was myself. Yet, the girl I checked out on the tall dressing mirror did not reflect the “me.” Once a friend told me, if clothes are our armors, the girl I saw was the most defenseless me I had ever experienced, when she had to be the strongest in the midst of a pandemic, alone. 

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As Margherita Cardelli of Giuliva Heritage said,  “Dressing up is who we are. It is a way to stand up for our values that definitely are not going to be put aside because of the virus. Rather, they’re felt even stronger.” I was not going to be the one who put her zest to the shelf.

That day, I shuffled my most recent playlist and put on my “to wear at a very special event” fit. When I stood in front of the mirror, I realized that I longed to illustrate my appearance on a new day’s blank page. I dressed up. I wore my mask on top of my makeup. There was no one to see it. However, finally, after weeks of neglecting the need to look like myself, there I stood in my boots in the middle of the bedroom with my makeup smudged on my mask. 

And I loved it.

(picture by Su Karaca)

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The Atlantic’s “White Noise” Lives Up To Its Name

White Noise, released by The Atlantic and directed by Daniel Lombroso, joins an increasingly crowded genre of films trying to make sense of the alt-right, the loose collective, centered on 4-chan and Reddit, of mostly young men connected by their support of Donald Trump, hatred of the Left, and little else.

Calling the alt-right an ideology is a little misleading – the term covers a motley of beliefs from White Supremacists to incels and opportunist trolls. White Noise differentiates itself by following the lives of three of the mostly anonymous movement’s public faces: pill salesman and Twitter personality Mike Cernovich, anti-immigration advocate Lauren Southern and White Supremacist Richard Spencer. We watch them go on dates (Southern’s boyfriend tells her that they have a duty to reproduce European children), throw awkward parties (the white ethnostate doesn’t look very fun) and decompress after being heckled at college campus speaking engagements, but learn very little of their actual beliefs.

The best moments of White Noise come when the ridiculousness of their philosophies are driven home to them. Southern and Cernovich marry and have children with non-white partners, and when asked about it the smoke pouring out of their ears is almost tangible. Southern in particular must deal with Titanic-sized levels of cognitive dissonance, as she denies being a feminist while dealing with rampant misogyny and come-ons from married “defenders of the family,” and advocates for the traditional role of women while herself trying to maintain a professional life and a family. 

But even these moments, few as they are, are made bitter-sweet by the realization: Why are we following these people at all? This problem extends to all of the films tracking the alt-right. They focus almost exclusively on the movement’s members and beliefs, but never ask themselves whether we should be giving them that kind of attention at all. Treating their beliefs as intellectual puzzles obfuscates their maliciousness, and focusing only on them rather than the people they harm gives the alt-right exactly what it wants.

White Noise is guilty of this fault twice-over: by exclusively following the personal lives of the leaders it gives them exposure while failing to explain the harm they cause or how their views came about. The film gives us glimpses of the people we might have followed – the immigrants Southern interviews in France, living under a bridge, promised a life in Europe and given only a tent; Cernovich’s long-suffering Iranian-American wife, a living refutation of his beliefs, surrounded by Islamophobia and misogyny but still in love with the father of her child – but instead we are given a pity-laden portrayal of the people least deserving of our attention.

The fatal flaw of the film, however, lies elsewhere. In the final 15 minutes it stumbles into peddling the comforting myth that being a bad person makes the alt-righters sad, a view no more true than the thought that good people are always happy. (On the contrary, it is precisely their unhappiness that makes a sizable portion of the alt-right join, not the other way around.) This illusion breeds pity for them, and allows us to be complacent in the face of their bigotry.

Keeping tabs on the alt-right is important, but only because of the damage they do, not because of what they are in themselves. White Noise is a pertinent reminder of what happens when we forget that.

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Tea, Tumult, and Tradition: a Trip Through The Crown Season 4 Trailer

Mark your calendars because the fourth season of the beloved historically based television series featuring Britain’s royal upper crust, The Crown, is set to release on Netflix this Sunday November 15th. This season spans the late 70s into the dawn of the 1990s, following Elizabeth and England’s journey through the Irish Republican Army attacks, the ten week Falkland War, and tense relations with South Africa during the apartheid period.

Paralleling the tumult the country faced internationally, there was also a fair share of personal drama within the palace walls. Between Prince Charles’ courtship of Lady Diana Spencer, his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, Princess Margaret’s battle with mental health, and the decline of Princess Anne’s first marriage to Captain Mark Phillips, the audience will have an abundance of drama to look forward to.

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Season 4 is uniquely intriguing since it focuses on not only one, but two women in the highest seats of political power in England. On the throne as the figurehead of monarchy and generational rule is Queen Elizabeth played by the brilliant Academy Award winning actress Olivia Coleman. Joining the cast as her rival in power and wit is Gillian Anderson as the cunning Margaret Thatcher, a leader of the people and voice for democratic principles in her role as England’s first female prime minister. 

The tension between the two women bleeds through the screen in the cinematically rich trailer released by Netflix on October 29th.

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In the opening minutes, the audience catches a glimpse of a meeting between Elizabeth and Margaret in the Queen’s private sitting room. In this dramatic scene, Thatcher kneels before the Queen as a sign of respect, but just before rising to her feet she remarks,

“We are the same age after all… just six months between us.” 

Taken aback by Margaret’s statement, Elizabeth asks,

“And who is the senior?”

To which Margaret responds,

“I am… ma’am.”

The brief pause between Margaret’s response and her hesitant “ma’am” speaks volumes. Not only does it place emphasis on the fact that she is the older of the two, but it also conveys to Elizabeth that Margaret will not bow to the power of the crown. Margaret wants to show Elizabeth that she is just as wise, just as poised, and just as prepared to guide the English people into a new dawn. She is willing to work alongside Elizabeth, but she will not sacrifice her principles and bend to the will of the monarchy. In the brief seconds of this interaction, the audience experiences a taste of the intriguing and tumultuous relationship between the two most powerful women in England that will play out through the course of the season.

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While the past three seasons sang an ode to Elizabeth, this season will sing for both Margaret and Elizabeth, shining light on the neverending hardships and short lived victories brought on by being a woman in a male dominated sphere. Prince Philip himself shares his doubts, boldly declaring to Elizabeth that

“Two women running the shop. [That’s] the last thing this country needs.”

To this Elizabeth retorts,

“Perhaps that’s precisely what this country needs.”

And perhaps Elizabeth is right. In the next minutes of the trailer, the audience is blinded by the flash of a camera as a photographer snaps a portrait of the members of Parliament. Like a rose peeking out of a bushel of thorns, Margaret Thatcher sits cross legged, adorned in a deep magenta dress, blaring in stark contrast with the sea of black suits. Despite being out of place, Thatcher is unafraid to shake the ground she stands on and rally for change, shifting the power of long standing political and social institutions that were once the backbone of England. 

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As the wrought iron gilded gates of Buckingham Palace open, allowing Margaret’s car to enter, the trailer cuts to a clip of her boldly declaring, 

“My goal is to change this country from being dependent to self-reliant, and I think in that I am succeeding.”

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The film then cuts to a large crowd of protestors filling the streets with throngs of police officers shielding them in. In the center of the shot, a group of hands holds up a large black poster with bold white lettering reading, “Civil Rights Association.” Thatcher’s England is one of change, a shift from the status quo. Elizabeth, as head of the monarchy, is in strong juxtaposition with Thatcher’s vision, and she warns,

“Joblessness, recession, crises. It’s a dangerous game to make enemies left, right, and center.”

Margaret, however, is prepared and retorts,

“What if one is comfortable with having enemies?”

This bold assertion solidifies Margaret’s mission, and shows the audience that she is not afraid of Elizabeth and the ancient power of monarchy that she represents, paving the way for an interesting power dynamic throughout the season.

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Woven between the political drama from Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, Season 4 also welcomes the appearance of Emma Corrin as the lovely Princess Diana. The season will follow Prince Charles’ courtship of Lady Diana Spencer, their grand 1981 wedding, and the subsequent deterioration of their marriage in later years. Diana’s story is one of both tragedy and immense inspiration, and it will be exciting to watch Corrin personify her story on screen, breathing new air into a broken woman. In studying Diana’s persona, Corrin notes,

“She had so much time for other people… and she was incredibly emotionally intelligent.”

Princess Diana came from another world, and entering the royal realm was like setting foot in a foreign land. Life as a royal comes with a whole different set of societal norms and expectations than one would experience in ordinary society, and The Crown season 4 will explore these complex differences. 

In a breathtaking clip, the audience watches Diana rollerblade down the halls of Buckingham Palace, listening to music on her walkman radio. Her pink gingham pants, white wheeled skates, and short blonde hair stick out in stark contrast with the age old galleries, arching doorways, and gold mouldings of the palace. Gliding her way through the halls, Diana represents a break in long lasting family tradition, a breath of fresh air.

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As a member of the royal family, Diana the individual had to take on a whole new role as Princess Diana—a figurehead and role model for the people. A role that would eventually wear her down and lead to her breaking point. 

In a beautifully tragic clip, the audience watches Diana dance alone in a blue leotard and silky sky blue skirt in a grand isolated room in the palace. Diana dances wildly, flailing her arms and spinning endlessly round and round as she releases mounds of frustration and pent up emotions until she falls broken to the floor. Like a fallen dove, tainted by long exposure to the sun and lack of food and sustenance, Diana is worn down by the burdens of life. This scene is painful, yet perhaps the most poignant of the trailer. It reminds audiences that although The Crown is a beloved television series, it’s events and emotions were also a reality for real women and men who lived and continue to live within the walls of Buckingham Palace, secluded from the rest of the world.

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In an interview with Harper’s BAZAAR UK, Corrin reminds the audience,

“Our series is so separate from the reality. No one really knows or will ever know what their relationship was like… and nor should we.”

Nor should we. That statement holds immense power, and reminds The Crown enthusiasts that we are simply watching an artistic interpretation of a very real and very personal history. As cinematically brilliant and informative as The Crown is, it is one depiction of complex characters and nuanced events that we will never truly understand. And as a member of the audience, there is comfort in the fact that we will never truly know the centuries of joy and pain plastered into the walls of the palace, but rather we can observe and appreciate The Crown’s new season from the safety of our homes.

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Javier Senosiain & The Organic House

Understanding organic architecture is about feeling the world around you. Think back to the last time you took your bike, scooter, even your Big Wheel out to play around your neighborhood. As the wind lightly glossed your face and tousled your hair, you gained speed. Faster and faster until –– a sharp connection to the asphalt, bits of green grass stuck to the blood on your knee. By that time, you would relegate yourself to the indoors, dabbing Neosporin on the cut and cleaning the soil off your fingertips. 

Organic architecture takes the synthetic, manmade forms of building and integrates them with the surrounding world. The architects pay attention to the use of the natural within the artificial. Yes, humans created the showerhead and the sink spout, but the water? That is nature, which must be acknowledged. Louis Sullivan, the “father of skyscrapers,” pioneered the term under the belief that “if the work is to be organic, the function of the parts must have the same quality as the function of the whole.” While Frank Lloyd Wright is often highlighted during the discussion, the organic style has been found in traditional Eastern styles of buildings, most especially Japanese architecture. The dominance of nature within the space of the building is most notable, as architects must bend ideas such as form, shapes, and color to the will of the nature in front of them. 

The different tools for organic architecture are as follows: geometric shapes, curvilinear lines, unaltered materials, and authentic form. 

Surprisingly enough, for some architects, math guides their conception of organic architecture. Math, specifically geometry, define the world around us. While many things in the world are not as easily explained, our description and understanding of nature’s proportions are dependent on math. Basic geometric shapes govern both the artificial and natural world, acting as a bridge for the two to connect. 

For example, Antoni Gaudi, a Catalan architect, adopted “geometrical structures present in nature,” specifically “hyperbolic hyperboloids that are in fact inspired by tree trunks.” By harmonizing the shapes within nature and the mathematical constructions within architecture, Gaudi was able to cohere the two within the Sagrada Familia. Furthermore, Louis Sullivan also denoted various principles based on lines, discussing the balance between geometric shapes and curvilinear forms. 

Many architects, most notably within the Eastern building tradition, use materials derived naturally for their structures. By utilizing the same forms that repeat in the landscape, the construction seems less artificial, thereby raw and unprocessed by humans. The use of raw materials and various shapes leads to the idea of the aggregate form representing and flowing along with the assemblage of nature itself. 

Another leader in the organic style is Javier Senosiain, a Mexican architect who combines his heritage with the form and function of his work. Senosiain has researched bio-architecture and freeform design, leading him to create the “Organic House” in 1984. While this piece was developed and constructed over 20 years ago, it still remains relevant to this day. 

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The “Organic House” is covered in a lush green landscape, the building itself almost completely hidden by the environment around it. Senosiain constructed it in this way because, to him, “to take a walk in the garden is to walk over the roof of the house itself without even realizing it.” A key piece of the “organic” part of organic architecture is the viewer’s interaction with space itself. When the interaction between the human and the building resembles that of a creation point, space itself becomes primal.

The “elemental functions required by man: a place to live and fellowship with others.”

Where Frank Lloyd Wright built atop a waterfall, Senosiain burrowed beneath it.

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Instead of taking an external approach with the rolling green hills of Mexico, Senosiain worked inwardly. The architecture feeds off the energy of the hills through the interior, working within nature rather than around it.

Senosian discusses what the house maintains as “the elemental functions required by man: a place to live, and fellowship with others.” I think this is what I love so much about the piece itself. While emphasizing all of the traditional forms of organic architecture, Senosiain brings something new to the table. He emphasizes a kind of primitivism in his work, where so many others display elegance. From the gritty terro-cement interior to the hidden exterior, Senosiain doesn’t just juxtapose Naucalpan de Juarez and the habitual form. He does not settle for connection between the artificial and the natural. He turns the artificial into the natural.

The very essence of building broaches the unnatural.

The world at our fingertips is the untamed, touched only by the cosmos. When we build atop that world, we turn the natural into the artificial. In the Bay Area, every plot of usable land has transformed from golden grass to apartment complexes in the 10-mile radius surrounding my home. So-called “scenic routes” cut through the rolling hills and deep valleys, trying to make as little of a human impact as possible. But when nature hands us rock slides, we don’t back down. We put up signs, nets, and bridges until the industrial has usurped the organic. The Organic House stands at the boundary of this ever-changing phenomenon. We won’t stop reconstructing the Earth: designing, creating, and building is who we are and how we have chosen to leave our mark as humans.  

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What does the Organic House have to do with our current state of affairs? What does organic architecture provide us in the time of Covid-19? At the very least, the pandemic has drastically changed and sped up production of transportation and habitual architecture to maintain policies of social distancing. Rigid, urban life –– moving shoulder to shoulder on cramped streets in cramped cities –– has all but disappeared in the last couple months, leaving us to reconcile our ephemerality with the permanence of nature. In the next few months, architects may be emboldened to repurpose our connection with nature, and as a byproduct, our connection to ourselves. After the virus, when we depart from online modules of existence and back into the natural world, maybe the architecture, along with us, will become more organic.

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How Ratched Reigns with Style

In 2019, Empire Magazine asked its readers who they thought were the most iconic villains of all time. From their answers, the magazine published an online article highlighting the 20 most iconic villains and why such characters were so recognizable. The antagonists selected to feature in the piece included, among others, The Joker, Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort, Agent Smith, Sauron, Hannibal Lecter, Loki, and…

Nurse Ratched.

Nurse Ratched? The only female villain on such a list? It seems like Louise Fletcher’s Oscar-worthy portrayal of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest antagonist has been immortalized by people throughout the years. What has enthralled the audiences to care for, or rather, fear such a character? What is it about Mildred Ratched that makes people remember her so “fondly?” Ryan Murphy and Sarah Paulson’s new Netflix series Ratched goes deep into those questions.

Or do they? The first season rather deconstructs the nature of Ratched’s character, showing her as a determined, quick-witted, imposing woman. But before trying to show her as the merciless villain of the 1975 movie and the 1962 book, the series humanizes her through her backstory. And part of this contrast between her commanding nature and her hidden softer side is highlighted through fashion and costume design.

The series takes place in 1947, 15 years before both the novel and the movie’s story, so the costume design had to reflect the form-fitting, waist-fitted, more professional nature of the clothing at the time. But vivid, all-encompassing bold colors and flamboyant yet grounded accessories (hats, glasses, purses) were part of the creators’ contemporary touch in the series. These features are apparent dichotomies of the dichromatic, dull whites and reds contrasting with the movie’s grey mental asylum walls, showing a different side of Nurse Ratched, a more lively and young character who is still learning who she wants to be. And that also reflects Mildred’s portrayal by both actresses. While Louise Fletcher’s depiction of Ratched is emotionally subtle and artificial, and heavily controlled, showing nothing of her inner thoughts and conflicts, Sarah Paulson depicts a more emotionally conflicted Ratched, who frequently appears cold and unsympathetically oblivious like her future self, but is also often very vulnerable and, shockingly, kind.  

Nurse Ratched (who, spoiler alert, is not actually a nurse initially) can be seen in two distinct wardrobes categories throughout the series. The first is her blue-green nurse uniform, dubbed by the costume designers as “surgical green.” In itself, green appears several times in the whole series, worn by virtually every single main character. Costume designer Rebecca Guzzi explained that Murphy wanted green in its various shades to signify “violence, oppression, lust, envy, greed, and evil,” traits that permeate the story.

For Ratched and Nurse Bucket (the head nurse of the Lucia State Hospital where the story takes place), their surgical silky green uniform represents status, since all the other trainee and orderly hospital employers wear aqua blue to match with the idyllic coastal landscape around it. But Ratched’s nurse wardrobe (which also features the iconic war-time nurse cap) is not complete without her bold red lipstick. Ryan Murphy did not want red appearing in any garment, so blood could create the right contrast for a scene to be impactful, but he demanded Mildred’s lips to be red. Whenever she is wearing her monochromatic surgical green uniform, her lips pop out in a menacing manner, which gives more effect to the poise and intimidation of her speech when she is working at the Hospital.

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The other category of Nurse Ratched’s wardrobes entails the clothing worn whenever she presents herself to other people in her off-duty hours. That is when the costume designers put all their knowledge, style, and creativity together. But it was not only them that had a hand in deciding her garment’s complexions. Sarah Paulson had a massive influence on building the fashionista side of her character. It may feel weird to imagine the Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest wearing a 1940s navy blue tilted fedora, bright emerald gloves, cat-eye sunglasses, a navy cape embroidered with an R, a dark green purse, navy pants, and a buttoned-up navy and green-edged vest. Or maybe picture her dressed in softer tones like pastel orange accessorizing with two pearl necklaces. But the show is bold and decides to interpret her past in their own way. Her sense of style is specified as coming from the fashion magazines she reads. Because she wants to accomplish her goals (I will not spoil what they are), she learns to adapt and dress the part.

Every single garment choice is thoroughly thought out by both the costume designers and Mildred herself, and that is why Sarah Paulson’s input was critical. Her navy blue and green look was explicitly designed to give her an air of a hero, as Guzzi says that “she's trying to be the perfect nurse and that she's, in her mind, trying to care for people in the way that she thinks is appropriate,” and yet it is dark and bright at the same time, which ends up making her look close to a godly figure, demanding respect. In the scene she wears those garbs, she tries to manipulate an injured person to comply with her, first appealing to his safety. And her pastel orange costume was designed to give her a professional, structured, tailored, and fancy look because she wears it while applying to work for the Lucia State Hospital.

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However, Ratched is not the only character in the show that draws attention due to her garments (all of them do, but I must only pick one other). Amongst all the supporting characters, Sharon Stone’s Lenore Osgood dazzles with her ostentatious style. While every other person in the story is more austere due to WWII’s economic impact in the US, Osgood is a Greta Garbo inspired person, dripping in silk satins, furs, and diamonds here and there. Ryan Murphy even stated that he wanted the audience to think that she would have no qualms wearing jewelry in her bathtub (which she does). The colors Osgood is most attached to are whites and creams (she also wears green and red, which do reflect the meaning of these colors as stated before), which match with her hair and also represent the shiny nature of glamour that blinds the eyes and is unmistakable at any glance. With Lenore, it was all about the excessive, reflecting her style of life and, of course, the mental plot involving her and her son.

At the end of the day, if Ratched does not entice you because of its story, the director’s touch, or the portrayal of its actors, the production design and, more importantly, the costume design behind the series will undoubtedly amaze you. You can check out Ratched now on Netflix.

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Blackness and Authenticity in Punk

It’s incredibly telling that rock critic and historian Greil Marcus was able to pronounce what punk rock was in 1979 – just two years after Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols was released, the only album by the band he calls the “formal (though not historical) conclusion” of punk. Punk was a brief flash of brilliance, an explosion whose shrapnel we are still feeling today as the genres that splintered off: post-punk, hardcore, new wave, noise rock, pop-punk, whatever term the editors of No Depression finally settled on, and ultimately all of “alternative” rock. One way or another, punk is the year zero for all rock music that came after; its effects are hard to overstate, and go far beyond the music. 

Marcus argues the Sex Pistols took punk’s first-wave to a vitriolic conclusion by redefining it in their image, away from the avant-garde punks of New York. Self-appointed dean of rock critics Robert Chistgau describes the work of “avant-punk” as:

harness[ing] late industrial capitalism in a love-hate relationship whose difficulties are acknowledged, and sometimes disarmed, by means of ironic aesthetic strategies: formal rigidity, role-playing, humor. In fact, ironies will pervade and, in a way, define this project: the lock-step drumming will make liberation compulsive, pain-threshold feedback will stimulate the body while it deadens the ears… 

The Pistols dropped the “avant-” and with it the irony and self-conscious artistry of Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, Lou Reed, and other seminal avant-punks. In its place they put – or at least Rotten and Vicious put – unadulterated, ugly nihilism. This is why Marcus places Sex Pistols at the formal conclusion of punk: they were committed to the destruction of everything, including (paradoxically) rock itself. Unlike the Clash, who were careful to be on the right side politically, the politics of the Pistols was pure negation in its most gleefully manic form. This is what makes listening to Nevermind the Bollocks exhilarating, to this day: the guitars assault the senses while the drums clamor away oppressively, and Rotten – what hasn’t been said about him already? His snarls, his rolled-R’s, half-sung half-growled, that devious cackle; he’s the most convincingly nasty singer rock’s ever seen. When Rotten says he is the Antichrist, you almost believe him. 

Rotten’s lyrics are loathing-filled tirades, the product of unfocused dissatisfaction channeled into hate and aimed at anything in sight. Listening to the Pistols is less an experience of having your dissatisfactions reflected back to you than magnified, made metaphysical in scope, and as Christgau writes, aimed at – for the time in rock – those in power. He is a lightning rod for the inchoate rage and dissatisfaction in the listener. He gives the intoxicating feeling of having the freedom to take things too far, of hearing your worst impulses acted out, of glimpsing something beyond the claustrophobia of ordinary life, of, as Elvis Costello sang, biting the hand that feeds you. It can be childish, but also often brilliant and beautiful. The Pistols showed the pure joy of hate.

Still, the Sex Pistols were doomed to fail from the beginning, in both their broader goal of tearing down the institutions they railed against, and in merely surviving as a band. Denial of everything can never make a coherent philosophical position – much less a viable political one. They tried to destroy rock by making it; to deny the past and the future alike while drawing on the former and influencing the latter; to remove themselves from the game of images while astutely managing theirs; to be outcasts signed to a major label. Working under the thought that what we’re offended can show us our true beliefs and expose our hypocrisies, the Pistols railed against the tyranny they saw in English society. But by the same logic they also gave voice to, and thereby legitimized the pointlessly cruel behavior of Sid Vicious. Their contradictions vitalized their music while destroying them as individuals and a band. Marcus is right that the noblest thing Rotten could have done was to leave, to become as anonymous as he could.

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In contrast to the high-minded vitriol (and below-the-belt punches) of the Pistols, there is my favorite of the first-wave English punks, the Buzzcocks. Their EP Spiral Scratch was the first independently released punk album in the UK, beginning the proudly independent trend in punk rock. Rightly grouped among the progenitors of pop-punk, Buzzcocks used the discordance and cacophony of punk on their masterpiece, Singles Going Steady, to give musical expression to the anguish, excitement, humor, and longing of love, infusing the bombast with an ear for pop craftsmanship.

Buzzcocks proved to their peers and the masses alike that the musical language of punk could be used to express something other than hate and boredom; punk, to them, was personal. Their best songs refused to participate in the lyrical refrains of prior punk, from the avant-punk Christgau described to Rotten’s nihilism. “Orgasm Addict,” a charming song about masturbation, would go on to help inspire future generations of self-love themed punk songs (a natural development, perhaps, of punk’s DIY attitude). Pete Shelley sounds exasperated in “What Do I Get” from a lack of love, while on “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” the band sounds like a cynical reflection of the Beach Boys. They expressed classic punk themes on the bratty “Oh Shit” and “Autonomy.” These were no one chord wonders. 

Their most effective statement of purpose is found on the single “Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve).” Guitars rip and clash, then momentarily hold back, before repeating the cycle in the neverending game of exhaustion and ecstasy, heartbreak and rapture of doomed love. While the guitars give sonic articulation to the tsunami of emotion which threatens to crush Shelley under its weight, the drums start and stop in turn; rarely has a drum mimicked a nervously flitting heartbeat so well. Shelley’s pointed use of gender neutral pronouns – he was the first openly bisexual musician in English punk – makes the song welcoming of love of all types, a rarity in many punk songs. His boyish yelp is more pained than angry, contrasted all the more by Howard Devoto’s sneering affect on Spiral Scratch. Shelley asks more questions than punk’s usual list of demands, voices a rare vulnerability in a genre seemingly dominated by machismo visions of male invulnerability. 

They were decried by many in the punk community as phonies. They weren’t political enough; they were too poppy; they didn’t sound tough. Punk wasn’t always overtly political, of course: the first UK punk single, the Damned’s “New Rose,” was dismissed by Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols as just being about a bird. Nonetheless, in a world where his mere existence as a queer man was made political, Shelley weaponized his vulnerability against the heteronormative culture around him. As he said, expressing a theme Riot Grrrls would later pick up: “Well, I never knew there was a law against sounding vulnerable. And anyway, personal politics are part of the human condition, so what could be more political than human relationships?” 

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As for the accusation of appealing to pop: Who cares? Punk isn’t, and never could have been, a total break from the past. The Buzzcocks, though influenced by the Pistols, owe far more to the faux-dumbness of the Ramones, who never had the political pretensions of the English punks nor their unironic straightforwardness. The Ramones flaunted their bubblegum pop influences from the famous first words of their debut: “Hey ho, let’s go!” Their punk wasn’t about denying the past but transforming it: democratizing it to anyone who can manage three cords and reinvigorating it from the bloatedness and naked commercialism of the ‘70s. But where the Ramones interrogation of the past was often ironic, masked by a studied naïvete, Buzzcocks played it straight. They openly revel in Beatlesque melodies, while Shelley admitted to admiring the music of the Supremes and Kinks (a cardinal sin in punk at the time). Punk wasn’t a break with the past or a denial of it; it was a method of interpreting it, a way of making music and of living. They distorted their influences through the lens of punk, and in so doing made pop, but made it more immediate than anyone before them. They may have just been talking about birds (and blokes), but that didn’t make their music any less affecting or radical, nor did it make them inauthentic. 

*****

In an analysis of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, Chuck Klosterman reflects on the media cycle surrounding the follow-up to the incredibly popular Nevermind. In Utero was purported, prior to release, to be “unlistenable,” and Cobain himself claimed it was going to sell “a quarter as much” as Nevermind. Legendary, and legendarily acerbic, producer and Big Black frontman Steve Albini was producing. Newsweek reported their label, Geffen, wouldn’t release the record as is. To Cobain, though, this was intentional. The album had to be bad – that is, bad in the eyes of the general listening public – to be good in Cobain’s eyes. He was unable to reconcile the sales figures of Nevermind with his own credibility as an artist; the caustic elements of In Utero were atonement for his sins on Nevermind. The feeling Klosterman ascribes to Cobain is guilt: for success, artistic and commercial, for “selling out,” for not being punk enough. 

Cobain was struggling with what will be the focus of the remainder of this essay: punk’s fraught notion of authenticity and its implications. Punks rejected the (what they saw as) white middle-class values of respectability and conformity for a “realer,” more “authentic” lifestyle, and to achieve the autonomy they felt had been denied them by those values. Thus, in order to subvert the dominant culture, punk fetishized the ugly over the beautiful, the depressed over the happy, the detestable over the morally sanctioned, and the urban over the suburban. Punks created their counterculture through what Daniel Traber in Cultural Critique terms self-marginalization: they repudiated the privileges afforded them by their race (mostly white), and class (mostly middle-class) and rejected that culture’s values. This reasoning is what led, for example, The Clash to implore “respectable” whites to riot: “Black man got lotta problems/ But they don’t mind throwin’ a brick… While we walk the streets/ Too chicken to even try it.” This rejection of their inherited privileges was in some sense done out of a feeling of moral imperative, which Joel Olston would later elegize in Profane Existence as constituting a rejection of “the white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist world order.” But it was also a means of acting out the alienation many punks felt and creating a culture for themselves – whoever “them” was defined as. 

Differentiating real from fake was crucial to the project of punk. But since punk was defined by the negation of dominant cultural values, the continued hegemony of those values was necessary to sustain its uniqueness and authenticity. Subversion, that is, requires a dominant culture to undermine in order to have meaning. (The power of subversion is therefore limited, as it is defined equally as much by the dominant culture as mainstream forms of expression are – its meaning is always parasitic upon the mainstream.) Thus despite the acute need individual punks felt to distinguish themselves, punk came to be defined by a certain look (think: Richard Hell, lean and hungry, torn clothes manicured to look ragged) and set of behaviors (think: self-destruction). The notion of “authenticity” operating during the first-wave of punk is memorably summarized by one scenester in the L.A. punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization: "Everyone got called a poseur, but you could tell the difference: Did you live in a rat-hole and dye your hair pink and wreck every towel you owned and live hand-to-mouth on Olde English 800 and potato chips? Or did you live at home and do everything your mom told you and then sneak out?" 

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Of course, notions of authenticity varied across and even within scenes; the L.A. punk scene, for example, was criticized as not being political enough by British punks and Greil Marcus, just as the Singles Going Steady era Buzzcocks had been. But the general trends – poverty, rejection of authority, etc. – are enough to see the problematic implications of the notion. Their self-marginalization was based on a constructed vision of the marginalized other inherited from their – typically – white, suburban middle-class upbringing. Thus in attempting to duplicate the experiences and position of the marginalized, they implicitly acknowledged their conception of the other.

Punk’s articulation of marginalization can be likened to that espoused in Norman Mailer’s essay The White Negro, in which he wrote that free from the restraints of white morality, the black underclass lives a more creative, spontaneous, sexual, and hip life. “The Negro,” Mailer wrote, “kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present… relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body.” In a world marred by the twin horrors of concentration camps and the atom bomb, we [white Americans] must all face the same choice African-Americans did, which is to repress oneself, or to “encourage the psychopath in oneself”: “to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present… the life where a man must go until he is beat… where he must be with it or doomed not to swing.” Punk adopted this dichotomy with a desperate zeal.

The suburbs, seen as the home of the white middle-class, was a slow death-by-boredom, oppression through conformity, and above all, mundane. Only by rejecting that life could authentically be found. (The source of Mailer and punk’s shared notion that the marginalized are more “authentic” can be traced back to a Romantic line of thought where the peasant, “untouched” by civilization, is closer to natural man, and thus more “authentic.” Punk inverted the formula – the urban was romanticized, not the rural, and the life of the underclass was exciting, not simple – but kept the essence the same.)

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Like Mailer, punk found the authenticity lacking in white culture in Black culture. Patti Smith succinctly restates Mailer’s themes in “Rock N Roll N•••••”: “Jimi Hendrix was a n••••• / Jesus Christ and Grandma, too / Jackson Pollock was a n•••••.” Blackness is identified with coolness and art. Smith also identifies, as a punk, with the Black outsider: “Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me / Outside of society, that’s where I want to be.”

Through her identification as a punk in the song, Smith recasts her whiteness by aligning herself with a racial other. As Dick Hebdige famously argued, first-wave punk was an attempt to forge a new racial identity, what Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay call an “oppositional whiteness” – a whiteness which understands that it cannot be the assumed universal, a raceless race, and which sometimes attempts to stand in solidarity with minorities. Punk’s project of self-marginalization and their creation of this oppositional whiteness was deliberately modeled on their identification with Black culture, particularly the modes of resistance established by reggae. Punks such as Rotten, The Clash, Slits and Ruts worked reggae and its rhetoric directly into their music and fashion, sometimes as literally as The Clash’s cover of “Police and Thieves'' (at punk shows reggae was the only other music allowed to be played between sets). But reggae was more than just musical inspiration: it provided the structure of punk’s rebellion. Its image as “rebel music,” its countercultural hero stars, its lyrical themes and its DIY approach were all directly appropriated by punk. The events of the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival riots in particular, which showed how the cultural expression of reggae could be interwoven with an effective politics, would become an important source of inspiration for punk. 

But if in reggae, punk found a language with which to express its outsider status and a model for how to create an oppositional politics through music, fundamental asymmetries remained, and the boundaries between the two were firmly maintained. Punk was, despite its best efforts, rock music, and was therefore given massive exposure by rock critics and scandalized reporting from the newspapers. The biggest first-wave punk acts were also signed to major labels, granting them far greater monetary resources than even the biggest reggae acts had access to. Most importantly, though, punk was, by and large, a white genre, sung in the standard English of England and America; reggae was a Black art form, often sung in Jamaican patois. Both were, of course, deliberately exclusionary, often in similar ways, but the crucial differences between them meant that punk could capture the attention of the powerful in ways reggae never could. The self-marginalization of punks could never eliminate their privileges entirely; a white punk can shave off a mohawk, but a Black reggae listener cannot change their skin color. Punk’s appropriation of reggae tropes and assumption of outsider status can thus begin to look much more sinister.

The scholarship on the punk-reggae connection traces out many important results of the asymmetries spelled out here, but most important here is that punk derived its authenticity by pilfering the form and tropes of reggae. This led to the essentialization of the racial make-up of the two forms, to the subsequent exclusion of reggae artists and those who looked like them in punk. Punk came to think of itself as a white response to reggae, a “White Riot” in The Clash’s famous formulation. This both erased the history of minority punk and proto-punk artists and dissuaded future generations of minorities from participating in post first-wave punk scenes. Their appropriation of outsider status also led to some ugly false equivalences between the oppression faced by punks and minorities, which cross the line from solidarity into talking over and a lack of understanding (as in Smith’s song and The Avengers’ “White N•••••”), and pointing anger at oppression in the wrong direction (as in Minor Threat’s “Guilty of Being White” and the NF-aligned Oi! bands). Their self-marginalization comes to look less like solidarity or a moral stance than poverty tourism, wherein punks sought excitement and an exoticized notion of “authenticity” in the hardships shouldered out of necessity by the oppressed. 

The inevitable short-comings of self-marginalization led to punk recreating the blindspots and biases of the dominant culture, to its political detriment. Daniel Traber argues, for example, that punk’s denial of society’s values aimed first at individual autonomy over creating an inclusive counterculture, in effect recreating the individualism of the late-capitalist culture they despised:

The late capitalist alienation these subjects feel is due to their investment in a version of autonomy that perpetuates that sense of isolation by privileging an insular individuation over a collectivity that will allow the inclusion of non-punks.

This precluded larger political change by making the focus iconoclasm, not collective action. Rather than challenging the dominant culture, it merely created an alternative, one which was incapable of threatening its hegemony and in fact relied on that hegemony for its meaning. (And by the ‘80s this was understood –  a loss, but a noble one, which is, according to Michael Azzerad, very punk indeed.) The individualist system remained the same because of their focus on atomized autonomy. Richard Rorty sums up the sentiment in assessing Nietzsche’s reverence of Becoming over Being: the inversion was “fruitless – fruitless because it retained the overall form of ontotheological systems, merely changing God’s name to that of the Devil.” Punk, at best, merely flipped the system on its head. At worst, it recreated it in all its ugliness. 

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Punk authenticity continues to capture our attention, from the torrent of insider histories lionizing punks’ lifestyles to 40 year anniversary reviews proclaiming this album to be the verified real thing. Even those claiming to be above it can’t help themselves from appealing to it, as Pitchfork did in a review of Nick Lowe’s Jesus of Cool when they remark that, rather than scrap it in the “all-too-familiar dialogue of authenticity and reactionism, Lowe cut the crap and made a clever, fierce, and far-reaching record.” And part of the appeal of indie rock (which owes its existence to punk) remains the “authenticity” of its stars, who – unlike all those other, very relevant rock stars – are just like you. Authenticity thus seems impossible to escape, despite the seemingly massive changes that took place in punk since its first wave: the emergence of Riot Grrrl, Queercore and the explosion of zine writing critiquing punk for its racism, sexism and homophobia. They pointed to the flaws in the search for authenticity which they were also liable to, yet again exposing the limits of self-marginalization.

Bikini Kill via

For at the heart of the discussion of authenticity there lies yet another contradiction that punk has wrestled with from its inception. It is exemplified on the one hand by the play of groups like the New York Dolls and the desire for an oppositional whiteness Tremblay and Duncombe identified. It is also reflected in the destruction of meaning intended in the widespread experimentation with Nazi imagery at the time. On the other hand there is the need to “be yourself” by regaining the autonomy denied you by society, to allow for “real” individual expression à la Mailer. Drew Daniels analogizes the latter notion to Russel’s correspondence theory of truth: a performer is being authentic when their private identity matches their performance. But punk has been fighting such straightforward epistemologies from the beginning, playing around the concept of fixed and essential identities. The contradictions of punk’s notion of authenticity carried into the project of self-marginalization, which posits that, to some extent at least, identities are fluid and can be remade at will, but was almost always conceived in terms of finding some hidden authentic self denied actualization by the rigid demands of society. 

This is why punks sought to separate themselves from society, and to create new systems of meaning where they could express their true inner selves. This is the great irony and failure of punk – it was only through critical engagement with, not detachment from, their native culture that they could have avoided the failures detailed above. What is needed is a new form of authenticity, one which is not vulnerable to the mistakes of the atomistic individuality and cultural pillaging of punk. What that might look like is the subject for another time, but one can see hints of it in the work of philosophers like Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel, cultural theorists like Daniel Traber, and, I believe, in the music of the Buzzcocks.

In “Oh, What Avails” Alice Munro writes of Joan, a woman who is in the first generation freed from their husbands and able to pursue their desires. “Not self-denial, the exaltation of balked desires, no kind of high-down helplessness. She is not to be so satisfied.” She leaves her husband for a lover, then another, her kids grow up and she stays skinny. But her foundation is slipping, a menace bubbles up which she tries to keep away:

Rubble. You can look down the street, and you can see the shadows, the light, the brick walls, the truck parked under a tree, the dog lying on the sidewalk, the dark summer awning, or the grayed snowdrift – you can see all these things in their temporary separateness, all connected underneath in such a troubling, satisfying, necessary, indescribable way. Or you can see rubble. Passing states, a useless variety of passing states. Rubble.

Joan misses something, however. Rubble is both ruin and promise; all that’s left is to clear it away. If only we could.

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The Sound of Philadelphia Still Echoes Through Pop Music

The nu-disco age of pop seems poised to be the soundtrack of the 2020s, as jazz was for the roaring 1920s. This year has seen an influx of disco-inspired hits as popstars like Dua Lipa, Miley Cyrus, Doja Cat and Lady Gaga have all leaned into the genre’s conventions. The bleakness of this year has certainly made an excellent case for a return to the escapism of disco. It’s a genre laced with a certain larger-than-life opulence that pours out of the sweeping nature of the orchestration and the cinematic level of production. These qualities helped shape disco after they were flooded into the mainstream by Philadelphia soul, more commonly known as TSOP (the Sound of Philadelphia).

While cities like Nashville and Detroit have booming music tourism economies honoring their respective places in music history, Philadelphia, as local record store owner Max Ochester succinctly put it, “is the city that sleeps on itself.” Philadelphia’s vast influence on music is often overlooked, with dangerous consequences—the last remaining home of Philly soul, Sigma Studios, is in danger of demolition to make way for the construction of residential properties on the lucrative Center City property. Artists and archivists are pushing for it to be designated a historic site in order to preserve the city’s cultural legacy, and on November 13th the case will go in front of the Philadelphia Historical Commission.

Philly soul served as a crucial cultural bridge between Motown’s gospel-laced R&B and the disco of the late ‘70s. Philly soul smoothed out some of the grit from soul to modernize the genre and pave the way for its slick convergence with pop—think Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall, Earth Wind and Fire, and Chic. Grounded in Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s Philadelphia International Records and the songwriting of Thom Bell and Linda Creed, the sound of Philadelphia was founded on lush, orchestra-based soul, unrelenting horns, and funk-inspired rhythms that flowed into the arrangements. For a brief introduction to the magic of TSOP, here are a few essential tracks:

Ready or Not - The Delfonics (1969)

Conventional wisdom says to pick The Delfonics’ Grammy-winning Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind) for a list of this kind, but I threw this one in for the hip-hop heads. This track had an epic comeback in the late ‘90s, as its uniquely bombastic production was sampled to form the basis of three hip-hop classics in three consecutive years—The Fugees’ Ready or Not (1996), Missy Elliott and Da Brat’s Sock it 2 Me (1997), and Dr. Dre and Eminem’s Forgot About Dre (1998).

Back Stabbers - The O’Jays (1972)

One of the most grandiose songs in the history of music, rhythmically and harmonically flawless, Back Stabbers is a verifiable suite. A frantic, paranoid build up of strings and colossal horns climax to the thrumming bass line of a pre-chorus that demands “what they do?!” What the O’Jays did, at least, was make a masterpiece.

Could It Be I’m Falling In Love - The Spinners (1972)

The Spinners’ self-titled third album is emblematic of the distance between Detroit and Philly soul. The group started off at Motown Records but migrated to Atlantic in 1972 and handed the production reins to Philly soul architect Thom Bell. The lead single off of Spinners (1973) was the more popular track I’ll Be Around, but Could It Be I’m Falling In Love is a more notable shift away from the doo-wop and gospel-inspired Motown, leaning into a harmonic and ethereal sound.

Me and Mrs. Jones - Billy Paul (1972)

This track is an absolutely immaculately produced coupling of vocals and instrumentals. There is something so…luxe, perhaps, about this song. It so succinctly encapsulates everything beautiful about this era of music, with equal attention to the romance, the grandeur, the mystery, the drama, the sweetness, and the smoothness. That moment when the trumpets and trombones swell to a bang and then completely cut out, leaving Billy Paul’s jazz-inflected voice to belt out “Me…and… Mrs.! Mrs. Jones” a cappella before the orchestration slinks back in and he sighs “we got a thing… going on”? Truly sublime.

Drowning In The Sea Of Love - Joe Simon (1972)

Joe Simon’s music is quite inexplicably underrated in the 21st century. The production on this track, for one, is nothing short of impeccable. A sense of ominousness floods the classic Gamble & Huff production, creating an atmosphere of trepidation you can practically feel, swelling like a wave preparing to engulf our lovesick protagonist. Walk On By-esque background vocals eerily complete a track full of mystique.

Dirty Ol’ Man - The Three Degrees (1973)

The common Three Degrees pick would be their hit single When Will I See You Again, but this defiant, consent-demanding disco anthem was huge in Europe and Japan and deserves more love than it gets. The pre-chorus is a masterclass in dynamics, the harmonies are insanely sharp, and the duel between the bass line and the violins on the chorus deserves an article of its own.

You Make Me Feel Brand New - The Stylistics (1974)

The Stylistics were the more schmaltzy manifestation of Thom Bell’s symphonic soul productions. Led by Russell Thompkins Jr.’s insanely fluid falsetto, the Stylistics tended towards sentimental ballads with rich soundscapes. But it wouldn’t be Philly soul without some genre ambiguity, and this track dips its toes into funk with a sitar line while cushioned in a broad, steady string section.

T.S.O.P. - MFSB (feat. The Three Degrees) (1974)

This instrumental piece is by the Philadelphia International Records’ house band MFSB (Mother Father Sister Brother). MFSB can be heard backing most of the tracks on this list, threading the distinct Philly soul sound through the ‘70s. The band also played a crucial part in the emergence of disco—T.S.O.P. is considered the very first disco song to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 100. It was also the first TV theme song to do so, as Gamble and Huff wrote it for the Soul Train opening credits. The lack of a canonical legacy for Philadelphia's role in music history is quite unbelievable given it literally soundtracked the definitive cultural institution of soul music.

You’ll Never Find Another Love like Mine - Lou Rawls (1976)

There are certain songs that, in theory, simply should not work—a bass crooner’s voice over a rumba rhythm intersected by a disco chorus? But Gamble & Huff worked their magic to create the best bass-led cinematic soul track this side of Barry White.

When Somebody Loves You Back - Teddy Pendergrass (1978)

Teddy Pendergrass emerged from his role as the drummer (and later lead singer) for Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes to become R&B’s preeminent ‘70s sex symbol. He absolutely simmers on this track as horns flutter with insane dynamism around characteristically brash Philly soul strings. Generations later his charisma, style, and impossibly sweet yet brash voice continue to be emulated by R&B heartthrobs.

Ain’t No Stopping Us Now - McFadden and Whitehead (1979)

Philadelphia International Records’ hit-making writer-producer duo McFadden and Whitehead stepped out from behind the scenes with this vivacious disco hit, featuring a booming bass line and throbbing back beat. It’s honestly just sunshine compressed into an audio file.

Check out Gamble and Huff’s 24/7 TSOP Soul Radio for more classic tracks.

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Ambience over Audience: the Colors of Live Music

Most people will tell you that nothing compares to the live version of a song. There is an undeniable richness to the essence that a live recording provides. It does, however, come at a cost—either literally in the price of admission to a show or byways of distractions from the live environment.

While some will argue that the sounds of a crowd are essential to the experience of a live concert, others (check the YouTube comments of a concert recording) just want the crowd to shut up. Thus have come various iterations of the same idea: master the live-recording feeling within a controlled setting. MTV Unplugged, NPR’s Tiny Desk, and most recently COLORS.

The YouTube-based show launched in 2016 with the aim to “showcase diverse talent and to connect people across the globe on a creative and emotional level.” Its vibrant, monochromatic backgrounds provide a distraction-free enviroment for the soul of each artist to shine. While they usually use the studio-instrumental as the backing track (as opposed to being an acoustic session), the artist still records a new take of their song.

Here are some of my favorite COLORS performances:

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Lianne La Havas - Bittersweet

It is a surprise that it took so long for Lianne La Havas to make an appearance. Her buttery and powerhouse of a voice makes for one of the most beautiful COLORS performances. The crimson color scheme fits the bittersweet (pun intended) tone of the song perfectly.

Woodkid - Pale Yellow

Choosing a yellow background must have been a no-brainer for this one, but unpredictably, Woodkid brought the first animal to COLORS. Both he and his CGI companion are suited up in the visual of his latest album, S16, as Woodkid’s stunning voice cracks over his lyrics.

Billie Eilish - idontwannabeyouanymore

In early 2018, Billie was at the onset of her meteoric rise, and performances like the one above helped shaped her into an internet-darling. It was hard to deny the raw talent she posses, and the teal background compliments one of her most well-known hair shades.

Nathy Peluso - SANA SANA

It is fitting that Nathy Peluso was matched to a neon-pink background, as her performance would be one of the most explosive and polarizing of COLORS catalog. Heavily memed and torn apart by Twitter, Nathy’s dance moves were quite unexpected, and her lyrics were hard to pick up even by Spanish-speakers. Nonetheless, the magic of this video is that one can’t look away—and even more surprising, your mind keeps coming back to it.

Jorja Smith - Blue Lights

Backed by a stunning shade of blue, Jorja’s smooth voice sounds magnificent.

Doja Cat - Juicy

Sans Tyga, Doja Cat shines in this rendition of one of her first hits, “Juicy.”

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Another perk of COLORS is that they upload their recordings to streaming services. Venture to their YouTube channel or the link below to discover some cutting-edge visuals and artists.

AOC Takes the Gaming World by Storm

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez garnered widespread attention on October 20th due to her Twitch stream of the hit game Among Us. Ocasio-Cortez, popularly known as AOC, represents New York’s 14th District and is the youngest person currently serving in Congress. AOC has become one of the younger generations’ most beloved politicians due to her reputation for progressiveness and her embrace of pop culture. Her use of Among Us to promote political action points to the importance of video games and other viral media to politics today. 

AOC playing a round of Among Us. Image via.

Innersloth’s hit game Among Us, released in 2018, has skyrocketed in popularity over the past few months, with over 1.5 million players enjoying the game. The game takes the premise of imposters trying to take over a spaceship filled with crewmates. The crewmates are each assigned tasks, such as fixing broken wires or fueling the ship’s engines. The imposters must kill the crewmates without getting caught. They can also distract the crewmates from their tasks by creating sabotages such as shutting off the ship’s oxygen or turning off the lights. The crewmates win by finishing tasks or by voting off the imposters, and the imposters win by killing a majority of the crewmates or by successfully sabotaging the ship. Among Us has become a viral sensation, with TikTok videos using the hashtag #amongus having garnered over 23 billion views. 

One of the many tasks crewmates may be assigned in Among Us. Image via.

Due to the game’s massive popularity, AOC decided to stream herself playing it to encourage viewers to vote. Gathering players such as fellow Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, singer mxmtoon, and streamer Disguised Toast, she took to popular  platform Twitch to stream Among Us. The stream attracted over 400,000 viewers, making it one of the top 20 most viewed streams of all time. It was a huge hit with viewers, with various memes about the stream gaining popularity online. For instance, AOC exclaiming “after everything we’ve been through” in response to being killed in the game has been turned into a popular TikTok audio that has been used over 8,000 times. 

AOC reacts to being selected as an imposter. Image via.

This is not the first time that politicians have interacted with the public through video games. For instance, AOC herself has previously used Animal Crossing: New Horizons to visit her Twitter follower’s islands. Joe Biden’s presidential campaign also recently released a “Biden HQ” island that Animal Crossing players can visit. The island features decorations allowing players to learn more about Biden as well as signage encouraging players to vote. The influence that video games hold due to their importance to pop culture is becoming more recognized, and politicians have begun taking advantage of this influence to encourage more widespread voting. 

An Animal Crossing: New Horizons player visits the Biden HQ island. Image via.

AOC’s Twitch stream is particularly notable because is represents the largest scale at which a political figure has utilized video games to reach the public to date. For better or worse, the nature of politics is changing, and politicians are using new tactics for public engagement. AOC’s Twitch stream represents a new era in which cultural elements previously dismissed as unimportant are now playing a much greater role in politics. It’s interesting to wonder how this will change the direction of politics in the near future. 

Watch the stream here. 

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