[SIC] DAY THREE HUNDRED TWENTY FIVE

Vol. 3, No. 44. Unlocked 🔓

[SIC] DAY THREE HUNDRED TWENTY FIVE

A morning of shifting culture mores / another day in the culture wars?

News broke this AM that Oasis did not get picked for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Joy Division/New Order failed to qualify too. Outkast did tho.

That notice of the continued decline of / affront to Cool Brittania -cum- reinvention of cultural/definitional shibboleths coincided with An Interview with Nick Logan, founder of THE FACE, by the current editor of the magazine, in which Logan’s admits he didn’t figure out what he was doing for years after starting “a rock magazine that always intended to stretch its wings into other areas”

Apropos of stretching; NEMESIS’s Culture After Youth Culture popped up next. Millennials are getting after it. Key excerpt:

Late-adolescent seems to already be the default end-state generational identity of many millennials. A more aspirational variation of this could be ageless – true wealth-enabled generational ambiguity. Think 40-year-olds that look like 20-year-olds, and, logically, 20-year-olds that want to look like 40-year-olds that look like 20-year-olds.

The NEMESIS post was followed by Big Spyplane’s endorsement on Emilia Petrarca’s return to the corner of Mercer and Howard to discover The Clout Corridor is no More. She goes, she sees, she gets curved by (a grown-up) Asspizza.

In that piece Nolita Dirtbag’s Hartman makes a case for the best, most salient clout moments happening “in motion,” - ie dynamic, but I think he’s speaking-into-being what’s coming (back), not what’s right now.

Clout now is instead in the cloud: the most notable ‘you weren’t there’ moments presently happen in our hands / eyes / ears - as with Clairo’s Apple dance at the Brat tour in NYC which “was fun and also… sponsored by Aperol.”

Whose branded takeover shares well-trodden strategic territory with the titular star of Colin Nagy’s Aramco World Edition, about the Petro-state propaganda organ that’s actually good? To be clear, I tend to side with Colin here: Origin does not equal itention, nor destiny. It is possible to use commercial energy to create valuable culture.

It is also possible (and probably the overwhelming tendency) to do it wrong - which is the thrust of David Marx’s “Age of the Double Sell Out.”

Corollary to all of this, then: Gen Z isn’t waiting for the ads. NBCU says your brand better become part of the plot.

Control the means of culture distribution, in other words. Look no further than this morning’s news that Ari Emanuel is buying Frieze from Endeavor in a deal reportedly worth $200 million, as your evidence.

[SIC] DAY THREE HUNDRED TWENTY FIVE