I’ve started to shave my face again and its inexplicable. It makes me wonder if my mind may know something that I don’t know about my future. I’m not a spiritual person or believe in any New Age bullshit, but I do believe that your mind can give you a heads up that sometime may be about to change in your life.
But anyway, I’m probably wrong. I’m always wrong.
I will note, however, that occasionally, usually right about now in the year, something mildly interesting happens to me. But it could be the rest of this year will just be me working on this novel project.
I think that’s what I should focus on the most at this point — just keep my head down and try to work as hard as possible on these novels.
Even though I’m an Old, I try to be hip with Fellow Young People. But before I begin, let me be clear — there are many, many interesting and unique podcasts out there and so even the best effort to serve the needs of the Youngs in a hypothetical “vibe shift” podcasting network probably wouldn’t work.
But I need something to write about in between writing the last few scenes of the first draft of my first novel, so you get this. Anyway, there is definitely an underserved audience when it comes to keeping up with Julia Fox’s every twitch.
Now, the question is — why would you want to do a podcast when you could do some sort of YouTube channel that might feature another It Girl, Emma Chamberlain?
Good question.
I think it’s because podcasts don’t require your complete attention. You can listen to them while making breakfast or driving your car. With a YouTube channel, the medium is the message and it’s assumed you’re going to watch what’s on the screen.
Anyway, all of this is just a daydream and I just feel like writing about this because it’s fun and I — you guessed it — like to daydream.
But in my daydream of a podcast network for the vibe shift, someone like Emma Chamberlain would be the host of one of the podcasts — maybe the main one –and the podcast would try to be very much like Spy Magazine or Gawker back in the day. Instead of Julia Allison getting a parking ticket and video taping it, this podcast would, I don’t know, interview Ms. Fox on a regular basis or even — it the nacent little media company was lucky — have her as a co-host with Emma Chamberlain.
Maybe, the title could be, ‘It Girls.”
And it would be Fox and Chamberlain talking about boys, fashion, being “bi-coastal” and whatever else Youngs have on their mind at any particular moment. That business plan virtually writes itself, now doesn’t it?
But all of that is just the ramblings of a very broke aspiring novelist in the middle of nowhere. I wish someone would do something with this idea, though. We, as a nation, need something fun-interesting to distract us from global climate change, the rise of fascism, you name it.
And, yet, I think what’s really going on is I want my youth back. I want my 30s back. My pining for snark is just another form of middle-aged nostalgia. My youth is never coming back, and if anything fun-interesting ever happens again it probably will be in the context of the metaverse and probably will in some way be a distraction foisted upon us by our new fascist MAGA overlords.
Instead of being fun-interesting, it will be a real-life episode of Black Mirror.
Anyway, like I said — this is very fun to write about.
While the use of the term “vibe shift” was done in a dramatically different context when it was first used in The New York Times, I like the phrase because it’s an easy-to-understand explanation for what’s going on.
It definitely seems as though now that we’re all “over” COVID, that we’re all ready for a new era — a vibe shift. We are now in the post-Rona era, even if Rona is very much still around, and so the “wind of change” is floating around pop culture.
I’ve given it some thought, and it seems to me that given what’s going on and how mature most of the Internet is, that the vibe shift will be heralded by a podcast network suddenly blowing up out of nowhere. It’s just too difficult to organically grow a blog like the old Gawker and Silicon Valley is very much cool to any new social media networks.
As such, it seems to me that if you had a bunch of really interesting young people in your social circle — in, say, NYC or LA — you could probably find a surprising amount of success with a podcast network that was in the tradition of Spy Magazine and Gawker Media.
But I suspect it would need to be a network, not just one podcast. Maybe six podcasts that were tightly focused on a variety of things. In my imagination, it would be a lot like Crooked Media mixed with TMZ mixed with the old Gawker Media.
You would need young, hip on-air talent that were very in tune with the vibe of youth culture in New York City and LA. I would suggest you scoop up a klatch of the more interesting, poised Tik-Tok people to populate your podcast network. But, alas, no one listens to me.
Lulz.
But there is a vibe shift. I would say late 2022 to early 2024 is going to be very be a totally different pop culture animal to what we had before the pandemic. Once late 2024 rolls around, we’re all going to be so focused on the existential dread of autocracy or civil war that we won’t be all that focused on pop culture anymore.
Here are a collection of pop culture items that I feel are representative of the punitive post-Rona “vibe shift” we may be undergoing.
Wet Leg Even though this band is made up of two soft-spoken young ladies from Great Britain, they definitely know how to rock. And they definitely seem seem as though they might be the camel’s nose in the tend when it comes to the possibility of rock coming back in some way.
Phoebe Bridgers Her song “Kyoto” is very representative of the vibe shift we may be going through. Or I’m just old and I really like the type of music she is referencing in her modern music.
Wolf Alice This is another band that seems to indicate that we may be in for more interesting pop culture in the next few years. They remind me a lot of the rock I grew up listening to. They’re really good.
Suki Waterhouse I had no idea that this model can sing. But she can! Go figure. She’s great. I really like her ethereal singing style.
Emma Chamberlain It definitely seems as though young Miss Chamberlain might be the “It Girl” of the vibe shift. Relative to my media consumption, she came out of nowhere. She did a great job interviewing people at the Met Gala and it will be interesting to see what she does going forward.
Nu-Wave This is where legacy artists lean into the ye olde New Wave of my youth. Miley Cyrus and Olivia Rodrigo are two examples of this. They are modern artists who are self-evidently into producing music that sounds like New Wave.
Tik-Tok This is very much a symbol of the Vibe Shift. The fact that this really new service is drawing eyeballs away from places like Instagram and Facebook is definitely an indication that we’re on the cusp of a new era. Multiverse Fiction The fact that the concept of the “multiverse” has, out of nowhere, become the go-to concept for pop culture is definitely an indication that audience tastes may be changing. What that means long term, is anyone’s guess. Political Undertoad This is the general unease of the Vibe Shift associated with the knowledge that between 2022 and 2025 the US could either implode into autocracy or explode into civil war.
This is all very moot for various reasons, but it is fun to idly daydream about this idea again. Listening to British duo “Wet Leg,” I can hear a deep music echo of the last time there was “good” music on the radio — that gauzy era known as “the 90s.”
Anyway, I keep thinking about the idea of a “vibe shift” and if it’s even possible for there to be one for various reasons. It’s a lot harder for a real vibe shift to happen than you might think. The reason is simple — for a vibe shift to happen, everyone has to be exposed to the same thing at the same time and make a collective decision as to what it all means.
So, yes, there may be the occasional general vibe shift, but I just don’t see there being a huge swings in vibes that happened up until the rise of social media. But, having said that, I was reading New York Magazine’s personality profile of the new Executive Editor of The New York Times, Joe Kahn, and it occurred to me we desperately need a new Spy-Gawker type publication to record this surreal post-Trumplandia world we live in.
I will note, as an aside, this passage from the piece, which definitely gives one some insight into who gets things published in New York Magazine.
Until last fall, I spent four years working at the Times, as a clerk for the columnist Maureen Dowd, whose only real input on this story was that she’d personally strangle me if I didn’t give Kahn a fair shake.
I mean, where’s snark?
The answer is, of course, snark is all over Twitter and no one cares about blogs anymore. Yet, it sure would be fun to have a blog that was obsessed with Julia Fox and mixed silly celebrity snark with biting media commentary. That’s just not going to happen. And if it does, I will be no where near it when it does happen.
But having said that, it continues to be extremely frustrating to me that I know that I could do something really interesting given the resources. We need a blog in the tradition of Late Night With David Letterman, Spy Magazine and Gawker. I just don’t see that ever happening again.
If it happens, it’s going to happen in, I don’t know, the metaverse or something. The era of print blogs is over. Long, long over. That will be the real vibe shift, when we’re so consumed by the metaverse that some snarky application of it will become popular.
It feels like on a certain level that American pop culture is stuck on the morning of Sept 12, 2001. There have been gradual “vibe shifts” now and again over the last 20 years, but for some reason the last two decades have been rather meh on the pop culture front.
As I’ve written before, the 80s were so rambunctious that the early 80s were very, very different from the late 80s. But in real terms, American pop culture is still in a hazy-post 9/11 world. Superhero movies are huge. There really hasn’t been an technological advancement since the advent of the iPhone. And, for all intents and purposes, pop culture is rather bland.
Now, I don’t know how much of that is just I’m old and grumpy and how much of that is real. But it definitely feels as though American pop culture is ripe for a dramatic shift of some sort.
Of course, it’s possible that all of this will be very moot starting 2025 when we we either have a civil war or slip peacefully into autocracy. That’s something we really have to keep in the back of our minds going forward. But it is possible that between now and then popular tastes will change.
And the way we’ll know it’s happened is when a comedy or a war movie or whatever that was released without any fanfare becomes huge out of the blue and Hollywood (and pop culture) turns on a dime and embraces the new the cultural zeitgeist.
But, like I said, it could be that I’m just old. It could be that pop tastes have changed for good and this is just the new normal we have to live in.
When it comes to the notion of a “vibe shift,” one has to look no further than the 1980s. The pop culture of the early 1980s was very, very different of that of the late 1980s. In a way, it seems like the 80s were the last decade to have real personality.
I mean, can you off the top of your head think of what the 90s were “about” other than grunge and the Dotcom Bubble? Compare to what we have now, the 90s were a regular Era of Good Feelings. A lot this, of course, came from how racist White People did not have the looming prospect of scary brown and black people dominating the nation’s demographics.
Both the 00s, the 10s and the 20s (so far) really haven’t been about anything other than vague things like “the War on Terror” or “the Great Recession” or “Trumplandia.” The 80s, meanwhile, had a lot of personality. True Grit.
The 80s were the last decade where everyone in the United States was on the same cultural page. When there was a “vibe shift” everyone did it at the same time.
And, really, it could be that it could take WW3 globally and civil war in the USA for there to be some sense of unity again when it comes to a “vibe shift.” WW3 would force everyone to sit up and take notice that a huge event was happening around them, that history was wide awake again. The fact that a limited nuclear exchange would fry everyone’s electronics might aid in that unity of vision, too.
But, lulz. What do I know. I’m just a nobody in the rural part of a flyover state.
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