"Just Let People Enjoy Things."

Yeah, but it's funnier if I don't.

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My girlfriend calls me a contrarian, but I happen to disagree. She also recently informed me that happens to think that I am pretentious and has a number of reasons for doing so—most of them revolving around bespoke grudges of my Taylor Swift rants. Her predominant allegation is that I think my preference for art and entertainment is of superior taste. Quality art is a rare bit of bright reprieve standing alone on an otherwise broken plane of ominous and ugly news, and over the years, I have attempted to cure myself of politics-brain by swapping out the daily news and podcasts for more books, music, TV shows, and movies. My deteriorating sanity has since been suspended in a queasy and unsettled pause, but this shift in consumption habits has allowed me to engage with art in a wider range and depth than the average Netflix or Spotify interlocutor. My taste is not “better” but it is more developed.

I resent that the word pretentious is haphazardly slapped onto anyone with somewhat discerning taste, especially if it doesn’t neatly conform to whatever pop-culture writers hype in ways that are absolute and unwavering. Everyone, to some extent, interacts with art and entertainment in conditions like these—subjects to the whims of the thinkpiece economy or some awful algorithm, and within the variously curdled discourse that such dynamics tend to create. The extent to which outlier opinions or dissent can exist within this grating and arbitrary and miserable space, there is an all-consuming strangeness to how the let people enjoy things ethos has conscripted legions of stans into a long war against the word “no.”

Let people enjoy things has been essential in broadening what has been considered canon, but it does not immunize the things you like from criticism. As a general rule, people who care about, say, music or prestige TV do not agree on much. There are professional opinion-havers with lucrative podcasting jobs and precarious writing gigs whose entire profession consists of blinking a lot and seeming personally offended by something another person said about, like, The Bear. In subreddits and Twitter where implied foghorns rumble all day and all night, people who might otherwise pass as normal in their work and personal lives absolutely lose their fucking minds about opinions so subjective and context-specific that it effectively scans as a personality defect. This perpetually sour, thwarted, ultra-stunted state certainly seems easier to understand when considering how all these defective nerds consider any form of disagreement to be an existential assault on their very personhood. And it’s all for things like The Barbie Movie or The Last of Us or Cowboy Carter, which are perfectly enjoyable 7-out-of-10 projects treated as if they are unanimous and unambiguous masterpieces.

True pretentious mentality is the belief that anything mainstream is inherently bad, which is a belief I do NOT hold. Sure, just because something is popular does not make it good; but just because something is popular does not mean it is overrated. I love the Nolan Batman trilogy. The Beatles are among my favorite bands. The Sopranos and Mad Men and The Wire are elite-tier TV shows. These are not particularly esoteric takes. But I’ve been told that I’m pretentious because I think Ted Lasso is essentially the current-day Friends (painfully mid), or that not every Top 40 pop song is high art that contains profound socio-political commentary, or that Disney adults are cringe, that grown-ass adults should broaden their literature horizons beyond Harry Potter and YA novels, and that Swifties are mildly irritating.

There is nothing inherently wrong with indulging in some mass-produced slop, given that it is balanced out with challenging yourself with art or entertainment that demands something more than passive consumption. But we’ve basically outsourced our culture to impersonal market forces and crystalline machines presenting us with caricatures of ourselves that we lazily conform to. We listen to whatever vibey tune Spotify serves us. We read whatever pastel-colored book that zoomed to the top of our TikTok feed. Media and culture seem to oscillate between bland content and unnecessarily controversial bile to draw in eyeballs, and this is all at the behest of some soulless tech goblin fiending to raise quarterly profits by .7%. Sure, major labels and Hollywood studios have long served disposable generic garbage to the middle of the bell curve. But there’s something particularly grim about the ubiquity of proprietary mathematical equations curating banal individualism in a way that flattens and commodifies culture until the only type of individualism left is the kind that makes you like everyone else. The downfall of humanity will not arrive in some epic catastrophe—it will be our gradual acceptance of mediocrity.

It is symptomatic of this broader moment’s and this particular millieu’s combination of generalized unease and all-devouring boredom that there are fan communities who get belligerently defensive about the dreck they choose to consume. They are mortally offended by the suggestion that the Marvel Cinematic Universe might be somehow less of an artistic endeavor than A Clockwork Orange or Big Lebowski, or that K-Pop may be more disposable than John Coltrane. It’s a form of inverted snobbery against any kind of value or vision. It isn’t enough that these things are, by any conceivable definition, culturally hegemonic, but anyone who evaluates these things against some metric of quality, it becomes an unbearable pain. Discussing art with them is like watching a total failure of an adult act incredibly smug and raise their fat clammy hands in the air whenever McDonald’s re-releases its discs of machine-extruded meat-derivative slurry, colloquially known as the McRib. It’s a perverse enjoyment of something so mercilessly sterile, abstracted beyond any ordinary pleasure. They are the messianic faithful delighting in the flat infinity of the bland. They will happily slurp from the toilet for no other reason than its convenience.

I spend enough of my newsletter roasting cultural trends and widespread idiosyncrasies endemic to Millennials and Gen-Z, so I am introducing a new section to discuss music, TV shows, movies, and books. We’ll also cover media literacy, how I engage with art and entertainment, and how to sift through the culture war riffraff that has become sort of a wet bilge that has leeched into the groundwater and made everyone a little disturbed. Since most of my content does plenty of irreverent skewering, it only seems fair (and healthy) to balance that out with praise for what I value—if only because I have a strange personal rule that anyone who rips on something widely beloved should feel obligated to disclose what they like so their preferences and perspectives can be judged accordingly. Since my joint Top 100 Albums project with

Kevin Alexander

was a hit, I’m hoping this will be positively received. I also assume the median This is a Newsletter! reader is a mildly disgruntled 34-year-old former exclusive American Apparel shopper who wrote a master’s thesis on George Condo (or something more interesting) and they are now doing something they are largely disinterested in professionally as they procrastinate a thorough reassessment of their organizing principles, and they have never used TikTok, have a Facebook page they have not touched in six years, and their relationship with Instagram has been steadily souring since 2019.

Consider this a futile attempt at a civilizing mission. Most pop-culture writing is tainted by blinkered baby-brained culture war partisanship, so this will be merely a drop in the antidote to all this suckage. I haven’t ironed out the exact pace or frequency of these topics appearing in my newsletter, but there are a few ideas and series in the works. This section will mostly deal with praising art and entertainment because as much as I enjoy a satisfying takedown, life is too short to expend my free time engaging with or writing about music or a show that I utterly despise. And if there is something you want me to review or analyze, let me know in the comments and I will take it under consideration for a full post—or, at the very least, we can have a cordial discussion about it.

Looking forward to where this goes.

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