Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re talking electronic music as the new cultural aesthetic, the greenwashing of bodegas, an incredible menswear sale to shop, the rise of Payton Tolle, and why your videos need to be shorter.
🔔REMINDER: HIP REPLACEMENT, live, at Ace Brooklyn
On September 17, Ben Dietz and I are hosting a live recording of HIP REPLACEMENT with special guest kate lindsay at Ace Hotel Brooklyn. It’ll be a fun night — and it’s free! With drinks too!! See you there!!!
👀 Trend Watchers: Is “electronic” the new “horror”?
Two things that have always been true about me: horror is my film genre and electronic music is my music genre. These are two facts that are core to my identity. A decade ago, I remember a shift occurring in horror after telling friends for years that horror was and is the best genre to explore political and social issues. Then came films like Get Out and I Saw The TV Glow and Parasite and The Substance, films that used horror to discuss societal issues like race, queerness, classim, and sexism that achieved critical and commercial success. These are all classics in their own way, and is how we ended up with a movie like Sinners and a role like Aunt Gladys earning top accolades at the most recent Oscars. This trend isn’t isolated to movies but has rippled into television (Widow’s Bay, The Last of Us, Descendants), music (Megan Thee Stallion, Kim Petras, Lady Gaga), and has created genres within itself (specifically horror for kids, from Poppy Playtime to Wednesday). Horror is a definitive Millennial genre, which is how and why I come bearing a similar vibe shift: electronic music is moving beyond a music genre and into a cultural aesthetic that — like horror — is becoming a go-to space for subversion and cultural commentary in the way horror was for the 2010s. We may could say this is Gen Z’s horror, but it’s perhaps more accurately Zillennial. (Gen Z’s horror / cultural aesthetic is likely something more digitally native.) The temperature in this space has been brewing for years, most specifically about amorphous ideas of raving and the club, the symbols of dance music without literally “being” dance music: with the symbolic rave of Aftersun, Charli XCX’s club virtue signalling with brat and the dance-lite gestures of Addison Rae, Emily Witt’s techno primer Health and Safety, the ascent of composers like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which has made way for figures like Ben Frost, Oliver Coates, Mica Levi, and Nathan Micay to media items like Dark, Pillion, The Zone of Interest, and Industry. It’s a curious shift that represents both the lingering cloud of technology above us, music “made by machines” being a literal and symbolic expression of how tech helps and hurts our lives. It also is a statement of how flat and in ways vapid our lives are, that a place to see and be seen is now a vehicle for expressing the self (while “interrogating” such vapidities). The metaphorical club and rave, in the Charli XCX sense, is a space of letting go and getting messy which is a pursuit we are increasingly robbed of: freedom as a gesture instead of a material fact in fascist times. This cultural aesthetic is only now rising as movies like the buzzy indie Club Kid from Jordan Firstman along with some books — Good Girl by Aria Aber, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda — illustrate how we’re going to see this gesture spread in a more fully formed way in and around mainstream culture. The catch is that, unlike horror, “the club” and raving is an increasingly rare thing: people’s familiarity with actual clubbing and actual electronic music will remain slim but the symbolism — a space of freedom with upbeat music, where you can be yourself without fear of being cringe — will continue to underline top media. It will bring with it a new crop of talent and, if we’re lucky, inspire new genres. We’ll see how this evolves but, as we know, this definitely means more Camila XCXs than we care for. Or: this is exactly how we’ve ended up with Adela and Katseye.
📓 NYC Diary: Nature everywhere
This was the week where we started earnestly looking at apartments, even seeing four in one day: one was great but too far; two were Landlord Specials™; and one was very, very good, inspiring our putting in an application. Now: we wait, before embarking on the search for this week. This has been a top question from friends and family: Do you have a place to live yet? Where are you looking? Are you really not leaving? What are you doing here? No; along the ACE and L; no; and we’re figuring it out and having fun in the process. Summer is “officially” over and I’m holding my breath as it creeps toward being not-summer after almost twenty years of the mostly perpetual summers of LA and Barcelona: my adult life has been marked by agreeable days starting in April, which increasingly extended to the end of October, if not early November. Some years it never ended! I realize the too-hot or terribly perfect weather of the past three weeks in NYC has been great but also is going to crash at any moment. Yesterday was the first day I worked without air conditioning, opening a window instead to let in the cool air. It was sweet! But also a sign that I am not in the metaphorical Kansas I have been occupying, for better or worse. The trees everywhere will surely tell me this too very soon, which we started to get brief glimpses of in driving down to Seaside Heights to see my grandmother. The final days of summer always feel sweeter in a place with seasons! Now, the things I noticed —
Sunflowers are everywhere, which is certainly a product of summer but also has been a surprising thing to see randomly in a medium or in a park or in front of someone’s house. LA has such verdant nature but, increasingly, I’m finding the access to nature in NYC is similarly at one’s fingertips. We’ll see how seasonal this is, but I know for certain it’s more than what we had in Europe.
Are bodegas greenwashing themselves? I’ve noticed so many bodegas that are marketing themselves as “organic markets” or “green garden” or “[INSERT NATURE NAME]” only to end up being bodegas that just sell oat milk and Seventh Generation products. I don’t have the historical context, obviously, but this certainly seems like a way to 1.) advertise and position oneself to gentrifiers and 2.) a response to Millennial’s seeking care-full brands and 3.) the ability to paint a common item (Bodega.) with green (“Organic.”) to position yourself as an almost MAHA outgrowth. It’s fascinating and says a lot about what we value in culture now.
