There was a time when the internet marketplace was not so bad. That was around when Neopets was a thing, and also www.onemorelevel.com. Now the internet is not very nice, Adobe Flash Player is on its last legs, and shopping on the internet sucks. The latter point is a newer phenomenon, ushered in by the rise of artificial scarcity as a marketing tactic, thanks to beauty, streetwear, sportswear giants like Kylie Cosmetics, Supreme, and Nike. Way (way) back when the internet was less bad, most items that could be purchased online were in stock. You could go to AmericanApparel.net and buy a nice spandex bodysuit, and then you could go to Converse.com and buy a pair of sneakers, or wherever we shopped in 2011. These days you can find hundreds, if not thousands, of items on any given website — from lingerie to hiking gear — and not a single item will be in stock.

Let me give you an example: The other day I wanted to buy a bra from SKIMS. I went to the site and opened up like 25 tabs, only to find that not a single bra in my size was in stock. I then checked Nordstrom (nothing) and even Depop and Poshmark (nada). I then decided I was interested in a pair of New Balance 990 sneakers. Those were — you guessed it — also out of stock in my size, and also out of stock in the kids’ section. Then I was like, “OK. Fine. Maybe I want a tube top from Paloma Wool.” Well, too bad, because those were also out of stock!!!!! You see the issue here.

I know that there is an explanation for this. Some brands are small, so they can’t afford to buy a lot of product. (I get it.) Some brands are trying to limit excess product for environmental reasons, so they underestimate their demand with plans to, after reassessing, restock later. (Good, but frustrating.) But so many brands deliberately under-buy for the sole purpose of exclusivity, driving up the brand value and resale price into infinity. It’s impossible to get your hands on any cool collaboration — except for Lemaire’s Uniqlo U line, God’s one gift to man — especially if the products manage to sell out in a matter of seconds. (New Balance’s latest Aimé Leon Dore collaboration sold out in less than a second, due to bots, according to Instagram comments.) Back in 2017, Loose Threads, a podcast and consulting and research firm, even ran an article questioning the logic behind investing into Supreme directly. If more money is to be made in the reselling market, why wouldn’t you invest your money there?

You’re probably thinking: Leah, brands use artificial scarcity because it works. It builds the brand and drives up sales. B*tch, I know! And I’m worried! If the future of retail is just one mad dash for an everyday product from a mid-tier brand, that only the very, very rich or the very, very internet-savvy (or both) can afford, then what’s the point? It’s not like these items are marketed as luxury goods, crafted by a master shoemaker whose workshop is nestled into the Italian countryside. The New Balance x Aimé Leon Dore 550 sneakers sell for a very reasonable $130, and are likely made in China. One person on Ebay (probably a man) is selling them for $2,000.

What’s happening here is that artificial scarcity — when coupled with a competitive reselling market — turns an everyday item into a luxury item, something that Marc Jacobs or Chanel do on their own when they charge $200 for a factory-made white t-shirt from China. But now even accessible, basics-oriented brands, like Everlane and H&M (their latest “sustainable” eco-engineered line — a bizarre PR stunt — sold out in minutes), seem to under-purchase to facilitate a sense of urgency. I’m worried that the upcoming Yeezy x GAP collaboration — which, might I add, was built on the ethos of accessibility — will follow suit.

There’s a kind of squeezing-out happening of the mid-tier fashion label, those brands that aren’t quite fast fashion but are still somewhat affordable. If these brands decide to alter their business models to operate on the more profitable (yet environmentally and financially detrimental) artificial-scarcity tactic, we’re left with two options: Buy mid-tier (or luxury-crafted) goods at way, way, way above market prices, or buy knockoffs from dropshippers at way, way, way below market prices. Neither of which are sustainable.

From an environmental standpoint, I’d rather companies under-produce than overproduce. But for those who are interested in fashion as an art form, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to acquire — literally and financially — well-designed pieces that aren’t from fast-fashion retailers. Demand doesn’t simply diminish once the products sell out, either. Customers then turn to aforementioned dropshippers with shady labor practices like Shein, AliExpress, and YesStyle for cheap knockoffs, which often ship from China. (The New York Times reported last month that Off-White has filed suit against nearly 1,500 copycats, many of which are dropshippers, since 2017.) If brands begin to look only to Supreme and Nike to establish their business models, I worry that artificial-scarcity will have a much larger impact — on the environment, on our wallets, and on our buying habits — than any industry can account for.

Everything Online Is Sold Out was originally published in Philistinnes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve been throwing things away. Notebooks, sticker sheets, bowls, worn-out socks, clothes I still like, shoes I sometimes wear. Every morning I check my five desk drawers and think: What goes? What stays? Then I move onto my closet, and then the bathroom, and then repeat. Why don’t you want these? My roommates ask, holding up a humidifier or stack of books. I’m just tired of looking at them, I say, which is as good of an answer as I can come up with.

The other day I calculated that I own 102 items of clothing, including shoes. Is that a lot? A little? Does it matter? I am trying to make sense of this new compulsion. According to r/Minimalism that is a fine number, so-so. According to r/FemaleFashionAdvice that is considerably lower than the average fashion-conscious woman. I was hoping this number would mean something but instead it simply means that all day, every day, I’ve been thinking about the objects that make up my life.

Before this compulsion started, to throw away, I had seen all of these items in my apartment, over, and over, and over, in bad news and in worse news, in one season and the next, in one apartment and then another. Every morning I would open my closet and say, “Not today, Silk Shirt,” and instead would pick out Beige Fleece Pullover or Gray Nike Zip-Up. Eventually, when the days were short and dark, I no longer had the energy to confront that I was not wearing Silk Shirt, had not for many months, and perhaps would not ever again. When I thought of Silk Shirt, I pictured the Before Times, and I would try to picture the After Times, and in those times, the After ones, I couldn’t see myself wearing Silk Shirt or even Mesh Long Sleeve. Maybe I was naked. Maybe I was wearing a football jersey. But never anything from Before.

Last week, The Cut’s Emilia Petrarca wrote an article titled “What Do We Do With Bad Clothing Memories?” about the clothes she owns that have been spiritually and/or aurally tainted by this past year, offering a kind of explanation for this desire to purge. She planned to wear her vintage Prada skirt on her birthday this year (as we all were) before remembering that she had last worn it, at the beginning of the pandemic, to a funeral. “I pulled it out of my closet [and] I remembered… the damp pool of snot in my face mask. My block heels sinking into the grass at the cemetery… Time has been such a slippery thing this year. I guess I did what a lot of people probably did, which is take all the bad memories and shove them into the back of the metaphorical closet that is my mind.”

But my clothes, and all of the seemingly innocent items in my apartment, don’t bring any distinct memories to mind. There’s just: Mug I Use A Lot and Desk Chair From Craigslist, both of which are now ambiently bad, for some reason. These kinds of objects (the ones I haven’t yet gotten rid of) became, and are still, the backdrop of my pandemic life, a kind of setting and stage for me to perform my daily, miserable little tasks. They haven’t been tainted by any particular pandemic memory — I haven’t worn Silk Shirt in over a year — but instead by the very passage of time that’s been sickened and slowed. I picture it like water poured over cloth, a kind of seeping. All day and night they drip, and drop.

Not all items do this, miraculously. My yoga mat doesn’t bother me. Neither does my Kendall x Kylie Cosmetics eyeshadow palette, that I’ve used maybe three times, even though it should. The objects I use and see most often to act out my new life indoors — like aforementioned Mug I Use A Lot and Desk Chair From Craigslist — are the worst offenders; reminders, incessant reminders, of a grief-riddled year.

Petrarca still plans to wear her Prada skirt on her birthday, but I am on my fourth garbage bag and sixth Poshmark and/or Depop sale. Each time I discard, I dismantle; I feel as though my apartment, and therefore my life, have gotten larger. To toss a sweater or winter glove into the donate pile is an act of wringing, a release of the grief that had pooled there.

There are, of course, some items I can’t discard or donate because I need them, or don’t have the money to replace them. But I am trying to live with less, and feel gratitude for the items that have remained, miraculously, untarnished. My bedroom is certainly not empty, but it is now much emptier. It is larger and brighter. I have extra closet space. My bookshelf is only half-full and Silk Shirt is gone. I’ve been reading a lot of e-books on minimalism lately (annoying sentence) but one example that minimalists often give to declutterers is to think of those who have lost all of their possessions in a house fire. They’re able to survive without any of their original belongings, they say, meaning: You’ll survive. But this past year has felt a bit like moving into a house after the fire. Our belongings — work clothes, travel mugs, going-out tops — are now blackened, useless. What then? I say burn it all down. Start again.

Just throw it all out was originally published in Philistinnes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

While walking down Broadway more than a few months ago, I told Leah about an intense craving for steak I’d harbored for a few days. It’s the one thing we can’t yet substitute with wheat gluten or tempeh or soy, not like the vegan reuben at Chicago Diner or the vegetarian protein nuggets at Saigon Shack. What I wanted was a steak, with orange peel and thick chunks of onion like my dad made from a Marlboro cookbook published in the ‘90s.

Leah asked me why I didn’t eat meat. I rattled off the usual answers: better for the environment, save the animals, save the planet, save the future, etc etc. But really the reason was that I hadn’t eaten meat in three years and I couldn’t very well start again now.

“Well, yeah, you could,” Leah said. “You could do it if you wanted to. Do you want to?”

Maybe, I said. But it didn’t matter, because I couldn’t. It would break the streak.

Then: “You’re gonna die one day, Annabel, and then all the streaks will be broken.”

I have thought about this sentence often since it fell out of Leah, casual and brilliant, puncturing my common sense. It’s peculiar and jolting to recognize your particular thought process as inessential, your instincts as utterly conceived. How many times have I explained my logic to a confounded expression? How many times has Leah been my skeptic?

Today I sit in Montana, considering what time I should head out on my run. Since being home in the isolated wilderness, I’ve run every day, just a couple of miles to stretch my surroundings beyond the walls of my grandmother’s living room. It’s cooler today, supposed to rain in the evening; I just ate some eggs for breakfast and can’t leave until my stomach is relatively empty, or else I’ll develop a cramp under my right rib. I could, I suppose, not run today at all — but I am again concerned with the streak, which has been established for nearly a week. To stop now would be to risk the entire affair.

My days are dictated by routine. I map every hour in my Google Calendar, office hours and happy hours and Birds of Prey at AMC Kips Bay. I go to the gym on Tuesdays and Fridays; I go to Think Coffee after.

I can’t seem to understand the point of routines if they can halt at any moment. If I stop now, when will I start again?

To live everyday within one house has ruptured the importance I’ve conceived around regimen. I wear leggings when I leave and slip my pajamas back on upon return. Like everyone else isolating at home, my time is split between my bed and the couch; I laid in bed for seven hours yesterday, between Zoom classes and homework.

Before the virus, I funneled my desire for control into my routine. Self-isolation, instead of alleviating, has compounded my need for structure, when everything else associated with daily life has fallen apart. I am afraid of sliding into something resembling My Year of Rest and Relaxation, sleeping through hours and days, lying corpse pose on my mattress. I’m inclined to think, if my anxiety treasures streaks, that I should train myself to neglect them — but I’m excavating my life for sources of control when I feel like I have none.

Maybe the best thing now is to forgo discussions of living healthily in explicitly unhealthy circumstances. I’m tired of trying to figure out the right way to live with anxiety; it already overwhelms my brain, I don’t want it to overwhelm my life.

I’ll probably go for a run today. In the grand scheme of things, a two mile jog will benefit me more than convincing myself it won’t. I probably won’t eat meat again, because the virtues of vegetarianism outweigh my brief cravings. I’m starting to understand life as a series of questions that have to be answered when they emerge. Crossing bridges, you know.

But I’m going to die one day, and all of my streaks will be broken. None of this will matter. It would do me well to think of that future as now.

Streaks was originally published in Philistinnes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is something very special about growing up in a small town. The public transportation is a trolley. You get maybe three good radio stations. There are these giant, multi-generational families that have lived here for so long that there are roads named after them, and they throw cool parties. After the parties you graduate from high school and, and this is the best part, nobody cares what you do. College? Great! Community College? Amazing! Nursing school? Fantastic! Plumber? Yes, king! Because of that nobody expects anything of anyone, so anything you do is respectable and impressive and worthwhile.

When I moved to New York, this was certainly not the case. People have dads who work for Netflix or Apple or they make millions of dollars doing something vague. You ask your friend like, “Wait, what does your dad do?” And they’re like, “Honestly, I don’t really know.” The first time that happened I was like “What do you mean,” and thought maybe they’d just misheard me. But they genuinely could not come up with a solid answer as to what their dad did, which is absolutely mind-blowing if you’re from a small town, since, for example, my mom is a “teacher” and my stepdad a “pest control manager,” both very definable and visualizable jobs.

When you go to school in New York all of your classmates have parents with indeterminate professions, and your classmates also hope to have indeterminate professions. They want to run businesses and make movies and be “brand strategists.” Most of them come from big cities, like L.A. and San Francisco and Atlanta and Chicago and Boston and N.Y.C. They describe high school as “harder than college” (LOL) and they had AP Latin? (???) They also knew, before getting into college, that they would need internships. Sonora, California, Miss Queen of the Southern Mines, never one time said anything to me about internships. Therefore I had no idea, for the first two years of college, that that was what I should have been doing. When I told a friend about this, she was like, “Well what did you think Raven Baxter was doing on That’s So Raven?” and I was like, “I don’t know? Being a teenage psychic?”

I’ve lived in New York for about two and half years, and I’m now just starting to understand what is required to actualize certain futures, that jobs are often offered not by merit but by nepotism. I‘m currently working my first internship in my last semester of my senior year, which is incredibly exciting and anxiety-inducing at the same time; it does feel that no matter how hard I work, my time will soon be up, and that I won’t ever “belong” in that kind of profession. It is very depressing to enter a job market that is only open to so few, those few whose parents are either already in that line of work, or who can help get them in.

One time I went to a bar for a friend’s birthday, and my friend and I ended up in a booth taking shots of tequila and screaming, and this random woman came over and joined us. She was like “Oh, I’m an editor and writer for this magazine,” and I was like, “Wait, is your name Jenna?” and she was like “Yeah?” and I was like, “Holy shit, I just pitched you with a story idea like a week ago,” and she was like “Damn, no way.” She was very funny and down-to-Earth and I was thrilled by the idea that she was someone who could make money writing, and I figured she was probably someone who came from like Idaho. And then the other day on Twitter I learned that her DAD is a famous journalist who has his own WIKIPEDIA page and then I was like “Oh, right.”

I do remind myself, often, that it’s my choice to live in New York. It’s my choice to have Big Dreams, and that I can return home at any time, and I can be a teacher or veterinarian and that would be fine. But now that I know what it’s like to work in an office with my own desk and computer and free snacks, where I get to write and get paid for it—something I could never do in Sonora—I know how devastated I would be if I had to move home and do something else, even if nobody else in town really cared.

When the coronavirus outbreak started spreading, and it was looking like I should probably come home, I didn’t want to. I thought I’d stay in NYC and just white-knuckle through it because if I went home, I wouldn’t know how long I would stay. If you’re from a small town, you know why you might not want to come back. If you’re not, just try to imagine going to a family reunion but all of your ex boyfriends and your racist neighbor, who once said at your summer BBQ that we should “deport all Muslims,” are there, and it’s that every day until you leave, and also one specific tree in the supermarket parking lot is now triggering.

But here I am, in Sonora for the next several… months (?), working from home and taking classes via Zoom, writing a midterm paper on dramatic literature, and thinking about how funny it is that I’m back here at the end of it all, anyway. How we’re all about to graduate during a pandemic and a recession, how our loved ones are at risk, how we’re at risk, how we might not be able to find jobs, how we’ve lost our jobs, how our parents have lost their jobs, how it doesn’t really matter what job you have if those you love aren’t healthy and safe. How none of us, and I mean none of us, will escape this unscathed.

I ran into a friend who lives in my neighborhood the other day, and we joked about how (while standing 6 ft. apart!) it would be a good time for a high school reunion, since everyone seemed to be coming home from college too, and that we should all spread out on the football field and drink together. That’s something, I realized, I could never do in New York, or really anywhere else but home. Whether or not that happens, I’d like to raise a football-field beer to Sonora, for nothing in particular other than just being home, the place where our loved ones are, the place we can all come back to in times of chaos and crisis, a place that, unlike, the cities of San Francisco or New York, could never drive us out when needed most. Cheers to belonging here, and cheers to our lives—however large and however long.

Bringing It All Back Home was originally published in Philistinnes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After a three-year wait, Animal Crossing: New Horizons comes out today to already damn-near perfect critical acclaim. A GamesRadar review praised Nintendo for “perfect[ing]“ the gameplay, and Vice called it “a little heaven in a world gone to hell.” But all of the reviews, tweets, YouTube videos, etc., that I’ve consumed seem to be particularly in awe of one feature: the HD, 1080p visuals.

“The way the sun shines over everything in the background really sells the world,” says YouTube commenter Macho Fantastico. GamesRadar describes the island as “drip-feed[ing] fresh things to discover and see” (ugh). And Alex Olney, in his Nintendo Life review, said: “The presentation in every sense here is all but flawless. It is one of the prettiest games on the Switch.”

Nobody but I, it seems, has taken any issue with the new visuals. From my deserted island of dissent, I will plead my case: the new graphics are bad.

By “bad” I don’t mean technically bad. Nintendo has accomplished an incredible feat, and the painstaking detail that went into the game is undoubtedly impressive — animals now have actual fur, fish glisten in the sun, flowers bob in the breeze. And who doesn’t like when colors are properly saturated, when flower petals and oranges and palm trees are given dimension and depth? I love when my apples have shadows!!!!

But when we really look at New Horizon, characters have been rendered so utterly soft and smooth and shiny that they look like plastic dolls. The shading on the leaves in the still above, for example, is so heavy-handed and individualized that each leaf becomes a component part, as though molded from clay. The reflection on the hair looks like the character is wearing some sort of hair-helmet, and the apples, with their own drop-shadow, appear to be floating, rather than resting, in front of the trees.

On a macro-level (trees and flowers aside), the rest of the natural world borders on photorealism. Convincingly puffy clouds streak a gradient sky, and the water is layered with various cerulean tones, which change their hue in the setting sun. But the island also takes on a whitish, undersaturated cast, and most of the colors are muted pastels, inoffensive and buffed out.

The grass, made up of tiny (realistic) blades, looks nothing like the pixelated, impressionistic squares that made up the grass of Animal Crossings past. Animals, too, are hyper-detailed and drop-shadowed, and wooden chairs look more like real-life chairs, both caught in-between Earthly realism and AC impressionism. The New Horizons world is neither realistic nor cartoonish — it’s a kind of unsettling in-between, as though you could reach into the game for a handful of (plastic) fruit.

New Horizons is a big jump, visually, from Animal Crossing for Gamecube, in which the graphics would now be delightfully and objectively horrible. The resolution was laughable. Spheres were… not. The colors were oversaturated and oftentimes fluorescent. This was before the Nintendo Wii’s “Mii,” so characters were short and blocky, and their faces hardly customizable. A skin tone option was lacking (and luckily remedied by later versions), but the hair style for women was triangular and pink, and men were given gray… horns? Animal Crossing for Gamecube (and its later versions: Wild World, New Leaf, etc.) were driven by their own illogical capabilities, and their strange, nonsensical renderings were designed to match.

It’s also worth mentioning that the inclusion of natural resources and crafting in New Horizons only bring it closer to reality. Gita Jackson for Vice mentioned that the storyline borders on a colonialist narrative scrubbed clean of consequence — your character arrives on a deserted island, depletes its resources, and builds a town. It’s no surprise that the HD Animal Crossing is the first to stir up its colonialist undertones; the other iterations of the game, save Pocket Camp, all had similar premises. In New Leaf, the character arrives at a new (fully inhabited) town, is mistaken for the new mayor, and then assumes the new role, maintaining control over the town and its villagers. But New Leaf’s visuals didn’t claim to be representational, so its storyline didn’t either. New Horizons, however, does depict a more realistic world, one which, more than ever before, parallels our own. For the first time we’re left with an eerie feeling that we’ve arrived not in the world of Animal Crossing, but of a sanitized and edenic Earth.

Animal Crossing’s remaining absurdity was, and certainly still is, part of the game’s appeal: the world of the franchise is still radically different from the real world. Refrigerators can be carried in your pocket. Animals walk on hind legs. It takes only a handful of hours for a pear to grow. The game is ludicrous; it defies time, space, human-animal capability. It is in this thought-experiment, a town cohabitated by upright-animals and people, that we lose ourselves, and it is this ethos that is complicated and confused by HD renderings. New Horizons retains a degree of improbability, sure, but its high-definition visuals create a new dissonance between the game’s content and its form. If I’m going to move to a deserted island, it shouldn’t be too close to home.

Who The Hell Asked For Animal Crossing in HD was originally published in Philistinnes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chicago band Ratboys shares several virtues with ’90s alt-rock. The melodic hooks and satisfyingly full guitars recall mainstream hits like the Foo Fighters’ “Learn to Fly” and Third Eye Blind, while trading in emo consciousness. There’s an unpretentious joy within the arrangements, a willingness to lean into potentially corny musical tropes and dip out before going too far.

For a while, Ratboys’ greatest strength was live performance. I saw the band open for Soccer Mommy at Music Hall of Williamsburg a couple of years ago, and was charmed by their stage presence and palpable camaraderie. Part of their success is lead singer and guitarist Julia Steiner — within a genre inarguably dominated by male voices, Steiner’s coolheaded, soft vocals are subversive. She’s laid-back and self-effacing without seeming manic-pixie, and it’s clear that she’s not just a female figurehead for another dude-rock college band. But when I listened to their discography at home, I felt something lacking — songs which had seemed so strong live lost gumption in their recorded versions. The records were meeker, less dynamic.

Their new album Printer’s Devil, released February 28, amends these limitations. Ratboys has steadily improved since their 2015 debut AOID; the three singles released ahead of Printer’s Devil build upon the strongest tracks from their second record, maintaining the steady rhythm of “Molly” and “Elvis is in the Freezer” while growing in sonic confidence. These songs, which pair unconventional lyrical topics with rewarding musical payoffs, are those in which Ratboys seems to commit most firmly to themselves. Their flirtation with country, using slide guitar in tandem with traditional rock techniques, add nuance to their indie foundation; there’s a sense of homage to early Wilco, for whom they’re opening on tour this spring.

Ratboys shares with Wilco a certain Midwestern humility that circumvents lyrical triteness. Chicago, despite being a heavily-populated metropolitan city with a thriving DIY scene, tends to refuse prestige, or at least greet it with modesty. Maybe it’s the Cubs, maybe it’s being nestled in between Missouri and Indiana — it’s not New York and it doesn’t want to be.

Theoretically, Ratboys’ simple candor could be alienating. Printer’s Devil’s “Anj” describes an evolving relationship with a childhood babysitter, Angie. Steiner shared in a press release that a conversation with Angie, in which they spoke about traumatic experiences, had resulted in “a fundamental role reversal” that destabilized her conceptions of those we grow up with and eternally see as “adults.” This is a theme throughout Printer’s Devil — in “Look To,” Steiner deconstructs the confusion of shifting power dynamics. “It’s hard to know you’ll need me soon,” she sings, “Like I used to need you.”

In “Anj,” the refrain of “I’m not alone,” and its turn to “You’re not alone,” has the potential to sound trite and lazy, and were the band more naively earnest, it would be. But these phrases aren’t a generalized prescription of self-acceptance, nor are they shrouded in extraneous metaphor. When Ratboys embrace the ordinary nature of these words, they feel gratifyingly inevitable.

Perhaps most illustrative of the band’s ethos is their irony-laced gothic music video for “I Go Out at Night.” Complete with opening credits and lightning strikes, Ratboys riff on film noir as zealous trick-or-treaters, in search of adventure yet easily freaked. A suspected witch gifts them a guitar and a jam session ensues; the witch cries proud tears as she watches this burgeoning band do what they do best.

For me, it’s essential Chicago. Growing up in the midwest means you have little to cling to in terms of clout, which leaves self-awareness as the most valuable social currency. The members of Ratboys flout the self-serious and reach for humor instead. Steiner writes about dead cats, 20th century Antarctic explorations, Victorian slum-houses, her sister. She knows you don’t have to care about what she has to say, and she says it anyway.

On Friday 3.20, all Bandcamp sales will profit artists directly. Support Ratboys here.

Evolution and Tradition with Ratboys was originally published in Philistinnes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every few weeks one thought slams into me like only oppressive memories do: Jack Antonoff wants to work with Julien Baker.

In an interview with Stereogum from 2017, the producer talked about writing with Lorde, Taylor Swift, and St. Vincent on their albums, his work post-Bleachers, the New Jersey festival he plans every summer called Shadow Of The City. “Let’s do what excites us,” he said, excitedly, in regards to making music that sounds different, music that changes with you. But then he said this: “I hope someone like Julien Baker calls me. I’d love to make an album with her.”

OOHH MY GOOODDDDD!!!!!! You would think this might inspire joy, that a relatively small artist like Julien would get the attention of a big-ticket producer like Antonoff. And yet! I am filled with frustration. I’m literally sweating.

I don’t hate Jack Antonoff — Taylor’s snappiest pop songs are those with his producing credits, and MASSEDUCTION is one of the best albums of the decade. He’s a good producer, and he seems like a nice enough guy. But if he touches Julien Baker, an independent artist who produces most of her own records herself, I will lose my mind.

Early March, the Dixie Chicks announced their revival with the Antonoffed single “Gaslighter.” It’s fine. Despite a “Best New Track” christening from Pitchfork, the song disappointed me. “Gaslighter, denier,” rhymes Natalie Maines. “Doin’ anything to get your ass farther.” Her voice is still as twangy and resonant as it is in Fly, but it has fewer places to roam. Instead of punchy and anthemic, the chorus feels repetitive and abrasive; instead of empowered, the lyrics feel conceived.

Mostly, I think it’s boring — which is exactly the risk of one producer monopolizing pop music.

Antonoff’s trio of greatest successes — Taylor, Lorde, and St. Vincent — have fairly distinct sounds and crossover audiences. It makes sense that he’d want to work with the most innovative artists in the field, and also that he’d want to steer a music monolith like Taylor in new directions. And these musicians’ ouvres are molded mostly from their own lives, the personal and specific experiences that could never be duplicated by another. Antonoff likes working with friends to ensure honest discussions in the studio, distilling vague feelings to singular potency; he carries himself with an aura of anti-establishment, despite birthing number one hits.

When working on 1989, Antonoff’s production quirks were more alternative. 2014 was just wading out of bass drops and EDM features and into ’80s synths, marking a mid-decade shift in pop music trends. “Out of the Woods” didn’t sound like anything I’d heard from a contemporary musician, and certainly didn’t sound like the same Taylor who’d written “All Too Well” just a few years earlier. It took me a while to accept the change, and even longer to appreciate it. But now, nearly every song of his features gated reverb and gang vocals — which I love, but which also get tired when they make an appearance on every track from a popular female artist. In 2020, pop seems to be hurtling more toward the campy Eurodance from Dua Lipa, and Caroline Polachek’s glitchy syncopation.

Antonoff’s touch is so noticeable that Caryn Ganz, pop music editor for The New York Times, refers to several of his Taylor Swift concoctions as “Getaway Cars,” after the memorable Reputation track; on an episode of the NYTimes Popcast, Ganz counts five “Getaway Cars” on Lover (“Cruel Summer” is among them). It could be that Antonoff has a distinct style — he knows his voice, and his audience — but it also could be that he struck gold with one single and knew it, and then stuck with it far past its expiration date.

Lost in “Gaslighter” are the charming quirks of early Dixie Chicks, the candor present in empty sonic spaces. Now every inch is covered, no pocket left unfilled. The single, for me, is doing too much of everything in the way of uninteresting genre crossovers. It ticks too many boxes.

It might be most noticeable in the harmonies — the vocals are tight and full, no margin of error. This contained, they feel as if in a tunnel; they lose the airiness within “Travelin’ Soldier” and “The Long Way Around.” Antonoff’s production is clean — if the bass is grimy, it’s still streamlined. His hallmark is a catchy hook, maybe to the detriment of any possible eccentricity.

Writing this kind of feels like yet another argument against selling out. Quit stealing all my secrets, you might imagine me yelling. Leave my faves alone! Maybe I’m doing a little of that. But mostly I just don’t want my entire music taste to end up sounding the same, just screaming bridge after screaming bridge, gated reverb pulsating so incessantly it knocks me flat on my ass.

For the love of God, Jack Antonoff, please stop Jack Antonoffing all over my favorite artists. I’ll say it: Leave my faves alone! I just want one of them to avoid the studio with you in it. If you make Julien Baker sound like Lorde there will be no point in having a Julien Baker or a Lorde at all.

Your love for an artist does not entitle you to their production credits. Apparently it doesn’t even entitle you to a Top Fans notification from Spotify because I didn’t get one and I really deserve it. It’s like the barrage of Joan Didion comparisons for writers — enough! We only need one.

And we only need one “Getaway Car.”

Please, Jack Antonoff, Leave Julien Baker Alone was originally published in Philistinnes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In a humbling and horrifying discovery, I have found all of my old Instagram bios in my privacy settings. You can find those by going to:

Settings → Security → Access Data → Former Bio Texts

For all of you who, unlike me, grew up not-annoying and cool, this probably isn’t very exciting. Your bios are probably very normal. I’ll bet they’re like: “CA 🌸 18 Years Young 🌻 Dog Lover,” which would be totally cute and acceptable, or even something like “🌊 Good Vibes Only 🌊” which is a visually balanced and inoffensive message.

My Instagram bios, however, tell a much different story. I liked Frank Ocean. I thought I was gay. I… cried a lot? Questions, so many of them, you and I will have. I challenge you to give me the benefit of the doubt, and believe me when I say I had no idea what I was thinking, or even what these mean, and that I’m probably much more cool (stable) now. Anyway, since you so kindly asked, here they all are for your viewing pleasure.

“experince is a brutal teacher, but you learn. my god, do you learn.” — c.s. lewis

“whoever you think i am, that’s who i am.” — helter skelter

👽🌸

california 🌜

i know a lot of interesting things (Note: this was untrue, I was 15)

sassy pisces from california

jingle bells

scary

i am 16 and afraid of the dark

:-)

i like girls and boys and giving myself tattoos :-)

aesthetic

$$$

knives

🐐

I crave that mineral

tell it

🍌

·゜·*:.。..。.:*·’(*▽*)’·*:.。. .。.:*·゜·*

I am lamp

I love lamp

(·ω·)ノ

glum

♓

I’m like a koala because I’m really clingy

Snail girl (snirl)

pillows are nature’s packing peanuts

it me

the barista and the stoner with the sweetest kiss around

the barista and the cat lover with the sweetest kiss around

the barista and the cat lover with the sweetest kiss around 🍂🍁

there’s nothing more I want except to be alone

love me now when I’m gone love me none

CHOCOLATE?!!

🌜🌛

Kayla’s my mom

I cry a lot, don’t worry about it

I’m just carbon and bad timing

“I’m always a slut for plants”

:~)

parisienne at heart

#flannel bisexual (Note: I would like to clarify that I am not bisexual and that I was just going through a phase.)

♓🐟

Now I’m not religious but if you cross me I’ll cross you

catch me goin 50mph out the school parking lot

I write stuff

goin to dad college gonna write a lotta books

Urethra Franklin

urethra franklin

L&C ’20 / urethra franklin

what the heck!

sabrina the teenage finch

🥀

A WOMAN ON A MISSION

A WOMAN ON A MISSION 👼

A WOMAN ON A MISSION ☁️☁️☁️

:•)

if you don’t sin jesus died for nothing

mother i never knew—every time i see the ocean, every time

i love you!

☆

winona forever

nyc

the dolphins make me cry

dolphins make me cry

horse e-books

🧚

🐎

🍋🍋🍋

let chill

y’all’d’ve

My Old Instagram Bios Chill Me To My Core was originally published in Philistinnes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.