Pop Culture Mondays/9.9.24
The REUNION Edition
Happy Monday, my darling pop culture junkies! We have had a LITTLE break, and of course, just because I took a break doesn't mean pop culture news did, so there is lots to catch up on. I will breeze through some of it and skip some other things because I could spend days writing about it all and not even scratch the surface. We talked about Oasis already, but more about Oasis. And I suppose I HAVE to touch on FOUNDER MODE though I don’t want to. I mean, I really don’t want to. But it is almost behind us. We have some TikTok trends and some content, as well as KENDRICK LAMAR at the Super Bowl.
But the BIG news this week?? Maybe bigger than Kendrick??)
Well…I say this slightly, holding my breath as I always expect hiccups regarding change. BUT this is PCM’s last official week on MEDIUM. Yes, that’s right, change is a coming. I have heard all your complaints about accessing Meidum, slow load times, and everything in between. I am so grateful to Medium for giving me the tools to launch this thing back in 2018 and for being there all this time. BUT PCM has evolved…we all have really…well, except Medium. TBH. Sorry sorry.
So, a million shoutouts to Matt Mullenweg and his exceptional team at WordPress, who have worked with me and Rebecca Unger, my incredible colleague, in building our very own dedicated site for PCM. I cannot wait to show it to you. I also expect the coming weeks to have some glitches, so please bear with me.
OK, so on that housekeeping note…let’s get to it. Grab your 🎧 and your 🍿 and enjoy.
A ROUND-UP:
A little different format this week but that’s just because we are going to touch on a bunch of things to keep you in the KNOW.
TIME TO MAKE SOME $$
Nothing brings people together like the idea of making a LOT of money. Sorry, perhaps that’s cynical of me..no, I am QUITE certain it is cynical of me. But I am also of the mindset of who cares. WHATEVER it takes. An Oasis reunion will be amazing. But, the brothers who have been at war with one another for over a decade are now reuniting and loving each other up on social media. Noel Gallagher is also selling his catalog, it seems (READ HERE).
And I love this analysis from Billboard this week as to WHY NOW:
Post-COVID, the ’90s have never been so popular. The decade’s aesthetic — baggy clothing, long hair, middle partings — has infiltrated TikTok videos, as has the sounds of the generation of musicians that made it big in the era. Reunion shows for the band’s contemporaries (and rivals) Blur and Pulp over the past two summers were attended by both Gen Z and their parents. Social media users have made spurious links between the selection of a Labour government in this year’s general election and that of Oasis’ return.
But for our purposes, it is the social media response to the news that they were back.
AHHH yes…authentic ’90s VIBES. Do you remember when MTV ran an ongoing tally of Blur record sales vs Oasis record sales when they released singles at the same time? IT WAS MENTAL. I was glued to the TV…I mean, this is when we were all so innocent. OJ trial and Blur vs Oasis. My entire personality in 1995. Blur WON and we chose this song over Oasis…we were YOUNG, and what did we know? Damon was adorable, though, so maybe it was that?
Where is Damon now? I mean, he has Gorillaz, so there’s that.
My fave thing about this tour and the only thing bringing me to Twitter/X is watching Liam on it:
And a little note on this and full disclosure: I work with Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster. All this talk about how TM raised ticket prices during the on-sale is just NOT true. ERRONEOUS. According to TM:
“Ticketmaster does not set prices, nor do we have or offer algorithmic surge pricing technologies,” the company said in a statement. “Furthermore, Ticketmaster did not change prices during this sale — prices were established before the sale began.”
Voila.
TRAUMA CANDY SALAD:
Love the kids. I really do. Back when I was in my late teens and early 20s, we just binged Blow, Red Bull, and Vodkas (sorry) and ordered late-night nuggets and cheese fries to deal with our traumas, which we kept buried DEEP DEEP inside. But the kids today have a SOMEWHAT healthier approach. Candy is better than narcotics, I promise. Oh, and they discuss it. PUBLICLY. The latest trend:
I mean…these are pretty dark. But healthier than my process when I was their age!
THE DOWNFALL OF BEE BETTER:
We always have rises and falls. We love them, don’t we? We raise people up to an unsustainable height…and then crash them down so hard that sometimes they never recover. Take this content creator, Bee Better, who always started his DOWNFALL video the same way. Explaining he was the youngest person to get an MBA in Canada — and an MBA in marketing. And so, therefore, according to HIM< he was an EXPERT in all things. So he would do these take-down videos, which, to be honest (TBH), always made me roll my eyes. But then he did one on Kamala Harris, and LORD…the community was like, NOPE, no, thank you, and the takedown began. He has removed his videos, so I cannot share them, but thankfully others captured it:
And AGAIN, I say this in ALL seriousness. Forget the CIA or MI6. Do you need to dig shit up on people? Turn to the TikTok community. SO it turns out, this kid is from a VERY wealthy family and he works for his dad’s company as the marketer — BUT the company is in business, BUG business with Trump so there’s that. Oh, and the school he got his BA from is dodgy, and the whole thing is a mess.
So a few things that came from THIS video specifically. Let’s go to the comments, which is where a lot of the beauty comes from TikTok.
First, people were still unsure what happened, so a little explainer in the comments.
Also, she talks about being “RATIOED.” So, like, what does THAT MEAN?
Some other reactions:
HELL hath no fury…
DOPAMINE MENU:
One last trend to discuss. The kids! Dopamine menus have been around for a while now, but I just have not discussed them with you. MY bad. So what is it? Here you go:
Articles are now being written about them!
NIKOCADO AVOCADO:
And another creator is taking heat. This is mukbanger Nikocado Avocado, who was obese and would eat huge amounts of food on camera for his devoted fans. Like these:
Yes, this is a thing.
Well, in a shocking turn of events, Nikocado revealed that he had lost 250 lbs and had been performing a social experiment for the last couple of years as he apparently had been posting old videos he took before he began his weight loss journey so no one knew that he was ON the journey. And then he posted this video of his reveal — which basically broke YouTube and he has turned himself into the villain, on purpose, to really attack his fans and others. WILD.
This video has over 31 MILLION views.
And the Internet lost its mind.
BRANDS, LISTEN UP!
Last week, a brand called CRAFTMIX got hate from an influencer who took umbrage that the brand sent them a PR box filled with its product because that influencer was sober. The problem was that the company is known for its mixers for cocktails AND mocktails, and the brand had checked with the influencer’s own PR team, and the PR team had told them to send and gave them the shipping details, obviously. The interesting part of this story, however, is HOW the brand handled the influencer’s angry post that should be studied…it was GENIUS:
I had never heard of this brand, but now I am buying up ALL of their product. Hats off to the founder, the social media manager, and the whole team. BRAVO.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT:
THIS SHOW. I binged it. I hate watched it. I love watched it. I questioned Nicole Kidman’s wigs. And her accent. People have called it “the poor man’s White Lotus” or “White Lotus for dumb people..”
It is fun and campy, and I love the cast and truly I will watch anything with Eve Hewson in it, so there’s that. But beyond anything else on this show, people are mostly talking about the opening credit scheme of THE DANCE.
The dance is fun, but it also totally contradicts the tone of the show, which is why I think it actually works.
Like, is it the actors AS their characters doing the dance, or is it the actors doing it as themselves? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS. But also, I love it.
MUTE THIS:
Ok, you can do whatever you want, of course. I am not bossing anyone around! But, for my own mental health, I have muted this term, which took over once upon a time Twitter last weekend. Because no one loves to hear themselves bloviate MORE than the Space Karen-worshipping sycophants.
What IS founder mode?
Paul Graham of Y Combinator wrote this post the other week:
IN that post, he explains:
In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who’ve tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.
It goes on…
The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it’s up to them to figure out how. But you don’t get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.
Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it’s described that way, doesn’t it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
I actually don't fully disagree here, but there are issues with it — -as is the case with anything coming from middle-aged rich white men who don't have a lens onto how the world works for everyone else. Like…women. But the response to this…both the fanboy madness and the criticisms just took over, and I had to take a break.
But a good tweet was this one:
NEVER FORGET.
Women who did the very thing Paul breaks down in his post were called bitches and overly ambitious or aggressive. Think AWAY and THE WING.
So yeah, I checked out.
THE FEUD GOES TO THR SUPER BOWL:
Honestly, Kendrick Lamar, as the halftime act at the Super Bowl, will be sensational. Monumental. Historic, if anything like his performance at the Forum we talked about over the summer. But the fact that this is taking the Drake feud to this level? Is incredible. I am HERE for it. See the video where he announces he is the act, which is also directed at Drake, who asked for ROUND TWO in their beef. Drake also sang about how he is as BIG AS THE SUPERBOWL:
The responses have been nothing short of brilliant:
THAT IS IT, my darlings…
That is that, my darlings. I hope this makes you feel caught up! Remember, next week, this may appear in your inbox a little differently. Bear with us, as we will definitely have kinks to work out. And if you don't get this in your inbox, I will post next week on the new way to find and subscribe to PCM!
In the meantime, enjoy this trailer of Will Farrell’s new project, which I love:
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Have an amazing week!!
Xx,
Brooke
