It's Sock-Overhaul Fall
And it's still "F**k Black Fr*day," too, partner
Happy Thanksgiving to you & yours from Blackbird Spyplane.
Our brand-new 2024 G.I.F.T.S. List, bursting with slappers for the mind, body and home, is here.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a helpful rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from incense to sweatpants to underwear — is here.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
In today’s Plane:
I’d been hearing great things about a new elite sock-maker on the scene, so I finally picked up some pairs to check out. They’re so good I’m going to usher out 2024 and prepare for the new year by reworking my socks rotation around them in a highly recommended life-improving Infrastructural Revamp.
A Mach 3+ seller of vintage art & fashion books (among other gems) at nice prices
The formation & erosion of Identity in the “Starter Packs” era
Let’s get to it —
As always we have zero “Black Fr*day” programming for you because, save some rare exceptions, that s**t is a waste of time. You have better things to do this long holiday weekend that will make you feel much happier and result in far fewer purchases you don’t actually want — give The Theater of the Black Fr*day Bargain a miss.
One example of a better thing you can do instead? Let your beautiful brain luxuriate in Spyplane Brilliance as I gaze at the Spylosopher’s Stone and capture the profundities that occur to me…
Case in point, in this past Tuesday’s sletter I (Jonah) wrote a trademark smash-hit essay about The Unswaggy Valley, and how, yes, “wack people” can ruin something you love. The essay centered on “the irreducible degree to which our appreciation of art always unfolds along a social axis,” exploring the way that, “when something is in the Unswaggy Valley, its currency as cultural capital enters a period of inflation.”
There is, however, a hyper-contemporary twist on The Unswaggy Valley dynamic that I did not mention — one which has only deepened the issue and raised the stakes.
I can illustrate it quickly with the story of a song.
In 1999, when Pavement put out the “Spit On A Stranger” CD single to promote their final studio LP, Terror Twilight, your Malkmus-loving boy Young Spyplane found myself skipping the f**k past the single itself, which I thought was fine, and playing track two, which I loved way more. I couldn’t believe they hadn’t put it on the album proper: a fantastic B-side called “Harness Your Hopes.”
For ~20 years, this song was a true obscurity. I would throw it on every now and then, and people would either be, like, ‘Whoa, ‘Harness Your Hopes,’ hell yeah,” or “What Pavement album was this on? Never heard it, tight.’”
Then, within the past 5 years or so, “Harness Your Hopes” blew up out of nowhere on TikTok, the way decades-old songs have a way of doing these days, to the point that, by some metrics, it’s now Pavement’s most popular track.
This deposited “Harness Your Hopes,” for now, into the Unswaggy Valley: It’s not a deep-cut sleeper anymore, and yet “Cut Your Hair” still feels like the canonized classic “big” Pavement song. So if you’re a “Harness Your Hopes” Day One and you care about not looking like a d*mn arriviste — even though you know it risks making you look laughably vain instead — you might find yourself compelled to tell people, “Please be clear, I didn’t just discover this song on TikTok, I’ve been rocking with it since the jump.”
The contemporary twist here is the delivery mechanism of TikTok and Spotify, because you aren’t just saying some emblematically 1990s-record-store-clerk s**t about how you were “early.” You’re also saying something that feels emblematically 2020s: “The affection I feel for this song is not the result of a streaming platform speaking its undead will through me.” You are trying, that is, to establish your own agency as distinct from both the taste of latecomers AND the prerogatives of “The Algorithmic Recommendation Industrial Complex.”
This opens up into a broader discussion of how algorithmic sorting is reshaping our understanding of taste, and from there into a discussion of how our sense of individuality itself is shaped, performed, and threatened in this era of the internet.
I make sense of the phenomenon of “Starter Pack” / subculture-taxonomy-type IG creators in this light. Accounts like these specialize in wry memes about different online & offline nano-demographics, as reflected by the things people within those nano-demographics (supposedly) love to say, do and buy.
On one level, these taxonomies can be fun in the same way a sharply observed piece of observational comedy is fun: We enjoy the air of cutting anthropological precision. Sometimes they are enjoyable in an impressionistic-absurdist Mad Libs kind of way, too. “Girls who drank Diet Cokes in summer 2022 really did be carrying around books by Christopher Lasch with their Juuls am I right??”
In aggregate, though, these memes make you: If anyone can be sorted into a type, identifiable by its own set of mockable signifiers and consumer choices, is there no such thing as individuality anymore?
In the comments on Tuesday’s essay, a reader called Pamela grappled sagely with a version of this question. “I wonder if we’ve passed through some event horizon,” she wrote, where we no longer believe “we can collect our way to an identity… I think about my various media collections, my catalogs of deep cuts, and I wonder if I’m actually mad about their newfound unswagginess, or has it just shone a light on unswagginess that’s been there all along? That is, I didn’t create any of these artworks, and the mere act of liking something shouldn’t impart any signifier.”
There’s definitely something to that. As the co-author of earth’s no. 1 anticonsumerist dope style & culture sletter, I do think that liking dope s**t is cool, and that thinking about, critiquing, or even just locking the f**k in with a piece of culture and deeply grooving upon it can represent a kind of active consumption vs. mere “signifier-amassing” passive consumption. But Pamela’s right that taste is only one part of the puzzle, and if you mistake it for the whole puzzle you are neglecting the part of yourself that wants not just to consume meaningful things but create meaningful things, too.
Meanwhile —
I’ve somehow managed to keep the same undershirts in rotation for nearly 20 (!?) years, a wild fact I discussed in our legendary essay about The Death of Thrifting. But I tend to cycle out my underwear and socks — “higher-touch” pieces of wardrobe infrastructure that wear out much faster — every few years.
Back in January I wrote about how I fully overhauled my underwear holdings upon the discovery of a deep-cut line of revelatory hemp-cotton bangers. And as 2024 comes to a close, I’m in the process of doing the same thing with my socks — a great way to usher in a new year btw — thanks to a bubbling new line whose socks I’ve been hearing great things about and finally slipped my dogs into: