Can "wack people" ruin something you love?

Status anxiety in the Unswaggy Valley

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Here at Blackbird Spyplane we focus on developments at the bleeding edge of the arts & slapper-sciences. As the 18th century poet and mystic Novalis once put it, “Philosophy is really homesickness — an urge to be at home everywhere.” And since we are the No. 1 source across all media for unbeatable philosophical epiphanies, you could say we own charming pied-à-terres in every corner of human experience.

And yet I (Jonah) have never done any Big-Brained Contemplating about what happens when a bleeding-edge development starts to feel… cauterized. When the blood starts to thin and dry out, and something that was once fire & popping threatens to become lame & corny… because “a bunch of wack people hopped on the bandwagon.”

You know what I’m talking about. You caught wind of some piece of culture, you loved it / copped it / rocked it / raved about it, but “then everybody else got into it” and your enthusiasm dwindled. This dynamic is so common it has its own shorthand formulation: “I liked x before it was y.”

We tend to mock this type of disavowal as flighty, snobbish, status-obsessed superficiality. If you really grooved upon that indie band’s songs, we ask, then how can the arrival of a bunch of new people to the fandom — people you deem to have coarser tastes than you — poison that groove? The lyrics and chords and guitar tones didn’t change. If you really vibed off that vintage poster of a Donald Judd stack piece, then why are you taking it off your wall, dismayed by Judd’s current transmutation into an IG moodboard cliché / Kardashian décor-inspo touchstone? His minimalist explorations didn’t get less intrinsically compelling, did they?

And if you really f**ked with that Salomon Xt-6 trail runner, then why does its broader adoption by swagless hordes who bought pairs on Ss*nse have you tossing yours? The proprietary Agile Chassis™ System (ACS) still “provides stability and dampening and works in concert with the EnergyCell midsole” and goes great with all kinds of pants, doesn’t it?

What’s happening in these cases is that The Cool Thing You Loved on Some IYKYK S**t has been picked up by other people and carried into an awkward expanse between “cult” status and “classic” status — an expanse which I am naming The Unswaggy Valley.

Here’s how the Unswaggy Valley works. For any piece of culture — a band, sculptor, movie, chair, sneaker, etc. — to inspire an “I was into it before all these wack people” reaction, it has to have once registered as deep-cut / cool / underground / cult. But not anymore, because then it would still feel like your “secret” property, and you could still feel a special kind of pride for liking it.

At the same time, it can’t have traveled all the way into Canonized Classic status, either, because then you wouldn’t feel any possessiveness over it. Broad admiration would be baked into the deal in a way you wouldn’t find remotely threatening to your own status as a Person of Taste.

Let’s illustrate this with some examples from film.

The Godfather Pt. II, Dazed & Confused, and Parasite, to name three masterpieces off the dome, are Canonized Classics: Widely beloved, with zero functional “cult” energy for anyone to feel cool about / possessive over. And so the fact that they’re lots of people’s favorite movies does little to diminish a status-anxious cinephile’s enthusiasm.

By contrast, Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, starring Josh O’Connor — currently Blackbird Spyplane’s No. 1 Movie of 2024 — is a beautiful, haunting, deep-cut banger like nothing I’ve ever encountered. I want more people to see it. But if it suddenly tipped over into “a thing,” where a bunch of people started publicly proclaiming and performing their love for it in annoying ways, while I don’t think I’d love it any less, my appreciation would, by definition, no longer feel “rare” in the way it does now. I would no longer feel like I’m part of some funky Chimera-pilled club whose other members I’m excited to meet.

Meanwhile, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, also co-starring Josh O’Connor, is a horny hit that feels in many ways like a cool indie, even though Am*zon and MGM distributed it. It did big box-office numbers and absolutely became a “thing” that a bunch of people started publicly proclaiming and performing their love for in annoying ways. The movie gripped the zeitgeist, vaporized the resale market for plaid 2000s-era Nike tennis shorts, inspired untold memes and generated wack Loewe tie-in merch.

Extremely Unswaggy Valley type s**t!

To be clear, though, saying something is in the Unswaggy Valley is not in itself a negative value judgment. Take Uncut Gems. Like Challengers, it was also indie-coded, did big numbers, inspired memes, and generated merch, all of which nudged it into the Unswaggy Valley, too. And yet Uncut Gems is a Spyplane-certified modern masterpiece.

So I’m not making a point here about something’s dopeness or lack thereof. I’m making a point, instead, about shifting tastes & status anxieties as they attach to objects of culture. What we are talking about is the irreducible degree to which our appreciation of art always unfolds along a social axis. When something is in the Unswaggy Valley, its currency as cultural capital has entered a period of inflation.

Renata Adler — a cool genius whose Speedboat is adored by cognoscenti but under-read at large — is in the deep-cut slapper column. Toni Morrison — a cool genius firmly and uncontroversially in the Literary Pantheon— is in the Canonized Classics column. Sally Rooney — a cool genius who sells a ton of books to people who other people find uncomfortably close to them demographically, so they make bad “knowing” jokes about her on Twitter to try to signal their superiority — is in the Unswaggy Valley.

Some cases blur the lines. Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a canonized classic, but it’s also “slow,” “difficult,” and sufficiently under-seen that it still counts as cult. James Cameron’s Avatar and Avatar 2: The Way of Water, are trippy spiritual-technological triumphs, but they’re also record-shattering blockbusters in a way that some snobs dismiss out of hand, which lends the films a weird counterintuitive cult energy.

Charli XCX somehow manages to feel simultaneously 1. cult (she charts much lower and remains relatively more “indie-” and “underdog-”coded than, say, Sabrina Carpenter), 2. mass (Vitamin Water and the DNC love her), and 3. squarely situated in the Unswaggy Valley, too (you could hear someone saying, “I’m not one of these lame brat-loving carpetbaggers, real heads know that How I’m Feeling Right Now was her best work with A.G. Cook.”).

Donald Judd is a Canonized Classic king, periodically re-discovered by bright-eyed twenty- and thirtysomethings who encounter his artwork initially as a deep-cut slapper but, with time, thirsty displays of enthusiasm (e.g., posting pictures of the new Spaces monograph on a coffee table next to a Daniel Arsh*m book) nudge him into the Unswaggy Valley. This same kind of thing happens cyclically with Akari lanterns and Eames chairs, too. It hasn’t quite happened to Anni Albers yet, but her textiles photograph so beautifully it might.

Despite such occasional category-benders, though, the concept of the Unswaggy Valley helps us make sense of how culture that starts off feeling “cool” can come to feel less so when more / different people embrace it — even as the work itself goes unchanged.

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“Blackbird Spyplane,” you might be thinking right about now, “everything you’ve said is acute, incisive and mind-expanding per usual. But come on — at the end of the day, what kind of petty, vain freak cares about ‘looking cool’ so much that their enjoyment of art can wither and crumble because other people like it?”

I feel you, and on some level I agree. But here’s the thing: Much the same way it can be difficult to “separate the art from the artist” when the person behind great work is revealed to have done unsavory s**t, it’s difficult to “separate the art from the audience,” when a bunch of people who you think are wack start f**king loudly with something you love.

Think of it this way. We all agree that a cool person with panache can wear a garment we’d previously dismissed and show it to us in a new, positive light — freaking & redeeming a previously benighted garment. Ipso facto we must also concede that a person whose style, energy and gestalt we find repellent can wear a garment we’d previously appreciated and show it to us in a new, negative light — casting a deathly pall on the slapper!

The Slopeslow Cowichan sweater is a beautiful deep-cut garment currently making inroads among Mach 5+ clothes appreciators, hand-knit in Japan from lovely fabrics like lambswool and yak wool. Until the other day, when the visionary Spyfriends at Vancouver’s Neighbour got in a small handful that swiftly sold out, it was only available via stockists across Japan (plus one in Korea). But say this chunky sweater somehow made its way from Vancouver to Sun Valley, Vail and Jackson Hole, circulating and spreading outwards from there, becoming a staple flex among sauce-free “finance guys” (a category of dude who loves a rare, expensive, zip-front knit): Its appeal would be non-negligibly altered, if not outright tainted.

The Common Projects Achilles is a great non-theoretical example of what happens when a onetime slapper enters the Unswaggy Valley and then goes on not to become a Canonized Classic but rather Anti-Swag Kryptonite. The Achilles is a simple, objectively clean-looking sneaker. It started off reading as chill and deep-cut in the mid- to late-’00s. Then it got rocked just widely enough to enter the Unswaggy Valley, and by ~2016 or so it had transformed so fully into a sauceless “moneyed millennial” / “tech bro” talisman that there was no way to wear it anymore and feel any control over how you signified.

Not yet anyway

In June 2023 I fished out my old flambéed pair of white lows, wondering if someone with my immense saucely powers and totally earned sense of confidence could resuscitate / freak them. But the cursed energies were still too strong! I might give it another go before too long, but for now they remain unrockable.

What we’re talking about is a tale as old as time, or at least as old as the 1950s, when the creation of mass culture begat the counterculture and, simultaneously, when Lifestyle Consumerism took hold of Western society, so that the things you bought were understood to communicate something about who you are.

This is precisely why a certain stripe of affluent liberal loved for years to be seen driving Teslas as a matter of cultural signaling (it’s an electric car = I care about the climate; it’s expensive = I still look rich). And it’s why they don’t anymore (The CEO = MAGA dork; the people who ride with him = loathsome). The cars stayed the same, but the cultural-political valence around “Who Drives a Tesla” flipped 180˚.

In response, some people offloaded their cars. Some got stickers that say, “I bought this before Elon went crazy” and other messages that make sure you know they aren’t right-wing stans.

I would whip a Honda CyberFit

Most of these people are sadly incapable of perceiving the fact that, no matter how wack Musk is, the Cybertruck design is actually a 9-out-of-10 ripper. The single-bar headlight is hard. It’s very cool that it’s badgeless. And the brutalist geometric planes of dulled stainless steel are extremely tight — it looks cyber-Soviet, real talk.

The problem is it’s too big, so it looks overcompensatory and aggro. And it’s too long, so it looks kind of goofy when viewed directly from the side. But if they made a Honda Fit x Cybertruck collab (and Honda handled the internals so it was actually a good car), it would be unbeatable. The Small Car Sector is in peril and needs this kind of juice!

What car-driving has in common with clothes-rocking is they are both intrinsically social activities. Yes, we use our affinities for all kinds of culture to “tell other people something about ourselves.” And yes, these affinities are always, by definition, socially constructed. But whereas you can theoretically have a private relationship with a song, or a painting, or a film, your relationship to a piece of clothing is something that necessarily happens in public, when the s**t you are wearing is beheld by other people.

It’s true that humans, like all living things, have God in them. And that if you could somehow spend time getting to know every person who seems “wack,” you would discover kindness, virtue and divinity in the vast majority of them — but this is not relevant to the inquiry at hand. The Tesla example underscores how our encounters with culture never happen in a vacuum. They are always constituted by shifting social information. And in the symbolic order we currently occupy, who else likes something is as potent as that social information gets.

P🌞E🌞A🌞C🌞E till next time — J & E

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