Herein lies the problem with using taste as approximation of identity— eventually those signifiers get aggregated and up-chained, and lose whatever they once had. And now with the internet, what was once a natural lifecycle is over in an instant. There’s a weird convergence of taste and sensibilities.
I wonder if we’ve passed through some event horizon where we’ve fundamentally broken the social contract that we can collect our way to an identity, and maybe I’m not even mad about it. This article hits it right on the nose: there is something inherently vain about identifying too closely with one’s taste, which is really just a collection of objects that is purchased or appreciated— ultimately consumed.
I think about my various media collections, my catalogs of deep cuts, and I wonder if I 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.
I think collecting isn't enough. There are still tiers of participation/contribution to parts of culture. We just don't have legible ways of deciphering where people stand. There's definitely a flattening that happens on platforms like Instagram. And in major cities, there is so much capital and access that people can adopt an identity by consumption quickly. We probably need to give up on collecting as a form of legible identity. If you did not create the item then you don't own it. Displaying taste through forms of contribution is probably much more useful
1) what would you do if BBSP enters the Unswaggy Valley? Do you consciously take steps that would prevent it from passing this cursèd rubicon?
2) I felt like I was losing my taste senses a few years ago, and my fix was to limit the number of available inputs to learn what other people think about things. So, I got off Instagram. I try not to be prescriptive with life advice but I do feel strongly that more people should do this, and that it wouldn’t be as ruinous to their social/intellectual/aesthetic life as they think.
3) I know you enjoyed Creation Lake, and this price hits on the idea I think is central to that book: the paradox of community is that it has to be exclusionary to cohere. ie, “we like this, but not in this way, and not when it reaches a certain scale.” Being part of a small, secret club is fun! I don't know what to do with this except feel kind of icky when I notice it in myself.
1) never happen, we are too funky, we will 100% guaranteed be one of the category blurrers between deep cut and canonized classic, basically the "jeanne dielman" of sletters
This article made me think of extremely mainstream cursed things like SantaCon, which started essentially as outsider art making fun of rampant consumerism influenced by the Surrealist movement. We really can’t control where the ball bounces. The wiki is worth a read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SantaCon
I've worked up some anti-anti-SantaCon sentiment. Complaining about SantaCon is for Manhattan arrivistes who want everyone to know they're above it. It can feel both prudish and snobby. Better approach is bemusement?
Not sure of the best approach to the unswaggy valley. Lean in and wrap yourself in what you like about x, memes/fandoms/what other people are doing be damned, or quietly put on shelf and chase something new. Wanted and never purchased Common Projects several times. Maybe in a few years?
You do a brilliant job of capturing the dynamics of taste, but it leaves me asking: why does what we love have to align with what others think? And who decides what’s “cool” or “wack” in the first place?
The idea that our connection to something—whether it’s music, art, or a pair of sneakers—can be soured by who else embraces it feels like we’re letting someone else define us. Shouldn’t the ultimate measure of taste be how it resonates with you, without needing external validation?
Otherwise, this whole cycle of deep cuts, canonized classics, and the Unswaggy Valley just reaffirms that it’s all cosplay anyway: a performance rather than a reflection of who we are. And most of us aren’t Daniel Day Lewis (see I just had to spend a moment thinking of an example that signaled “I know stuff”)
Maybe the real move isn’t navigating these dynamics but stepping outside them entirely. Quiet confidence that doesn’t care who’s paying attention.
no such thing as stepping outside the game...our identities are always--in part--a performance.
we are fundamentally social beings; is there a way to exist in a social space and not perform yourself?
I don't know that there's a stable "who we are" that remains unchanging in the face of shifting contexts
and I think we get caught up in the negative connotations of the word performative--it isn't innately negative to perform imo (there are definitely cursed ways to perform identity, but there's also plenty of space to do it blessedly)
I appreciate your reflection. I think your last sentence is spot on around enjoying the things you love confidently without regard to what people think about you, but it still doesn't contradict the idea that things you love can become tainted in your own eye due to evil/cursed people getting into them and kinda "appropriating" them as status or cultural signifiers while draining them off their original intent.
Think of some small producer who cares about the quality of their materials and processes and likes their customers knowing and caring about these things too. Imagine they start trending around finance bros or some other rich and uninterested consumer demographic who buys it as a status symbol on some "quiet luxury" wack shit just because it was trending somewhere. That is depressing to me as it kinda drains a lot of the meaning of those pieces and makes them into just an expensive object of consumption. Same with art or cultural practices or spaces with an important political or social resistance element: seeing some random consulting bros pull up and shallowly consume (rather than deeply participate) can feel desecrating and fucking sad.
So to go back to the original point, I think if you're really into something, wear it and love it and don't give a damn about how you're seen by others, but if you look around and you feel like something you love is being appropriate, corrupted and diluted, I don't blame you for feeling bummed out and maybe have your perception of that things tainted.
I love that phrase : "its hard to separate the art from the audience". it needs to enter common speech. Also I would totally submit my Honda Fit for a Cyber-retrofit. I love the size but the aesthetics could go a little harder.
Thought provoking read. Great comments from others.
I'd ad - clothing and items as we allow them to describe our person, is often about tasks. Farming, sailing, playing basketball, being punk, etc. When you participate in that task you are often exposed and utilize those items which allow you to benefit from the task. "I am a farmer, I wear overalls." Tasks may form our identity and form our relationships. It's what gives our lives meaning and builds our character and makes it worth it. Being passionate and dedicated can never enter the unswaggy valley. The passion shines through the object. It exists despite the object.
When a task becomes popular, it invites newcomers. New comers might take to it, and it's that community which must decide how to welcome new comers. But new comers may also be dilettantes, or braggadocios, or dismissive of known culture.
That's what is unswaggy - to desire a community, but fail to engage with it, to never participate, to have superficial passion. To wear a leather motorcycle jacket, claim to be of that crowd, and not know where the clutch is.
There is underneath this a desire by all people to belong. Social media and clout culture suggests you can belong through assembling the totems of a life worth living, whilst never engaging. I see those who ride these trend waves as people who have yet to find their own task. Their own sense of self.
As they say on Antiques Roadshow, buy what you like.
I don't believe that anything that one loves should lose its value by other people taking appreciation. The work in question didn't change. The truth of the matter is it's likely that every person at one point or another has been considered one of the people "ruining" it for someone who thinks they are cooler than them. I would at one point in my life take the other viewpoint and be precious about things that felt like they belonged to just me, but time has allowed me to let go.
You shouting ou La Chimera makes me wish I had a widely-read newsletter to have shouted it out in first. This has to be some adjacent bit of topo near the Unswaggy Valley... FOMOBOZO Hill.
As a shy kid who found home in a dirtbag, fringe sport during the early 2000s, this post helps me get why I mourn rock climbing these days. Falling in love with something’s spirit and being sold a product form different relationships, and if you care you’re gonna feel that core shift
Great piece! Reminds me of Georg Simmels 1904 sociological writings on fashion. He describes the social aspects of fashion and how the elites adopt a certain fashion to distinguish themselves from the masses who in turn start imitating it in an attempt to erase external distinctions of class - and thus the circle continues. This also makes the dynamics at play at least somewhat older than mass consumption in the 50s I guess.
That’s an interesting example because the character of a neighborhood actually can change — in both imagined and real ways… “Wack people” descend on it but the results aren’t just symbolic / vibes-based
I was with u so completely until the cybertruck ... However, I do not know how to drive and my ideal car is the isetta.
I really enjoyed this and have been reflecting on it and what I enjoy in public/private and why. It reminded me of a line from the hearingthings.co review of mahashmashana: I’d like to say I understand the hatred of Misty’s music, but to me, it’s like hating the most beautiful flower you’ve ever seen because there’s a loud bee buzzing around it.
This post really made me think about the way my community interacts with local makers.
I live in a small Northern community where people wear jawns like mukluks, Inuvik parkas (iykyk) and beaded earrings with strong roots in local Indigenous communities. Many of us are from elsewhere and cop pieces as gifts from the maker, at Christmas markets or at the local craft store. The bandwagon is encouraged and healthy because these heirlooms are a part of our local culture, and it's a little flexy: "I know a beader" screams clout. It's also a deliberate choice to avoid mass-produced equivalents that had to be hauled up here from, at best, a maker down south. But I feel like sometimes people will take it too far. Picture a white guy in high-top canvas boots with fur tassels, a handmade winter jacket and a fur hat. He is, and looks like, a dork because the people whose culture he's borrowing very rarely actually dress like that anymore, often for the opposite socio-economic reasons that let him buy all that merch.
Without discouraging collecting hot pieces, at what point do too many slappers, which rock individually but weigh you down with cultural insensitivity when combined, overload the acceleration to Mach 5+ and force a crash-landing in the Unswaggy Valley?
Great read. My favourite is when something becomes cool, widely available, then the interest tapers off leaving it for the real heads. A perfect example for me is long sleeve tees. Always been a huge fan, but they were borderline unavailable to cop in the late 2000s, especially in Australia. Then, they hit the zeitgeist hard and everyone was rocking graphic LS tees with writing on the sleeves. Now, no one really fucks with them but they’re still available and I can rock them on my own with out feeling like a goober. Same with post-hype restaurants that are still doing the thing that made them popular, just minus the heat of the zeitgeist and popularity. It’s a fine line, but sometimes if you hold out for long enough, things become rockable again
Herein lies the problem with using taste as approximation of identity— eventually those signifiers get aggregated and up-chained, and lose whatever they once had. And now with the internet, what was once a natural lifecycle is over in an instant. There’s a weird convergence of taste and sensibilities.
I wonder if we’ve passed through some event horizon where we’ve fundamentally broken the social contract that we can collect our way to an identity, and maybe I’m not even mad about it. This article hits it right on the nose: there is something inherently vain about identifying too closely with one’s taste, which is really just a collection of objects that is purchased or appreciated— ultimately consumed.
I think about my various media collections, my catalogs of deep cuts, and I wonder if I 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.
I think you’re right. There’s gotta be some other glue holding things together
I think collecting isn't enough. There are still tiers of participation/contribution to parts of culture. We just don't have legible ways of deciphering where people stand. There's definitely a flattening that happens on platforms like Instagram. And in major cities, there is so much capital and access that people can adopt an identity by consumption quickly. We probably need to give up on collecting as a form of legible identity. If you did not create the item then you don't own it. Displaying taste through forms of contribution is probably much more useful
Shoutout to W. David Marx and 'Status and Culture' who dives deep into the whole trend cycle and its relation to status
💯
1) what would you do if BBSP enters the Unswaggy Valley? Do you consciously take steps that would prevent it from passing this cursèd rubicon?
2) I felt like I was losing my taste senses a few years ago, and my fix was to limit the number of available inputs to learn what other people think about things. So, I got off Instagram. I try not to be prescriptive with life advice but I do feel strongly that more people should do this, and that it wouldn’t be as ruinous to their social/intellectual/aesthetic life as they think.
3) I know you enjoyed Creation Lake, and this price hits on the idea I think is central to that book: the paradox of community is that it has to be exclusionary to cohere. ie, “we like this, but not in this way, and not when it reaches a certain scale.” Being part of a small, secret club is fun! I don't know what to do with this except feel kind of icky when I notice it in myself.
1) never happen, we are too funky, we will 100% guaranteed be one of the category blurrers between deep cut and canonized classic, basically the "jeanne dielman" of sletters
2) can't argue with that !
3) i don't think drawing lines to demarcate a group is necessarily icky, though! this came up with kelefa sanneh when we talked about his book about musical tribes https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/gatekeeping-rocks-kelefa-sanneh-major-labels
This article made me think of extremely mainstream cursed things like SantaCon, which started essentially as outsider art making fun of rampant consumerism influenced by the Surrealist movement. We really can’t control where the ball bounces. The wiki is worth a read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SantaCon
I've worked up some anti-anti-SantaCon sentiment. Complaining about SantaCon is for Manhattan arrivistes who want everyone to know they're above it. It can feel both prudish and snobby. Better approach is bemusement?
Not sure of the best approach to the unswaggy valley. Lean in and wrap yourself in what you like about x, memes/fandoms/what other people are doing be damned, or quietly put on shelf and chase something new. Wanted and never purchased Common Projects several times. Maybe in a few years?
Wild arc
Pickleball was invented in 1965 in Washington state as a kids’ game. I wonder if the inventor is looking out at the horizon with that Oppenheimer face
You do a brilliant job of capturing the dynamics of taste, but it leaves me asking: why does what we love have to align with what others think? And who decides what’s “cool” or “wack” in the first place?
The idea that our connection to something—whether it’s music, art, or a pair of sneakers—can be soured by who else embraces it feels like we’re letting someone else define us. Shouldn’t the ultimate measure of taste be how it resonates with you, without needing external validation?
Otherwise, this whole cycle of deep cuts, canonized classics, and the Unswaggy Valley just reaffirms that it’s all cosplay anyway: a performance rather than a reflection of who we are. And most of us aren’t Daniel Day Lewis (see I just had to spend a moment thinking of an example that signaled “I know stuff”)
Maybe the real move isn’t navigating these dynamics but stepping outside them entirely. Quiet confidence that doesn’t care who’s paying attention.
no such thing as stepping outside the game...our identities are always--in part--a performance.
we are fundamentally social beings; is there a way to exist in a social space and not perform yourself?
I don't know that there's a stable "who we are" that remains unchanging in the face of shifting contexts
and I think we get caught up in the negative connotations of the word performative--it isn't innately negative to perform imo (there are definitely cursed ways to perform identity, but there's also plenty of space to do it blessedly)
I appreciate your reflection. I think your last sentence is spot on around enjoying the things you love confidently without regard to what people think about you, but it still doesn't contradict the idea that things you love can become tainted in your own eye due to evil/cursed people getting into them and kinda "appropriating" them as status or cultural signifiers while draining them off their original intent.
Think of some small producer who cares about the quality of their materials and processes and likes their customers knowing and caring about these things too. Imagine they start trending around finance bros or some other rich and uninterested consumer demographic who buys it as a status symbol on some "quiet luxury" wack shit just because it was trending somewhere. That is depressing to me as it kinda drains a lot of the meaning of those pieces and makes them into just an expensive object of consumption. Same with art or cultural practices or spaces with an important political or social resistance element: seeing some random consulting bros pull up and shallowly consume (rather than deeply participate) can feel desecrating and fucking sad.
So to go back to the original point, I think if you're really into something, wear it and love it and don't give a damn about how you're seen by others, but if you look around and you feel like something you love is being appropriate, corrupted and diluted, I don't blame you for feeling bummed out and maybe have your perception of that things tainted.
a top shelf pallete cleanse that was much needed after weeks of reading political eulogy, TY spyplanes 💜🌐
I love that phrase : "its hard to separate the art from the audience". it needs to enter common speech. Also I would totally submit my Honda Fit for a Cyber-retrofit. I love the size but the aesthetics could go a little harder.
You know what I’m talking about
Thought provoking read. Great comments from others.
I'd ad - clothing and items as we allow them to describe our person, is often about tasks. Farming, sailing, playing basketball, being punk, etc. When you participate in that task you are often exposed and utilize those items which allow you to benefit from the task. "I am a farmer, I wear overalls." Tasks may form our identity and form our relationships. It's what gives our lives meaning and builds our character and makes it worth it. Being passionate and dedicated can never enter the unswaggy valley. The passion shines through the object. It exists despite the object.
When a task becomes popular, it invites newcomers. New comers might take to it, and it's that community which must decide how to welcome new comers. But new comers may also be dilettantes, or braggadocios, or dismissive of known culture.
That's what is unswaggy - to desire a community, but fail to engage with it, to never participate, to have superficial passion. To wear a leather motorcycle jacket, claim to be of that crowd, and not know where the clutch is.
There is underneath this a desire by all people to belong. Social media and clout culture suggests you can belong through assembling the totems of a life worth living, whilst never engaging. I see those who ride these trend waves as people who have yet to find their own task. Their own sense of self.
As they say on Antiques Roadshow, buy what you like.
I don't believe that anything that one loves should lose its value by other people taking appreciation. The work in question didn't change. The truth of the matter is it's likely that every person at one point or another has been considered one of the people "ruining" it for someone who thinks they are cooler than them. I would at one point in my life take the other viewpoint and be precious about things that felt like they belonged to just me, but time has allowed me to let go.
You shouting ou La Chimera makes me wish I had a widely-read newsletter to have shouted it out in first. This has to be some adjacent bit of topo near the Unswaggy Valley... FOMOBOZO Hill.
Hahaha
As a shy kid who found home in a dirtbag, fringe sport during the early 2000s, this post helps me get why I mourn rock climbing these days. Falling in love with something’s spirit and being sold a product form different relationships, and if you care you’re gonna feel that core shift
The line can be hard to find in some cases but that’s an important distinction !
Great piece! Reminds me of Georg Simmels 1904 sociological writings on fashion. He describes the social aspects of fashion and how the elites adopt a certain fashion to distinguish themselves from the masses who in turn start imitating it in an attempt to erase external distinctions of class - and thus the circle continues. This also makes the dynamics at play at least somewhat older than mass consumption in the 50s I guess.
true -- could go even further back to sumptuary laws too !
fantastic piece! left me thinking about this concept as it applies to neighborhoods, ie “i lived in greenpoint but it was 2002”.
That’s an interesting example because the character of a neighborhood actually can change — in both imagined and real ways… “Wack people” descend on it but the results aren’t just symbolic / vibes-based
I was with u so completely until the cybertruck ... However, I do not know how to drive and my ideal car is the isetta.
I really enjoyed this and have been reflecting on it and what I enjoy in public/private and why. It reminded me of a line from the hearingthings.co review of mahashmashana: I’d like to say I understand the hatred of Misty’s music, but to me, it’s like hating the most beautiful flower you’ve ever seen because there’s a loud bee buzzing around it.
This post really made me think about the way my community interacts with local makers.
I live in a small Northern community where people wear jawns like mukluks, Inuvik parkas (iykyk) and beaded earrings with strong roots in local Indigenous communities. Many of us are from elsewhere and cop pieces as gifts from the maker, at Christmas markets or at the local craft store. The bandwagon is encouraged and healthy because these heirlooms are a part of our local culture, and it's a little flexy: "I know a beader" screams clout. It's also a deliberate choice to avoid mass-produced equivalents that had to be hauled up here from, at best, a maker down south. But I feel like sometimes people will take it too far. Picture a white guy in high-top canvas boots with fur tassels, a handmade winter jacket and a fur hat. He is, and looks like, a dork because the people whose culture he's borrowing very rarely actually dress like that anymore, often for the opposite socio-economic reasons that let him buy all that merch.
Without discouraging collecting hot pieces, at what point do too many slappers, which rock individually but weigh you down with cultural insensitivity when combined, overload the acceleration to Mach 5+ and force a crash-landing in the Unswaggy Valley?
Great read. My favourite is when something becomes cool, widely available, then the interest tapers off leaving it for the real heads. A perfect example for me is long sleeve tees. Always been a huge fan, but they were borderline unavailable to cop in the late 2000s, especially in Australia. Then, they hit the zeitgeist hard and everyone was rocking graphic LS tees with writing on the sleeves. Now, no one really fucks with them but they’re still available and I can rock them on my own with out feeling like a goober. Same with post-hype restaurants that are still doing the thing that made them popular, just minus the heat of the zeitgeist and popularity. It’s a fine line, but sometimes if you hold out for long enough, things become rockable again
100%