You can say no
Against cursed cheesy money-getting and the inevitable commercialization of all human existence
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Every so often, someone asks me, “Jonah, what big new exciting s--t is next for the Plane?”
Sometimes I have an answer that feels appropriate. “I’m about to play records I love for people in the OJAS HiFi room at SFMOMA,” I might say. Or, “We’re throwing a party with Neighbour and Lady White in Paris, open to all.” Or, “We’re about to publish an interview with [Cultural Luminary Whose Work We’ve Loved for Years].” Or, “We’re whipping up a sick new pair of shoes with Tarvas this fall, and 6 of the world’s coolest shops, in Brooklyn, Vancouver, Oakland, Paris, Tokyo and Stockholm, are going to carry it.”
Because, in addition to our profound capacity for stillness, please be clear that Blackbird Spyplane has motion.
But usually? I say something to the effect of, “Nothing!” It’s beautiful enough that so many people recognize Blackbird Spyplane’s excellence and underpay us to be part of our life-improving Classified Subscriber Tier. And it’s amazing enough that Erin and I have so much fun working on this strange miracle. So the goal that looms largest on our horizon is to keep working hard to make the Plane as good and as fun as it can be.
We’re uninterested in the zombie fetish for “scaling.” To put a finer point on it, I think a major reason we’ve become earth’s most influential and trusted style & culture publication is that, despite being born in the ‘80s, we carry in our DNA some potent “Swag Gen-X” coding. This compels us to keep it a Hundo P and give a miss to the type of corny and depressing sellout bulls--t that so many other people and brands either gleefully embrace or ruefully accept as par-for-the-course revenue streams these days.
Keeping it a Hundo P is, in a short-term sense, harder, because it means saying no to all kinds of “bags.” But we think it pays off in the long term, because:
It makes the Plane feel that much more personal and meaningful to us.
It demonstrates respect for the intelligence of our readers, who sense that we do not regard them as “a market,” but rather as the most beautiful, blessed and big-brained audience across all media.
So we reject the widespread attitude that Success = Major Bag Getting and “Big Things Coming.”
And what’s heartening to us is that we’re not alone. It can be easy to forget, because as a society it feels like we’re drowning in counter-evidence, but lots of people wish that small, special things could just stay that way, instead of their creators saying yes to every check, expanding senselessly while “chasing 10x,” and putting a bunch of dumb s--t into the world that no one asked for and no one wants.
Please be clear: We are rightly regarded as the Most Unsanctimonious sletter out. But we think the anti-sellout ethos is tight, and worth talking about, especially here in 2025, long past the concept’s supposed expiration date — not least because it can help make all of us feel less cynical, defeated, lonely and insane.
Case in point: Last week, Spyfriend Amanda Petrusich published a wonderful New Yorker profile of the kindvibed independent musical king and Spyfriend MacDemarco, in which themes of Scaling and Bag-Chasing — and Mac’s aversion to both — figured prominently. Mac puts out his music on his own label. His last two releases were instrumental albums that are dope and not what anyone would call commercial. Apparently he caps the size of the venues he plays, too, despite being bigger than ever. “I don’t want to play a f--king pavilion,” he told Amanda in a crucial passage. “I don’t want to play a f--king arena”…
“It’s not cool. I don’t want to have to get a f--king video wall to supplement the size of stage we’re playing on. That’s not my vibe.”
Grousing about purity can seem petulant or out of touch—DeMarco enjoys pejoratively referring to himself as a boomer—but he’s right that in the past couple of decades we’ve loosened our grip when it comes to our standards for art-making, particularly the way we consider intentionality or even truthfulness.
It’s easy now, possibly advantageous, not to think too critically about the machinery that motivates culture, especially when nobody has to worry about getting called a poser or a sellout. Anything goes. In that context, DeMarco’s gestures at sovereignty feel less cranky and more radical. He is simply trying to reclaim some ground.
What a great way to put it. When Amanda shared this profile to her IG, she called Mac “more unflinching and ideological about his approach to art than almost anyone else I can think of. I find myself valuing that idea more and more lately — resistance to some inevitable escalation.”
You can also see Amanda’s interest in artists resisting this “inevitable” escalation in her obituary for Grumpy Gen-X Icon Steve Albini, the music engineer whose anti-commercial commitment to Keeping it a Hundo P famously involved rejecting millions of dollars of profit participation in Nirvana’s In Utero because he thought bands deserved back-end money, not hired guns like him.
Closer to Spyplane HQ, here in the Bay, we gotta salute the great young Vallejo rapper LaRussell, who’s become a huge star while turning down $1.5 million label contracts and 360-degree Roc Nation deals, instead offering pay-what-you-will pricing for his independently released albums, at a restaurant he bought, and at his shows — which we’ve heard he puts on without a booking agency.
Now, are these the standards we should expect everyone to hold themselves to? This is where Doctrinaire Big-Brained Principle Havers run into trouble, because when the rubber of “personal integrity” meets the road of, say, “paying rent,” it can be tough, not to mention wack, to try and impose some rigid code of moral purity on others.
To take one case that’s stuck with me: Back in 2011, Kurt Vile sold his beautiful track “Baby’s Arms” to Bank of America for use in a commercial. These kinds of things happen all the time, but given Vile’s Philly Indie Lord status, this one felt surprising. Some people, myself included, were bummed out. You listen to certain songs, you feel like you’re floating, like there’s something besides cruelty and coldness in the world, like eternity is your mother, your mother is holding you, and you’re weeping in the warmth of her embrace. It is dismaying to hear these beautiful songs get bodysnatched and become the undead servants of a sales push, baby!
Vile faced a minor outcry online, and he explained that he’d licensed the song “to buy my daughter high end diapers,” “to pay back my publishing advance,” and “because I never cared about that sorta thing.” And, well, life as a musician is hard, even at Vile’s level. Raising a kid in this country is punishingly expensive. When push came to shove, could you blame him?
What about when a cool indie director signs on to direct a Marvel movie? What about when a cool podcast does an ad read for Better H*lp? What about when a funny and chill dude like Kareem Rahma does a sponsored Subway Takes promoting something called “AI colleagues” in partnership with a tech behemoth? What about when our friends at a cool independent label like Our Legacy accept investment from LVMH’s venture capital arm?
And so on. In all these cases, even if we’re bummed, most of us are prone circa 2025 to shrug and say, “Get your bag.” Times are tough, the economy is rigged, there’s no social safety net to speak of, and the funding mechanisms for idiosyncratic, independent work are as precarious as ever. The pressures to sell out, in other words, are vast and structural. Are you really gonna hold someone else’s feet to the fire for making a buck?
Erin and I might privately groan and say, “Woof that’s rough” when we see people cash checks we would not cash. But we know that, while some lines are clear (don’t take money from Raytheon) lots of them are fuzzier. There might be things we do at the Plane that Even More Morally Pure Beings than us would groan at. We are not here to Cast Judgment on anyone.
But the thing is, the aggregate effect of only ever shrugging at this s--t and saying “Get your bag” is that we risk convincing ourselves that the soul-killing forces of escalation, hellbent on commercializing all of human existence, are indeed inevitable. That there’s no other way, so we might as well just accept it.
And that’s why it feels so good to hear about someone like Mac DeMarco or LaRussell keeping it real. Not (only) because of what it says about their individual integrity but, more importantly, because they’re setting an admirable example. They’re reminding us that, even in 2025, things can be made, and life can be lived, on other terms.
We’ve seen something comparable happen in politics over the last decade. Circa 2015, with both major parties heavily under the sway of big money, people would have told you that corporate capture of the political process was a fait accompli. But then an independent candidate got extremely close to the White House while forswearing all super-PAC fundraising and relying on a flood of small-dollar donations instead. His pitch was straightforward: “If I don’t take anyone’s money but yours, then I don’t have to serve anyone’s interests but yours.” This was, unsurprisingly, very popular. An escalation that had felt inevitable was refused, and a counter-example was set. Flash forward to 2025, and an outsider NYC mayoral candidate adopted the same small-donor model and defeated a deep-pocketed, Establishment-backed rival.
People love it when somebody wedges open a little slice of imaginative horizon that Status Quo Protectors want us to believe has closed for good. It reminds us that escalation isn’t inevitable, that people aren’t obligated to “get a bag” no matter what, and that even though the choice might be increasingly hard, a choice still exists.
Vexingly, if you choose not to get a cursed and cheesy bag, that choice tends to be invisible. Whereas accepting a cursed / cheesy bag tends to be highly visible, which can make it seem like “everyone is selling out,” which consolidates the sense of inevitability.
The alternative — broadcasting loud & clear that you rejected a cursed / cheesy bag — can work, but it also risks coming off as preachy, “virtue signaling,” etc.
So it’s important to find charming and swaggy ways to let people know you are in the Cursed-Bag-Avoiding “Hundo P” column.
On that note, we’ve got an exciting announcement:
Blackbird Spyplane, the anti-spon reader-powered modern masterpiece, is proud to partner one-sidedly with the Honda Corporation today to run our first-ever advertisement, for the all-new 2025 Honda Fit.
We produced this ad in exchange for zero compensation of any kind, and with zero connection to Honda besides our admiration for the legacy of the Fit, a great car that was stupidly discontinued a few years ago in North America.
Yes, Blackbird Spyplane is so proudly ad-free we can proudly run a free ad for one of the Last Cool Small Cars You Could Buy in America Before They Took It Away From Us Like A--holes. If any of the images that came up when we did an image search for “2025 Honda Fit” are legit, the car looks sick, and it must be nice to live in a country where you can actually get one.
Peace til next time — Jonah & Erin
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a handy rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from natural deodorant to socks and underwear — is here.
Enjoy our new Ultimate Spyplane Guides to Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, Naoshima, Teshima & more.
Going to Copenhagen? Enjoy our landmark CPH guide.
Our new guide to How To Pack for a Trip Swaggily is here.
I usually feel like a dinosaur because I actually am Gen X and I still do often view the world through what usually seems like an ever-more-anachronistic lens of aversion to selling out (at least when it comes to creative endeavors), so it’s nice to see the case against scaling up and “getting the bag” made so well here. There is, of course, the $5 shows/Dischord records model that resonated for me in my youth, but the example that has stuck with me for years and years has always been the NY food legend Kenny Shopsin (definitely not a Gen X-er) once grousing about chefs who would scale up by opening multiple restaurants, asking something to the effect of, “Why the [expletive] would you open more restaurants instead of making the one restaurant you already have everything you want it to be?”
I'm reminded of this blog post from Robin Sloan, (who's novels are amazing, and blog is unmatched) : https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/dont-take-the-money/
> If you needed a moral maxim for the 21st century, a principle to help you determine right action, you could do a lot worse than “Don’t take the money.” One of the reasons you know it’s right is that people rarely get credit for not taking the money. Simple refusal — “no thanks”—generates no headlines, not even much conversation, but it’s happening all the time, all around us, people not taking the money, in amounts very large and very small. Refusing to establish an exchange rate for a certain kind of art, or work, or care.
Also the referenced Bleachers song worms its way into my head often. It's nice to have a maxim with a theme song.