Everyone's a Critic

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Dec 10, 2024
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Here’s a running list of my “critical” writing about movies, music, books, so on…

The Never Hungover Best of 2024

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December 3, 2024
The Never Hungover Best of 2024

I used to be strongly opposed to lists—ranking things felt pointlessly controversial, blurbs flattened art, your standard complaints…—but lately I’ve been less of a grinch. It’s insane that everybody shares their lists at the start of December, the LUCY album doesn’t come out until this Friday, but sometimes it’s fun to do what everybody else is doing. …

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The Promise and Heartbreak of Tha Tour, Pt. 1

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September 28, 2024
The Promise and Heartbreak of Tha Tour, Pt. 1

Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1 begins with a lie so profound that I named a blog after it. “We never hungover—never, boy,” boasts Birdman in what amount to the tape’s introductory remarks. It’s a throwaway flex amidst a soliloquy of marble floors, gold terlets, and chandeliers, the type of obviously untrue non-sequitur that inclines listeners to roll their e…

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The Trap Trap

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August 16, 2024
The Trap Trap

I saw Trap, M. Night Shyamalan’s father-daughter serial killer vehicle after being delighted by its trailer. The premise, as introduced in the clinical, delightful, and momentarily inescapable preview, is straightforward: a father takes his tween daughter to the equivalent of an Ariana Grande stadium show only to learn that the concert has been staged a…

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Brat Summer and the Millennial Imagination

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July 26, 2024
Brat Summer and the Millennial Imagination

In recent weeks, the cultural conversation has revolved around memes far too much. I’m wary of contributing to that undignified phenomenon. But there’s something worth interrogating about what happened once “Brat Summer” became the progressive millennial iteration of “Hawk Tuah” in, at most, two and a half months’ time. These are not sentences that feel…

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I wish I had the words to put this simply

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June 13, 2024
I wish I had the words to put this simply

It’s very easy to dismiss Honor Levy. But the Internet makes a lot of things easy. It’s easy to mainline porn to the point that it becomes a sort of political identity. It’s easy to order takeout slop and then tell strangers they’re being ableist when they imply you’re lazy. It’s easy to get in a fight with a person, probably a teenager, who lives in Ne…

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Civil War has nothing to say

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April 22, 2024
Civil War has nothing to say

Any publicity, the saying goes, is good publicity. In an era of fleeting attention-spans and monetized online engagement, the premise is hard to dispute. And so I was unsurprised to learn that Civil War, the film I learned about when its asinine map of a divided America was roundly mocked on the internet, broke A24’s

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A Brief Survey of Tasteful Evil

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March 4, 2024
A Brief Survey of Tasteful Evil

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest has been nominated for Best Picture, which means that far more people will see a claustrophobic, experimental film about Auschwitz than one could possibly imagine. For nearly all of these moviegoers, the experience will go something like this: a solemn arrival at the theater, the intentional omission of snacks, or …

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Pop Music's Main Character

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October 18, 2023
Pop Music's Main Character

I. ballad of a homeschooled girl

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The Man and his Bomb

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August 9, 2023
The Man and his Bomb

I. After seven and a half hours of delirious, inscrutable exposition, David Lynch shows a title card: July 16, 1945. White Sands, New Mexico. 5:29 AM (MWT). Lynch’s camera watches like a god, suspended above the barren desert scape. Then a rush of fire from the ground, then the earth’s evisceration, desert becoming dust, a towering mushroom plume. The t…

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PATIENTLY HATING #4: Letterboxd

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July 19, 2023
PATIENTLY HATING #4: Letterboxd

A spectre is haunting criticism – the spectre of Poptimism. Whether or not poptimism as it’s currently understood is responsible for the decline of popular culture into a sort of soulless, algorithmically-generated slop is incidental to the fact that it has become the default critical posture during the exact moment that all culture became pop and all n…

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Ten Years of Yeezus

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June 16, 2023
Ten Years of Yeezus

It was a hot May night and I had been drinking and my heart was full and that usually meant staying out as late as I could so that I could feel it all, but that night I had to make it home to watch Saturday Night Live. “NOT FOR SALE,” read the screen behind Kanye’s silhouette, before cutting into the horrifyingly white eyes and jaws of three barking dog…

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Waiting for Rustie

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June 2, 2023
Waiting for Rustie

About an hour and a half into his 2012 BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix, Rustie permits himself a brief detours from a torrent of original, unreleased songs to drop Danny Brown’s “WitIt.” The XXX bonus track is as straightforwardly a 2012 Danny Brown song as they come: over an infinitely climbing, colossal instrumental, Danny barks about drugs and sex in all …

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The Succession Industrial Complex

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May 23, 2023
The Succession Industrial Complex

The monoculture’s, like any rebirth, is proving fitful and spasmodic. Dimes Square, according to NME’s widely-mocked listicle, is over, but its music is coming to the mainstream. Not so fast, pronounced Pitchfork, panning the scene’s musical poster-child

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Coachella and the end of the internet

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May 2, 2023
Coachella and the end of the internet

It wasn’t clear, in the moments after Jai Paul’s debut performance at Coachella was scheduled to begin, whether the enigmatic Londoner was blowing the whole thing off. His stream was abruptly cancelled, rumors circulated that Paul was pulling the plug on his performance, time ticked by. Paul’s cold feet made sense on both a human and mythological level:…

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Fear and Groaning in the American City

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April 23, 2023
Fear and Groaning in the American City

Beau, ever a man of the times, is afraid. The third feature film from Ari Aster, the A24 golden boy whose first two (ostensibly) horror movies helped launch the production company into its pole position afront the moodboard-industrial-complex, follows a bumbling, pathetic Joaquin Phoenix across an internal odyssey that lands somewhere between sincerely …

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PATIENTLY HATING #3: Fred again..

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March 29, 2023
PATIENTLY HATING #3: Fred again..

A spectre is haunting criticism – the spectre of Poptimism. Whether or not poptimism as it’s currently understood is responsible for the decline of popular culture into a sort of soulless, algorithmically-generated slop is incidental to the fact that it has become the default critical posture during the exact moment that all culture became pop and all n…

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PATIENTLY HATING #1: J. Cole on "Planez"

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January 26, 2023
PATIENTLY HATING #1: J. Cole on "Planez"

A spectre is haunting criticism – the spectre of Poptimism. Whether or not poptimism as it’s currently understood is responsible for the decline of popular culture into a sort of soulless, algorithmically-generated slop is incidental to the fact that it has become the default critical posture during the exact moment that all culture became pop and all n…

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Make My Dream Come True

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January 19, 2023
Make My Dream Come True

“whats goin on my names jai im a artist/producer jst startin out in the game let me kno if u feel it…thanks 2every1 whos been backin me I rly appreciate it peace jai”.Thanks for reading Never Hungover! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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Rap, Capital; or, Where did the coyotes go?

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December 21, 2022
Rap, Capital; or, Where did the coyotes go?

There are not many apparent reasons to remember Follow the Leader, the short-lived 2016 CNBC program in which a host spent “72 hours embedded in the life of a different superstar entrepreneur.” Yet, as if by a happenstance so perfectly congruent with the ephemera of the rap music reverberating throughout the waning pre-Big-Streaming Internet,

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NO LISTS #1: billy woods - Aethiopes

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December 14, 2022
NO LISTS #1: billy woods - Aethiopes

December means the year-end list - the attempt at (re-)constructing the canon, at signifying your identity through your personal taste, at essentializing a year down to what art was released within it. Ranking art is a fool’s errand. Still, there’s something instinctively sensible about the impulse one feels at the year’s end to return to its finest ach…

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I took the ock to Poland

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October 11, 2022
I took the ock to Poland

Today I awoke to news that the wock had made its way to Poland. I didn’t know what this meant; now, I do.

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