Smoke Shop America

Thinking about Skrillex, Baby Invasion, and Galaxy Gas

An admission: despite my turning 30 years old in exactly eight months, my favorite album of the year is Skrillex’s F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3

An apology: In my new year’s effort to pitch more traditional, fleshed-out writing to editors, I have more or less forgotten how to blog.

A resolution: In the name of blogging more, with fewer essayistic pretensions, I am going to try and occasionally put a few things I’ve been thinking about recently in conversation, hopefully with the world around them.

A plea: I’ve resisted writing about the Substack House Style for some time, because tackling that feels like the sort of thing I’d regret almost immediately, but: at its worst, Substack writing sustains itself by putting things in conversation. If my writing veers into the too-far-gone, turbo-cooked Substack register, I’ll stop doing this, but I need you all to reel me in.

A blog post: Somewhere in my notes app, I have written down a quote attributed to William S. Burroughs: “if you want to see the future of America, go to an airport.” I’m fairly sure he didn’t say this, because when I google it nothing comes up. Where did I get this notion? A dream? A podcast? It doesn’t matter. The point, whether or not such a formulation was ever actually articulated, is that the center of the formation’s gravity has shifted. A different articulation: if you want to understand America today, go into a smoke shop.

I’ve been thinking about Ezra Marcus’s story in New York Magazine about the rise and fall (?) of Galaxy Gas and the flavored nitrous epidemic since reading it at the start of the year. As someone who has mercifully aged out of whippets and as such experiences them only through Twitter memes and Kanye West’s ongoing psychotic break, I experienced a distinct sense of dread while reading about the way in which smoke shop owners in Atlanta sussed out demand for nitrous oxide, applied the flavored vape playbook, contracted out Chinese development and distribution via WhatsApp (perhaps the only compelling argument for tariffs), and manufactured a genuine drug craze among a predominantly young, Black cohort that had largely stayed away from one of the most destructive drugs known to man. It’s an insane article, and not one I’m going to perfectly summarize, and you should read it. Its greatest success, though, is the way that it establishes the smoke shop as the predominant engine of innovation, economic activity, and grift in contemporary America. Smoke shops have always been incredibly sketchy, a sort of permanently-fluid business model that demarcates the line between legality and criminality at any given time; at smoke shops, one finds the least legal legal things, the most legal illegal things, and the illegal things most likely to be legalized in the next five years.

Since 2020’s mass delirium, smoke shops have come to serve as a brick-and-mortar articulation of the entire scam economy’s logic. Smoke shops are sleazily, gauchely decorated, they reek of incense, their fluorescent lights accentuate the bags in your eyes and bring you deep shame for having set foot inside them; their attendants have on offering the vapes they can legally sell and, in the back, the vapes they could sell until last month. Cell phone repairs, Bitcoin ATMs, screen-printed sweatshirts of Daffy Duck smoking loud. The main reason I stopped vaping was neither financial nor physical, but because I feared that setting foot in one of these establishments after turning thirty would have substantial karmic consequences. Since, roughly speaking, the mass regulation of Juuls, smoke shops have transformed themselves from seedy vice-merchants into genuine economic innovators; almost no business-owner is asked to navigate shifting rules and regulations as much as a smoke shop owner in the flavored, disposable vape era. The Galaxy Gas story demonstrates how the fluidity with which smoke shop owners have learned to dodge regulation and move on from the most recently banned vape to the newer, more garish one has instilled within them a real, hard-nosed entrepreneurialism; if the pre-2020 smoke shop operated with a tacit governmental permission, the modern smoke shop forces the issue, exploiting every loophole and unregulated vice imaginable. They feel, in other words, like contemporary America does: scammy, sleazy, dirty, flouting every rule of decency and common sense one previously had.

This weekend was the Crescent City Classic, a 10K that winds from the Superdome to City Park though one of New Orleans’ most picturesque, tree-lined avenues. Perhaps it means nothing that, whereas last year I ran it with no music, this year I pressed play on Skrillex’s F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3 at the race’s start? But this is the sort of thing I have been mining for reason recently, the sort of thing you parse for its significance when you’re basically middle-aged and have your shit pretty much together but for some reason cannot stop listening to a brand-new dubstep album. You ask: do I need to establish an ironic distance from this? Do I need to cast my affection for this record in a sort of nostalgic, Spring Breakers-y light? Do I need to write a thinkpiece? Hopefully, a blog post will suffice: I can’t stop listening to the Skrillex album not only because it is punchy and delirious and effective and never overstays its welcome, but because this is the sort of music you listen to when you live in a smoke shop.

Let not the Skrillex record’s timeliness detract from its being a genuinely wonderful album. For a work of art truly of its time, insofar as it is both steeped in contemporary logic and deeply fucking stupid, look no further than Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion. The less said the better—you will either like this movie or you won’t, and you’ll know which type of person you are about 20 minutes into the film, and if you are in the latter category you should take the rest of your time back (life is short, and you need to learn to do these things). For what it’s worth, I thought the Burial score was good if not revelatory, I thought the gimmick was fun at first, and the Venetian Islands houses were beautiful; when my girlfriend and I went to Miami a week or so after I watched the film, I kept saying “baby invasion” while driving past expensive homes, and I think she loved that. Baby Invasion wants desperately to be of its time, which is why it should have been an Art Basel installation rather than a feature film. All Korine is, for better or worse, masturbatory; Baby Invasion is gooning. A defender might say: seethe! Cope! Baby Invasion is nihilist, online, a mirror to modern society. To which I’d say, no, dumbass, the film obviously fails on its own terms, and if you don’t believe me, look at the chat. Where Eugene Koylyarenko’s Spree features a genuinely verisimilitudinous live chat, Baby Invasion’s stream of comments is off-base to the point of distraction. The second worst thing you can do as an artist is use generative AI, which to Korine’s credit he does effectively here; the worst is have 40-year-olds write comments like they are trolls. Baby Invasion’s undoing is not its nihilism, but its cringe.

And yet, Baby Invasion remains an important document—or, at least, a document—of our current delirium. Korine, one of American film’s premiere shockster-provacateurs, operates not unlike a smoke shop owner, meaning not unlike the modern American Man: his meta is figuring out what he can get away with. Sometimes, permissiveness creates wonders; as I type this, I’m listening to Skrillex himself dare to sing a Fall-Out-Boy-esque chorus on his record’s penultimate song, and I’m smiling. More often, though, you wish for an adult in the room to tell everybody to stop. In Smoke Shop America, the adults in the room sell flavored whippets instead.