High-level stuff:
Too busy attending weddings in the northeast to blog recently…love, the first chills of fall, “Pink Pony Club” all in the air
The New York Football Giants and New Orleans Saints are a combined 0-4. Everything in its right place, sure, but: what gives?
Coachella lineup: who’s to say? Not me—not my place. I have, however, enjoyed combing through this year’s Big Ears lineup. A little anemic at the top, but it’s fun to see which acts people are going buck for and dig into discographies. A motto: it’s always good to learn.
Other new(ish) music I’ve been rocking with tremendously: Snuggle’s Goodbyehouse (what is in the water in Copenhagen?), Corridos Ketamina’s EP (they need to fix that name), Floating Point’s opening and closing sets at Glastonbury (you know what to expect by now, just really good shit).
Culture moved on pretty quickly from the Druski whiteface thing. Makes sense—there was an assassination (not touching that), the FBI’s using ChatGPT to write NPC-style confession texts, LSU has the best defense in the country—but my two cents: better as a feat in makeup design than as a skit qua skit. Will not enter the reaction gif pantheon. Has Druski entered his Oscar-bait era? I’ve got Benny Safdie -250, but not counting Josh out,
Tired of hearing about One Battle After Another.
Finished Changeover. Beautiful book-object, peak sportswriting, I think I prefer Sinner now, I rock with his meekness and complicated relationship to Italianness. Call him Griddy Nathan the way he hit that shit.
Now, two quick blogs:
You should not listen to Young Thug’s jail calls.
Young Thug has had a rough few weeks…accusations of “snitching” due to newly-circulated footage of statements made to police during the investigation leading to his winding, farcical prosecution, leaked jail calls from his years incarcerated awaiting trial, and the sort of messy online PR campaign we’d come to expect from someone who once defended James Harden by claiming he “don’t have internet.” Thugger Daily, the fan account-turned vital journalistic resource during the trial, has been deputized as part of the YSL press push; it’s an unfortunate mess. Alphonse Pierre broke it down with characteristic insight and comprehension; nothing much to add there. My two cents: I’m happy that Jeffery Williams is no longer in jail, have given up on Young Thug the artist a long time ago, nothing that happens post-release could ever change my stance on the former and very little could on the latter.
A word is in order, however, on the grist of this depressing news cycle: namely, Young Thug’s leaked jail calls. That these calls have circulated at all speaks to the particularly odious gossip-driven environment that the “music press” has come to inhabit; so, too, do suspicions that some or all of the calls have been AI-generated speak to this depraved moment. The fact of the matter is that Young Thug’s jail calls are not newsworthy. One of the many indignities that incarcerated people face is the recording of their every word (with the limited exception of ostensibly private conversations with their attorneys, but you’d be right to harbor suspicions there as well); listening to someone’s recorded jail calls should be as stigmatized as, say, viewing their leaked nude photographs.
As I wrote back when Young Thug entered his mixed guilty and no-contest pleas, the criminal punishment system relies upon a series of interlocking coercive tools to get the outcomes its stewards desire. Chief among these tools is the practice of recording phone calls made from jail, a fundamental incursion upon one’s privacy that when taken in conjunction with egregious price-gouging amounts to a total blockade on communication with the outside world for people awaiting trial in jail. Aside from the unfathomable indignity of having your every word recorded (in this respect, as in many, incarcerated people are cast as guinea pigs for our surveilled futures), recorded jail calls have the practical effect of ratcheting up convictions by serving as constant evidence-accumulation tools. If an incarcerated person gives in to the fundamentally human instinct to, say, discuss the allegations keeping them behind bars with their loved ones, prosecutors can and will play decontextualized snippets of those conversations to juries to serve as de facto confessions. Incarcerated people strategizing with their outside support systems will have jail calls used to support often baseless allegations of witness tampering and evidence destruction. It is not uncommon for hours and hours of recorded jail calls to be turned over to defense attorneys on the literal eve of criminal trials, sending teams on needle-in-a-haystack mad dashes to identify what precisely prosecutors intend to use to try and sink their clients into a prison sentence.
I concede, of course, that there are imaginable situations in which a recorded jail call might be newsworthy. A frustrated man, having sat in jail for more than a year awaiting a political prosecution, gossiping about his famous colleagues is not one of them. The widespread circulation of Young Thug’s jail calls is but another unfortunate example of the phenomenon through which people on the internet act like police officers in order to enjoy the feeling of moral superiority over whomever they have determined it is acceptable to lord that specific day. It may feel like a petty grievance—Young Thug is famous! That’s what the money is for!—but this entire, mean-spirited cycle marks a further iteration of the normalization of an invasive, vengeful schadenfreude that continues to birth a crueler and more antisocial culture. You should always resist the urge to be a cop.
When did everyone get so comfortable complaining about products?
I used to consider “airing grievances about corporate products on the internet” with a certain type of pitiable archetype: your sweaty conservative tweeting at Schnipper’s because they forgot the fries, your incensed normie friend tweeting at United from the runway, your aunt’s undiagnosed schizophrenic friend posting on Facebook about how the Ken fight in Barbie turned her child gay, if not worse. Recently, though, the meta has shifted such that seemingly everybody feels emboldened, if not compelled, to complain about corporate execution non-stop. On the sports side, I recently watched leagues of people with whom I ostensibly share sensibilities kvetch for a week straight at the notion that RedZone, the NFL live highlight reel meant to allow adults to microdose the brainrot subway-surfer shit their kids are mainlining one room over, would feature commercials. Elsewhere, the type of people who pay for blue checks so that they can one day earn money calling Russell Westbrook trash spent multiple weeks soyfacing nostalgically for the days before NBA 2K apparently imposed grade inflation on its player ratings. Worse yet, for my money, are the collective cries from “film twitter” (tough scenes) regarding the perceived inability of Warner Brothers to properly market One Battle After Another, which hysteria’s fever-pitch translated to one of the most regrettable grassroots meme campaigns in recent memory.
I could half-ass a sweeping conclusion here—we’re all becoming stan armies? consumption is so integral to our identity-construction that we’ve forgotten to be embarrassed about it? America has entered its proto-Wall-e chud century?—but tidy endings are for ChatGPT and early-season episodes of Entourage. Instead, a call to action: stop embarrassing yourselves acting like Marvel adults.
thank you