what the fuck is “entourage?” i keep hearing about in first term obama media but i have never met a single person in real life who claims to have seen an episode
It’s really if Sex and the City was dudes, in LA, the main character is a movie star in a way that kinda inverted Jessica being a writer really now that I think of it.
Are there any books, blogs or articles you'd recommend for learning more about the online culture of Web 1.5 + what factors were driving the transformation over the 2010s into what we have now? I was online while it was happening and still don't really understand it beyond Facebook causing a bunch of websites like CollegeHumor to kill their self hosted sites due to taking views and clicks.
Hm I can’t think of sources but in terms of themes I’d look at Buzzfeed and clickbait, Gawker and the stable of feed “verticals” as a business model, and the professionalization of “feminist blogging” into identity media
Interesting starting to see people start to “revisit” the years of my young adulthood, particularly in seeing what they get wrong.
So let me be clear, no one in the 2000s was hearing emo when they went out.
There was “let’s do ‘alternative’ again” massified “indie”, 80s revival, and “blog house”/electroclash (white people were maybe listening to rap, at home, and collecting sneakers). To the extent emo had any sort of regular touring scene, it was limited to the midwest. It was something high schoolers listened to. It wasn’t even the thing that high schoolers listened to that left some impression on the culture – that was “scene”.
All the emo nights, that’s not a throwback to how the 2000s were. The 2000s were never like that. (If anything, emo night is a replacement for the '90s-era marginal-throwback institution of “goth night”)
Oh and mashups. Songs made by mixing two or more previously existing (and recognizable) songs together were absolutely a 2000s thing.
Realizing that the thing about the 2000s, certainly at least in my LA experience – neo-disco “blog house” DJed parties with photographers and not like, scene scene kids, but like the Mis-Shapes, Cory Kennedy, the kind of scene that “scene” was gesturing at, rooftop parties at art collectives, VICE magazine, hipsters – is that those are all recapitulations of things that originally came about in the load-bearing context of heavy hard drug use – heroin, cocaine, benzos and other pills – and were a little silly in our generation.
VICE started out (as government-funded CanCon) in Toronto when it was a beat, heroiny (but not white-flighted. Canada!) city. Back before they sold out (and were richly paid) a sort of raw-dadly “don’t be fucking junkies, kids” was part of Gavin McInnes’ schtick.
And then I went to a free VICE party in Hollywood sponsored by Colt 45, which was funding it and giving free tallboys because before the ‘08 crash alcohol companies just gave it away to establish brands with us urban (pre-social media use) “influencers” and I guess the “indie sleaze” 70s vibe (I used to live two blocks from the original American Apparel store!) matched up with the “hey, remember Billy Dee Williams?” branding. But it just… no. We were a wild, free, and fun-loving crowd in that we were in our twenties, but…
I mean, part of it was we were the back-to-the-city generation, and that was the kind of authentic grittiness we had romanticized about the last time white life was lived in cities, the 1970s. Of course we were middle-class white, like 70s cities or the places where the headline meth and Oxy waves weren’t.
Ecstasy kinda came back but they called it “Molly” and held “raves” in stadiums
Xanax was kind of a thing but as an anxiolytic it’s kind of a combination of benzos that don’t fuck you up and cocaine that doesn’t get you speeding (cocaine is not only a stimulant but an anti-anxiety agent; when cokeheads tell you all about their brilliant idea for a screenplay/world domination scheme it’s cause they’re not only amped up but disinhibited)
Coke was kind of a thing, Gawker all “can you imagine! there’s a coke bar in Brooklyn (that surely sells trampled-on shit) called Kokies!”
But that was kinda the suburbanites thrilled at their urban worldliness that they could even find anything harder than weed now, one $60 bag at a time, it wasn’t really sybaritic excess. Even at post-warehouse sunrise afterparties where we got naked in the hot tub there were never piles of cocaine or anything, and we mostly made jokes and left by 9
Sparks, that was our thing. Coming before Four Loko, it was the wild speedball combination of malt liquor and caffeine, that’s how adventurous we were.
