Hello again,
I profiled Blindboy for the New York Times last week and tried to explain some of what makes his podcast interesting. If you haven’t come across it before I’d recommend listening to an episode or two. I say this in the piece too but it’s very different to what I’d see as typical “popular millennial podcast” fare, which often tends to be orientated around culture war topics, with hosts either deliberately courting controversy or talking mostly about trending social justice issues in an “explanatory” register. Like “here’s what you should think about “X thing” that happened this week if you’re a right-minded type” kind of stuff.
This isn’t really to slight everyone who does do this, but when any register comes to feel like the dominant way of doing things in a particular form, work which steps outside this feels exciting. Blindboy does come off as progressive or left wing or whatever you’d prefer to call it, but never pious or uptight, which is pretty unusual at present. You don’t have the sense he’s just saying things because that’s what you’re supposed to say this week, or to try and convince you he’s a good person who you should pay to support for that reason, or have the vague sense you’re being scolded when you listen to him. Another person who does this well on her podcast is Chanté Joseph.
But this substack isn’t really about piousness or the mainstreaming of a hectoring tone. (I am writing elsewhere on this phenomenon currently, and I have sort of written about it before here and spoken about it here if you are interested in more of my thoughts on that). This substack is going to be more about something else which came up in our conversation a lot (but that I didn’t go into in loads of detail in the piece because of space constraints): This general sense of a culture which doesn’t take people seriously, or encourage them to take themselves seriously.
I really love the profile as a form. They can be kind of boring at present because many celebrities have a huge PR apparatus around them, so the interviewer isn’t having a genuine conversation with the subject, but more rattling through approved talking points. Although of course some places still get good access. Still, I prefer subjects who sit outside the celebrity ecosystem because I feel this kind of profile can be a way to explore interesting cultural changes through a person who represents them well, as well as being a sort of mini character study, with less constraints in terms of what you can talk about than there are for a typical celebrity.
As I said though, space constraints do still mean you don’t get to write about everything interesting that came up during your conversation in the piece. There was a theme we kept coming back to, of what is taken seriously, and silliness, and “solemnity”, as Blindboy describes it. He sees solemnity as “the performance of seriousness” which is expected from certain kinds of public figures. I go into this in the piece too, but one of the reasons he wears the plastic bag is to challenge this expectation of solemnity.
Say if he’s on a political chat show, the presence of someone with a plastic bag on their head draws attention to the various other characters that politicians and columnists and so on perform. Personas we are more used to seeing as authority figures or intellectuals or in other elevated roles but which are, in some cases, no less ridiculous than a plastic bag.
So there was that on the one hand, this narrow idea of how a Serious and Important person should present themselves. And the kind of person who is automatically read as Serious and Important, no matter what they actually have to say for themselves.
And then, parallel to this, we also spoke a lot about the fact that we inhabit a very infantilising culture. The corporate world is a good example of this. That start-up trend of zany furniture and toys everywhere and pizza and beer, all of which makes an office feel like a nursery school. Blindboy said he had started working in a bland, corporate shared office space as a sort of rebuke to this. “I love the order [this office] gives me, in a world that wants me to wear shorts and have a bouncy castle. I refuse to allow a trampoline into this office. I won't even have a bean bag,” he said.
You can see the same infantalising tendency in the cultural products which are intended to have mass appeal and the way they all have to be made in this weird, OTT, hyper register. Sarah Manavis wrote a good piece recently about how strange it is that factual documentaries all seem to be presented by reality TV stars now. Blindboy had a really good quote that summed it up, too, on the fact he gets to discuss esoteric topics which it is assumed have no real audience on the podcast. “I have a space where no editor comes in and says, ‘Can you speak about Love Island as well?’” he said.
I know that we can make the argument that a Love Island star isn’t inherently an unserious documentary presenter. Or we can say: Wait, isn’t this just doing the same thing, of assuming that because a reality star presents in a certain way, then we shouldn’t take them seriously. I feel like we’ve had a decade of circular discourse (which I have found tired and boring right from the start) arguing these points. But the fact is that while, yes, a reality star could theoretically also be a great documentary presenter who would talk in a nuanced, intellectual and engaging way about any number of issues, many of them simply are not.
I think we can all agree too, that we aren’t getting served up TV and radio programs full of shoe-horned lowbrow pop culture references as a project to make us challenge our understanding of solemnity. And instead because the people making this stuff just don’t take the average person (the expected audience member) very seriously at all. My view is that discourse about being a ‘highbrow person who likes lowbrow things too’ or whatever always seems to be mostly about elevating the importance and status of lowbrow culture, when it enjoys enormous, outsize status already. I don’t think that’s a particularly worthwhile endeavour. My view is that the average person has far more sophisticated taste than our culture currently gives them credit for. I think that’s why people love Blindboy so much; because they feel like he takes them seriously.
The conversation about solemnity and the expected presentation of a serious person resonated a lot with me in a personal capacity too. As a young woman writer I feel you must be extraordinarily careful with how you present yourself to avoid having your work branded with a silly, patronising framing. (We aren’t the only group who this happens to. Gay men, for one, get it a lot too actually.)
If you write personal essays you’re “brave” or they are “heart wrenching”. If you write criticism you’re “tearing down other women”. If you’re funny you become this zany, sassy figure. Or your novel might be “whip smart”. Since you don’t have a particularly sophisticated inner life your novel is probably basically just your diary too.
It can feel like the pitfalls are endless. As if, at any moment, you might be imprisoned within a hot pink, glittery cage. And from there you will growl and snap at braying crowds who shout “Yes, fabby queen!!”, “Love your blogs about TikTok trends :)!”
Till next week xxxxxxxxxx
Here are some pre-order links for Lazy City if you are minded to order, for the UK (it will be out in August) and the US (it will be out in October). Pre-orders tell shops that people are interested in and excited about the book which helps the book a lot.
Also I will be reading an extract of my diary, Lazy City this Thursday (27th April) !!!!! Come if you are in London, I think it will be really fun :).
Some Things I Liked Recently
This essay on changing trends in TV, the way in which HBO in particular was risqué and avant garde and why. I really loved this quote, better times!
“Hey, how do you like it? The ratings are up.” I said to him, “If you don’t take the ratings down by a third, I’m going to cancel this fucking show. I don’t want ratings. I want a better show…stop explaining jokes.”
Nihal’s NTS show “Nile to Bank with Nihal”. Have been a loyal listener of this for a while. She started playing music for an audience pretty recently so it’s been really cool to see how much she’s done in a short space of time. I always say I never write about music anymore (that’s what I started writing about when I was a student) because I like it too much and I don’t want to make it into work. But I have noticed the odd recommendation creeping back on this space…. Anyway, give it a listen!
This essay on how Twitter has changed, and generally on what it actually “is” which you don’t actually see discussed so much.
Really resonated with the passage on highbrow / lowbrow & how audiences aren’t taken seriously - articulated a lot of things I’ve been uneasy with for the past few years tbh !! I’m the classic audience member for this type of content so I get it recommended a lot & it often misses the mark for me & I think that’s a part of why!