My name is Ben and I’ve been a cultural critic for seventeen years.

I’ve mostly covered book, movies and music in that order. Independently on Dead End Follies, but also for the occasional magazine. I work today as a cultural journalist for an indie French Canadian media, which is in many respects an extension of my job as a critic.

A major part of my job consists in doing what we all do: watch movies, television shows, read books and listen to records. But the job demands that I do it a lot more than you do and that I pay attention nonetheless, so that I can establish patterns, trends, declare when ideas are tired and champion new and exciting ideas. Critics might be snob, but we’re professionals and most of us are taking the job seriously.

Doing that, I’ve developed large and sweeping theories as well as the most niche and unrelatable observations. Here are five of them.

1) Art takes a lot of place in everybody’s life, mostly through a form of storytelling or music. Some weeks, we spend all of our downtime watching a television show or playing a video game. The demand is universal, but the willingness to meet the offer has gone down. We want more art and entertainment, but paying for it has become an inconvenience since you can get almost anything for free on internet. That makes creating the offer more difficult than it’s ever been since the money in scarce.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. The model is already adapting, notably through Patreon. Paying for art is one thing, but paying for artists to keep making art is another. Culture is slowly becoming an artisan business again. Metal has survived and even thrived while it rescinded from popular culture by embracing its artisan nature, but the model scales to a global audience and the output is only going to get better. In other words, you need to get buddy with your favorite creators and become their overly chatty guy at the merch table. This is my idealistic take on how art will endure.

2) Your favorite childhood IP getting a next generation reboot is almost always a bad thing because it always comes from a place of financial opportunity rather than a place of love. No one in Hollywood wants to redo Ghostbusters with Finn Wolfhard because they love Harold Ramis and Bill Murray. They do it because they think you’re gonna pay to see it because YOU love them.

It’s OK to love Ghostbusters, but you can always rewatch Ghostbusters. But reopening and continuing something that was great to begin with only increases the chances that it becomes progressively worse. If you get you ass in a theatre seat to watch an overproduced turd based on your cultural nostalgia alone, you’re almost assuring that there’s going to be another (worse) one because you’re paying money for it and money is the only currency in mainstream culture deciding what lives and what dies.

3) There’s a lot of boring opinion online. Whenever you’re formulating an opinion about something, please first think of: a) the obvious opinion to have b) the contrarian one c) one that would quietly acknowledges both without making you a nazi.

Here’s a nasty example: Citizen Vigilante

a) “Citizen Vigilante is bad because it’s incredibly racist and poorly constructed, but mostly because it’s incredibly racist.”

b) “Citizen Vigilante is camp because it’s a Uwe Boll movie, it’s not meant to be taken seriously, you libtard!”

c) “Why are we discussing this crazy Uwe Boll movie where Armie Hammer plays a rogue American black ops soldier who’s also somehow a slumlord in Eastern Europe and perhaps even a pimp?”

The online debate about Citizen Vigilante is not about the merits of the movie because the movie is bad. It’s also obnoxiously racist and nonsensical and it’s the only reason why it filtered through the cultural discourse.

Don’t ever be where you’re expected. Originality is the currency of critics and you can’t ever establish your authority on the debate if the audience knows what you’re going to say before you open your mouth. In Citizen Vigilante’s case, there is a myriad of ways to invalidate it without ever falling for the ideological debate trap.

Bad artists love to weaponize ideology in order to remain relevant. The world needs to be reminded why they are not worth discussing to begin with.

4) Hollow Press’ hybrid of video game lore and personal storytelling is one of the most exciting new art forms I’ve seen happen organically over the twenty-first century. Born out of nostalgia, but also out of the self-mythologizing opportunities the intimacy between a person and a video game character can foster, it’s a new, haunted form of expression that can deliver powerful ideas and emotions.

Vermis was my first and most meditative experience with this new bred of storytelling, but it’s catching on and it creates artifacts able to bridge the past and the present together. I don’t think it’ll even become a mainstream thing, but the idea itself of hybridizing art forms through their absence (these books are manuals for video games that never existed) is a way to shun money, technology and commercial imperatives in order to embrace true creativity. There has to be more declinations.

5) I’ve learned to love artists that protect their creativity at all costs. Young film directors who refuse to take charge of an already existing IP. Independent musicians who refuse to compromise for labels. Authors who refuse to alter their creative vision in order to get a major contract and remain with indie publishers. Even if I don’t like the art, I will respect these artist on this philosophy alone.

’s excellent Music: A Subversive History has verbalized something that was on the tip of my tongue for many years: true art comes from the fringes. It is devoid of commercial responsibility and even, to a certain degree, of a need to please. It is pure self-expression and if it resonates with enough people, it will live on. That’s why I enjoy art that leans into the extremes to a certain degree. It’s trying to tell me something and not necessarily what I want to hear. So I love artists that understand and protect their creative freedom.

I had this fascinating debate with my colleague Vanessa Destiné, this week, about Gracie Abrams, although “debate” may be overstating it. Vanessa made fun of Abrams’s new record on Instagram, arguing that it was almost aggressively earnest and that possessing both a microphone and a record deal does not automatically make your life interesting.

As usual, Vanessa was onto something. She always is.

The problem is not simply that Gracie Abrams is uninteresting. A lot of uninteresting people have made interesting art, usually by transforming their ordinary lives into something larger, stranger or more revealing than it is in reality. The problem is that Abrams presents her life through a collection of emotional codes already established by pop singers who were previously certified as interesting. Most obviously, Taylor Swift.

Abrams talks about her life on the record, certainly. But confession is not necessarily sincerity. Is she actually describing her experience or describing it in the way she understands a young female pop star is now expected to describe experience?

Taylor Swift established the dominant blueprint more than a decade ago: the singer is heartbroken but observant, wounded but articulate, open to love while simultaneously preparing evidence for the prosecution. Every failed relationship becomes both private trauma and public content. Lana Del Rey helped make self-destruction look glamorous; Clairo made emotional vagueness feel intimate. These artists did not invent sadness, romantic obsession or bad decisions, but they turned them into recognizable aesthetic positions. Gracie’s character is an amalgamation of other, more popular pop singers.

This is the central confusion surrounding sincerity in contemporary art: we mistake the accurate performance of vulnerability for vulnerability itself. Gracie Abrams may be telling the truth about her life, but she is telling it through a character built from other people’s truths. She is not necessarily insincere in the traditional sense. She may believe every word. But belief is not the opposite of conformity. Most people believe they’re someone else than they truly are. It’s kind of normal? In other words, uninteresting as Vanessa was saying. You don’t pay money to listen to your high school friend diss imaginary haters on Facebook. You get it for free.

But how can you even tell if an artist is sincere and truly being themselves anymore?

The Strange Curse of New Sincerity

There was a time when it was cool to be sincere. The nineties.

You can blame Kurt Cobain for this, in the same way you can directly or indirectly blame Kurt Cobain for almost everything that happened between 1991 and 9/11. Nirvana’s rebellion against the artificiality of the eighties recording industry was sincere, which meant the recording industry immediately had to figure out how to manufacture it. And it did. Within three or four years, alienation had a dress code. Authenticity had a marketing department. Every major label wanted someone who looked uncomfortable being famous, preferably while wearing a cardigan.

The movie and publishing industries followed because sincerity was suddenly what everyone wanted. Audiences wanted art that felt personal, wounded and unpolished. They wanted artists who appeared to be telling the truth even when the truth was ugly, embarrassing or commercially inconvenient. So that is what the culture sold them.

Eventually, people realized they were being sold sincerity, which made sincerity feel insincere. The whole thing collapsed under the weight of its own marketing. This is how most fads die. Something becomes desirable because it seems impossible to manufacture. Then somebody manufactures it.

Whether it was aggressively commercial or self-consciously independent, New Sincerity became pretty embarrassing within a few years. This is what happens whenever sincerity develops recognizable conventions: once everyone knows what honesty is supposed to look like, honesty starts looking like a costume.

New Sincerity was less a coherent movement than a cultural weather system. You could hear it in Creed just as easily as Neutral Milk Hotel. You could read it in Jodi Picoult and David Foster Wallace. You could see it in Forrest Gump and in almost anything Richard Linklater was doing. These artists had little in common beyond the conviction that emotions should be expressed directly, seriously and without the protective coating of irony.

New Sincerity was everywhere because sincerity was what people wanted. Until they recognized its machinery. Then sincerity became cringe.

Not necessarily because the emotions were false, but because the audience had learned how those emotions were being produced. Creed might have meant every word. Forrest Gump might genuinely believe that uncomplicated goodness will carry you through history. But sincerity becomes difficult to tolerate once it starts repeating itself. What initially feels brave eventually becomes a formula, and formulas always seem dishonest — even when everyone involved believes in them.

Sincerity also became the default expectation: the easiest, least sophisticated way to make art. Simply hurling your unsolicited feelings at strangers was no longer considered brave. It was considered poor boundary management.

An artist now needed a persona: some constructed public self through which the private self could be filtered, distorted and made interesting because the self was deemed uninteresting now.

I’m not sure who perfected this first, but Marilyn Manson was one of the defining examples. He was obviously artificial. That was the point. The makeup, the name, the interviews and the apocalyptic carnival-barker routine announced that nothing should be taken literally. And yet the songs had an undeniable undertow. There was something happening beneath the costume that made the costume feel like a code. Manson could not possibly be the person he claimed to be, so audiences assumed he must be something more profound. The character became a puzzle, and deciphering him became part of consuming the art.

He was too interesting to be sincere.

Or, more accurately, he made sincerity seem inadequate to the task of explaining him. His public persona appeared to be the only vehicle through which he could articulate whatever he actually believed. The mask did not conceal the truth. The mask was supposedly the mechanism that made truth possible. We would eventually discover that certain elements of the persona may have been considerably more sincere than anyone wanted him to be.

Making sincerity desirable worked for as long as the people supplying it were both sincere and interesting. But the moment sincerity became commercially valuable, it also became complicated. Once a feeling becomes a commodity, you can no longer tell whether it is being expressed because the artist needs to express it or because the audience has demonstrated a willingness to pay for it. The feeling may still be real. The artist may mean every word. But sincerity performed for profit is indistinguishable from the performance of sincerity.

This does not mean commercially successful art cannot be honest. It means honesty is no longer enough. It has to survive our awareness of the machinery surrounding it. So what is sincere and interesting art supposed to look like now?

Of Course, This Essay Is About David Lynch. Somewhat

I’ve been obsessed with self-expression lately.

Not autobiography, necessarily. Not confession. I don’t need every novel to be a thinly disguised account of the author’s divorce, and I don’t need every album to arrive with a forensic map of who broke whose heart. The story does not even have to be true.

It simply has to reveal something. Something the creator loves, fears, envies, misunderstands or wants desperately enough to build an entire fictional structure around it. The work has to connect to some private conviction that exists beyond the plot, to some value, anxiety or desire that would remain meaningful even if the story disappeared.

This is what I mean by sincerity now. Not factual accuracy. Not emotional exhibitionism. A detectable relationship between the work and the person who made it. I increasingly have no interest in stories that are merely stories. I want to feel the pressure of the creator behind them. I want to know that something was at stake beyond whether the narrative functioned properly. Something he or she may reveal in spite of themselves.

A perfectly constructed story can still feel vacant. A flawed one can feel alive if it accidentally reveals what its creator cannot stop thinking about.

This kind of self-expression is not rare once you know what to look for. I find it constantly in extreme music, perhaps because extreme music has never been particularly good at pretending it is normal.

Full of Hell express a profound dissatisfaction with reality in almost everything they make, along with a belief that something vast and unknowable exists beyond it. Their music sounds like an attempt to escape the material world and only becoming more violently entangled with it. This is something I relate to deeply.

Merzbow seems interested in disappearing into sound altogether. The noise is so dense and overwhelming that the individual behind it begins to dissolve. The music becomes an environment where personality, structure and sometimes even thought itself can temporarily cease to exist.

Matt Pike moves in the opposite direction. In High on Fire, he externalizes his manic energy through larger-than-life cartoon scenarios involving warlocks, ancient civilizations, interstellar violence and men swinging axes at forces beyond human comprehension. None of this is autobiographical in any conventional sense, but it may reveal more about Pike than a tasteful acoustic song about his childhood ever could. Primitive Man turns self-loathing into audio pressure. Lingua Ignota transforms rage, faith and trauma into something resembling religious theatre.

These artists are not sincere because their work is loud, abrasive or difficult. Intensity is not automatically honesty. But it is difficult to pursue an aesthetic this obsessively without revealing why you need it. You cannot go that hard at something without being at least partly sincere.

The most sincere person in the room, though, has always been David Lynch.

His movies are so devoid of self-conscious barriers that they are only intermittently interested in structure. They are not explanations of ideas or feelings. They are representations of ideas and feelings Lynch cannot (or refuses to) translate into ordinary language. What you see in a David Lynch movie is not a coherent account of his philosophy. It is not an argument you can reverse-engineer into a series of conclusions. It is what happens inside him. Images emerge from some private place Lynch does not entirely understand and is thoroughly uninterested in deconstructing for our convenience.

This is what makes his work feel magical. The images seem to belong to him before they belong to the story.

The Mystery Man in Lost Highway does not need an origin story. He appears at a party, tells Fred Madison that he is also inside Fred’s house and hands him a phone. That is all the information we receive because it is all the information the image requires. He is the representation of something you either understand on a subdermal level or you do not. The Lady in the Radiator from Eraserhead is simply a woman who lives inside a radiator. She is beauty and deformity, nostalgia and anxiety, comfort and annihilation somehow occupying the same tiny stage. Explaining where she came from would not make her more meaningful. It would only make her less herself.

Then there is Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive, where Lynch makes the relationship between performance and sincerity almost explicit. Betty and Rita enter a theatre in the middle of the night. An emcee repeatedly tells them that there is no band, that everything they are hearing is recorded, that the performance is an illusion. A trumpet player appears to play, then removes the instrument from his mouth while the trumpet continues. The trick is exposed before it even has the chance to deceive anyone.

Then Rebekah Del Rio walks onto the stage and sings “Llorando.” The performance is overwhelming. Betty and Rita begin to cry. Then Del Rio collapses while her voice continues without her. The singer was never singing. The music was never live. Everyone in the room knew this. And none of it makes the emotion less real.

That is the paradox Lynch understands better than almost anyone: artifice does not invalidate sincerity. Sometimes artifice is the only way sincerity can become visible. The performance is fake, the tears are real, and the distinction between them suddenly seems irrelevant. This may be the purest version of sincerity in art: not telling the audience what you feel, but constructing an illusion so precise that it produces the feeling anyway.

Perhaps this is just a long-winded way of saying that I miss David Lynch. He died last year, but his movies remain available, which is one of the better arrangements we have made with death. I can always watch them again. But nostalgia is not really the point. The point is that we have collectively constructed a false idea of what sincerity looks like. We assume it must be stripped down, unguarded and confessional. We assume the artist becomes more truthful as the distance between the work and the artist disappears.

But talking about yourself does not mean you are telling the audience the truth. It does not even mean you are telling yourself the truth. Most people operate with at least a modest collection of delusions about who they are, what they want and why they do anything. A diary can be as artificial as a science-fiction novel. Sometimes more so. Self-expression is not the act of reporting what happened to you. It is the act of mining whatever is inside you and building something from it.

Whenever David Lynch is mentioned, the words “genius” and “unique” are scattered around like fairy dust. He has also been imitated more often (and more poorly) than almost any filmmaker deserves to be. But his imitators generally copy the visible evidence: red curtains, ominous electrical currents, cryptic dialogue, lounge singers and people behaving as though they have recently received terrible news from another dimension. They reproduce the style because they were never privy to its source. Nobody was. Lynch himself seemed largely uninterested in determining where the images came from. He trusted them before he understood them.

Being like David Lynch does not mean being “Lynchian.” It does not mean filming a dwarf speaking backward or inserting a mysterious nightclub into the third act. It means accepting the images that come to you and having the courage to show them to other people before you have explained them away. It means risking embarrassment, confusion and accusations of pretension. It means allowing the work to reveal something about you that you may not possess the language to reveal about yourself.

Some people will not understand. Some will become irritated by the expectation that they should understand. This is inevitable. In fact, it may be the only reliable part of the process.Sincerity is not dead. We have simply been looking for it in the wrong places. We search for it in confession, transparency and factual disclosure, when it may be hiding inside distortion, fantasy and artifice.

But looking inward without knowing what you will find (or whether you will be able to control it) takes courage. Sharing it takes even more.

It's been a good run. A great one even.

Anyone who’s even remotely into Jackass' peculiar, thoroughly unsubtle sense of humor will tell you: we've been justifying our love for this ragtag group of failed actors, self-styled stuntmen, aging skateboarders and professional idiots for twenty-five years now. But we regret nothing. It’s been too weirdly real. The laughs have been too real, too visceral and they’re the only thing that matters. If you think that’s somehow an indictment on the future of society, that is not our problem. That is a solely a you problem, buddy.

I have loved both the idea and the reality of Jackass since 1999, and I will not be apologizing for it now. No, it is not smart. Its entire premise is outsourced stupidity. Whether or not it will make you laugh is genetic. For a little over a quarter century, Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius and the boys have been field-testing the worst ideas our twelve-year-old selves could imagine if our parents left town and gravity stopped having legal consequences. They have been extremely creative about it, which almost makes it worse.

But the main reason Jackass has remained funny for almost three decades is that it allowed us to project ourselves into the chaos from the safety of our living rooms. They got hurt so we did not have to. They panicked, flinched, screamed, laughed and limped away on our behalf. Because they were good-natured and transparent about the whole stupid ritual, they made us feel like one of the boys.

The new and final movie Jackass: Best and Last is meant to be the end of the road. A greatest hits record with a couple new songs and some “rare” B-sides anyone with access to the internet had already seen. But it is really the end? Can Jackass even die?

The Death of Johnny Knoxville

Jackass has died before. Its first death came in 2002, when the original MTV show ended and everyone assumed this deranged little pirate ship had finally run out of ocean. Then Jackass 3D was supposed to be the last one. Then Jackass Forever was sold as the cataclysmic conclusion after that. But it kept going, mostly because Johnny Knoxville and the boys still had the desire, the loyalty and, somehow, the physical capacity to keep going. It went on because they still could and that may be the purest reason anything has to continue.

But this time, there is a hard limit. The problem with building an empire on the human body is that the human body eventually starts renegotiating the contract.

Ol’ Knoxville cannot be the same guy anymore. The deal changed after he got hit by an actual bull in Jackass Forever, because there are only so many times a man can turn his skull into a public utility before the universe starts charging interest. In this final chapter, he feels less like the lead lunatic and more like the master of ceremonies, standing at the edge of the circus he helped build and making sure everyone remembers where the exits are.

Ehren McGhehey looks even closer to the limit. He has always been one of Jackass’s great victims, the guy seemingly placed on earth to absorb everyone else’s worst idea, but now the gag carries a different weight. Even when the stunt is simple, you can see him tensing up. How bad is this going to be? How much do I still owe the bit? Steve-O and Chris Pontius look more or less preserved by whatever strange chemicals keep beautiful idiots alive, but the question hangs over them now too: is everyone only one stunt away from discovering their hard limit?

So Jackass: Best and Last feels like the end of something even if endings have never meant much to Jackass. There is a fragility to the new stunts that was never really present in the other chapters. The pain is still funny, because the pain has to be funny or the entire project collapses, but there is a new layer ofvulnerability underneath it. The boys can see the finish line now. They are no longer flirting with mortality in the abstract. They are negotiating with it in real time.

Johnny Knoxville has stopped being the embodiment of our reckless immaturity and has become P.J. Clapp again. You can hear Jeff Tremaine call him P.J. in early stunt footage and I don’t think that’s an accident. The superhero has put the costume back in the closet. That does not mean Knoxville was an act, because he obviously wasn’t. If anything, that is what made him so compelling. He really was that guy. He really was willing to get hit, launched, crushed, bitten, bruised and humiliated for the sacred American purpose of making his friends laugh. But nothing lasts forever. Eventually, even the man who built his legend by ignoring consequences has to acknowledge that consequences were keeping notes the whole time.

Knoxville walked away on his own terms, instead of letting the franchise or his body make the decision for him. There is power in that. A different kind of power than getting shot out of a cannon or mauled by livestock, but maybe a rarer one.

Jackass is ending because Johnny Knoxville took the reasonable way out and that’s against the ethos of his life’s project.

Or is it?

Jackass is dead, long live Jackass

Johnny Knoxville has symbolically died, but Jackass will live forever.

You can’t close that Pandora’s box. You can’t spend twenty-five years proving that outsourcing idiocy to a group of good-natured friends is an excellent idea and then expect the world to politely forget. Best and Last almost makes the argument by accident.

Jackass Forever already started introducing a new generation of goofballs: notably Zach Holmes, Rachel Wolfson, Jasper Dolphin, his dad Dark Shark and the man they call Poopies, which remains maybe the most spiritually accurate nickname in the history of the franchise. I have no idea what happens to the brand from here and maybe the brand is not even the important part.

The important part is that Jackass built a machine simple enough to outlive everyone who made it famous: friends, cameras, terrible ideas, shared fear, shared pain, shared laughter. That formula has no natural expiration date.

I’ll be blunt: Poopies has superstar potential within the Jackass ecosystem.

His face has never not been funny. It is the face of a turbulent twelve-year-old trapped inside a grown man’s body, the face of someone who seems to understand consequences only after they have already started happening to him. He has the charisma to carry idiotic, self-destructive stunts into another decade, should he choose to do it. He is thirty-nine, so let’s not get insane here. This is a fifteen-year plan at most.

In theory, anyone with a camera, a friend group and a catastrophic misunderstanding of self-preservation could keep Jackass alive. But Poopies has something more specific. He feels iconic in the right way. Johnny Knoxville was a timeless daredevil, a man who made recklessness look elegant by somehow smiling directly through catastrophe. Poopies is different. Poopies is the quintessential Jackass teenager all grown up, which is to say not grown up at all, just legally older and easier to injure.

In the opening number of Jackass: Best and Last, the boys (and Rachel) perform stunts to Bonnie Tyler’s Holding Out for a Hero and somehow, against all available evidence, it made me emotional.

I need a hero, Tyler bellows, without an ounce of irony.

And maybe that is what Jackass has been this whole time: a hero delivery system for idiots. Not heroes in the classical sense, obviously. No one is suggesting that getting launched into plywood for our amusement is morally equivalent to saving a child from a burning building. But courage is courage, and for twenty-five years, these people have given us something weirdly noble by letting us watch them confront every stupid, primal, twelve-year-old impulse we were not brave, dumb or unemployed enough to pursue ourselves.

They made fear funny. They made pain communal. They kept us safe from our worst ideas by having them first. They gave us a good time while hurting nobody but themselves, and even that was done with consent, friendship and a level of transparency most serious art would kill to have.

So yes, Jackass will live on. The idea is too simple, too funny and too human to disappear. But it can only live on through the right people. It needs the right idiots. The right bodies. The right terrible instincts. The right absence of dignity.

Your move, Poopies.

And if you are not that guy, then make way for the next hero for all of us idiots.

I loved the first two seasons of Euphoria. Fucking LOVED them.

The show was sophisticated and gorgeous-looking, but it connected with audiences for a deceptively simple reason: it was a show about teenagers in distress narrated by teenagers in distress and it was visually represented as such. Teenagers are melodramatic creatures by nature. Everything is happening to them for the first time, therefore everything’s a greek tragedy and creator Sam Levinson played this quirk with a straight face to great effect.

In a way, the forced four years hiatus should’ve signified the end. You can’t step into the same river twice, said Heraclitus 2500 years ago. Everyone had moved on to bigger and better things. Zendaya predictably turned into a supernova. So did Coleman Domingo, somewhat. Dominic Fike became a recording artist. Labrinth just fucked off. Everyone moved on except Sam Levinson who was crucified for The Idol before it even came out.

Television being the financial treadmill that it is, a new season of Euphoria was inevitable for as long as there was a demand for it and you can engineer demand for just about anything in 2026. But the characters would have to be adult and it could never work. They were never meant to graduate high school. So, I hated everything about this new season. But here are the ten things I hated the most. In no particular order.

By the way, spoilers.

Nate's a fucking loser now

America’s no. 1 abusive boyfriend and collateral victim of the world’s unhappiest dad has become an entrepreneur without a project or funds of his own and he’s still banging Cassie because of course, bullshit entrepreneurs marry their high school sweethearts. What made Nate such a magnetic character that turned Jacob Elordi into a global superstar was the aura of danger and volatility to him. He was a young man fighting for his soul.

Not anymore. In season three, poor Nate Jacobs is fighting for his life against Armenian gangsters that serve no purpose outside of chasing him down and chopping down pieces of him like they’re in the longest, most dramatic Benny Hill episode of all-time. Nate’s not the bad guy anymore. He’s a joke without a punchline that no one is laughing at. He was a dick, but even he didn’t deserve such an ending.

Labrinth was replaced by Hans Zimmer

Look, I like Hans Zimmer as much as the next guy, but could we just have been a little more creative here? The music of Labrinth was part of the identity of Euphoria as much as Sam Levinson’s writing was because of how different it felt. How it captured the intensity of Rue’s internal struggle.

I get that he didn’t want to be involved with the train wreck of season three, but could Levinson have found someone else than the guy everyone has been hiring for twenty years?

Apparently Fez is Alive!?!

Angus Cloud, who interpreted the world’s kindest and most considerate drug dealer, died from a drug overdose himself in 2023. How difficult could it have been to leave him out of the fucking storyline, especially that his character is locked up for life without the possibility of parole and that his bullish little brother Ashtray doesn’t even get mention on screen. It doesn’t serve any purpose to keep the character alive except to remind us Cloud has died.

I get angry just thinking about it. Cloud was one of the highlights of season two and deserved a much better fate than being turned into a cheap callback.

Women and Sex Work

Rue works in a strip club. Maddy becomes a pimp. Cassie grossly markets her body to whoever want to buy it because she doesn’t know what else to do. Jules has become this fucked up sex slave. Even Faye doesn’t do much outside of getting banged and muling dope for neo-nazis. Rosalia’s a stripper too, somehow. The only market of the future for women according to Sam Levinson is becoming involved in sex work.

I mean poor Lexi isn’t, but she’s also left out of any important storyline of what should hopefully be the last season of Euphoria. She was being presented as this grand maestro of Euphoria’s narration at the end of season two, only to be completely abandoned because POON SELLS or whatever.

Jules' storyline (or lack thereof)

Let’s be honest: Jules never had anywhere to go after season one. This show was structured around Rue and once Jules got fed up with her shit, she became a support character. I’m OK with that because Hunter Schafer went on to do bigger and better things. In season three, she’s painting, she has kooky cellophane wrap sex with her sugar daddy and she fights with Rue. To say she was unnecessary to the story being told would be an understatement.

What I hated the most about Jules in season three is how cynical she had become. She seems satisfied painting all day long and getting fucked by Ellis once every blue moon. This quest for love, light and beauty as part of her trans experience was apparently over. Jules became satisfied with being an object of desire and this is so ridiculously against the nature of the young woman from season one and season two.

No Gia

What the fuck? Technically, she should’ve had more screentime than anyone else on the cast because she’s still a teenager in Euphoria's timeline. How is fucking Faye is almost every episode, but not Gia? She was the one strand of idealism left in Rue that attached her to a hypothetical better life. I would’ve taken her on the phone over Fez any day.

Laurie shitting herself

TW: suicide scene

I think we could’ve all done without.

Soulless Maddy

Maddy Perez was always the girl who could take care of herself. That was already established in season one. What made her character arc riveting was her learning the value of kindness and being of genuine service to others. Maddy was empowering when being self-reliant, but she was transcendent when she became sweet. Apparently that died somewhere in the five years between season one and two.

Season three Maddy is a soulless power broker interesting in selling Cassie’s ass to the highest bidder. In fact, she becomes so good at selling ass that it literally becomes her profession when Ali transforms Alamo into a pasta strainer. Even if she never actually shows her ass on screen, sex also becomes the cornerstone of Maddy’s personality because it is the cornerstone of Sam Levinson’s.

Whatever Cassie Has Become

A lot has already been said about Cassie’s messy, pornographic adult life, but I just want to stress out something: what made her compelling in the first two seasons was her inner struggle to find peace and contentment within herself, the way her younger sister was able to. The quintessential hot blonde from high school was addicted to attention, which made her miserable and the most endearing part of her character was that she understood this predicament.

Well, not anymore. Now, it makes total sense that social media open the floodgates of infinite toxic validation to a conventionally attractive young woman. But again there’s no arc. Cassie gets on a treadmill and just keeps running.

Rue and Faye Shitting Fentanyl Ballons in a Bathtub

I’ve kept the most important problem for last.

Here’s a confession: I cried at the end of season one upon realizing that rue’s hoodie was her father’s and that her addiction was really her inability to overcome her the cruelty of having to grieve her dad. Rue’s greatest enemy was a ghost that lived inside her heart. Not a fucking autistic neo-nazi drug lord. I want to see Rue struggle with the past, not gag herself with fentanyl balloon only to shit them into a bathtub two scenes later.

I want to see emotional pain, not physical pain damn it. I want to relate to Rue, not watch a Breaking Bad meets True Detective knockoff featuring emotionally immature young adults. Sam Levinson felt like he painted himself into a corner with this storyline, but he had all the excuses to make Laurie disappear in the five years gap between season two and three. What I’m about to see is horrible, but I’m glad Rue died at the end.

Fucking Sam Levinson could’ve reunited her with her DAD instead of making this stupid, useless Fezco-has-broken-out-of-jail scene, but I’ll settle for ending this miserable fiasco by any means necessary. I’m glad it’s over, but Euphoria didn’t deserve to die such a slow and agonizing death.

On vacation, I’ve read the book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, by Liz Pelly. It’s a book that was moderately discussed when it came out last year, but that wasn't nearly discussed enough.

I’ve learned so much alarming stuff on a company that I thought was already alarming. Notably that:

• Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon never really cared about music. They’re ad guys who figured infinite music was a cheat code to funnel traffic and they were totally right.

• The most profitable demographic isn’t music lovers, it’s people who hate silence.

• AI music is one can of worms on the platform, but there’s also generic background music ordered by Spotify to fill up playlists keeping musicians employed playing stuff they hate instead of what they really want to do. It’s royalties they don’t have to pay.

• No, they don’t care about AI music, but they do care about AI fucking up their listening data. Slop is allowed if you don’t boost its stats.

• Perhaps the least surprising, but most sneakily alarming business practice: they collect a ruthless amount of data to optimize the efficiency of their service.

I want to direct your attention to this last revelation. Data collection has been increasingly normalized in the twenty-first century. It’s a new form of business currency. It seems reasonable enough and self-explanatory. You want to track your users routines in order to tailor the offer to their tastes. But I’d argue that data collection is one of the main drivers of habit decay and enshittification of online creative services from Spotify to Netflix.

You Don’t Know What The Fuck You Want. You Never Did

Late philosopher Mark Fisher called it "the slow cancellation of the future".

Before internet, time used to be linear. Once something had happened, it happened. It became a memory and, in most cases, it became forgotten. Because time was like a road, so your eyes were locked ahead. Unparalleled access to technology has transformed time into a shallow ocean where everything that ever happened is at arm’s reach. Therefore, it has become way easier to reach into the past than to come up with new ideas.

You see it everywhere, from nostalgia culture to the reboot of film franchises that were not that old to begin with like The Mummy or that were Alien extended universe that never worked by the way of weird, anachronistic music like Fisher’s quintessential example of The Arctic Monkeys doing the post-punk thing in 2002.

It’s easier to drift towards the past than to embrace the present or the futur because it feels familiar. I’m sure this isn’t a revelation to you.

But the past has become the drug of choice for corporations also for a much more nefarious purpose: they’re trying to shape your future based on your previous experience. It feels reasonable enough for a business to map out their consumers preference in order to customize the offer to their tastes, but it walls us out of our most exciting option as said consumers: the ability to change paradigms.

I know what you’re going to say: if you’re so hell-bent on discovering new music, you should take responsibility for it. Believe me, I am. As Liz Pelly reveals in Mood Machine, you can download your Spotify data and on the 9237 songs I’ve listened to over the last six months, I’ve manually selected 73% of them and most the them I haven’t can be explained by the fact that I have let an entire album run its course. I have used the shuffle option for only six songs.

But even as my high level of agency, I find my usage of Spotify mind-numbing. If I don’t know what to listen to before opening the app, I’ll find it difficult to think past my recent browsing history. In trying to engineer the prefect "frictionless" experience, this app is fighting the possibility that I’d possibly want to discover new artists or rethink my music taste. Perfect frictionlessness involves that I will always remain the same. I don’t know what the fuck I want, but what I do know is that I don’t want Spotify to tell me.

Slouching Towards A Curation Culture

Once again, as Pelly thoughtfully highlighted, Spotify has created a problem without an easy solution.

Changing streaming platform is not going to solve the problem because what Spotify created is a business model. They’re its most aggressive iteration, but you’re not going to end fast food by swapping McDonald’s for Raising Cane even if it tastes better and it feels less evil. It’s another iteration of the same thing.

The only solution relies on us. Especially us who enjoy indie and DIY culture. It’s up to us to connect to artists we love on their favored communication channel and support them in the way that is most beneficial for them. Mostly by going to live performances and buying merch. Your choices in that regard means something. Maybe less so to Taylor Swift than to Full of Hell, but any decision you make with your money outside Spotify’s curatorial algorithm is both self-definition and meaningful support to an artist you love.

I’ve always had a list of curators who helped me discover new music. Good old word-to-mouth. Another way I have of discovering new music is arriving super early to every show and plowing through the openers. That’s some ideal audience behavior if I’ve ever seen one, but I told you how serious I was about my music. About 10% of the opening bands that I don’t already know are interesting, but sometimes I discover a band like END that blows a hole through the back of my head like a fucking shotgun.

I’m aware that I’m not going to change the world on my own, but here’s a list of curators that help me discover new and exciting music. From metal to any subgenre of weirdo internet music out there. Feel free to do the same in the comments:

Jerry Monk, A.K.A The Metal Architect

Andrew Nolan

Deep Cuts

Pad Chennington

Crustbag

Dante Dagger

Wyattxhim

Amoeba Records

Also, because I love you and I believe in leading by example so much, here’s a list of artists I’ve been obsessing over for the last couple weeks, months or year. Artists that I apparently generate too much Spotify royalty for to be profitable:

Amenra

Portal

Touché Amoré

Volker Bertelmann

Flore Laurentienne

Krzyztof Penderecki

Terje Rypdal

Full of Hell

Inter Arma

Víg Mihály

Here you go. This is mostly metal, ambient and film music. I’m not pretending to start a social movement or anything, but let’s talk to one another instead of talking to algorithms. It’s just more fun and I swear to you I will not recommend you a Norwegian black metal record solely based on you’re enjoyment of a long with shrieked vocals.

For over ten years, I’ve worked on a novel.

It’ll make you feel special at first, like you’re abandoning the rat race of conventional 9-to-5 living to become some kind of hip, ethereal creative outlaw. But this feeling is an illusion. Chuck Wendig (a quite successful writer I do not particularly appreciate), once said : “the internet is 50% porn, 50% writers” and he was very much on-the-money about that. If you’re working on a novel, there is an entire subterranean marketplace of people just like you online. Some get it published. Some publish it themselves. Some barely get it over the line.

Only a handful of them turn out to be special and unless you’re Jordan Harper, B.R Yeager or Elle Nash, it most likely wasn’t yours. Although I have gotten a first draft over the line once or twice, I have largely failed at writing a long form story I wanted other people to read. Not because of what I did write, but rather because of what I didn’t. I rejected my own mediocrity and the quite likely fate that whatever my creativity could conjure would be dead on arrival. I wanted to entertain people, but I also wanted to provide them with a prism through which they could better understand themselves. Something they could have a real attachment to. Anything below that would be a failure.

Call it pretentiousness or call it idiotically high expectations. I believe both judgements are not essentially wrong. Even if I had written such novel, whether or not it became important does not belong to me. In all transparency, writing a rosetta stone to who I am as a person would’ve probably satisfied me even if it had sold twelve copies. I suspect that I am not alone, though.

Because there are some works of art that have decided what they wanted to you feel before you’ve ever experienced them and what they wanted you to feel is way, way too many contradicting feelings about too many topics. I’m talking about works like Guns N’ Roses Chinese Democracy or Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Works that are meant to be rosetta stones to a creator’s identity, but also meant to have mass market appeal and cultural gravitas who have failed on almost every respect. I’m fascinated with these attempts at engineering important art because they speak of insecurities that create built-in problems that I highly relate to.

I thought I’d share them with you.

"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man."

When Axl Rose started working on Chinese Democracy, he was one of the most important musicians on the planet and his dogged obsession over this album almost singlehandedly robbed him of this status.

The most interesting detail about Rose’s obsession with being hyper meaningful is that he already was. Appetite for Destruction will never not be a historically important record and a funhouse mirror though which a certain kind of feral, broken youth could see and understand themselves. A song like Welcome to the Jungle or Night Train intuitively make sense to a certain kind of people almost forty years into their existence even if they feel culturally dated.

But here’s the thing: when you win this hard, you have to let go of a certain part of your identity. You can never be the hard-swinging underdog again. You’ve knocked it out of the park and you’ve won the game. But Axl Rose refuse to let it go. Guns N’ Roses followed up with the pompous and byzantine double album Use Your Illusion 1 & 2, which was supposed to reflect how Rose felt like a stray dog caged my his own celebrity or something. It felt important, but also bloated and unnecessarily lengthy. It would’ve been another seismic album were it amputated of half of its songs. I mean:

Civil War

Bad Apples

Yesterdays

Garden of Eden

Knocking On Heaven’s Door

Live and Let Die

You Could Be Mine

Don’t Cry

November Rain

Estranged

This is as strong of a collection of songs as Appetite for Destruction (or almost) and it better features the epic trilogy of power ballads that were meant to be the album’s crown jewel. The reception to Use Your Illusions 1 & 2 was not as overwhelmingly positive as it has been for Appetite for Destruction and Axl wanted nothing else, but to capture this feeling again. So he leaned over Chinese Democracy, alienated every single one of his collaborators and refused to accept that some things can only happen once.

It took him fifteen years to finally release it. By then, it had become a running gag in music culture. Chinese Democracy could never live up to the expectations Rose set for it. You cannot engineer a masterpiece, especially over such a long period of time. What came out was a committed, but confused quilt of different style from blues to industrial rock as a moment in music history where rock was fading out of cultural pertinent. It sounded exactly like what it was: an album made by a musician obsessed with making music that matters, but that didn’t know how. So he jammed every possible idea he had in there. Sometimes inside the same song. I don’t think it’s straightforwardly bad as much as it is insane.

Chinese Democracy was marked by the tension between Axl Rose refusing to recede from the culture to become a part of music history and the profound cultural changes he didn’t want to be real. He wanted the initial impulse that created Appetite for Destruction to last forever even if it was long dead.

Sometimes the world don’t change, but you do

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is a different beast because over the forty-something years it took him to make his movie, he remained a beloved and somewhat pertinent cultural figure.

Unlike for Rose, his reputation was not torpedoed before releasing what was supposed to be his magnum opus. As confused as Chinese Democracy sounded when it came out, it was nothing compared to the absolute mess Megalopolis was. The only thing that clear to me upon watching this train wreck in theatre is that it was probably completely different from what it was meant to be at the start. My theory is that Coppola worked his way from a title only.

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Losing my dog to brain cancer is not something I’ve had on my bingo card for 2026.

Until last weekend, I didn’t think there was something even remotely wrong with him. But Ozzy was an absolute tank and he had just been suffering in silence for months. Retrospectively, after reading these horrible internet articles you only read if you suspect your dog has a brain tumour, there were signs. He was more clingy, he had minor bladder problems since this winter, exercising was a chore more than it had ever been. We thought he was just transitioning into being a grumpy old bulldog.

We thought he was being slightly unreasonable, but it turned out he was being the most reasonable he could for our sake.

Ozzy was only six years old. He would’ve turned seven on June 28, but he was unlikely to make it even if we granted him palliative care. So we gave him an loving exit from the pain he'd been enduring all this time. All this dog ever wanted was to be with Josie and I and that’s exactly where he was when his heart stopped beating. Given that he was medicated, he was somewhat himself too. I wish I could’ve given him more time. I wish I could’ve given him more, but I know we’ve done right by him. There was nothing beautiful left for my big boy. It's absurd and unfair to have to do this, but it was the last kindness we could afford him.

We’re in a spectacular amount of pain right now, but it feels right. Our pain should be as intense as the love we had for him. A heart that's able to love is also a heart that can suffer. These are two sides of the same coin.

This dog tested me. He tested my patience, my kindness and the kind of person I perceive myself to be. I didn’t always live up to my own standards, but he was always the first to wipe the slate clean. If anything, this is the part of him I’d like to carry with me from now on. The art of letting bygones be bygones. Letting the beautiful outweigh the ugly. Never letting the inadequacies of reality parasite my relationship with the people I choose to love. May he help me to accept imperfection in others like he accepted mine.

May he help me accept my own imperfections like he accepted them. If anything, my dog was strong and he showed me was true strength was like during our short time together.

The cruel irony of his passing is that we’ve rescued him from SPCA in 2021 in part to help us with the grieving of our first dog Scarlett. We’ve adopted him exactly two months and half after her passing, on a Super Bowl weekend. He hadn’t been beaten, but he'd been awfully neglected for the first eighteen months of his life. He was basically a feral bowling ball with fur. Josie and I weren’t perfect by any means, but we’re not quitters and we’ve worked together. All three. We’ve listened, observed and came to understand each other. We found our place of love and bliss.

We found our place of love and bliss. Now it’s gone.

The home I built with Josie is my place of balance. It’s where I go to even things out. Ozzy was part of it as was Scarlett before him. I feel wobbly now, but it’s important that I find my footing without the help of another pet. It’s too much pressure to put on companionship. Even if I’ve been feeling like someone punched me in the chest real hard since Wednesday evening, I know that I need to find the bliss he provided within myself. It’s something I’ve been going over with my therapist for months now, but Ozzy’s passing has made it a sink or swim moment. A dog is a comforting responsibility to anchor your life around, especially if you don’t have children. It makes it convenient to remain the same person.

Growing older, I’ve come to admire artists who reinvent themselves with dignity. Trent Reznor, David Bowie, Matthew McConaughey, etc. Figures who refused to depend on expectation. This has become quite the existential quagmire for me. I need to become a better version of myself to myself because I do not have Ozzy to lean on anymore. It’s a cold observation to make as the pain of his passing is still piercing through me, but those who have been following me for some time know that I believe there is meaning in everything. The next couple months are going to be difficult, but they are going to be important. They will reveal what I’m made of and how I am willing to treat myself while I have no other major responsibility.

Bye Ozzy.

I take comfort imagining you’re going to spend time with the other Ozzy on the other side, who also loved bulldogs. Thank you for being my dream dog. Thank you for being an unbelievable teacher also. That’s something I didn’t expect, but that I will be eternally grateful to you for. Going forward, I will try to be as good to myself as you’ve been to me. I will try to extent the courtesy to others too and let the burning love that I feel constantly outweigh the parasites of fear and resentment just like you did, man. I’m going to miss you like hell, but it’ll be my duty to carry your memory wherever I go.

You’ll be back with us in a couple week. You’ll be with your older sister Scarlett on top of the bookshelf. With us. Forever. No more crate, no more broomsticks to tell you where you can and can’t go. No more time apart. One more of these car rides you hate, but you’ll spend this one in my arms. I promise. I’m sorry I couldn’t get you more of that while you were alive. I’m sorry I couldn’t get you more time period. But what we had together mattered. You matter.

Loulou

Crazy Train

Big Boy

Big Baby

Ozzy.

Thanks for being my dog. Our time together was too short, but Josie and I will cherish it forever. I’m in a world of pain right now, but thank you for showing me that how hard I was able to love. Rest in peace. Rest easy.

I love you.

1

Three things happened to me this week.

First, I’ve read Chuck Klosterman’s essay Something Else, where he discusses his increasing interest in authenticity amidst the general decreased interest in authenticity in the context of reframing your relationship to celebrities after they die. Then, I’ve the movie Mile End Kicks, which explores the awkward transitional period between the raw boned honesty of the nineties and the age of social media-driven self-aware mythmaking the music industry is still in today.

Last, but not least: I went to see Converge live. It was a communal experience where the catharsis desired and the catharsis delivered was exactly the same. I don't know what felt more elating: seeing them interpret Dark Horse fifteen feet from my face or the collective frenzy it triggered. These are the nights I live for.

2

Nirvana’s frontman Kurt Cobain was quite possibly the most successful sincere man in music history. But he hated everything about the industry that made him way too famous for his own sake, so we’ve collectively tried to decipher his public persona when he was alive.

Why did he wear dresses? Why did he spit on cameras? What message was he trying to convey by sabotaging his performance on Top of the Pops? What could he possibly mean by originally wanting to title his final album I Hate Myself And I Wanna Die?

Even if he provided with an answer that was loud, clear and final by taking his own life, some people still refuse to believe that Cobain must’ve hated it all today and insist that he was murdered. Outside of being a championship-winning professional athlete, being a rock star of Kurt Cobain’s magnitude is a bout the highest social position you can achieve from a layman’s perspective. How could it possibly make you miserable, right?

The nineties are viewed as the peak of authenticity and sincerity in popular culture, but it’s largely a retrospective observation. The window of time where it was legitimately true lasted very little time. It started in September of 1991 with the release of the Smells Like Teen Spirit video and might’ve not made it until the end of 1992 before music labels, clothing companies and whatnot started selling the idea of authenticity back to us. Grunge became an aesthetic and stopped being a response to an increasingly artificial society.

We’ve never really come down from this. This commodification of authenticity and sincerity crystallized into post-grunge try hard figures like Nickelback, Bush, Third Eye Blind and other less abrasive, more user-friendly spin off the raw and ugly rebellion Kurt Cobain started. These were guys that sounded more or less in the same ballpark, but that you could introduce to your mother.

They’ve all been obnoxiously successful not because of Kurt Cobain, but because this is what we want. Whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not.

3

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Bo Lueders passed away yesterday. Although it was not explicitly stated on social media, the lead guitarist for Harms Way in all likeliness took his own life. He was 38 years old. The news hit me like a ton of bricks. Not only I’ve been a fan of the band for several years, they played such life-affirming, chest thumping music that made you want to fistfight your way up a mountain that I foolishly thought their music had the same effect on the band that it had on me.

Some of you might know, I’ve worked at a suicide hotline for three years. Taking calls from people undergoing crisis, talking them off the ledge, finding things to hope for and appropriate help resources when needed. Along the way, I’ve learned some things about distress, despair and suicide that I believe everyone should know. I should’ve written this article sooner. I’ve been helping whoever has been asking for help, but I should’ve written this article anyway.

Because despair and suicide are still such taboos, it’s crucial to have literary about your own suffering. I’m not claiming this could’ve saved Bo or anything, but that’s the thing with suicide: you can alway save the next guy.

• You don’t want to die, you want to stop suffering.

• If you’re thinking about suicide in concrete terms, if you’re planning methods, places or moments, you need to go to a hospital. If you call a suicide hotline with a set date and method, that’s what we’re going to tell you. If you’re this far into suicidal ideation, you are a medical emergency.

• You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. You can’t save anyone, it’s up to people to save themselves. All you can do is to provide support and direction.

• There is never one just reason why someone commits suicide. It’s an accumulation of obvious and not-so-obvious reasons that compound into hopelessness. You’re doing what you can to help and if the worst has happened, you’ve done what you can. If you feel overbearing guilt, there is help for you too.

• Suicide is a better-safe-than-sorry kind of business. If you’re not sure about what you’re feeling, talk about it. If you’ve not sure what your loved ones are feeling, talk about it. The “calls for help” and the “attention seekers” are always one step away from becoming casualties. Take everything seriously.

• You should think of despair as some kind of house fire. Sometimes, the firefighters arrive in time and drag the occupant to security, sometimes there’s too much smoke. They can’t see or hear you. That’s why it’s crucial to be proactive when your loved ones are not doing well.

• Another way to think about it is as a kind of myopia. Suffering feels like it occupies all the space in your life, but there’s always a friend you drifted away from that could help if you reconnect with them. Always a hobby you abandoned that would be healing if you picked it up again. There’s always a toxic job to walk away from. Always someone ready to forgive you for past transgressions. Finding these pockets of hope in your life are paramount to survival.

• There are fundamentally two types of suffering: one that has a direct cause, one that doesn’t. The former is easier to heal, but if you think about killing yourself and can’t figure out why, go see a doctor. That means your brain is conspiring against you and that you need medical assistance in order to regain proper balance. Whether it’s trough medication or therapy, you’ll need to trust science in order to do so, but what do you have to lose?

• A wise man once told me “when all else fails, go where there’s people who still love you”. That works. That saved some people on the darkest days of their lives.

• If you don’t know how to start feeling better: it’s about doing the smallest, most insignificant gesture to show kindness to yourself. With one caller, she just walked on her porch to get fresh air (she hadn’t left her apartment for four days). With another one, I stayed on the phone with her while she cooked a burger on her air fryer. She’d been craving it all week, but kept denying herself that one moment.

• Crying is usually good. It means that you’re still alive and that you’re going through it. It means that you accept your suffering. You have to accept the bad moments and it’s more difficult than it seems. People want to rush through bad times to get to the good ones, but it doesn’t work like that. Happiness is not a competition. You have to let the bad out to make place for the good.

• You never call soon enough. You’re not taking another, more urgent case’s place. If you’re suffering and you think about killing yourself even in the most abstract terms, you more than qualify to call. Never hesitate.

• You are loved. The world is more beautiful with you in it. Whoever you are.

  If you’re thinking about hurting yourself, please dial 988 before doing anything. If you’re in Canada or Quebec, dial 1-888-APPELLE or text 535353.

  RIP Bo.

  Thanks for the music. Thanks for the feelings.

As a childless art critic, my life irrevocably revolves around my tastes.

It’s both a good and a bad thing, but it makes it easy to stop questioning the reasons why you like or dislike something. You’re the authority, your word goes. But are you REALLY the authority? It’s a question I ask myself constantly. Chuck Klosterman — who is the closest thing I have for a hero and model — said in a 2019 piece for The Atlantic:

“…the idea that when someone loves art that’s considered to be in bad taste, particularly as a critic, that love is a reflection of what they are most authentically moved by. Because they have no other motive for lionizing the art, outside of their own desire to express their worldview. Whereas the idea of good taste, which is such an important quality for the professional critic, is an example of people using other people’s ideas to adopt a persona they assume gives them authority and depth. That instinct is a very real thing, and it’s very detrimental.”

I think about this quote a lot. I’ve thought about it after my friend and fellow music journalist Jean-Simon Fabien wrote a piece where he enthusiastically broke down the song Fuel, by Metallica. You have to love Fuel in order to write this extensively about it. It’s a song that is maligned for being goofy and counterintuitive to the dark and dramatic creative paradigm Metallica have cultivated for themselves, but it’s also catchy and anthemic. It’s not meant to be taken seriously and therefore, it’s labeled by the keepers of good taste as a song loved by people who don’t take music seriously. BBQ dads, truckers, whoever attends one show every two years.

But loving Fuel and loving music isn’t mutually exclusive. I think it’s a decent song if you discount the fact that it’s made by the same people who wrote Master of Puppets eleven years prior. If you take it for what it is and not for its failure to be something else, it’s a song that makes you want to drive over lawful speed limits. Critics tend to hate Fuel because it was made by ridiculously complicated people and yet it’s not complicated at all. But it’s not a flaw, it’s by design. Jean-Simon wrote about Fuel because he loves it. I write about it because I do too. But that’s real taste. We share a love for music that makes you want to drive a car faster than you should 1.

The purest expression of what would be considered bad taste in 2026 would be my undying appreciation for the American rock band Godsmack. Whatever preemptive conclusion you’re about to take about this unbecoming confession for an art critic is less interesting than you think it is. I could shelf this disclosure under the safe, but ultimately meaningly umbrella of “guilty pleasure” but I’m not going to. I don’t feel guilty for listening to Godsmack. Never did.

What I’m here to tell you is that listening to Godsmack reminds me — even today as they drifted over more of a radio rock formula over the years — of why I love music in the first place. It elicits something pure in me.

My first meaningful experience with Godsmack came in 2003 when I bought their third album Faceless somewhere counterintuitive, like a Canadian Tire or a Future Shop. It was cheap, I enjoyed a handful of their hits already (Voodoo, Awake, I Stand Alone) and I thought Sully Erna looked cool as shit, but that was it. Twenty-three years in, I don’t think the record has aged. Most of you remember it for the Scorpion King single because of the The Rock, but it’s an album full of earnest, blood-pumping rock songs: Straight Out Of Line, Make Me Believe, Re-Align, Releasing the Demons, Serenity, it’s a clear proposition that was aligned with the times and like all the things aligned with specific times, culture moved away from it.

But I did not enjoy Faceless because it was an earnest, blood-pumping collection of rock songs. I’ve enjoyed (and still enjoy) Faceless because it’s an earnest collection of blood-pumping rock songs with vaguely introspective lyrics about overcoming adversity and finding the inner strength to stand up to your demons to make something out of yourself. It was what I needed to hear after finally running a violence-marred childhood and therefore, like anthemic rock is bound to do, Faceless has created a meaning that exists only for me. Godsmack came into my life in a moment where I was creating what would become the identity I have now.

It’s funny because I remember Faceless the way others remember Hybrid Theory and Meteora by Linkin Park. While I don’t see one band as more valid than the other, I do believe that Godsmack were more consistent and that Chester’s passing has lent Linkin Park nostalgic credibility they wouldn’t have otherwise.

As I’ve grown into cultural criticism, I’ve moved away from my old records. When you’re reviewing music seriously, part of the job is to be interested in new stuff and my path went down much more abrasive self-expression. These are the years where I’ve discovered Mayhem, Converge, Crowbar and other eardrum-slicing sounds. So, they went away for many years. I did not turn my back on Godsmack, they just drifted into an ether where artists that don’t represent your personality anymore.

But then I’ve seen them at Heavy MTL Festival in 2019. I’ve decided to watch their set while waiting for my favorite band of all-time Slayer and guess what? I’ve had a great fucking time. Mostly because Godsmack have largely remained the same. They have growns into more of a Sirius XM sound or what would the well-thinking would call “butt rock”, but they still press the buttons.

Remember how I said that Fuel got labeled as music for people who don’t take music seriously? Well, I would argue that it would be erroneous to try to appreciate Godsmack’s music for its own sake. What Sully Erna and his bandmates play is a soundtrack to moments of heightened feelings. It makes full sense when you’re in a certain type of headspace, whether it’s the euphoria of a rock show, the physical pain of a treadmill or the self-reflexive melancholia of writing an article about bad taste, Godsmack has a place beyond the real of good or bad taste.

I love Godsmack the way Jean-Simon likes Fuel and Chuck Klosterman likes KISS and I don’t feel guilty one bit. They’re something I enjoy without even considering taste. Personal connection always supersedes whatever is considered consensus for a time and place.

It feels like aeons away now, but Limp Bizkit used to be one of the most hated bands in the world and this collective opinion was mostly based on the public perception of their vocalist Fred Durst. Now that they’ve made themselves accessible to the public after a long hiatus and show a self-deprecating sense of humour about being old, everyone loves them again. It’s of good taste to say you’re going to see Limp Bizkit headline a festival and it’s even in better taste to earnestly enjoy yourself because post-irony is a big thing right now. It’s OK to love things you self-consciously understand aren’t good.

But you know what? They’re one variable away to be hated again. Or even worse, forgotten.

Because good taste is a form of conformity. By liking what a consensus of tastemakers want you to like, you’re consciously or unconsciously branding yourself at someone who associates with an arbitrary sense of meaning that could slide off cultural relevancy at any time. I’m realizing that I’m arguing against my profession here, but I’m not saying that you should like dogshit art on purpose. I’m saying that you should like what you like and not what I’m telling you to like. Klosterman said the same piece that I quoted earlier that criticism is a form of intellectual entertainment and I wholeheartedly believe that.

It’s always more fun and interesting to interrogate the reasons why you enjoy what you enjoy than trying to convince someone that an artist matters more than another. Because these reasons are connected to what makes art special and important. Not the arbitrary grade of some dork from Pitchfork. AC/DC have been filling up stadiums for 50 years and they’ve never really been considered relevant to how music is being played. They’re more popular than your favorite band. They’ve always been and yet they don’t matter. Not in the way “meaningful” music matters to critics.

My life revolves around my artistic tastes. A little too much and sometimes it makes me lose the highway. Don’t let anyone tell you that your tastes are shit. Not even me.

I retired from gaming in 2015. Or at least I staged a very public retirement, the way athletes do when they want people to admire their discipline. I was somewhere inside GTA V when I decided I was done.

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Except I didn’t. Not completely. I’m lying to myself like this all the time.

For all my mature and virtuous talk about making time to accomplish myself creatively, I quietly replaced a hundred-hour commitment with a a slew five-minute ones. I traded Los Santos for whatever glowing, frictionless distraction my iPhone could deliver on demand. And for a while, it felt incredible. No endings to reach. No pressure to complete anything. Just the pure, low-stakes pleasure of playing something because I wanted to, not because I felt obligated to keep up with the cultural conversation or justify the money I’d already spent.

Also — and this might be the most honest part — most of it was free, which somehow made it feel even more valuable.

That feeling didn’t last. It couldn’t. It never does. The monetization train eventually arrived on the App Store like it always does — quietly at first, then all at once. If ads first interrupted games, the quickly started being the game. Entire experiences now exist for the sole purpose of funneling you into watching a thirty-second commercial for something you will never buy and immediately forget.

The other day, I downloaded something called Sled Surfers, which looks like it escaped from 1989 in the best possible way. It has that simple, almost innocent design philosophy where the objective is self-explanatory and the joy is supposed to be immediate. Except it isn’t. Not really. The only way to keep it from becoming mind-numbing is to watch ads so you can earn in-game currency, so you can sled faster, so you can keep watching ads more efficiently. It’s a closed loop of engineered dissatisfaction.

You sled down hills to watch ads, so you can sled down hills slightly quicker. It’s bullshit. And I keep playing it anyway, the same way a smoker keeps lighting cigarettes they no longer enjoy, just to maintain a certain type of feeling that isn’t even good for me.

And that’s when it hit me, maybe the Super Nintendo wasn’t just a peak in my gaming life. Maybe it was the last time I ever played something that treated my attention span with respect. You watched the ad to buy the thing and if you bought the thing, well it was yours to play with forever.

What follows are a series of thoughts about why that matters, and why it might never happen again.

• Everyone who owned a SNES owned Super Mario World and for this reason, no one liked it the way we should have. This is both a pick-up-and-play game and an intricate emotional adventure that could span over weeks, making it potentially the most well-balanced video game of all-time.

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I always have my worst thoughts whenever thinking is least useful. At four in the morning. Mid-sprint while tracking a midfielder who is objectively faster than me. Occasionally during sex, which feels unfair to everyone involved. These are not “essay thoughts.” They’re not arguments. They’re more like weird brain glitches that feel too specific to be shared and too persistent to ignore.

I used to throw them onto Twitter like scraps off a balcony. Then in 2023, when Elon Musk amplified COVID disinformation minutes after Bronny James went into cardiac arrest at USC, I hit whatever my internal moral kill switch is and logged off. Permanently. There are different reasons to leave a platform. Some people leave because it’s toxic. Some leave because it’s boring. I left because I realized I was technically participating in an ecosystem where a billionaire could turn a teenager’s medical emergency into engagement bait. That was my line.

I don’t have many. But I have that one.

So now the thoughts just stay with me. They echo around in the shower. They follow me while I’m picking up the Prince of Barkness’s poop off the sidewalk, which is maybe the least glamorous setting in which to contemplate metaphysics.

The one that keeps resurfacing is this: If art is self-expression (which I always say it is), what survives when you remove the expression? If you take away the microphone, the canvas, the guitar, the camera, who is that person on a Tuesday at 11:30 a.m.? Are they still themselves? Or were they only themselves because the world provided a stage?

So I started making a list. An alternate-universe employment chart for the artists who actually matter to me. Not celebrities in the abstract. Not culturally approved legends. The ones who rewired my nervous system at inconvenient ages. This isn’t about irony. It’s not “Wouldn’t it be funny if X worked at Costco.” It’s more diagnostic than that. I’m trying to figure out what part of these people feels structural and what part feels circumstantial.

Because if Kurt Cobain had been born in a different town, in a different decade, does he become a mechanic? A guidance counselor? A guy who fixes VCRs and occasionally scares his coworkers? And if the answer is yes, what does that say about the fragility of artistic identity?

And (here’s the part I don’t say out loud at 4 a.m.) if you remove writing from my life, what job do I default to? What temperament do I reveal?

Anyway. Here’s the list.

Actors & Filmmakers

Matthew McConaughey : Celebrity chef. The kind who has a YouTube channel with six millions followers. He’s a great-looking high achiever with generational skills at making people around him feel comfortable. He's bound to get famous even without acting. Maybe he’d have restaurants, but other people would run them for him.

Maika Monroe : Account manager for an ad agency. She’s so good at projecting stress and tension that she has to feel it all the time, right? Whatever she ends up doing, multiple burnouts and cocaine problems are inevitable. Sorry Maika, you’re living your best life here and now.

Joaquin Phoenix : Online casino owner or something. Something in a legal grey zone that would allow him to be a shirtless, margarita-drinking stranger somewhere on an exotic beach. The kind of stranger you get drunk with once on vacation and then never see again for the rest of your life.

John Hawkes : Telemarketing supervisor. I feel like bartender is too poetic of an outcome for an underachiever like Hawkes, but he would find a way to underachieve in this parallel life too. He’d also find a way to become a legend, but only among his employees and at the SPCA where he’d volunteer at twice a week.

Paul Thomas Anderson : Substitute teacher in high school. This is one guy I can’t see happy without movies. He’s probably alcoholic and he left his wife for his younger mistress, but the girl he left her for never wanted anything serious, so he lives alone in a small apartment and feels misunderstood. Oh and he’s never getting tenure.

Takashi Miike : Anarchist. He would find another way to express his marginality and normies would most likely pay the price of him not having art to do so. He would be the kind of anarchist to steal a wrecking ball and run it through a train station just so that no one gets to work on time on a specific day.

Jake Gyllenhall : Underwear model. Who are we even kidding here?

Natalie Portman : Psychiatrist for the criminally insane. I don’t see her using her tremendous looks to earn a living again. She seems too smart and self-aware. Well, maybe she’s have a secret OnlyFans or something and be a closet multimillionnaire.

Werner Herzog : Night shift counselor at a suicide hotline. It would go as well as you think it would, but he’d keep his job because he’d be unionized and no one else would want to work nights anyway.

Cillian Murphy : Professional chess player. This man is quietly intense and therefore would require a quietly intense profession that would make him somehow even more of a sex-symbol. Either that or a bomb squad operator.

Kevin Smith : Convenience store owner. That would allow him to tell his stories, gain an audiences and make money off clients who want cigarettes and entertainment. That could be the name of his business. “Cigarettes & Entertainment”. Here you go, Kevin. I’ve figured out your alternate self.

John McTiernan : Astronaut. In no way this guy doesn’t do something cool as shit even without art. But he would be the only beneficiary. He’d see and do all the cool stuff and we would even know he exists.

Ari Aster : Nightclub owner. His father was a jazz musician, but since he's not allowed to be an artist it’s only logical to give his old man a place to have a residency in. He’s another guy who would suffer without art, I think.

Jim Jarmusch : Professional dancer. Alright, alright, I’m cheating. But admit it — you see it too. He’d bring the precision and an understated coolness to the craft.

Emerald Fennell : Feminist studies teacher in college. She would be going on CNN and call out misogynist bullshit, you know it. She would call me out for not having enough women in this list and be totally right.

Michael Mann : Interior designer. And he would make a killing. Maybe even have a style called after him. Neo-Manhaus or something.

Musicians

Ozzy Osbourne : Paramedic. That’s a best case scenario because Ozzy would most likely be either jobless or a slightly better criminal you’d give him credit for, but he did channel his adrenaline-seeking problem in this life. No reason to think he couldn’t do it again. Plus, he’s good with blood and has a high tolerance for pain.

Jacob Bannon (Converge) : Police detective. But a cool, wounded one like the one Jake Gyllenhaal plays in Prisoners. He’d be taking too much on himself, but efficiently shield broken kids from the evils of the world just like he does with his band.

Daveed Diggs (clipping.) : Microbiologist. One that works taking samples in the middle of the forest. That man is way too happy, healthy and has too much of a bohemian energy to ride a desk at a 9-to-5 job.

Leonard Cohen : Private English tutor. A flexible job that would indulge his outsider nature and his love for words. He’d eventually get #metoo’ed by one of his students and become a very successful, but tragic English tutor for inmates.

Colin Stetson : Architect. He would be making people feel things through well-organized space rather than movie soundtracks. Something about composers, even the weird ones, screams “responsible adult” to me.

Dylan Walker (Full of Hell) : Handyman. The type that lives in a small Pennsylvanian town who everyone knows and calls when they need to fet something fixed: their car, gets their electricity wired at their fishing cabin, repair a blocked sink. The way I see it, he’d be happy, make a good living without ever having to pay taxes.

Lemmy Kilmister : The craziest, booziest guy on the military base that somehow never dies when he’s deployed. He was a military history buff to begin with and Motörhead’s entire ethos revolved around standing proud and defiant in the face of their inevitable demise so him standing up for what he believes in an alternate universe feels correct.

Dave Mustaine : Foreman at a construction site. He’d be very good at his job and everyone would hate him because he’s constantly remind them and would always talk about how he cofounded the company with the bosses, but got bought out because of his boozing. Some people can’t avoid fate.

Andrew Nolan : Librarian. He’s already pretty great at it.

Merzbow : Entomologist. Something weird and unexpected. He would work in a museum and not talk to anybody, but someone would find him talking to his beetles at some point. Good chances of dying at work of unknown causes too.

Brendan Murphy (Counterparts) : Social worker. He would be beloved and always the coolest guy in the room even if being around trauma and hurt all the time would become toxic for his mental health at some point. Brendan and Jacob from Converge have interchangeable fates, really.

Matt Pike : Professional wrestler. He’s big, strong, has a larger than life persona and he can sell emotion with the best of them. He’s also addicted to a reckless lifestyle, which would make him a fit to become an indies legend. Big Sabu energy to Pike.

Tom Araya : Sports commentator. He has such a peculiar voice when he gets excited, the world needs to appreciate him for it. Maybe a soccer commentator for the LA Galaxy or El Paso FC. The fire in that throat needs to light the way.

Trent Reznor : Urban planner or politician. He’s dedicated at making complex things happen, making people’s lives better and seems to have gotten out of his own way years ago. Maybe I’m just secretly wishing he runs for office.

Brian Eno : Monk. He’s find a way to that organ even on another planet. His colleagues would be delighted. Maybe get a little sleepy at prayer time.

Chino Moreno : A cool, hipster fast food owner. Where burgers cost 20$ and waiters deliver them on old-school four wheels roller skates. In this timeline, underage girls would want to sleep with him too.

Henry Rollins : Garage owner. He’d get in at a clerk at 16, knowing nothing of mechanics, learning everything on the fly and buying the place from the retiring owner at a sensible price before forty. His work ethic would carry him through anything.

Authors

Blake Butler : Nuclear scientist. He’d be frantically searching for invisible truth somewhere else than beyond the words he’s writing. No way he can stop himself. Chances are he could lose his mind and become a Batman vilain.

Chuck Klosterman : Media coordinator for a college sports team. It’s unclear if he’d find an outlet as suited to his personality as he did in this life, but he’d play trivia three nights a week at the bar and become somewhat of a local legend.

Charlene Elsby : Philosophy teacher. Duh. She’s host a podcast about Hegel no one understands and then one day, go on a psychotic rant and disappear from the internet, taking the episode down with her. After a certain time, you’d start wondering if you ever heard that rant or just dreamed it.

Brian Alan Ellis : Television host or male gigolo. He was born to make an impact in thirty seconds or less. That soulful dry wit and wet hot look won’t go to waste.

Bret Easton Ellis : Some kind of high powered executive, but that inherited his dad’s compan. He looks too good behind a giant desk to let it go to waste and he’s probably be alright to swap cultural authority for corporate authority. He’d keep people on their toes in board meetings.

Chuck Palahniuk : The most mischievous methadone clinic supervisor there is. This type of work would clearly be a way to make ends meet for him and nothing more. His real passion would be a sprawling miniature train track in his basement or dealing drugs to his old patients. One of the two.

David Foster Wallace : Math teacher. It’s unclear whether or not he would suffer the same fate, but he would have less pressure to be extraordinary and he’d be working in a field he’s already good at. So I like his chances to at least live a little longer.

Elle Nash : Professional catfisher. She would scam thousands of horny men out of their money and would never get caught. There would be one of these Netflix three episodes documentary that never goes anywhere.

Jordan Harper : Uber driver that does underground races in L.A at night. Another one of these guys who’d need an outlet for all the creativity and the adrenaline flooding his work. He’s either be very good at it or die in a crash on his third race.

Max Booth III : Community theatre owner. Does this qualify as art? He’s be running the place, giving classes and would always, ALWAYS overdo it at Halloween, which would make local parents feel uneasy around him.

B.R Yeager : Indie video game designer. Is this cheating? The demons in this man’s head would need a way out and shoppers on Steam have an appetite for them.

Stephen King : English teacher. No adverbs, kids.

Brian Evenson : Hypno-therapist. Technically a great one who could get anyone under. What happens then would remain up for debate though. Very likely one of his patients drags him to court.

Joe Clifford : Mechanic. He’d work on Harley-Davidsons on the lock and have his own reclamation project in his garage he’d work on for years and eventually gift his oldest son because he’d get old and too insecure to ride it.

Mark Manson : Politician. Hopefully. This man is an obvious leader and has the collective welfare at heart.

J. David Osborne : Unknown. He’d vanish without a trace at age 24 or under, but no one would ever know whether he’s alive or dead. He’d stumbled upon something that’s not meant to be stumbled upon and disappear into it.

Eryk Pruitt : Bartender. Well, shit. Wait. Space-time be damned, some thing are just meant to be.

What about you guys? Tell me in the comment what would your favorite artists do without art and visit Dead End Follies if you enjoyed this. There’s SO much more for you up there.

My parents hated pro wrestling almost as much as I loved it.

To them, it was a circus of neon narcissists :hair sprayed into architectural impossibilities, torsos lacquered like Thanksgiving turkeys, grown men pretending to hurt each other without ever suffering anything resembling a consequence. It was loud. It was fake. It was morally suspect.

To me, it was church.

Every Sunday morning, the ring became a stained-glass arena where good and evil were dropkicked. The heroes wore bright colors. The villains sneered. Justice was loud and immediate. Nobody needed therapy; they needed a finishing move.I was eight. Of course I believed it. More importantly, I needed to.

Where were my parents when The Undertaker locked The Ultimate Warrior inside an airtight coffin on television, huh? Where were they when Jake Roberts tied Randy Savage in the ropes and let a live snake clamp down on his arm like the Old Testament had briefly switched networks?

Because here’s what adults forget: that wasn’t “fake violence.” That was myth. That was apocalypse scaled down to fit between cereal commercials.

There was no shortage of characters in the early-’90s World Wrestling Federation. There were the supernatural demigods: Hulk Hogan, all patriotism and pythons; The Ultimate Warrior, vibrating at a frequency only dogs and eight-year-olds could hear; The Undertaker, already halfway to the afterlife.

There were the neon technicians: Bret Hart in radioactive pink, making precision look heroic; Shawn Michaels, preening and elastic and somehow aware of his own camera angles.

There were the scale anomalies: Randy Savage, pure chaos in tassels; Kevin Nash as Diesel who no one knew whether he was a trucker or a biker; the terrifying Yokozuna; Tatanka, forever undefeated until he suddenly wasn’t; and the unfortunately branded 1–2–3 Kid, who felt like someone’s older brother had accidentally wandered into the ring.

Cartoons had nothing on the then-named WWF. Cartoons didn’t bleed. Cartoons didn’t slam each other through announce tables.

My favorite was Shawn Michaels. He told a classic underdog story better than any of his contemporaries and therefore lived rent-free inside my prepubescent head. But when I talk to anyone my age about what we now call the New Generation Era, there’s one name that always surfaces first.

Not the champions.
Not the headliners.
Not the “face of the company.”

The name that arrives, unprompted, is Razor Ramon.

Say Hello To The Bad Guy

So how did a 6’7”, 280-pound Cuban-American caricature — essentially a legally distinct version of Tony Montana from Scarface — become an enduring emotional landmark for a generation that still doesn’t understand whether or not its enjoyment or pro wrestling is ironic?

That question feels ridiculous. Which is why it’s interesting.

I do not have the answer to a question no one asked out loud before, all I have is my own memory of this bygone era and everybody knows memory is both a heightened, selective and manipulative mechanism. Here’s what I suspect: Scott Hall — the man also known as Razor Ramon — embodies a transition that was happening both in my life and in then WWF: adolescence. The shift from the New Generation to the Attitude Era.

Razor Ramon was the first antihero for a generation drifting into self-awareness during the strange cultural in-between of the 1990s. A decade that distrusted sincerity, mocked overt ambition, and quietly decided that the only way to win was to pretend you weren’t playing. This was a character who could have existed in any era of professional wrestling and get over. But he could only have felt meaningful to kids who were learning, in real time, that trying too hard was social suicide and that the highest form of status was indifference to whatever you were told the stakes were.

In other words, he was cool. Even in neon trunks, knee-high boots, and hair shellacked into architectural defiance, Scott Hall radiated something that transcended the costume. He felt aspirational, but not in the way Hulk Hogan or Michael Jordan were aspirational. Those men wanted to be admired. Their greatness required your belief. Razor Ramon did not seek admiration. He assumed it.

He was aspirational the way older kids at school are aspirational. They don’t explain themselves. They don’t audition for your affection. They exist at a frequency you hope to one day access.

Whenever Razor appeared, the atmosphere changed. He didn’t chase attention; attention reorganized itself around him. He wasn’t a pure babyface. He wasn’t a pure heel. He was something more confusing and, therefore, more modern: an individualist who made detachment look like power. He turned this individualism — a trait traditionally coded as villainous — into a form of streetwise authority.

Now why was this so important again? Before the working class antihereo Stone Cold Steve Austin declared open season on corporate authority, Scott Hall quietly bent the rules of alignment. Professional wrestling, at least in its most cartoonish form, had always depended on clarity. Heroes were virtuous. Villains were corrupt. The crowd’s job was to choose a side and remain loyal.

But Razor complicated that arrangement.

The traits that were supposed to define him as villainous — selfishness, arrogance, detachment — were precisely the traits audiences found magnetic. That recalibration mirrored something happening outside the ring. We were learning, slowly, that identity was not binary. That you could be principled and self-serving. Loyal and aloof. That “bad” qualities could function as survival mechanisms.

Razor Ramon didn’t turn good. The audience turned toward him.

And in doing so, they quietly accepted a new idea: you could be both good and bad at the same time. Sometimes, being “bad” was simply refusing to perform goodness for other people’s comfort. “Say hello to the bad guy” became more than a catchphrase. It became a self-help mantra.

Nostalgia, Charisma and Integrity

When Scott Hall jumped to WCW and stopped calling himself Razor Ramon, something strange happened. The name changed. The accent softened. The copyright disappeared. The man did not.

He walked into WCW as Scott Hall, aligned himself with Kevin Nash, and was presented as an equal: co-conspirator, co-architect of chaos. On paper, they were a unit. In practice, watch the entrances again. Watch the pacing. The body language. The way the camera gravitates only one way.

Hall’s swagger didn’t feel like a performance anymore. It felt like a leak. Like the character had consumed the actor and decided to keep going without corporate permission. He crossed storyline and kayfabe like a shadowalking highlander. There was only ever one of him.

I think the transition into the New World Order and later the nWo Wolfpac is what cemented Scott Hall into millennial memory as something larger than a wrestler.

There are two layers to our appreciation. There’s the real-time experience: a kid watching a cool antihero destabilize the moral geometry of wrestling. And then there’s the retrospective glow. The adult looking back and realizing that Hall feels even cooler now than he did then, because nostalgia airbrushes hesitation and magnifies aura. Memory edits out the awkward promos and keeps the slow strut, the half-smirk, the feeling that this guy was operating on a different plane. But the deeper reason the image persists is less about faction warfare and more about fantasy.

Scott Hall embodied the promise of a graceful passage into adulthood.

Where threats were manageable. Where humiliation could be avenged by calling your friends to swarm whoever crossed you. Where defeat was temporary, because next week the music would hit again and the story would reset. Wrestling promised that pain had structure. That chaos was episodic. And through all of it, Hall remained unchanged.

Same strut. Same half-smirk. Same sense that nothing. No loss, no betrayal, no corporate shift could fundamentally rattle him. He wasn’t just the coolest kid in school. He was the kid who never had to grow out of being the coolest kid in school.

Which is why he remains frozen that way. Not as a man. As a feeling.

Whenever I find a toothpick, I’m seventeen again and responsibility is still theoretical.

There’s no boss I can’t flip off. No job I can’t abandon. No mortgage quietly accruing interest in the background of my life. Consequences feel negotiable. Problems feel episodic. Anything unbearable can be dismissed with a snarky flick of the wrist. It’s a freedom only memory can manufacture. The kind of strength that exists because enough of us agree it once did.

Scott Hall struggled with addiction. His later years were messy and painful. The cool was never as invincible as it looked beneath the arena lights. But the feeling he projected, the idea that you could move through danger without flinching, still lives.

And maybe that’s the real reason Razor Ramon endures. He exists in the negative space between adult consequence and adolescent fantasy. The split second where you imagine flipping everyone off and walking away untouched. The mortgage evaporates. The boss shrinks. The damage resets by next week’s episode.

He doesn’t need to be realistic. He doesn’t even need to be real anymore.

He’s a secret handshake for a generation that learned how to smirk before it learned how to cope.

If you enjoyed this piece, visit Dead End Follies. There’s A LOT more where it comes from.

I’m slightly obsessed with ancillary tapes by nineties French black metal collective Les Légions Noires. Not the Vlad Tepes or Mütiilation material. Everyone knows about these and almost everyone agrees (self-included) it’s essential.

I’m talking about the other stuff.

The tapes that sound like they weren’t meant to be listened to. The clumsy, bferal side projects that feel like someone hit record on a four-track just to see what would happen and never bothered to check if it worked. There are dozens of these orbiting around Les Légions Noires, but today I want to focus on Moëvöt’s 1993 demo Abgzvoryathre — because it’s great, but also because it’s glorified shitposting.

There were four main projects in Les Légions Noires: Vlad Tepes, Mütiilation, Belkètre and Torgeist. Although it’s basically impossible to know who’s who in this collective, Moëvöt is apparently a side-project from the intuitively named Vordb Bathor Ecsed, who plays in the latter two bands. I have no way of knowing whether this is true of not. According to most sources, Abgzvoryathre is also technically the first thing LLN has ever officially released. This explains some things.

It’s dark ambient that would’ve kept my twelve years old self up at night.

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It’s probably Hitler’s fault again.

I don’t mean that ironically. This is not one of those sneaky right-wing pieces that attempts to shine a sympathetic light on a genocidal figure. But when he killed himself, Adolf Hitler reset the planet’s moral compass. He became — as Chuck Klosterman stated in his essay collection I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined) — a “placeholder for evil.” Any villain in a big-budget mainstream American movie is modeled after him, whether it’s a conscious decision.

Hitler was evil incarnate, so any credible on-screen villain will do Hitler shit.

By that, I mean everything from unchecked imperialism to blowing up the planet — or even the universe. The latter has been a latent fascination of mine for years. Not every villain wants to destroy the universe, but a wide range of nefarious characters, from James Bond villains to Marvel antagonists, have at least flirted with nihilistic endgames. This is a deeply strange thing to want. Why would you campaign to cease to exist? What kind of victory is nothingness?

Because when the stakes are this high, they’re not stakes at all. There’s no real conflict when no one in their right mind wants the universe (or even just the planet) to disappear. Total annihilation defeats the purpose of storytelling. Villains who want that are, in the words of Dennis Lehane’s iconic character Bubba Rogowski, “empty rifles.” They look and act intimidating, but they don’t have anything meaningful to threaten other characters with. So why do we keep doing this? Why do we stretch narrative stakes until they collapse under their own weight?

To perform cultural surgery on the problem, you first have to understand where it comes from. Here are three hypotheses:

1. Destroying the universe is cinematic shorthand for genocide.

   This is the easy assumption to make, but it’s also the most boring and, I suspect, the most comforting. The true horror of genocide lives in remembrance. As horrible as it is to write: surviving is a prerequisite for inheriting trauma. If Stalin’s Russia proved anything, it’s that history can be manipulated when there’s no one left alive to tell it.

   The threat of annihilation carries weight, but following through on it makes no narrative sense. The existence of nuclear weapons proves that mutually assured destruction is real, yet every country maintains an arsenal out of fear that someone else might erase them, not because they genuinely want to erase anyone. There’s something more profound at play here. Something disquieting.

   We were never that noble.

2. Destroying the universe is symbolic of murder-suicide.

   While murder is common currency in Hollywood productions, murder-suicide is a far more tormented proposition. There’s something desperate, unhinged, and perversely incoherent about wanting to end someone else’s life for reasons so painful to you that you also want to join them in death. Now we’re circling a different kind of weight. One that feels personal.

   When you feel personally targeted by someone, guilt almost arrives automatically. What did I do to this psychopath to make him want to destroy my planet? But that’s not really it, is it? The dynamic rarely feels targeted. Villains want to destroy the universe simply because it exists. They aren’t jealous lovers or betrayed business partners. They’re avatars of absolute power.

3. Destroying the universe is a stand-in for the loss of individuality

   Nothingness and meaninglessness are the ultimate forms of conformity. Contemporary existence rests on the primacy of individuality and destroying the universe becomes the ultimate individualist gesture because it denies everyone else’s. Even in disappearance, a universe-destroying villain renders his grand design eternal. I suspect this is what galactic antagonists are really after: the ultimate ego trip. Becoming the harvester of the end.

   It’s not just about wielding life-and-death power over everyone, but over everything. They’re almost always opposed by a ragtag team of unlikely companions who express themselves in radically different ways. Survival becomes synonymous with preserving one’s individuality, and that’s what audiences respond to.

   But this creates a paradox. If everyone is fighting to prove how unique and special they are, then no one is. That paradox exists in our day-to-day lives too, though.

Reengineering Villainy

So how do we renovate evil to give it maximum impact? What does maximum movie villainy look like?

Thanos hinted at an answer. In Avengers: Infinity War, he feared resource scarcity and obsessed over population control. He believed he was doing the right thing and that detail matters. No one believes they’re the villain of their own story, even when they’re trampling someone else’s liberty. They see themselves as willing to sacrifice what others won’t. The Avengers barely engage him philosophically (they try to punch him instead like true Americans) but that’s beside the point. His motivations were compelling on their own.

But that’s not the only interesting way to be a villain. In I Wear the Black Hat, Chuck Klosterman argues that a true villain “knows the most, but cares the least.” Who fits that description more cleanly than the people who have colonized our reality with their digital ecosystems?

It’s a boring claim to say that Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are evil. That argument has become cultural background noise. But they haven’t just reshaped reality; they’ve made us complicit in its reshaping. No one wants to be on Facebook anymore, yet everyone is and so millions of dollars flow into Facebook ads every day because people advertise where the people are. These people who advertise are your employer, your government, but also you and me.

These figures “know the most” because they harvest nearly every decision we make online, building psychological models designed to keep us on their platforms longer, so we see more ads. That much is documented. And they “care the least” because, within capitalism, financial growth is the only metric that ultimately matters. If money keeps flowing, nothing changes. If money stops, only the changes that restore the flow are considered.

They don’t feel responsible for poverty, global conflict or social inequity. They feel responsible to shareholders. The consequences of their inventions are framed as unfortunate byproducts of the freedom they champion.

Maximum villainy engineers a level of comfort that functions just well enough to fragment opposition while uniting people in subservience. Do you want your Amazon shipment in 24 hours, or do you want someone you’ll never meet to earn a living wage and work humane hours, even if it means waiting ten days for that package?

Exactly.

Real villainy doesn’t want nothingness. It wants engagement. It wants approval. It’s a gaping hole that never fills, no matter how much you pour into it. Defeating true villainy demands a sacrifice from you, not out of the villain.

I’m using real-life examples, but this is a framework: seduction, comfort, convenience, appealing to the lesser instincts of others in order to consolidate power. That works. Whether it can function inside a two-hour blockbuster is debatable, but it thrives on television and even more in novels.

Yet this isn’t the villainy we’re usually given. We get antagonists who want to destroy everything because it doesn’t belong to them. That’s comforting. It’s easy to root against that guy. He’ll never implicate you if he wants you to disappear.

Over the last thirty years, the world changed faster than our ability to understand what to be afraid of.

I read a lot of books. At some point — through a combination of bad decisions and institutional optimism — I even earned a master’s degree for reading novels and explaining why they supposedly mattered. This means I’ve spent an alarming portion of my life with books that were introduced to me as life-changing experiences and instead functioned more like elaborate exercises in cognitive misery.

That’s what happens in book school: you’re taught which novels matter by people who have already decided why they matter, for reasons they kind of made up so they can teach courses about it. These are the same people who get visibly flustered at a McDonald’s drive-thru, because the simultaneousness of choice and time constraints destabilizes their entire belief system.

The truth is, you don’t have to read anything if you don’t want to. Reading is like exercise: it’s work, it can be exhausting and at no point does anyone accidentally finish a book the way they accidentally finish a bag of chips. But if you stick with it, it eventually becomes rewarding in a way that’s mildly addictive.

You can read smut or you can read Hegel, just as some people take long walks while others surrender their entire personalities to CrossFit. The specific routine matters less than the fact that you’re doing the work. Still, whatever you choose to read, there are certain novels that have been declared important at various moments in history that you can skip entirely without ever triggering that low-grade cultural anxiety we call FOMO.

Ulysses, by James Joyce

Here’s the truth about Ulysses. It’s long, showy, and incrementally aggravating to anyone who doesn’t experience syntax as a recreational drug. It is historically important because it detonated the existing definition of what a novel was allowed to be. James Joyce wrote it in roughly eighteen different prose styles without ever losing control of the machine even as you, the reader, will absolutely lose the plot at various intervals. But it’s not a bug, it’s the feature. Joyce is demonstrating mastery. He is letting you know he’s better than you, but doing it politely enough that you’re supposed to feel grateful.

At the time, novels were still expected to be long, serious, third-person affairs, epic narratives or respectable psychological studies. Ulysses dragged literature into the twentieth century by proving a novel could be many incompatible things at once, sometimes on the same page. That accomplishment is real, undeniable, and already absorbed into everything that came after it.

There you go. You no longer need to read this hulking, thousand-page account of twenty-four hours in Dublin (yes, twenty-four hours). Odds are, you will not experience a spiritual awakening. You probably won’t even experience clarity. And not to spoil the ending, but going to Dublin in real life won’t fix this either.

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At first, I didn’t get it.

After two episodes, Heated Rivalry struck me as cheap, exploitative, and so aggressively sexual that it seemed to undercut whatever larger argument it was trying to make. So I did what I’ve been trained to do by years of cultural participation and mild professional confidence: I wrote a cautious, self-aware, politely conflicted white-guy review for work. It was measured. It was fair. It was wrong. I was immediately and enthusiastically taken apart for it, which is what tends to happen when you speak critically about something that is clearly making people feel seen, soothed, or momentarily less alone.

I understood that Heated Rivalry was not meant for me. What surprised me was my lingering belief that this fact still entitled me to an opinion about what LGBTQ+ representation should look like. That belief didn’t come from malice or bad faith; it came from habit. From the assumption that cultural legitimacy is earned by arguing well, rather than by being heard first.

So I kept watching, mostly out of stubbornness and partly out of a vague fear that I’d missed something obvious. By the third episode, something became impossible to ignore: this wasn’t clumsiness, it was strategy. The shock was the point. If creator Jacob Tierney made those first two episodes feel so aggressively sexual, it wasn’t because he lacked restraint, it was because he needed to break through the noise and grab my attention by the collar.

Over the following weeks, Heated Rivalry unfolded in public, blooming under the warm, validating sun of collective affection. And even though some of my initial criticisms still technically applied, they stopped feeling relevant. I could see the appeal not despite the excess, but because of it. This wasn’t just representation; it was comfort. A new kind of feel-good show, one that prioritizes emotional reassurance over formal restraint.

And once I realized that, I started thinking about the Sex Pistols.

Punk is Not Punk is Not Punk is Not Punk

When the Sex Pistols first emerged in 1975, they failed every conventional audition. They weren’t handsome in a marketable way, they barely knew how to play their instruments and they carried themselves like people who had never once been gently encouraged to shower. None of this mattered the moment the songs landed. The tracks were short, blunt, and violently pissed off, which turned out to be the only qualifications that counted.

People didn’t pay attention to the Sex Pistols because they were talented, they paid attention because the band sounded like a thought that hadn’t existed in public yet. They gave voice to a raw, youthful anger and a boredom with inherited rules that had been quietly fermenting for years. The Pistols didn’t invent that disenchantment, they just found a way to articulate it loudly, crudely, and before anyone else figured out how to say it out loud.

Now, I’m not comparing Heated Rivalry to the Sex Pistols. I’m not even saying Heated Rivalry is punk. Not because it isn’t, but because punk is one of those words that can now be stretched to mean almost anything. It’s an idea that’s been slowly hollowed out by its own inclusiveness, even though its original eruption was defined by exclusionary impulses.

At this point, I could argue that the coffee pot I just used while writing this piece is punk, because it keeps my money away from Starbucks. You could counter that it’s not punk at all, because it brews American coffee and my daily caffeine habit is therefore financing imperialism. I could argue that going to my day job in an hour is punk, because I work for an independent media outlet that quietly bankrolls personal projects where I get to express myself without commercial compromise. All of these arguments would technically work.

That’s the problem. When everything can be punk, nothing really is anymore. At least not in the way it once mattered.

What I’m saying is that Heated Rivalry became a monster success for the same basic reason the Sex Pistols did: it invented a new way to start a conversation no one was fully prepared to have. Not even the people who desperately wanted it to exist.

At first, I did the dumbest possible thing and compared it to Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, then lamented its lack of subtlety and sophistication. But that absence isn’t a failure of craft, it’s the mechanism. Heated Rivalry isn’t trying to seduce you with nuance, it’s trying to knock the door off its hinges. It’s not conventionally good. But it’s so disruptive to entrenched, accepted cultural norms that it feels almost prophetic, less like a well-made object than a flare shot into the night, announcing that something unresolved has finally found a way to speak.

Making Queerness Unavoidable

Before Heated Rivalry, the cultural conversation around queerness was less evolved than we liked to believe. Even when it was front and center, especially when it was treated positively. There was always some kind of narrative choke point. A hesitation. A caveat. An unspoken rule about how far it was allowed to go.

In Challengers, queerness exists as a naughty little secret passed between Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist. There’s one spectacular scene, vibrating with limitless sexuality and then the movie politely shuts the door on it, never to return. In the films of Xavier Dolan (who I genuinely love) queerness gets all the space it could want, but it arrives freighted with explosive anger, emotional volatility, and the constant suggestion that something might break at any moment.

What we almost never saw was something far simpler and, somehow, more radical: healthy young men who just love each other and have a lot of sex. No tragic framing. No narrative punishment. No symbolic apology. No social burden.

At least, not until Heated Rivalry.

The glue that makes Heated Rivalry work is that Shane and Ilya are professional athletes. Not aspirational creatives, not tortured outsiders, not people auditioning for cultural permission, but elite performers operating inside a system that is outwardly homophobic and inwardly obsessed with men’s bodies. A world where, paradoxically, everyone is gay and no one is allowed to say it.

They’re also at the absolute top of the social food chain. They’re worshipped for what they can do on the ice, and who they choose to love (or aggressively sleep with) has no measurable impact on their excellence. Their value is already settled. Desire doesn’t diminish them; it barely registers as a variable.

That’s the fantasy Heated Rivalry offers, and it’s a meaningful one. Shane and Ilya represent something we don’t actually have in society yet: true superstars, at the peak of their powers, refusing to treat the closet as a meaningful structure at all. Not cautiously stepping out of it, not reframing it as a brave narrative arc, but blowing it up so completely that it stops being part of the conversation.

We’ve had professional athletes come out before. Robbie Rogers did it in soccer,but on the day he retired. Jason Collins did it in the twilight of his NBA career. The NHL has Luke Prokop, who came out young and bravely, and is currently buried in the minors. We’ve also had players refuse to wear Pride Night jerseys, which somehow feels like a louder statement than any press release. What we haven’t had is the thing that actually matters.

Imagine Connor McDavid coming out and continuing to obliterate the league every night. Imagine Victor Wembanyama doing it while redefining what a human body is allowed to be on a basketball court. No retirement tour. No symbolic courage followed by disappearance. Just sustained, undeniable dominance.

That’s the proposition Heated Rivalry makes. Not visibility as sacrifice, but queerness as a natural fact coexisting with excellence. If that ever happened in real life, it wouldn’t just change sports culture, it would permanently rewire it. And once sports change, the rest of the world has a habit of following whether it wants to or not. Getting your ass kicked night in, night out by an openly gay athlete would normalize queerness in society in a way that would be irreversible. It would not happen overnight, but it would trigger a series of changes that would permanently damage bigotry.

I’d be lying if I said I’m a Heated Rivalry enthusiast now. But I get it. I get that when the Sex Pistols first appeared, there were older men who felt personally offended. Not because the music was bad, but because they had never been spoken to this way before. They had never seen youth this openly angry, this uninterested in permission, and they had no interest in examining the society that made punk inevitable in the first place.

My initial reaction to Heated Rivalry put me squarely in that lineage. I became one of those men, briefly and predictably. That’s not a personal failure so much as a cultural reflex. It’s bigger than me. And ultimately, it doesn’t matter what I think about the show.

We still don’t have an LGBTQ+ superstar openly dominating professional sports. But we are closer than we were before. And the fact that this shift might be partially traced back to a pulpy, excessive, wildly popular show about hockey players falling in love says more about how culture actually changes than any argument I could ever make about taste.

I bought the Donnie Darko Director’s Cut DVD in 2004, at the exact same moment I bought The Big Lebowski. I didn’t really know what either movie was about. I just knew that both titles kept surfacing in online conversations that passed for cultural consensus back the and I had roughly forty dollars of disposable income earmarked for becoming a slightly different person than I was the week before.

So I made a decision that felt rational at the time, even though it was closer to astrology than consumer research. This is how cultural taste worked in the early internet era: you triangulated a few message boards, trusted the enthusiasm of strangers who wrote in complete sentences and hoped the universe would meet you halfway. In retrospect, that single transaction ranks comfortably among the ten best investments I’ve ever made, which is alarming when you consider that it involved two obsolete cultural artifacts and absolutely no clear understanding of anything.

I was 21 years old. You probably did dumber stuff and that age.

I most certainly did.

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I’ve always been fascinated by old, marginal records.

The kind that were made with enormous conviction and almost no expectation of being understood. Music driven by obsession rather than audience, ambition rather than strategy. These are artifacts designed to be cherished by maybe five people, then quietly abandoned by everyone else.

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My mom was appalled that I paid for this. Twice.

The obvious appeal of seeing him live is the spectacle, because there is no precedent to lean on. A soloist snare drummer is already an eccentric proposition, but Kiyasu treats the table he’s performing on as a secondary instrument, his own body as a tertiary one, and the idea of control as something to be actively antagonized. He blows raspberries into the drumhead. He slams, scolds, and grapples with his performance like it’s a poltergeist with outstanding debts. This is less a concert than a confrontation.

Only one person does this in a way that feels fully intentional, which is why Kiyasu has become that rarest of things: an experimental musician who thrives in the attention economy. He’s the crazy Japanese drummer who divides Instagram the way Moses parted the Red Sea, except instead of salvation on one side and damnation on the other, it’s “this is transcendent” versus “this should not exist” with very little middle ground and absolutely no consensus on which side is correct.

I mean, look at this and tell me you don’t have an opinion:

What you can’t possibly know about a Ryosuke Kiyasu live set is that the performance-art hijinks are only a percentage of the act. They matter and I don’t believe he would be this successful without them, but they’re generally held in reserve, unleashed in the final five minutes when the intensity spikes and the physicality tips from impressive into alarming. That’s the payoff, the viral moment, the part people upload.

For the first twenty-something minutes, though—believe it or not—you’re watching a legitimately skilled experimental drummer. Not chaos, not irony, not stunt work, but a strange discipline. What Ryosuke Kiyasu is interested in is discovering what new and exciting sounds he can extract from a snare drum, a pair of sticks, a table, his own body and whatever else happens to be within reach. Every evening is different. Every decision opens doors to destinations he previously ignored or didn’t know existed.

Since I’ve seen him twice now, I know how he operates. His shows begin almost quietly. The first time, he spent close to a full minute adjusting his drumhead before making a single declarative sound:testing tension, listening, calibrating the room. When he finally started, it wasn’t with volume but with intent: light pings against the side of the snare, sharp taps, sticks slammed flat against the table.

A detail most people miss in his online clips is his relationship to microphones. Kiyasu usually places one on the floor and another on the table, but he doesn’t use them consistently. That’s the point. He wants you to hear the sound both with and without amplification, to register the difference as part of the composition. Some sounds only exist when they’re amplificated, others lose their meaning once they are. The performance lives in that oscillation, in the constant decision of whether a sound should be made louder or allowed to disappear.

One thing he does that takes on an entirely different meaning once a microphone is involved is rolling his snare drum across the table. Through the PA it goes WHOOOMP, a sound that simply does not exist without amplification. It’s aggressive, closer to the roar of a wild animal than anything we normally associate with percussion. The visual instability matters, too: the table shudders, the drum threatens to fall, and sometimes it does. The possibility of failure is built into the sound, and that risk radiates outward as a sense of real danger.

When I interviewed him for work in 2023, Kiyasu told me that anger is an important creative engine for him and that perilous roll is often the first place it surfaces when he plays.

But he’s legitimately great at handling and channeling his anger. He leads you toward it the way someone might lead you to Narnia: not by shoving you through the wardrobe, but by walking you calmly through a series of precise, controlled movements first. Whenever he’s not busy creating a viral moment, Ryosuke Kiyasu is an impressive improvisational jazz drummer, capable of spending several minutes wowing you by working polyrhythms out of everything available to him: his snare, the table, the floor, his own body. You get the idea.

By cycling through a repertoire of known and half-known sounds, he gradually lets go. Control loosens. The map runs out. And that’s when he allows himself to step into genuinely dangerous, uncharted territory.

Every night, all roads lead to rebellion and excess. There’s no transcendence waiting at the end of a Ryosuke Kiyasu set, no important message hiding behind the sweat and the splinters. What’s happening is simpler and maybe more useful than that: we’re rebelling together: against expectations, against musical norms, against whatever polite ideas we had about performance before walking into the room. A Kiyasu gig functions like a cultural reset button, the kind that makes you think: yes, this can happen and it’s great precisely because it doesn’t hurt anybody, except maybe Kiyasu himself.

I think there’s a point to those spasming finales. Not a profound one, not something you embroider on a throw pillow, but a point worth sitting with anyway. He can play drums like that (because he just did) and in doing so, he proves his own premise: there are still new, volatile ways to make sound if you’re willing to look ridiculous while finding them.

The people who recoil from his social media clips are part of the performance too. He keeps doing it night after night, and the louder the objections get, the further the idea travels. The pearl-clutchers become his unwilling roadies, hauling the message along: art can still be explosive, and sometimes the blast radius is the whole point.

I’ve paid to see Ryosuke Kiyasu twice and I’ll do it again. Sorry mom.