Sublime

The 2010s is what I want to call the era of Lifestyle. You know what it felt like, because you lived through it. And I did too. Since 2014 I have lived in New York, inside the machine where Lifestyle is made. Spending my waking moments moving through these branded experiences, I felt they they pointed to something I could say but not name.

In a SoundCloud landscape teeming with off-the-wall musical experiments, it makes sense that artists are anointing themselves as genre-generators. It’s a way to compete in the attention economy, a tactic to distinguish your sound from what could otherwise be perceived as another set of weird noises in a sea of bizarre bleeps and bloops.

This problem of overabundance is why I wrote my piece last year. As consumption of digital media increased, we began to see a larger volume of curators — coolhunters, just like Gladwell had outlined in ’97, but this time in a digital space. On Tumblr, this looked like blogs of curated art or photography; on Pinterest, we saw well-crafted collection... See more

One such curator is Derrick Gee, a former online radio d.j. who lives in Australia. I first encountered Gee on TikTok and was pulled in by his architect-ish look: thin wireframe glasses and stylishly baggy, often monochrome outfits. He records videos of himself talking into a microphone in a low, soothing voice, breaking down trends in contemporary... See more

what’s remarkable about this particular pendulum swing is that after centuries of wrestling with hierarchies of taste, the cultural stigma that has always come with indulging in bad taste has disappeared.