Sublime

It’s no secret: Black culture drives pop culture. It is “the original avant-garde,” as Felipe Luciano, a former TV producer, has said. But I sometimes wonder if appropriation is a prerequisite of Black culture going mainstream.

The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste . The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev. The hipster bought all his toi... See more

What the popularization of slugging on the internet represents is an ongoing, and unmistakably American, battle over ownership: the masking of cultural theft as cultural literacy. It should come as no surprise that slugging videos have garnered hundreds of millions of views. TikTok’s fabric is woven through with appropriation. Ownership is a shared... See more

Before the internet demanded our attention 24/7, television, radio, and lifestyle magazines had a very specific grip on the zeitgeist, combing youth culture to determine the next craze. Now, gauging cool is a far more democratic endeavor, and the escalating speed of digital culture means that fads can come and go before they even peak. Mediated thr... See more