Dear Gossips,
Before bed last night I read a piece at Salon about pop culture FOMO that I’m still thinking about this morning. Artists keep dropping new releases without warning. And then the internet rushes to consume and analyse…before the next New Big Thing comes out. Kendrick Lamar to Beyoncé to Drake to Radiohead, one after another – are we speeding through our enjoyment of these works, to feel like we’re a part of the movement and the hype and not “missing out”, but then not giving that work enough time to live in our lives before the next major work is made available?
One of the hypotheses in this article is that if a think-piece isn’t offered immediately, it won’t be of interest later on, in a few weeks, once the initial momentum has slowed. I’m not sure I agree. I’m still reading think-pieces on Lemonade, and the counter think-pieces too, like Ebony’s defence of Beyoncé that was posted yesterday in response to bell hooks’s criticism of her two days before. And I’m still waiting for Roxane Gay’s think-piece on Lemonade, and/or hoping she’ll write one, because I’ve not read it yet. Also Kathleen and I have discussed the possibility that we may want to add to our own Lemonade posts, perhaps after we’ve seen her on tour in a couple of weeks and have had a month to let more thoughts grow around it.
But it is something to think about. Whether or not our haste to collectively experience a major pop culture “surprise” event at a time when we’ve enjoyed a heavy blessing of “surprise” events shortens the cultural impact of these events. Or are we just stressing for no f-cking reason because we need to feel every goddamn thing all the goddamn time in the time of the internet? Click here to read the article.
Yours in gossip,
Lainey
