AIDA sits on the train and counts in a label – and wonders where the hype around the little critters comes from with the filled teeth.
While I am writing this, I sit in one train and in the last five minutes alone five people with a label have passed my bag past me, some even with more than one. If you have spent the last few weeks under a stone: Labust are small plush plastic monsters with a nasty-sweet face, which you can hang on your bag as a trailer. They look like Merch for a children’s program, as if they were the nasty cousins from the teletubbies, and originally they were also based on figures from a children’s book series from an artist from Hong Kong. But today no one is interested in no one: Labust has become a merch without an underlying story, a pop -cultural phenomenon without a cultural product, with which, as with the mouse, My Little Pony, Dragonball Z or on my sake, it also connects it. They are simply there, reasonably cute, popular with Lisa from Blackpink and the snake at the opening of the first German shop from the Chinese manufacturer Popmart for 15 hours. So long was not even when the Berghain reopened after the pandemic.
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So why are the little critters so popular? I think: comfort. Consolation in really shitty times. They are small and cheeky and cute and, above all, somehow cozy with their plush costume – and that means they are a welcome distraction from the horror of the present. Honestly: How can you still write about pop these days or about the connection between pop and politics? On social media there are album announcements alongside labels next to outstanding bodies that are the result of a man-made famine, shitposts in addition to discourses on the pros and cons of criticism in feuilleton and videos from the queue before the opening of the Berlin popmart shop, Memes alongside videos from Fascho-Aufmarschen and Foodfotos In addition to news that is from right-hand journe report. Everything stands side by side as if equivalent. Social media seems to flatten our environment into a landscape in which everything works as if it has the same relevance. Labubu, war, art, right pressure, cooking recipe, hospital closure, rental prices explosion, tradwifelife, relationship tips, influencer drama. And even if we rationally know that one and the other are not comparable, it is the media environment in which we move.
A distinction between the “Real Life” and the Internet seems to me to be absurd – and both are closer and closer together, and influences each other. See the label that pre -carche at my seat or the snake at the shop in Berlin. But still I also believe that we should all stroke a little grass and maybe make a window on tipping. We post by the madness of the present as if that would change anything on the horror of the world, but in reality it is just a simulacrum of activism or discourse, which in many cases only serves as self -assurance.
In view of the horror on our screen, you can either go completely into the rabbithole, or avert completely from the news, and hedonism of not knowledge and desire to know, in thoughts or in plush form. And both are strategies that I can somehow understand. But maybe there is another way.
Last weekend I was in Vienna at Popfest, a free festival in the middle of the city. From Thursday to Sunday, dozens of Austrian bands played on one of the most representative places in the Austrian capital between museums, university and representative church. The party is curated every year by other artists: inside, this year, for example, verified and Paul’s jets, and covers a wide range of the Austrian music world. And the audience was so different: especially young, but not exclusively, and various than pretty much any other festival that I have visited in recent years. Young Gen-Alpha-Bros were confronted with feminist experimentalelectronica, chayas with old heroes such as Kreisky and old industrial corners with Liam-Gallagher memory hairdressing with local pop stars like Eli Preiss.
How do I get it from Labux and news overkill now? I ran through the crowd and flashed, mainstream and indie artists, newcomers like the ZEW and established artists such as LGOONY and Crack Ignaz – and all accessible to the city society. No registrations, no money, no compulsion to consume, not even many fences or other access restrictions for the main stage. It was a space to meet, access to culture, really for everyone. I think that is exactly what we need right now: to come out of the house, to stand with other people in rooms, to experience pop and art. Especially now that, in the face of rising prices and falling grants, fewer and fewer people are accessible and we sink more and more lonely before our screens. The world will not save a concert evening – but maybe do what art can do best: remember our humanity.