People buy fake ceremony from Ibiza clubs to pretend in the socials as if they were rich. Are we back in the zero?
I think I saw the summit of absurdity a few days ago: According to social media reports, clubs in Ibiza should offer fake bills with which one would be able to flex on social media how rich you are-without having to be. 100 euros for a fake bill instead of actually having to run 10,000 or more? Sounds like a good deal for some.
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The private jet fake has been around for a long time-photo opportunities where you can pretend to sit in a private jet, but never take off. And even if this is absolutely nothing for me, somehow I can understand it: While everything takes ever more expensive, you can see at influencers: inside how absolutely bottomless luxury is celebrated. Private jet, luxury watches, and how, you don’t have a small channel bag in the wardrobe and you don’t cook your pasta while you are in a haute couture outfit? You have to actively escape these pictures again and again so that you do not victim to them.
It is not as if Flex culture is something new-the old Rome can only laugh-but it is better through social media and because everyone: r is its own: r transmitter. And I realize when I go out myself: it feels like a brand and consumption fetish that I still know from the 2010s and which is celebrated in films such as “American Psycho” in the nineties and eighties.
Conscious consumption, fair fashion, “quiet luxury”? Only stupid trends for Plebs and Normies, the zeitgeist seems to call us up. No, in times of increasing social inequality, wealth is celebrated again, or at least as if. As usual, phenomena like the prudent Bezos wedding can be explained with your foam party on a luxury yacht and the really ridiculously tasteless invitation cards? Or ever increasing engagement rings on social media, such as the supposedly five million dollar ring, which the footballer and convicted tax fraud Cristiano Ronaldo gave his long-standing partner, or Taylor Swift’s gigantic engagement ring?
Pop cultural trends from the moth box
And these are not the only pop cultural trends from the moth box that are back with Full Force – eating disorders as an aesthetic ideal, misogynia and other devaluations of marginalized groups are celebrated again, as if we have never had a conversation as a whole that it may not have been okay to hump Models to skeletons and that anorexia and not an idea belonging to celebrated. But I misunderstood something, I thought we would continue to develop as humanity.
On Friday, September 19, I was able to sit on the jury at the awarding of the International Music Journalism Awards, a prize for music journalism, in which I have received it twice (and moderated the award!). The mood was, well, pressed – cultural journalism in general and music journalism is cut in particular and it is becoming increasingly difficult to make pop culture reporting that is not court reporting where power structures are also critically questioned. But it still exists – for example with Matilda Jelitto, the winner for the prize as a music journalist of the year in German, and with the international winner, Sophie Gilbert. Her book, “Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned A Generation of Women Against Themselves”, especially published in German as “Girl vs. Girl: How pop culture spends women against each other”. I am still in the middle of it and cannot say that it is fun to read the book – but I think there is hardly a more important book that has been published last year. At least not for me. Sophie Gilbert writes about the outgoing nineties and nineties, and how the pop cultural discourse on gender has raised a whole generation of women to self-hate and internalized misogynia.
Misogynia as a lifestyle
Sophie Gilbert’s book has caused memories that I had actually buried deep inside me. Not exactly pleasant, but all the more important to understand the current discourse on women, flinta, “femininity” in order to the phenomenon of tradwives, the discussion about physical self -determination in order to be able to grasp all of this better. And that is what music and pop culture journalism can do if it is really well done: explain our world a little better, with the help of pop cultural products as tools and vehicles.
That is exactly what we need more than ever today. Political debates are also more and more pop culture, as we saw, for example, in the election campaign in the United States. Trump does not make politics, he offers a pop -cultural drawing universe with sidekicks and slogans, from which you can become a fan where you can identify with him or other figures from your world. Maybe a bit like a boy band. The right -wing activist Charlie Kirk, who has so far unclear motifs (even if right -wing discourse wants to tell something else), offered politics for students: inside and students as a pop cultural happening, which seems to be more fun with little nuances and a lot of pop cultural symbolism than to deal seriously with debates and topics. And in Germany we currently have a Ministry of Economic Affairs that with Memes and cheeky sayings on Instagram facts about energy supply … let’s say: creatively twisted.
The leap from a record criticism to Katharina Reich’s edgelord memes seems a bit far, but ultimately music and pop culture journalism are exactly there: explaining phenomena and codes. Whether it is a poorly built meme or the need to pretend to have been celebrated in Ibiza.