GOOD EVENING!

This is the POP CULTURE CHEAT SHEET, your weekly intel to fuel your water cooler conversations, delivered to your inbox every Monday. If someone forwarded you this email, be sure and subscribe here. 

LUNCH BREAK

five quick consumption recs for the time between meetings

1. TWO WORDS: ALL WILL BE REVEALED. The Chalamet conspiracy has new legs. 

2. ARE YOU WEARING THE LOCKHEED MARTINS? The military industrial complex now encompasses streetwear. 

3. POP CONSERVATISM. TIL: Trump invoked his presidential power to encourage production of Rush Hour 4. 

4. FOR YOUR EXPROPRIATION. Amanda Seyfried is taking a Marxist approach to her Oscars campaign.

5. MACHINE PARENTING. Altman’s appearance on Fallon generates some backlash.

is charli xcx gen z’s joan didion?

There is a vast divide between the skillset it takes to write culturally resonant pop music and the skillset it takes to write culturally resonant essays – and Charli xcx plummeted into that ravine last week. 

Take a peek at the comment section of the tweet promoting her latest essay if you have the stomach to witness an evisceration. Fans and haters alike urged her to put down the pen, likening the piece to the OU essay that got zero points but plenty of airtime as a culture war catalyst earlier in the month. 

The premise of Charli’s piece – whether alignment with the mainstream or consumerism should kill something’s “cool factor” – is interesting, particularly after her last album cycle catapulted her to stardom after years on the fringe.

There were some good nuggets in Charli’s essay. In pop music, those nuggets would be gold. A pop song’s word count is limited; artists provide the framework for meaning in concise, pithy phrases and the listener fills out the rest with their own insight. 

Charli excelled at providing the bones for profundity, but writing an essay is far more surgical. You have to explicitly spell out your argument, guiding readers through each logical progression beat-by-beat. The reader tracks your claims meticulously; very little is left to interpretation. 

Charli struggled with these parameters. It doesn’t negate her pop prowess, but it does underscore that virtuosity doesn’t necessarily translate across formats. So, Joan Didion, your crown is safe. Charli, if you need an editor the next go-around, we have a strategic communications firm to recommend.

TREND RAPPORT

viral vocab of the week 

TIL (acronym) – Shorthand for “Today I Learned.” The abbreviation was popularized by a subreddit dedicated to niche facts.

GLOVING (n.) – The practice of rhythmically moving your fingers in light-up gloves. It spawned a series of memes satirizing the intensity of the gloving community, and spun off the term “degloving” to describe disbarment from said community. 

“...FOR AN AMAZING REASON” (phrasal template) –  A meme phrase popularized by absurdist parodies of The Dodo-style short-form videos. The syntax was recently employed by the official NASA account.

SEE YOU NEXT MONDAY!

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