Category: Writing Samples

The last fifteen minutes of Steven Soderbergh’s new film Presence do not live up to their cathartic potential. Up to this anticlimactic finale, the supernatural family drama promises a lot—its story gets progressively tenser through an increasingly charged conflict between the Presence, a spirit that dwells in an unoccupied suburban house, and the Paynes, a troubled family of four who move into the house and become tormented by the Presence. 

The spirit is the movie’s viewpoint character, which is an ingenious twist on the haunted house genre. Since we witness the world from the Presence’s point of view, we develop a keen curiosity for its sinister actions. Why does it grow violently protective of Chloe, the younger daughter grieving the mysterious death of her friend Nadia? Is it going to hurt Tyler, the douchebag brother who dismisses Chloe’s feelings? Why doesn’t it like Ryan, Tyler’s fratty emo friend who’s interested in Chloe? Does it know something we don’t about the fractured relationship between Rebekah and Chris, the frigid mother and the sensitive father? All thrilling questions—only sort of answered by the time the movie wraps up. 

Here’s where things go sideways. After Rebekah and Chris leave for a business trip, Ryan comes to the house and drugs both Tyler and Chloe and then tries to kill Chloe. The Presence wakes up drugged Tyler, who then runs to Chloe’s room and tackles Ryan, but this climactic battle is over before it even starts, because both Tyler and Ryan fall through Chloe’s bedroom window and die. The grieving Paynes decide to move out after this incident. In the last scene, the Presence reveals itself in the mirror to Rebekah, who breaks down once she realizes that the Presence is actually the ghost of dead Tyler, who was not able to leave this world until he saved Chloe from Ryan. 

The scene is meant to be a gratifying revelation but in this alleged catharsis lurks a loop that breaks the brain. Namely, Tyler’s ghost comes to life after Tyler saves Chloe, but Tyler saves Chloe only after Tyler’s ghost tells him to, which means Tyler’s ghost must come to life before Tyler saves Chloe. It’s a bootstrap paradox that falls short not because it’s an illegitimate plot device but because it’s an ineffective way to create emotional payoff. It sells us a resolution in which the effect precedes the cause, in which we’re supposed to retroactively grow to care for the alive douchebag Tyler after we get swept off our feet by the dead remorseful Tyler.

To paper over this tortuous logic, the movie introduces the oracle archetype: Lisa, a medium who visits the Paynes and confirms that some sort of spirit is in the house. She tells the family that “[time] doesn’t work the same way for [the Presence]. Past, present can be happening at the same time, so it doesn’t even know when it is.” 

The idea here, it seems, is that we accept nonlinear time as an explanation and just go with it, because we did the same for many other movies which distorted our perception of time, like Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. But this analogy is not quite right. In Arrival, Louise Banks sees that time is circular once she learns the palindromic language of the heptapods, but she never time travels to affect the course of her actions. The causality is never broken; it’s in fact upheld.  

There also seems to be a faint influence of the multiverse theory in Tyler’s character arc. Perhaps the Presence has come from another universe, not the future (though the future is curiously absent from Lisa’s explanation)? If that’s the case, is Tyler’s ghost then from a universe in which Chloe died and in which Tyler spent the rest of his life without a sister and is therefore trying to prevent that outcome in this universe? Sure, that’s a fine explanation, but then Tyler can’t “[come] back to save [Chloe]”—which is what Rebekah says when she realizes the Presence is the ghost of Tyler—because the other Tyler was never in this universe to begin with. 

Maybe this all sounds fastidious, so let’s ignore the vexing time warp for a moment. Inconsistencies still abound. Why does Chloe, who clearly feels and acknowledges the Presence, not heed its blatantly obvious warnings about Ryan? Why can the Presence furiously shake Tyler’s room and neatly arrange Chloe’s books but can’t do anything to Ryan when he drugs Chloe? Why does Chris—the attuned and loving father who believes Chloe when she says the Presence is in the house—go on a business trip with Rebekah and leave the kids alone with the ominous spirit? 

None of these plot holes are unsolvable, but they require more airtime—time for timelines to disentangle and motivations to unravel. Presence, for some reason, insists on not giving that coverage. It compresses a story that could have breathed as a multi-episode series into an unapologetically compact film with a brisk eighty-five-minute runtime. What the movie leaves us with, in the end, are desultory answers to questions that clamor for discipline and precision. 

At a recent party in San Francisco, I caught up with an acquaintance whom I had not seen in a long time. A thoughtful guy, kind and emotionally intelligent. Life had been good to him lately: he moved in with his new girlfriend and seemed very happy with the relationship. He said the first few months of dating were surprisingly easy, that both of them immediately knew the relationship would become serious. How did they know, I asked. 

“Well, it was just obvious that each person had done the work.”

The work. 

At that moment, it was clear to me that I was witnessing an emblematic milestone in Western secular culture because I knew, without even asking, that work in the context of our conversation did not mean physical labor or commitment to the relationship. It meant that my acquaintance and his girlfriend, prior to meeting each other, did whatever was necessary to improve their “inner selves.” 

They introspected. They reflected. They journaled. They read. They healed. They both saw a therapist. I know for sure that he also had a life coach. The “work” was the emotional—and in some cases even spiritual—exercise that helped them identify unhelpful behaviors. What are examples of such behaviors? The list is long: anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, anxious-avoidant attachment, trauma response, lack of personal boundaries, lack of professional boundaries, projection, catastrophizing, and many, many others. It doesn’t even matter which unhelpful behavior they worked on; what matters is that the work helped overcome that unhelpful behavior. The work led to personal growth. 

This wasn’t a onetime observation. A year ago, at another party, I sat next to a girl who told me that she had started distancing herself from people in her life who were not interested in working on themselves. Many times over the past few years, I have also heard people say that not going to therapy or not having interest in personal growth is a deal-breaker in dating. Mainstream publications are rife with articles and columns that take this stance, like this one in Vox or this one in The Cut. 

Sharing personal stories of working on faulty behaviors, through deep reflection, has become a way of socializing in fast-paced, secular metropolitan cities. Self-improvement is what my friends and I often talk about when we hang out. Some friends are proponents of therapy. Some are proponents of life coaching. Others love to read self-help books and learn frameworks that chart the path toward wholesomeness. Toward self-actualization. 

I have tried and loved all of them. My journey of self-improvement started in 2001, at the mere age of nine. My parents decided I needed to see a child psychologist after I had watched The Sixth Sense and could not sleep for weeks because I was convinced I was seeing dead people. Mind you, this was 2001 in Southern Europe, which meant this was a highly confidential operation because a nine-year-old kid in therapy was undoubtedly a crazy nine-year-old. Thank you for that, Haley Joel Osment. 

The psychologist at the time concluded I simply had too much free time to think and that I should be preoccupied by numerous extracurricular activities to the point of exhaustion. It took me a decade to accept that “too much free time to think” was a euphemism for anxiety, and so, many years later, I became the first person in my college friend group to start going to therapy. 

I became more aware of my anxiety and my unhelpful behaviors. I started reading a lot about mental health. I quit drinking. I became better at setting personal boundaries. I worked on my emotional regulation. I then started working in the life coaching industry and got a fantastic coach who helped me out even more. Simply put, my mid and late twenties were all about self-improvement.

Coincidentally, as I was working on my inner self, the Western world became more attuned to the idea of self-improvement, and suddenly, more people were into it. But, in the past two years, I started noticing that working on yourself took a new meaning. It became a way to signal goodness to others, a way to market your sense of virtue. 

That is, if you are someone who works on the inner self, it is a sign that you are aware of your faults, of all the traits that make you less of an ideal human, and that you are committed to correcting them. And, obviously, that means you can’t spend time with people who don’t see those faults in themselves and who are not ready to do the work to correct them, right? 

I noticed this pattern of thinking in myself last summer, when I had a conversation with my dad, a staunch adherent of the boomer principles of life. Which is to say that he says what he thinks and what he thinks is that the newer generations are too thin-skinned these days. He was telling me that my vocal disapproval of an upcoming big family reunion was a sign of my selfishness, and I was telling him that I was simply setting personal boundaries. We fought. 

“He’s projecting his need to be a people-pleaser again,” I remember having this thought as we yelled at each other. “This is triggering me, he really needs to see someone and work on this.” 

Yuck. It was the first time I noticed a thought like this with an objective eye. I sounded obnoxious. As if I felt I was morally superior to my dad because he doesn’t see his own depravities, while I, the wholesome human I am, worked so hard to correct my own wickedness. 

My self-improvement started to feel eerily self-righteous. And, my observation so far has been that, wherever there is an air of self-righteousness, there is an undercurrent of deep-seated Puritanism. Prompted by these anecdotes, I went down the rabbit hole of learning more about the history of the Puritans. 

The learnings were striking, the similarities too conspicuous to ignore. I am becoming increasingly convinced that the Puritan history of modern Western secular society is indeed the high-octane fuel that keeps the self-improvement culture in motion.

I have mockingly referenced Puritanism so many times in my life, but I admittedly knew very little about the Puritans, and the “very little” was based solely on what I learned through watching Charmed—that the Puritans were allergic to alleged witches. So, here’s an essential crash course on Puritan history in case you, like me, like to reference Puritanism without actually knowing anything about the Puritans.

Roman Catholicism was the main religion in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, and the Catholic Church tightly regulated the relationship between individual believers and God. For the most part, it was all swell until the Church began using its power to do shady deals, like allowing sinners to buy forgiveness with money, otherwise known as the indulgence system.¹

There was a small group of people who were not only unhappy with this entrepreneurial streak but who also believed the Church was too liberal in its definition of salvation. These renegades believed that only through faith, not through good works, could a person be saved from their sins. Put differently, you could “love thy neighbor” all you wanted to, but unless you were committed in your faith to God, there was no salvation for you. 

The first person to take a strong stance on this was Martin Luther, a German priest and author. In 1517, he published 95 theses, a manifesto that challenged the Church’s indulgence system and that proposed a new way of looking at the relationship between individual believers and God. Most notably, Luther—and his soon-to-be followers otherwise known as the Lutherans—believed that what mattered the most was the individual’s faith, and that the Bible was the unquestionable source of truth.² This attitude would become known as Justificatio sola fide (Justification by faith alone) or, simply, sola fide. 

In a nutshell, Luther protested against Roman Catholicism. That’s how Protestantism, as a distinct branch of Christianity, was born. Luther’s teachings inspired other thinkers, which led to numerous variations of the Protestant ideology. Of the most notable importance was John Calvin, a French theologian and reformer, who expanded Luther’s ideas into his own branch of Protestantism, later known as Calvinism. Over the next few decades, the Lutheran branch of Protestantism spread primarily through Germany and Scandinavia³, while the Calvinist branch found its way to England. 

This meant Protestantism became popular in England as well, but some English Protestants thought the Queen was simply not doing enough to reform the Church of England, to truly push this movement all the way through. These folks believed their only way out of the never-ending Catholic sin was to leave England altogether. By 1620, they sailed aboard the Mayflower to New England and landed near Plymouth, Massachusetts in New England. Though today they often get clustered under the Puritan umbrella, these 102 separatists were actually the Pilgrims.⁴ 

Now, there was a group of English Protestants who did not want to leave England. They wanted to keep fighting and to purify the Church of England by eradicating Catholicism. Non-separatists is how historians call them. In 1630, however, they realized that getting rid of Catholicism was a mission impossible, so they did what the Pilgrims did ten years earlier. With an official charter from the King of England to establish a colony and to extend a purely-Protestant non-separatist branch of the Church of England, these 1,000 voyagers came to New England and created the Massachusetts Bay Colony in Boston. These folks were the actual Puritans. 

Let’s take a step back and think about the implications of these migrations, because this is where things get interesting. Most Puritans were Calvinists⁵, which means the tenets of Calvinism were influential in the creation of modern-day America. There is much more nuance to all of this and it’s not a clean split (for instance, the Scottish Calvinist Protestants are technically called Presbyterians⁶, and there are many Lutherans around the American Midwest today), but what matters is that Puritans brought a very particular flavor of Protestantism to America. 

Much of the research literature points out that Puritans, both men and women, were well-read and literate. These were the folks who founded Harvard⁷ (and who indeed burned witches, so think about that irony for a moment). After all, that was the whole point: they wanted to understand the Bible themselves without interference from the Church. Many historians have also noted that Puritans were exhaustingly introspective and subjected themselves to intense self-examinations, be it through journaling or through exacting studies of the Bible and their own beliefs. ^{8 9} 

There we go, I thought. Sounds familiar to the in-vogue introspection of the self-improvement industry today. Why, though? Clearly, something about Calvinism and its tenets could explain why Puritans acted this way, but what was that something? And what was so special about John Calvin’s teachings to justify the creation of an entirely distinct branch of Protestantism? 

Finding answers to these questions was surprisingly hard. There is a lot out there about Calvinism, from the importance of covenants to The Five Points of Calvinism, but barely any evidence to prove the alleged causal relationship between Calvinist principles and Puritan introspective tendencies.  

I eventually discovered a 2007 essay¹⁰, buried in the depths of the internet, written by Phillip Cary, a professor of philosophy at the Eastern University in Pennsylvania, for his guest lecture at the Concordia Theological Seminary in Indiana. I am no theologist and know very little about religion, but I thought his essay was a great piece of writing. 

The essay provides a perceptive comparison of the Lutheran versus Calvinist way of thinking, and shows that a simple but critical difference between the Lutheran and Calvinist syllogism—a type of logical argument that applies deductive reasoning using two assumed-to-be true premises—in the interpretation of the Bible explains pretty much everything about the tenets of Calvinism. 

In the essay, Cary points out that both Luther and Calvin taught believers are justified by faith alone. Calvin learned this from Luther, so it’s a common Protestant tenet they share: sola fide. Implicit in that statement is the notion that both Luther and Calvin did not believe in the idea of good works, which the Catholics loved. For the two of them, faith is about the belief in the premise of the gospel. There is, however, a critical nuance rarely discussed elsewhere. Cary emphasizes that the two thinkers differed in how they applied deductive reasoning when interpreting the Bible. 

Martin Luther’s syllogism, according to Cary, is based on the following: 

Major premise: Christ told me, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.” 
Minor premise: Christ never lies but only tells the truth. 
Conclusion: I am baptized (that is, I have a new life in Christ).

Cary says about this syllogism: “[…] Luther’s sola fide does not mean that we rely on faith alone, but rather that we rely on the word of God alone. For that is what faith does: it relies on the truth of the word, not on itself.”

Contrast this to John Calvin’s syllogism, which Cary calls the “The Standard Protestant syllogism” and which, we can infer, influenced how the Puritans who settled in New England thought about the Bible:

Major premise: Whoever believes in Christ is saved.
Minor premise: I believe in Christ.
Conclusion: I am saved. 

On the Calvinist reasoning, Cary writes: “Notice what this requires of us: not just that we believe, but that we know we believe. I call this the requirement of ‘reflective faith.’ Protestant faith has to be reflective in that it is not enough just to believe, you have to believe you believe, maybe even know you believe.” 

If you are a Calvinist, Cary argues, you must teach that those who truly believe are sure to receive the gift of perseverance in faith to the end of their lives. From what I gathered through other readings, this the Perseverance component in The Five Points of Calvinism. 

“Calvin teaches,” Cary continues, “that believers can and should know they are predestined for salvation, which means they can and should know they will persevere in faith to the end, which means they can and should know they are eternally saved, now, already in this life […].”

Notice how agonizingly circular this all sounds. According to Calvin, you theoretically are able to know whether you are predestined for salvation, which, if you are, means you have received the gift of perseverance in faith to the end of life. Which, if you did, means you should know that you believe because, obviously, your faith is the type of faith that perseveres to the end. Uh, what? How does one know that? 

Cary explains: “This is where reflective faith comes in as an essential element in Calvin’s theology. [Calvin] makes a distinction between temporary faith and true saving faith, which of course is faith that perseveres, and he thinks we can and should know if we have true faith. The people with temporary faith may just be mistaken about the status of their faith, which of course is a rather terrifying possibility. […] How am I supposed to make this distinction between temporary and true faith? Where am I supposed to look? Disastrously, I am supposed to look inward.”

“So if you are a good Calvinist,” Cary expands, “you are supposed to notice this—notice that you are getting more inwardly sanctified, which gives you assurance of faith, that is, assurance that you really do have true faith. […] lnstead of looking at myself and finding a sinner—for as Luther rightly says, even the righteous man sins in all his good works—and thus being driven in repentance to take hold once again of the gospel alone as the sole assurance of mv salvation, I am supposed to look at my own heart and see something reassuring. I am supposed to see that I have made real spiritual progress and that I am becoming more inwardly holy and righteous.”

But, as Cary points out, “[…] For this reflective faith, faith relying on itself, is how faith becomes a work, something we must do and accomplish in order to be saved. Then it has exactly the same problems as justification by works. You can always wonder if your works are good enough, and, if you are honest, the answer will be: ‘No, they are not good enough.’”

What Cary shows is that both currents of reasoning are agonized by the same question: how can I find the assurance that I, the sinner that I am, will be saved? But they find solace in different answers. 

The Lutherans accept that it’s hard to trust God and that faith is sometimes a lot of work and that there is a distinct possibility their faith is not good enough, but that ultimately what matters is God’s word alone. When you get baptized, it is Christ himself who, through the mouth of the minister, says “I baptize you,” so who cares if your faith is not good enough? Essentially, let go and let God, and go live your life.

The Calvinists, or the Standard Protestants, and therefore their descendants in Puritans, instead take on that burden and spend their entire lives trying to figure out if they will be saved. You can’t just trust in God’s word alone, you have to know that you have faith and that your faith is good enough. What better way to do that than to constantly reassess your commitment to God, searching for signals that you made progress on the quality of your faith? That you improved your faith. Or, many centuries later in the secular world, searching for signals that you made progress on your inner self. That you improved your inner self.

The parallels to the self-improvement culture are uncanny. Even so, three follow-up questions immediately come to mind. One, who is God in the secular world? Both the Lutheran and Calvinist syllogism are about the strength of faith in Jesus Christ, and Puritans, as well as other Protestants, obviously cared deeply what Christ thought of them and their faith. But, who is God today for a secular individual, who is doing therapy or coaching or simply reading self-help books? Who or what is this individual believing in? 

I can’t answer this question confidently, but my best guess is that it is a persona marketed to us as the ideal secular citizen. I remember reading an interview with one of my favorite musicians, Marie Davidson, for the Guardian, in which she said: “You’re supposed to love work, have tons of friends, you’re supposed to go out, you’re supposed to have kids … You’re supposed to do everything, but that’s not real. That’s bullshit for me, that’s a persona that consumerism created to sell products.” This answer feels right to me. It’s perhaps this idea of wholesomeness, of an ideal state in which an individual is physically, mentally, and morally healthy, uncorrupted by misfortunes and difficulties of life. 

Two, what is the secular world being saved from? This I find a bit easier to answer because I think the similarity is clearer. Be it the Puritans or the secular world today, everyone wants to be saved from their own impurities. Puritans wanted to be saved from their sins, and many of those sins (examples: adultery, witchcraft) would not necessarily make a modern secular individual feel unworthy. But, make no mistake, the secular world is haunted by evils as well. Just think about it: emotional regulation, anger management, getting rid of “toxic” behaviors, reducing anxious thoughts, learning to not get worked up. We don’t see these as sins, but we definitely see them as behaviors that need to be purified. 

Three, does this mean self-improvement is bad? I don’t think so; on the contrary, I think it can be great. After all, I know many people, including myself, who benefitted from dedicating time to work on themselves. Just like I think it can be great to have faith and to be a believer. If it makes you happy and if it gives you peace, whether that’s acknowledging the work you’ve done on your inner self or appreciating the strength of your faith, I don’t see anything wrong with that. 

That said, I think it’s worth paying attention to those moments when we start to feel excessive pride, a sense of moral superiority over others, through our reflective pursuits. Religious or secular, believer or non-believer, faith or self-improvement, no matter who we are and what we believe in, there is a fine line between virtue and delusion, and not knowing which side we’re on is, tragically, when our virtues cause our inevitable downfall. 

Articles and essays that have sparked my interest in understanding the roots of self-improvement culture and that I enjoyed reading

1. “You Don’t Have to Work on Yourself Forever,” by Shayla Love for VICE (2020).
2. “Sola Fide: Luther and Calvin,” by Phillip Cary for Concordia Theological Quarterly (2007).
3. “How the Life Coaching Industry Sells Pseudo-Solutions to Our Deepest Problems,” by Ronald Purser for Current Affairs (2023).
4. “Techno workaholic Marie Davidson: “I’m a total maniac who is very hard on myself,” by Whitney Wei for The Guardian (2018).

References

1. The Protestant Reformation, National Geographic Education. ↩︎
2. AMST 140Y: Religion in American Life and Thoughts, The Pennsylvania State University (2006) ↩︎
3. Lutheranism by region, Wikipedia; graph: By percent of total population, 77+ million worldwide as reported on February 17, 2024, referencing a 2020 statistic. ↩︎
4. “Pilgrims, Puritans, and the importance of the unexceptional,” by John Moore for Washington University in St. Louis (Arts & Sciences). ↩︎
5. The Protestant Reformation, National Geographic Education. ↩︎
6. “The Puritans: A Transatlantic History by David D. Hall,” by Darryl G. Hart, The Orthodox Presbyterian Church. ↩︎
7. “Pilgrims, Puritans, and the importance of the unexceptional,” by John Moore for Washington University in St. Louis (Arts & Sciences). ↩︎
8. The Puritan and his God, Chapter 3 from the book Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction by Francis J. Bremer. ↩︎
9. Thoreau’s departure from American Puritan tradition: The self and divinity, by Alan M. Busch, Florida Atlantic University Digital Library. ↩︎
10. “Sola Fide: Luther and Calvin,” by Phillip Cary for Concordia Theological Quarterly. ↩︎

Last fall, I bought a beautiful notebook with ivory-colored thick pages, which I have been using to write down my favorite lyrics while listening to music. I didn’t have a rule as to which lyrics I would put on paper. I wanted it to be intuitive; if I heard a verse or a sentence in a song that caught my attention, I would take out a color pen, consult Spotify or Genius.com, and transcribe it. After a full year, I now have a good mix of songwriters documented in my lyrical diary. Marie Davidson, Townes Van Zandt, Sia, Jazmine Sullivan, Amy Winehouse, John Grant, Little Simz, and so on.

I knew the answer already, but just out of curiosity, I then wanted to do a little bit of research and see whether the internet agrees with my adhoc list of best songwriters. It unsurprisingly does not. ChatGPT told me that any notion of “best” is subjective, but that certain songwriters are “widely recognized for their exceptional talent and influential contributions to the music industry.” For our AI pal, that means: Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Prince, and a few others. My guess is that it was probably trained, among many other articles, on Rolling Stone’s “The 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.” A much lengthier list, with some other nuggets like Björk, Bono, Michael Jackson, and Leonard Cohen.

I am a big fan of Björk and Michael Jackson. I do listen to David Bowie every once in a while, and I adore Prince’s Purple Rain album. But I really don’t care for their lyrics. I also know that many of the other mentioned musicians have genuinely been the greatest gifts to the music industry, and yet, I also don’t care for their songwriting.

It was apparent to me, after just a few months of writing down lyrics, what I was drawn to in songwriting: personal specificity. The verses and lines referencing exact locations, particular moments, or real names of other people, all of which have unequivocal connection to the artist. The sort of specificity that has traditionally been more suited for prose and not for chart-topping music.

But it’s really been only in the past few weeks—an incidental result of reading Susan Sontag’s essays— that I have started disentangling why I am drawn to personal specificity. Before I get to the why, let’s start with the what. What are examples of personal specificity and who are some of the vanguards of this sensibility?

The what behind personal specificity

Specific places:
John Grant, Benjamin Clementine, and Rina Sawayama

The following songwriters exemplify personal specificity by writing about particular locations: explicitly identifying them and often providing names of exact neighborhoods, streets, or buildings. I personally tend to gravitate—as will soon be obvious—to those artists who dissect the liminal spaces between their hometowns and the cities they had escaped to. These liminal spaces are charged with so much emotion and I find it inspiring when a songwriter can translate that to listeners.

"Back then I often found myself
Driving on the road at night
And the radio was broadcasting the ocean
Warm late spring wind whips through my hair
I am right here, but I want to be there
And no one in this world is gonna stop me.

At 25 and 36 to Boulder
I was getting warm
But now I'm getting colder
And I stomp my feet demanding like a child
I hope you get everything you wanted boy
I hope you conquer the world and turn it into your toy
But don't come crying when you're forced to learn the truth."
—— John Grant, Pale Green Ghosts

I am not too versed in John Grant’s discography, but his song “Pale Green Ghosts” is by far one of the most striking, beautifully written electronic tracks of the last few decades. Pale green ghosts is a reference to the Russian olive trees found along the I-25 highway, close to Grant’s childhood home in Colorado, and is a locational anchor that serves as the glue of this haunting, Rachmaninoff-inspired song.

These two verses do an excellent job at painting Grant’s anxiety and greed as he drives on Interstate 25 and switches to 36 to get to Boulder, Colorado. He never says this explicitly in the song, but the specificity of the highways and cities give us enough information to infer what’s going on—Grant is taking us back in time, to a period when his younger self had a greedier and simpler vision of the world, fueled by ambition and desire to succeed (“turn it into your toy“). Many years later, Grant would end up with a history of substance and sex addiction, a jarring outcome that Grant now sees as lack of maturity and self-awareness (“but don’t come crying when you’re forced to learn the truth.”)

It’s a beautiful and heartbreaking ode to one’s inner child by a much wiser, slightly more damaged older self in a setting that always warps time. A setting called home.

"Adiós
Yes, goodbye, adiós
Adiós to the little child in me
Who kept on blaming everyone else
Instead facing his own defeat in Edmonton
After all, I should have no regret
For if it wasn’t for the mistake I made yesterday?
Where would I be by now?" 
—— Benjamin Clementine, Adiós

While Benjamin Clementine has cemented his status as one of the most admirable songwriters in Europe, he hasn’t yet reached that level of recognition in other parts of the world. And, by “other parts of the world,” I particularly mean the United States, where an English-speaking artist should not have a hard time gaining traction. My guess is that his avant-pop, spoken-word style of music eschews the formula that typically guarantees at least moderate success on mainstream charts.

It’s a shame because he is a terrific songwriter, and one who ingeniously uses locational specificity as a poetic device. London and Paris, the two cities that have defined much of Clementine’s life, have often been the central topics of his songs, from “Winston Churchill Boy” to “London,” but nothing gets more personal and more specific than “Adiós,” a song about Edmonton—his hometown where Clementine grew up in a strict, religious family.

Take out the line about Edmonton from this verse and the song could easily have a very different meaning. It could be understood as a self-lacerating rumination about one’s own immaturity or even about an unfortunate faux pas. The charm is in the essence of this line, though, in which Clementine says “instead of facing his own defeat in Edmonton.” It’s a moment of specificity that tells us he is saying goodbye to his younger self, the one who was likely at odds with his religious family and the one who escaped Edmonton to busk in Paris. The defeats he didn’t face were probably life’s hardest lessons: that, in most cases, we can’t blame anyone else—even those closest to us—for our hardships.

"国々に　歩き渡り
鳴り響き　悲劇のシンフォニー
喜びに　変わる悲しみ
をさぐる毎日

28 and I still want to scream 
Can't face who I can and can't be
5,938 miles between you
You make me

Akasaka sad 'cause I'm a
Sucker, sucker, so I suffer"
—— Rina Sawayama, Akasaka Sad

In so much of Western culture, Tokyo is often glamorized, seen as something majestic, unattainable, maybe even indescribable. For Rina Sawayama, Tokyo represents hope that inevitably always turns into depression. We learn about this dichotomy on “Akasaka Sad,” a track from Rina’s debut album, which describes her perpetual desire to connect with her Japanese roots, leading to repeated stays at a hotel in Akasaka, a district of Tokyo.

The album’s themes of unclear identity and familial mental health issues are vividly described on this song and manifest exceptionally through numbers, measurements, and exact locations, none of which are typical poetic devices of a songwriter. Rina flees London—where she had immigrated to with her parents when she was five—to find solace in Tokyo, but even with 5,938 miles away from London and just two years shy of turning thirty, the generational trauma catches up with her. It’s a sad feeling, one that only immigrants stuck in a limbo between multiple cultural identities know, and Rina pays homage to this turmoil in the only way that makes sense—with geographical precision, with mathematical exactness, and without any symbolism.

Specific moments:
Little Simz, St. Vincent, and Amy Winehouse

The following songwriters exemplify personal specificity by narrating very specific moments in their lives. This type of specificity is the closest a song can get to being an artist’s diary entry. It requires precision and vulnerability and—most importantly—a life that’s lived; a life full of moments worth writing about.

"Book smart with the bars, but I never learnt that from school
16 doing up radios sets, I was spinning up all them fools
Times I would get home late to my mumzie's crib
'Simbi, who are you with?
What have you done?
Where have you been?'
Shit 
Tears in my eyes, real tears when Ken got nicked 
Tore everyone apart, but the law don't give two shits
Just another Black boy in the system doing time in bin"
—— Little Simz, 101 FM

An artist with precision and vulnerability is Simbiatu Abisola Abiola Ajikawo, who goes by the nickname Simbi and who is more commonly known to the rest of the world as Little Simz, the British-Nigerian rapper based out of London. One of my favorite rappers, not only does she capture the essence of British hip hop today, with her exquisite blend of rap layered on top of grime, R&B, and punk, but she embodies specificity in all of her lyrics.

Take “101 FM,” for example, from her album GREY Area, which takes listeners back to Simbi’s adolescence, when she was coming up in the UK’s music industry, “doing up radio sets […] spinning up all them fools,” coming back home late, annoying her mom. The three lines that quote her mom, “Simbi, who are you with? What have you done? Where have you been,” do a beautiful job of painting that classic teenage moment of facing an infuriated parent after a night out, rolling your eyes at them, and mumbling “Shit.”

She then gets even more personal and tells the listeners about the year when her childhood friend got incarcerated, which tore her community apart and left an indelible mark on her adolescence, and, very likely, on her view of the world. This is hip hop at its best: heartbreaking, funny, and endearing all at the same time.

"Prince Johnny, you're kind but you're not simple
By now, I think I know the difference—
You wanna be a son of someone.

Remember the time we went and snorted
That piece of the Berlin Wall that you'd extorted
And we had such a laugh of it,
Prostrate on my carpet

You traced the Andes with your index
And bragged of when and where and who you gonna bed next
All with sons of someone's"
—— St. Vincent, Prince Johnny 

I wouldn’t say that Annie Clark, more commonly known as St. Vincent, is a songwriter who wears her heart on her sleeve. But she captures intimate moments from her personal life with great specificity, even if the listeners might not be able to identify the people behind the aliases. On my favorite track of hers, “Prince Johnny,” Clark takes us directly into the post-New York nightlife comedown hours, with her and Johnny—a pseudonym for a friend from the city’s queer scene who’s very self-destructive and rejects help—prostrate on Clark’s carpet, both very likely high on drugs (they literally snorted a piece of the Berlin Wall; it’s not a metaphor).

The next verse stops the time for listeners and masterfully depicts the intimate moment between them, as Johnny traces his index fingers along Clark’s breasts (the Andes mountains likely being a fitting metaphor) and brags about the famous people he’s going to sleep with. I love these few verses because they distill Clark’s sadness into a concise, nonjudgmental narrative: as she listens to her friend claim the starfucker title with great pride, Clark realizes that Johnny is ultimately just looking for validation and acceptance from his own family—to be a son of someone’s. We, as listeners, get to live vicariously through this specific moment and see the shiny but also dark side of New York’s inexhaustible love for those who don’t belong anywhere else.

"Your neighbors were screaming, I don't have a key for downstairs
So I punched all the buzzers, hoping you wouldn't be there
And now my head's hurting, you say I always get my own way
But you were in the shower when I got there, and I'd have wanted to stay
But I got nothing to say

You were so beautiful before today
And then I heard what you say
Man, that was ugly

The Moschino bra you bought me last Christmas
Put it in the box, put it in the box
Frank's in there, and I don't care
Put it in the box, put it in the box
Just take it, take the box, take the box"
—— Amy Winehouse, Take the Box 

A wordsmith in a league of her own, Amy Winehouse was a true master of lyrical specificity. From hip hop-like references to Donny Hathaway and Ray Charles on “Rehab” to the famous 9-and-14 shoutout to her and Nas’ shared birth dates on “Me & Mr. Jones,” she allowed so much visibility into her personal life through lyrics.

A standout for me is the track “Take the Box” from her debut album Frank, which word-for-word describes the day when Amy went to her ex-boyfriend’s house to drop of his stuff following their breakup. She describes the moment with immaculate exactness (“Your neighbors were screaming, I don’t have a key for downstairs, so I punched all the buzzers, hoping you wouldn’t be there“), including the Moschino bra and Frank Sinatra CD gifts that Amy didn’t want to keep (“The Moschino bra you bought me last Christmas”, “Frank’s in there, and I don’t care”), and puts on paper what is essentially a highly personal time capsule. Amy did the impossible with this song: isolated an event that lasted only a few minutes, made it factual as if she were offering a testimony, and somehow made it heartbreakingly poetic as well.

Specific people:
Nicki Minaj, Sia, and Big Boi

The following songwriters exemplify personal specificity by referencing actual people in their work, often by real names and without any pseudonyms. It’s a courageous and a risky thing to do. Each time an artist references real people in their work, they break down the walls that separate their two selves: the artist and the person behind the artist.

"She said, "Fuck Fendi", but I think she was playin'
I heard she move them thangs, I think she fuckin' Wayne
She call herself Lewinsky, that means she give him brain
She tryna be like Lil' Kim, her picture looks the same
Why she ain't signed with G-Unit, she from Queens, right?
And what's her nationality, she Chinese, right?"
—— Nicki Minaj, Still I Rise 

Nicki Minaj is well known for her unmatched razor-sharp lyrics and I doubt anyone familiar with her music would dispute that. But I think she doesn’t get enough credit for her ability to continuously weave in direct, up-to-date references to people in her own life, references that leave no room for endless interpretation. “Barbie Dreams” from Queen is probably a recent example of this, though I prefer the more factual specificity on “All Things Go” from The Pinkprint and on many songs from Beam Me up Scotty.

With “Still I Rise,” for example, she mocks her haters who compare her to Lil’ Kim, or speculate whether she’s sleeping with Lil Wayne, or wonder what actually happened between Nicki and her former manager Big Fendi (their fallout happened earlier than people thought), or why she never signed G-Unit, the record label founded by 50 Cent, a fellow Queens-native (50 Cent explicitly said “’cause of Fendi.”) What I love about a verse like this is that Nicki doesn’t play coy; she acknowledges each rumor and each person involved in the rumor, and she makes it clear that it’s ultimately no one else’s business to know. But should anyone be interested, there is plenty of material out there that can help address each piece of gossip. By bringing in so many names of people in her life, Nicki puts her watermark on this song. Even if you’ve never listened to the track, just by reading the verse, you know that Nicki is behind it.

"Ella is worried about her weight
She won't eat in public anymore
She is fucking her ex again
When they've finished, she sleeps on the floor

Nate has a heart of gold
But give it away he will not
His mother abandoned him at ten
It's a pain he has never forgot

Mary's afraid of herself
Her sentences often cut half
She will never give her own opinion
She's afraid that people might laugh

And I am afraid of sharks
I will not swim out past my head
And sometimes I worry my boyfriend will die
My first love is already dead."
—— Sia, Fear

Sia Furler is another fascinating songwriter to study when it comes to lyrical specificity with people, mostly because she has consciously evaded exactness in her songwriting over the last decade. Just think of songs like “Chandelier,” “Cheap Thrills,” or “Titanium”—they are everything but specific. Packed with catchy punchlines, most of these bops are known for their tropey and effervescent lyrics. You can listen to them, vibe to them, but you won’t get to actually learn anything about people in Sia’s life. In her interview with Chris Connelly for Nightline, she even admitted these lyrics were written using a bulletproof pop-song formula. “I usually choose a one solid concept,” she described “So, I see a chandelier. So then, I’m like, oh I know, how could I use that, that’s a strong title.”

What most people don’t realize is that Sia’s vague, concept-centric lyrics are successful only because she intentionally does the opposite of what she’s really good at: writing frighteningly personal lyrics. Before her trademark wigs and the “Titanium”-induced fame, her lyrics were piercingly clear and raw, rife with unequivocal references to her turbulent personal life. On “Fear,” from her 2001 album Healing is Diffucult, Sia goes through several specific people who are all fighting different manifestations of fear, highlighting how this debilitating emotion had hindered their lives. We don’t know whether these people are her real friends, but we get a hint with the lines “And sometimes I worry my boyfriend will die / My first love is already dead,” which is an explicit reference to the sudden death of her then-boyfriend, Dan Pontifex, in 1997 and the booze-and-drugs spree that followed.

I am also convinced that Amy Winehouse’s lyrical specificity was actually strongly influenced by Sia’s earlier work. The transparent references and unwavering absence of metaphor in Sia’s earlier songs like “Healing is Difficult” are the same anti-poetic devices with which Amy crafted her hits. In 2014, speaking to Howard Stern, Sia mentioned that she and Amy—while Amy was still alive—happened to be playing at the Chateau Marmonte on the same day. “[Amy] played the guitar, and she happened to be playing an old song of mine that was called Little Man,” Sia said. Amy mentioned that “Little Man” was one of her favorite songs, which naturally made Sia think that Amy would be open to collaborating. “I knew her peripherally,” she added, “and, I was like, well, we should work together. And [Amy] was like no, no fucking way, man, I’m totally intimidated by you.”

"Shoulda bought an ounce, but you copped a dub
Shoulda held back, but you throwed a punch
'Posed to meet your girl but you packed a lunch
No D to the U to the G for you
Got a son on the way by the name of Bamboo
Got a little baby girl, four-year—Jordan
Never turned my back on my kids, for them
Should've hit it, quit it, rag-top
Before you re-up, get a laptop
Make a business for yourself, boy, set some goals
Make a fat diamond out of dusty coal"
—— Outkast, B. O. B. - Bombs Over Baghdad 

I am also a big fan of Big Boi (Antwan André Patton), former member of OutKast, who has often used real names of people in his life. On a personal favorite track of OutKast, “B. O. B — Bombs Over Baghdad,” Patton gives a frisky lecture to ghetto youth and throws in the names of two of his kids, Bamboo and Jordan (his third kid Cross wasn’t born yet at the time), emphasizing what a committed father he always had been and coloring his playful commentary on the ghetto with tried-and-tested advice. On “GhettoMusick,” a track from Patton’s Speakerboxxx part of OutKast’s 2003 album, he also mentions his grandmother, Edna Mae Kearse, who showed him “how to be a smooth operator, dominator in the state of Georgia.” (Funnily enough, his grandmother planned to have a book, which according to Patton was “going to fuck everybody in the family“) I am not going to make huge leaps here and argue there is something profound to Patton name-dropping his family in these songs — but it brings realness to his image and gives texture to his lyrics.

The why behind personal specificity

As I’ve mentioned, it’s only in the past few weeks that I have started wondering why I am drawn to personal specificity in songwriting. And, the answer is: transparency. I initially couldn’t name the reason, but as I was reading Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” it suddenly all clicked. “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today,” writes Sontag. “Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.”

Now, I know it’s a bit counterintuitive to apply Sontag’s commentary to songwriting because many of her essays argue against the importance of content in art, but where I do see relevance in her argument is in the notion that interpretation “presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers” and that it “amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone.” In other words, interpretation of art is an act of searching for “meaning:” what did the artist mean? what is the meaning of this color? what is the meaning of this tone? what is the meaning of this song?

It’s the search for the songwriter’s meaning with people’s adorations of songs like The Beatles’ “Yesterday” or Radiohead’s “Creep” or Prince’s “Purple Rain” or Björk’s “Pagan Poetry” that has always baffled me (and, full disclaimer, I actually adore the latter two). The lyrics in these songs are so generalized, sometimes rife with metaphor, that it almost doesn’t make sense to infer any meaning whatsoever. I’m not saying these are bad songs but I feel that we often attribute too much value to highly stylized songwriting just because it can have so many layers of “meaning.”

Instead, why not value songwriting that is so specific, so exact that it warrants only one interpretation, which is the one clearly given by the songwriter? It’s what Sontag describes as “[eluding] the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be… just what it is.” Personal specificity abolishes ambiguity in songwriting and produces art that is so transparent, so unique, and so irreplicable. Neither would Nicki Minaj ever rap about depression in Rina Sawayama’s hotel in Akasaka nor would Sia ever sing about John Grant’s existential crisis on Colorado highways.

Of course, this only answers why I as a listener am drawn to specificity. There is still the lingering second question, which is: why are songwriters today writing lyrics with so much personal specificity to begin with? It’s obviously not a new thing (some immediate examples that come to mind: Lauryn Hill with “Zion” back in 1998, Eminem with “Mockingbird” in 2004), but my perception is that it’s more common today.

My hunch—and it admittedly could be a silly hypothesis—is that the democratization of music through the rise of platforms like MySpace or Soundcloud and through the increased accessibility of production equipment has led to an industry-specific survival of the fittest. What once made songs with generalized lyrics, like Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” or John Lennon’s “Imagine” or ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” successful is no longer what works in the world of recommender systems and limited attention span. Generalized lyrics require too much time and too many interpretations to pique one’s interest. Specific lyrics provide straight-to-the point narrative and one truth, which is what the world craves today. In order to survive, therefore, artists need to “specialize” their brand and stand out. What better way to do that than to write very specific lyrics?

In the end, honestly, whatever explanation there is for so much personal specificity in songwriting, I am here for it. And I certainly hope it doesn’t go away.

Photography credits

The photos in this article are works of several incredible photographers.

(1) John Grant: courtesy of Hörður Sveinsson. Follow Hörður on Instagram as well.
(2) Benjamin Clementine; courtesy of Steven Pan. Follow Steven on Instagram as well or reach out to him on Models.
(3) Rina Sawayama; courtesy of Chloe Sheppard. Follow Chloe on Instagram as well.
(4) Little Simz; courtesy of Nwaka Okparaeke. Follow Nwaka on Instagram as well.
(5) St. Vincent; courtesy of Stephano Colombini + Alberto Albanese (also known as Scandebergs). Follow Stephano and Alberto on Instagram as well.
(6) Amy Winehouse; courtesy of Jeff Kravitz. Follow Jeff on Instagram as well.
(7) Nicki Minaj; courtesy of Patrick Demarchelier. Pay tribute by following Patrick’s work on Instagram.
(8) Sia; courtesy of Amy Sussman. Follow Amy on Instagram as well.
(9) Big Boi; courtesy of GL Askew II. Follow GL Askew II on Instagram as well.

Two years ago, while having lunch with my parents, my dad and I got into an argument over the societal value of content creators. My dad claimed he didn’t understand how someone making YouTube videos could be making so much money and what—if any—benefit they were bringing to the table.

I managed to convince him that societal value doesn’t manifest only in something physical, like a sold good, but that it can also manifest in something more virtual and cultural, like a content creator who is pushing boundaries of comedy.

But I couldn’t answer his other question. He asked how one can even know what a great content creator is when the only metric measuring their success is popularity. I knew that I had strong opinions of which content creators were good and which were not, but I couldn’t give him a good answer as to what actually made them good.

So, after two years of scrolling through Instagram when I really could be exercising, of watching YouTube videos at 2 a.m. when I really could be sleeping, of reading interviews with content creators when I really could be doing meal prep for the upcoming week, I think I finally have an answer to my dad’s question.

Very good content creators have at least two of the following: depth, relevance, and novelty. Great content creators have all three. I’ll call these three pillars “The Venn Diagram of Content Creators.”

The Venn Diagram of Content Creators: Depth, Relevance, Novelty

There are a lot of content creators out there. The decent ones, those who attract at least some level of viewership, fall at least into one of these pillars: depth, relevance, or novelty.

Depth refers to the uniqueness or incisiveness of the creator’s content. It essentially answers the question: Will I learn something new or think differently about myself or the world by consuming this creator’s content? A YouTuber who offers very structured and honest film reviews that are different than those of mainstream critics would be a deep content creator. On the flip side, a YouTuber who offers reviews that are vague and very similar to those of mainstream critics would not be a deep content creator.

Relevance answers the question: Could many people be interested in this? I want to be specific here and emphasize the modality of this question. Relevance is not only about whether people currently care about the content, but it also speaks to the possibility that many people could care about the content if they were exposed to it. A talented photographer who documents lesser-known conflicts and crimes around the world on Instagram would be an example of a relevant content creator. While the subjects of the photographer’s content might be unfamiliar to the followers, the followers can still be invested in their stories. Conversely, a TikTok creator who reviews high-end ski gear would not be a relevant content creator. There will certainly be a subset of people who care about this topic, but the majority of the people will find it inaccessible.

Finally, novelty answers the question: Is this content something I have never seen before or is it presented in a refreshingly unconventional way? For example, an incredibly talented TikTok creator who does fantastic impressions of celebrities is not novel. Many people have done that for many years now. But, say that the same TikTok creator not only impersonates the celebrities, but dresses up to look exactly like them, and then publishes reels of demanding absurd orders at Starbucks as the celebrities–that would be novel.

Decent content creators are typically good at one of these three pillars. It’s the overlapping regions of the Venn Diagram, however, where very good and great content creators are found. The very good ones can be identified in the overlapping spaces of two pillars. And the great ones can be found in the overlapping space of all three pillars.

So, who are they?

The Very Good Content Creators

Overlap 1: deep, relevant, but not novel

The first category of very good content creators is the overlap of those creators whose content is both deep and relevant, but not novel. In most cases, these content creators appeal to wider audiences because their content showcases ideas or discussions that most of us care about or are at least somewhat interested in. These creators also typically offer unique and incisive insight in their content.

The content and its presentation, however, are not necessarily novel. Product reviews, styling inspiration, fashion advice, and art are typical examples of this: they can be incisive and unique but not novel.

I love fashion, so I follow a few content creators whose Instagrams and YouTube channels are great examples of this intersection. Nick Wooster, for instance, has been a popular style icon among men because he seamlessly achieves depth and relevance in his content. Insta photos of well-dressed men are not in any way novel, but Wooster offers something unique: cool and youthful sense of style against the backdrop of his admirable physique. And, that’s the catch. While the content itself is nothing new, Wooster’s personality and his curation of outfits offer something far more incisive—an underlying affirmation for young guys around the world that one can still turn heads, even in their sixties.

Other two creators I follow are Olaf Hernandez and Gallucks, two younger guys who take a distinctly futuristic approach to streetwear. As a result, while they are not relevant to the wider male audiences as much as Wooster is, they have quickly become an endless source of inspiration for city dwellers.

Hernandez, in particular, has a great eye for curating looks across the entire color spectrum, playing with exaggerated and contrasting silhouettes, showing how the neo-Y2K style can look refreshingly sexy. Gallucks takes a completely different approach; his outfits are usually far more monochromatic and reminiscent of underground London and Berlin clubbing scenes, but they are not replicas of those nightlife uniforms. The outfits instead take a far more bionic and far more approachable tone. On top of that, you can also find him on YouTube giving well-argued reviews of footwear, clothing, and fashion scenes across the world.

These guys are clearly not doing anything novel. But their talent, eye for quality, and sense of style put them above the rest and add depth to the endless universe of fashion content.

Overlap 2: relevant, novel, but not deep

The second category of very good content creators is the overlap of those creators whose content is both relevant and novel, but not deep. What that means is that these creators will typically not offer any unique or incisive insight in their content, but their content is usually relevant to larger masses and is presented in a refreshing, unorthodox way. My hypothesis is that this overlap tends to be the easiest target for criticism because “anyone could do it.” Which is, by all means, not the case.

One of my favorite content creators who falls in this category is Amelia Dimoldenberg, English journalist and content creator, known for her YouTube series Chicken Shop Date. If you haven’t seen it, the premise is very simple: Amelia and a celebrity guest meet up for a date at a place that you would most likely never choose for a first date—a chicken shop.

Now, some versions of this premise existed previously in American MTV shows, but what’s really novel about Dimoldenberg’s approach is that the final cuts of the episodes are quick, snappy, cringey, deadpan, and for the most part, actually have nothing to do with dating itself.

And, it’s absolutely relevant. Maybe you’re a Rosalía fan? You’ll enjoy the episode in which Rosalía tells Dimoldenberg she’s going to be her wingwoman while Dimoldenberg tries to break down what “peng” and “leng” stand for in English slang. Or maybe you don’t care for Rosalía but love Daniel Kaluuya? Then watch Dimoldenberg try to seduce him using zero facial expressions. Or maybe you’d rather witness Shania Twain’s chaotic mom energy while in a chicken shop? That’s an episode too.

You won’t learn anything new about these celebrities when watching Chicken Shop Date. But, the episodes are absurdly entertaining and strategically unconventional, which will catch your attention even if you have seen many other interviews with these celebrities before. So, don’t immediately discredit it. You try coming up with deadpan questions for different celebrities that will feel equally disarming and alarming. It’s not easy.

Overlap 3: deep, novel, but not relevant

The third category of very good content creators is the overlap of those creators whose content is both deep and novel, but not relevant. My opinion is that these creators get the shorter end of the stick in the online hustle game. They are typically a refreshing addition to the online world, because they offer unique insights and because they present novel content or at least existing content in a novel way, but because their content doesn’t appeal to the masses, their fandom doesn’t have as much expansion potential.

One of my favorite content creators in this category is AJayII, a YouTuber who produces videos of her live reactions to albums and songs, typically pop or hip hop. She has attained a cult following within the online music community for her genuine and formidably analytical reviews of music releases. While not musically trained, she is able to recognize quality and deconstruct that quality in a very accessible way for her viewers.

I loved, for example, that she amusingly kept complaining about Sia’s lacking enunciation in her reaction video to 1000 Forms of Fear or that she couldn’t stand Ariana Granda’s sweetener. She is certainly a deep content creator. I also think her method of evaluating music is novel; I don’t know whether other creators were recording live album reactions before her, but AJayII was the first content creator I discovered who was listening to the albums for the first time and reacting to them realtime instead of producing a post-mortem album review.

The catch is that only music aficionados actually listen to whole albums and care about the contextual significance of the album’s songwriting, production, and art direction. For that reason, someone like AJayII will probably not seem like a relevant content creator to a person who only occasionally enjoys listening to music.

The Great Content Creators

The full overlap: deep, relevant, novel

And, for the grand finale, we reach the full overlap. The great content creators can be found at the overlap of all three pillars. They are deep, they are relevant, and they are novel. This is by far the hardest space to reach, and I think getting there is a combination of talent and timing. Who are these unicorns?

There’s quite a few of them out there but my two favorite are Emma Chamberlain and Nikkie de Jager-Drossaers, more commonly known as NikkieTutorials.

By this point, Emma Chamberlain has become a celebrity herself, but even before her meteoric rise, her content was pushing boundaries. I remember discovering her for the first time and being initially dismissive, then intrigued, and then absolutely amazed. She was relevant. She talked about anything and everything, from existential life crises to the driest minutiae of her routine, which was also the first time I understood what “relatable” meant—I actually could relate to her!

Her style of recording and editing videos was absolutely refreshing to me, maybe even initially a bit disorienting but certainly catchy and addictive. And, while most people will say that there is nothing deep about what she does, I think Chamberlain’s content is anything but shallow. Just watch the video in which she drives around LA on a Monday, trying out different coffees, and offering amusingly entertaining and yet very incisive reviews that capture the misery of wanting to branch out only to realize that you just want to stick to the coffee you already know and love.

Everyone can do it, right? I really don’t think so. Just observe the people in your own life, or even yourself, and ask who would actually spend a day passionately trying out different coffees and getting absolutely absorbed in such mundane adventure?

Nikkie de Jager-Drossaers is a Dutch makeup artist who rose to fame with her YouTube makeup tutorials. Makeup instructions are not necessarily novel, but what de Jager-Drossaers was doing with her videos was absolutely groundbreaking at the time: essentially reverse-engineering celebrities’ makeup and then engineering them back for her viewers. I would also say her novelty then increased even more once she became more known and started having famous people on her channel, like Lady Gaga and Adele. To see public figures appear willingly without makeup and get transformed by a makeup artist was a huge milestone in our celebrity culture.

de Jager-Drossaers’ depth is unquestionable. You don’t need to understand makeup or even be interested in it to realize that she is definitely an artist. You could make an argument that relevance of her content is more gender-specific, but as the boundaries of gender expression have been relaxed over the last decade, many guys have also become more appreciative of makeup. As a result, someone like de Jager-Drossaers has become one of the defining content creators of the 2010s and early 2020s.

What both Chamberlain and de Jager-Drossaers prove is that occupying the space of full overlap in the Venn diagram is certainly a matter of timing, especially as it relates to novelty. But it’s important to note that novelty can’t be intentionally timed, and neither Chamberlain nor de Jager-Drossaers finetuned their rise according to some obscure calendar of success. What did happen is that both of them, being talented and hard-working and innovative, came a time when culture needed them the most. And they seized the opportunity to push cultural boundaries.

So, the formula to being a great content creator, I would say at least, is very clearly defined. What goes into that formula, on the other hand, whether that is depth or relevance or novelty, is most certainly not something that everyone can do. It requires a lot of talent, it requires a lot of hard work, and it requires a bit of luck and a bit of opportune timing.

This essay won an Honorable Mention at the Writer’s Digest 94th Annual Writing Competition in the category “Nonfiction Essay or Article.”

I recently made a Pinterest account and the first board I created—a bit pretentiously titled Ésthetique Bizarre—ended up consisting of designs, scenes, and characters that are anything but conventionally beautiful. They are unusual. Some are weird. Some even disturbing. And yet, I still found them all very captivating. 

Why was I spending time meticulously curating these images that are not pretty? It made me pause. I then looked through my Instagram and realized this inspiration didn’t come out of nowhere. It was everywhere.

One of the accounts I follow is Fecal Matter, the moniker of Steven Raj Bhaskaran and Hannah Rose Dalton, whose designs, clothes, and makeup would probably be considered frightening by most people (their website shop, even if the idea scares you, is absolutely worth checking out).

Another one I follow is Salvia, a young Welsh artist who uses similar “extreme” techniques of creating otherworldly looks but also specializes in producing content that might look to some as body horror.

And then there is someone like Jaco Putker, who is far less extreme in his presentation but who produces equally bizarre content, often toying with images of centaurs, swines, and gloomy stills of the working class.

What was striking to me was that these niche multimedia artists were not the only ones who had been going against the longstanding standards of beauty. I thought about all the other people I follow who have influenced music, film, and fashion in recent years, and observed very quickly that this trend had permeated the mainstream quite some time ago. Even if we were not paying attention, we definitely witnessed many examples of this.

Lady Gaga showing up at YouTube Music Awards in 2013, wearing an Yves Saint Laurent black leather shirt and horrifying grills. Azealia Banks’ bizarre mouth-and-teeth eyes for the glossy cover of her single Yung Rapunxel that same year. Rosalía’s diabolic limbs as part of art direction for her 2022 album Motomami. The South London-native Klein crouching in darkness with white hair and bloodshot eyes for the eerie but stunning cover of her 2019 album Lifetime.

Quaint scenes of animal and human mutilation in the 2019 movie Midsommar. The beautiful women of the 2019 movie Atlantics possessed by spirits of the Senegalese men lost at sea. The already-formidable Till Lindemann glazed in honey for Zoo Magazine in 2015. The zombie-like Rick Genest modeling for Thierry Mugler. Grotesquely distorted, pastel-colored figures by the Japanese-Canadian artist Jesse Kanda on the promo poster for his 2017 exhibition in Tokyo.

There’s no other way to put it—all these images, videos, and scenes are unsettling. At the same time, I don’t think they can be called ugly. Somewhat sinister for sure, but glamorous in their own way as well. They are chic. Unsettling chic.

The obvious question to all this is: why is it happening? de Pressigny, writer for i-D, analyzed aspects of this phenomenon back in 2018 and interviewed Dr. Ruth Adams, a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at King’s College London, who described the rise of this aesthetic as “[…] clearly a backlash against normative beauty standards, although the amount of labour involved is obviously no less.”

This labor-intensive movement is definitely not unprecedented. In the same article, de Pressigny points out that punks, goths, and emo kids have all rebelled against normative beauty standards as part of their own subcultural geneses, embracing ugly and weird as something to be proud of.

It’s an astute observation, and I would even add that the desire to distort the definitions of beauty and ugliness has been part of our culture for many centuries and decades, going from New York’s nightclubs with the outrageously glamorous Club Kids and the androgynous, extraterrestrial Grace Jones in the 1980s all the way back to 1850s, when the German philosopher Karl Rosenkranz published his seminal book on this topic, Aesthetic of Ugliness.

What I do think is unprecedented is how mainstream this desire has become. When I look back at my formative teenage years, mid to late aughts, celebrities strived for fit, sexy, clean, and pretty. Now we get to see a global pop-star like Billie Eilish go against all these currents and an influential magazine like Vogue feature extreme-beauty artists like Fecal Matter and Salvia. On the surface, this all can be interpreted as the mainstream finally revolting against beauty standards. But I think there is something more profound to it.

As Rosenkranz implies in Aesthetic of Ugliness, associating ugliness with negativity and evil is the society’s default approach. Yet, it is unwarranted. Ugliness stands on its own, it has its own positivity, and I would venture to say—it has its own appeal. And, what I think is happening is that the mainstream is finally finding its own ugliness attractive. That, I believe, is a result of two major changes over the last decade: the rise of “hyper” connection due to social media and the rise of public conversations about mental health.

What I mean by “hyper” connection is that we have accelerated how we connect and learn about each other. With platforms like Instagram and TikTok, it now just takes seconds to see what strangers are doing, what strangers are thinking, and how strangers are feeling. The widely held narrative so far has been that this microscopic surveillance of other people’s lives is toxic and dangerous.

I don’t disagree, but this wormhole created by social media has also allowed us to learn early on that there are other people like us out there. Other people who have the same insecurities. Other people who like the same weird things. Other people who are equally unadjusted. When we learn of others who share that same ugliness, we learn to accept it and we learn to love it.

Another global common denominator in the last decade has been the increasingly more transparent discussion of mental health. Just ten to fifteen years ago, issues like depression and anxiety were not something one could easily bring up in a casual conversation. To some extent, that was because they were dismissed as something frivolous but mostly because they were taboo, associated with the crazy and the unstable.

Today, we talk about them with incisive nuance, from “Big T” trauma and dissociation to major depressive disorder and substance-induced anxiety disorder. We are all starting to see that—what has now already become a catchphrase—it’s okay to not be okay. We all carry pain, we all have something dark and scary within us, and we are all employing strange, probably unhealthy coping mechanisms to survive. The ugliness that got you labeled as crazy and unstable back in the day is now so ordinary that people might think there is something wrong if you don’t have any issues.

Most interestingly, as a result of these major shifts in our cultural landscape, not only are we collectively starting to find our ugliness attractive, but what I see is that we are also creating space to elevate that ugliness. To make it glamorous. To bring in a new aesthetic to the front: the unsettling chic.

As with all cultural movements in the cyclical nature of our history, unsettling chic might fade away eventually. Maybe we transition at some point to a modern-age renaissance, glorifying bionic perfection and settling for nothing less. Maybe we evolve to a highly technologically advanced species and the concept of beauty is no longer in the eye of the beholder; instead, it is a clearly formulated and reproducible artifact of a new science: beauty engineering.

But, at least for now, in this very human world that’s rife with imperfection and unpredictability, one thing is certain—we are all ugly in our own way. And how beautiful is that?

Cover photo of Rick Genest, courtesy of Joey L. Follow him on Instagram as well.

Anyone who follows the mainstream pop culture will agree Rosalía stole the spotlight in 2022. Fans were the first to have their moment. Her spectacular, genre-bending album Motomami dropped in March after much anticipation, climbed on almost every critic’s list of the year’s best albums, and justifiably hit many of the global top music charts.

Haters got their moment as well. Her debut performance on SNL—unconventional for the show but absolutely magnificent—earlier this year was followed by internet hate comments, which I thought were blatantly mean and narrow-minded. One Twitter user described her Marc Jacobs outfit as “[…] brought to you by Bed Bath & Beyond.” I mean, seriously?

Even the Millennials and the Gen Z, and likely even the Gen X, who had no idea who Rosalía was must have seen, at some point this year, a TikTok or Instagram reel featuring her song “Bizcochito”. Once the song became a thing, in a classic meta moment of social media, it became a way for others who didn’t understand why it was a thing to make fun of themselves for not being able to understand why it was a thing.

I absolutely loved everything about her presence this year. Even eight months after it dropped, Motomami is still on repeat in my Spotify feed. I really enjoyed watching the evolution of her unconventional aesthetic on Instagram. And I continue to be amazed by how talented and hard-working yet completely genuine she is. Just watching her interviews is enough to see this.

I guess, on some level, I loved that she stole the spotlight this year because I felt that I understood it. I loved the music. I felt connected to the current culture. I got it. It was therefore only natural when she announced San Francisco as one of her stops on the new global tour that I would be there. I knew the new live show would be unlike anything else I’ve seen before, but I was confident I would love it and rave about it.

On October 4, my friends and I showed up early at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium to get good spots near the stage. I did not expect that four hours later I would be leaving the concert and thinking: I… didn’t love it?

Rosalía was spectacular as usual, but my feelings about the actual show were mixed. I was confused why she had a “camera motopapi” on the stage and why she sang into the camera instead of the audience for a good chunk of the show. I didn’t understand why the concert felt more like a TikTok reel rather than a real live show. I was annoyed by the fact that almost everyone had their phones up the entire time, even putting up stationary selfie sticks, to record the show. And why did she only have one outfit for the entirety of the two-and-a-half-hour show? Why was there not a little bit more pizazz?

I came back home and concluded that maybe I was actually disappointed. But something felt off about my evaluation. When I don’t like a show, I am vocal about it. I get annoyed that I paid for an expensive ticket to see an artist who doesn’t put an effort to put on a good show. And I never think about the show again.

With Rosalía’s show, it’s all I could think about for the next few days. The concert was not bad, but it felt weird. And not the usual weird, like the type of weird Lady Gaga will put on but it will still be theatrical, meticulous, and high-brow. Rosalía’s show was at the same time theatrical and unassuming, meticulous and chaotic, high-brow and unsophisticated.

For the first time, in all these years of going to concerts and following hot-off-the-press pop culture, I realized that I was doing what I’ve always berated others for doing: sticking to their preferences and not even considering a different point of view. Even though we’re the same age, Rosalía was miles ahead in her perception of what is timely, relevant, and relatable for audiences today. Meanwhile, I was that person, the Millennial falling behind and getting bitter over the fact that things are no longer how they used to be. With that new sense of awareness, I then slowly started to reconstruct my feelings about the show.

Is there a rule that there needs to be a stage with a theatrical performer, carefully curated dancers, and no camera guys? Sure, the show did resemble a TikTok reel but that in itself was art. Rosalía was essentially a content creator for those two and half hours, recording herself sing to us as we all recorded her record herself. After three full years of pandemic-induced focus on our digital selves, how meta is that?

And, who says that a performer needs to have multiple outfits in one show? Sure, she did sport only one look, but that’s exactly what Motomami is about: being minimalist, stripped to the core, with just one but incredibly powerful tool in one’s arsenal: the voice. And with her voice, Rosalía sang and we all felt it.

Sure, people were definitely mounting selfie sticks to record the entire concert, but I had to admit to myself that it was no different from me being “polite” and just slightly raising my phone to record “short snippets” of the show.

The show was certainly a bit of an unnatural experience for me. It challenged me. But that’s what’s so great about Rosalía: she brings together people from all walks of life—from your regular-nightlife club-goers to elitist music connoisseurs—and challenges everyone to be a motomami and a motopapi. To be their genuine selves but to also consider a different point of view.

There was one particular moment in the show that I won’t forget. After finishing “TKN”, Rosalía sat on one of the stage props, as her dancers took turns to dance to a studio mix of Lorna’s famous “Papi Chulo” and probably the even more famous Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina”. She joined them shortly, dancing and singing “dame más gasolina” along with the audience. The whole scene struck me as unusual because, just a moment ago, we were watching her play the piano and sing about hentai.

Looking back, I now realize what a significant cultural moment that was. In the same night, the Millennial-slash-Gen-Z crowd was going equally ecstatic over a famous 2000s club reggaeton hit and a cute Disney-like song about anime porn. Twenty years ago, in the world in which we existed then, this would not have been a thing. The Daddy Yankee crowd would not have been anywhere near the hentai crowd.

But, in 2022, in the age of Motomami, we live in Rosalía’s world. And in her world, Rosalía challenges us, forcing different crowds to coexist.

And what a great world that is to live in.

Cover photo courtesy of Xavi Torrent. Follow him on Instagram as well.

It has been ten years since Amy Winehouse’s death on July 23, 2011. With a decade in absence of one of the world’s most iconic musicians, I think it is important to look back and understand why she made such a big impact on the music industry, and — most importantly — why she became an icon at all.

Few would hesitate to say that Amy Winehouse reshaped the music scene. After her debut album Frank, which went mostly unrecognized by the wider public, she floored the world with her unstereotypical sound and irreverent image once Back to Black reached the ears of listeners across the world. Her jazz-inspired, eclectic range of music paved the way for many British female artists, including today’s mega-stars like Adele, while her visual mix of London’s high-end subculture fashion with humorously crass attitude strongly cemented her anti-mainstream status. For many people, she became a fixation: someone who consistently provided enough material for malignantly scrupulous attention.

Of course, one could say this was because she continuously flooded the media with her tumultuous drug and alcohol abuse, but I wouldn’t say her troubled image was the reason why people cared so much about the personal details of her life. In fact, I always thought that her relentlessly honest and occasionally brusque attitude was probably the real “culprit” behind her worshipped persona.

She was witty, unrefined in speech and manner, and sometimes overly presumptuous, which did not align with an unobjectionable image that a star of her caliber was supposed to portray. This dichotomy made her an icon in the eyes of both the dazed fan base and the gossip-hungry media. Sadly, the majority of the public only wanted to see the widely-publicized image of Amy Winehouse — the troubled and drama-ridden diva who was not able to keep up with the hurdles and frenzy thrown at her by the unforgiving paparazzi. The disheartening reality is that she was never emotionally equipped to be a star. Her purpose always rested in her art.

That is probably the most important notion to remember about Amy Winehouse: that, at heart, she was an artist — a true musician and primarily a splendid lyricist — but not a performer or an entertainer. Her earlier live performances were certainly memorable (especially when her backup vocalists Zalon and Ade became regulars on her tours), but her essence was deeply imprinted in her albums and, most notably, in her songwriting. In that sense, her iconic status was not supposed to be based on her image but rather on her music.

Much of this, however, has already been said in Asif Kapadia’s fantastic 2015 documentary Amy, so it may be more valuable to mention what her music meant to me, a longtime fan of her work. When I first heard her music, which was just around the time “Rehab” started climbing the charts, I was initially drawn to her sound. There weren’t any artists at the time, at least to my knowledge, who were rooted in jazz origins, drawing from the likes of Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and Donny Hathaway, and who seamlessly incorporated accessibility in their music.

There was something unique, though not necessarily unprecedented, in Amy Winehouse’s music, but it took me a while to realize that it was the surprisingly compatible combination of her highbrow jazz influences and the catchy girl group sound — in addition to her extraordinary vocals — that made her music so distinctive.

Over time, I grew to appreciate the entirety of her work, from the tracks on Frank and Back to Black to the posthumous Lioness: Hidden Treasures, reggae- and ska-inspired covers on her B-sides, as well as some lesser known gems, such as her cover of Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” with Quincy Jones.

Even more importantly, I started to value her incredible songwriting. Her lyrics notably changed from Frank to Back to Black, transforming from narrative storytelling to chorus-centered verses, but her ability to write about varying aspects of life, whether it was love, adultery, or simply getting angry over having to share weed, in a highly poetic way remained consistent throughout all her life.

I also appreciated that she portrayed a timeless sense of love in her music. Many artists at the time, and even more so today, recorded songs that centered on denying any traces of love in the search of personal empowerment, resulting in songs that very quickly began to sound worn-out and uninspiring.

Amy Winehouse, on the other hand, wrote songs that told the same story of how much pain she was willing to go through just to sustain her sense of love. Granted, such lyrics conveyed a certain dose of self-inflicted tragedy, but I always thought it was incredibly refreshing and courageous to have a modern female artist who was not afraid to put the entirety of her body and soul in her music.

There are three songs of Amy Winehouse that everyone should listen to at least a few times in their lives to truly appreciate her brilliance. “You Sent Me Flying,” a song from her debut album Frank, shows her masterfully narrating and pitch-perfect singing through a dazzling jazz track, which will surely satisfy every music buff out there.

“Wake Up Alone,” a heartbreaking ballad from Back to Black, showcases some of the most brilliant songwriting I have ever read. It is a heart-stopping poem that captures the unnerving anxiety of loneliness, and will induce empathetic feelings even in those who have not experienced the same feelings on such a profound level.

Finally, “Addicted,” the last song on Back to Black and another example of fantastic songwriting, best displays Amy Winehouse’s entertaining wit as she humorously laments having to share weed with her roommate’s boyfriend, and that, from now on, she’ll “check him at the door, make sure he got green,” and that she will be “tighter than airport security teams.”

These songs succinctly show why she was — and will always remain — an icon: because she was a witty poet who wrote songs that reflected what we all felt and knew, but were often unable to express in words. In many ways, her warm and romantic nature thrived in her songs, and always awaited to be discovered by those who had enough curiosity to find it.

🕒 This article is more than 5 years old (Published Jan 28, 2018).

Annie Clark graced San Francisco last week with her widely-discussed new concert tour, aptly baptized “Fear the Future.” Four years after the Digital Witness tour, which positioned St. Vincent at a peculiar intersection of music, theater, and performance art, there was much to expect from the upcoming album Masseduction and the accompanying tour.

The new record, to me at least, didn’t end up feeling as cohesive as her previous albums, and after hearing mixed reactions to her new glitzy tour, I didn’t know what to expect. On top of that, with Clark’s newly-found spot in the celebrity limelight thanks to her relationship with Cara Delevingne, I wondered: is St. Vincent’s new persona a genuine work of art or is Annie Clark joining the ranks of Dorian Gray? Well, despite my initially lukewarm acceptance of her new record and image, I have to say that the concert was, luckily, nothing short of brilliant.

The first half consisted of Masseduction-ized renditions of songs from previous albums, during which Clark progressively moved across the triangular stage, finally ending at the center, as if she wanted to figuratively portray her growth as an artist during the last decade. Snippets of choreography from the previous tour could easily be seen in “Rattlesnake,” “Birth in Reverse,” and “Digital Witness,” and the self-lacerating tracks from Strange Mercy felt pleasantly unrecognizable with the new subdued production and Clark’s all-pink leather outfit.

After a short break following the first set, she returned to the stage, which at that point was subtly redesigned, donning a new outfit and quickly proceeded to play the entirety of Masseduction. There was little—if any at all—difference between the concert and studio versions of the songs, but Clark’s exceptional guitar-playing skills were enough to compensate for this lack of variation.

The second part of the show, however, was probably the reason for the plethora of mixed opinions I heard in the months preceding the show. The austere center-stage podium, flashy background videos (which mostly featured excerpts from her promo videos), and the lack of live band all might have seemed unnecessarily vain. It’s almost hard to imagine that that St. Vincent of the Marry Me and Actor era would ever entertain an auditorium of concertgoers with backing tracks and bizarre promo videos, but in some way, the conceited design of the show worked well—and likely intentionally—with the album’s overt focus on power, sex, and drugs.

Interestingly, I found the new tour invariably more personal and spontaneous than her 2014 Digital Witness tour. Both tours were heavy on choreography and performance art, but Fear the Future show felt familial and not as distant as the one from four years ago. It could be because Tuck and Patti, Clark’s uncle and aunt, opened the show and shared numerous stories about Annie Clark before she became St. Vincent, which created a vastly different atmosphere from the one concocted by Holly Herndon, who opened her previous tour when I saw Clark perform in Boston.

This time, Clark also openly talked to the audience—whether it was sharing political innuendos or satirizing her song “New York”—which was a distinct no-go zone in her previous tour. This is not to say that one was better than the other, but the new tour somehow seemed to be more about Annie Clark and less about St. Vincent.

Altogether, I thought the show was undoubtedly brave and mesmerizing. It takes guts to perform an entire new album after opening the show with ten tracks from previous albums, and Clark certainly staged a captivating performance with an admirable level of confidence. It was also impressive to see another theatrical concert tour that was equally as stunning as—yet so different from—the Digital Witness tour.

Maybe the well-oiled atmosphere won’t suit everyone, but I see no reason to expect a leisurely performance from a musician who has transcended the stereotypical expectations of a solo female artist. Granted, it all might feel a little too self-centered, but who cares? Annie Clark has put a lot of work into her art to deliver some of the most entertaining music today, and if that comes with a little bit of vanity, let her have it.

Cover photo courtesy of Mariana Rodriguez Hakim.