We Are in Peak Low-Brow Culture
...and it feels so good. On Camp, good bad taste and having a sense of humor over a sense of sophistication.
On July 5th around 6 o’clock, Rachael and I sat outside of Serpentine Cocktail Bar in the West Village. The summer sun was still out. A sleepiness hung in the air following the holiday. Tourist families in large sensible sandals flagged down taxis without an ounce of conviction, their limp arms not so much asking for a ride but rather “am I doing this right?” Men in denim cutoffs with impeccable jawlines and even more impeccable posture passed and greeted one other in that mostly extinct neighborhood way. Rachael nursed a martini with a lemon twist, the chilled glass fogging against the humidity, while I stabbed a long toothpick at a bowl of bright green olives swimming in herbed oil.
By 7 o’clock, it started to rain. The hostess asked if we wanted to move inside. We looked up at the awning as fat drops tumbled off and splattered onto the sidewalk, at the glowing streets lit by twilight and then, at each other to confirm:
“No, actually. I think we’re good.”
It was all idyllic to a point of ridiculous. We were in a Woody Allen movie, a corny painting of Paris being hawked by a Montmartre street vendor, a 90s yacht rock song about dancing in the rain.
It was beautiful. It was romantic. It was…cringe.
“Have you noticed that there’s nothing beautiful about the Gen Z aesthetic?” I asked, examining our little scene. “Everything is full of irony. Everything is sort of…ugly.”
“I don’t think Gen Z is concerned with beautiful,” Rachael replied.
Right but that’s exactly my point. The age we’re living in seems violently allergic to anything “beautiful” in earnest. We are in peak appreciating low-brow (even sometimes bad) taste: hyper-pop music that sounds like dial-up internet1, graphic design resembling Microsoft Paint, reality over prestige television as appointment viewing, clothing from the aughts that has no business working together assembled into ensembles conjuring a “slay” here and a “mother” there (slang that, it should be noted, was stolen from ball culture, created by and for people who were deemed unacceptable and lacking the substance of sophistication). Even celebrities previously labeled “trashy” are now rightfully being lauded for their talent and cultural contributions, emblems that were disposed of as soon as we hated ourselves for glorifying the trends of the times and thereby, glorifying them.
Paris, Pamela, Lindsay. Britney, Anna Nicole, Megan.
I think of how hard critics and audiences alike came down on Showgirls, for example, only for it to be the main hair and makeup reference for Euphoria, an element that aesthetically defined arguably the show of its generation. Or how niche and “cult” Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers was characterized in its 2012 reception, only for it to serve as the singular inspiration for Camila Cabello’s entire 2024 rebrand, her a mainstream pop star with humble beginnings on a reality singing competition watched mostly by Christian mothers in the Midwest.
It was deeply uncool to love Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera when I was younger. I remember fighting with a girl on my field hockey team whose main flex about bands like Fallout Boy (the more “serious” music) was that they wrote their own songs. “Who cares!” I shot back, “I love Britney’s songs more even if she didn’t write them!” Fast forward to today when pop is at its most musically diverse, robust and celebrated. Fully grown (straight!) men proudly proclaim their obsession with Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter instead of some pretentious underground band you’ve never heard of. We don’t just have five pop girls; we have 30. The most influential cultural figure in the world sings about boys on the football team and crying in backseats over a broken heart to engender complex emotions in her listeners, the storytelling valuable in its simplicity and universality, yes, but not particularly elevated or to quote her, “cool.” In Letterboxd red carpet interviews, Gen Z filmmakers proudly reference Legally Blonde and House Bunny in their Top Four Favorite Films as opposed to, I don’t know, Breathless and The Godfather. It’s a sign of the times. Culture thought of as cheap, tawdry, and shallow decades ago is now the epitome of taste.
Recently, I fell down a rabbit hole of thrifting TikToks, which tends toward Y2K trends, which tends toward calling polyester asymmetrical shirts with purple stripes “gorgeous.” I’m fascinated. These are garments my generation vowed to throw away and burn all photographic evidence of; now they’ve risen from their bebe / True Religion / Rainbow graves and made their way back with a flammable vengeance. Bella Hadid, you will be dealt with! Yet, every outfit these TikTok fashion girls put together has a cleverness to it, a self-awareness and lack of pretense that feels refreshing, original and fun. There’s a thrill and satisfaction in the spectacle being excessive, intentionally mismatched (see The Wrong Shoe Theory), and completely unexpected. If you don’t get the wink and nod by looking at it, you’ll at least have a reaction and that’s better than nothing.
I was thinking about this in the context of apathy being the opposite of love, rather than hate. The purpose of art is to feel, even if that feeling is disgust, unease, or disdain. That’s the beauty of experiencing art, each individual feels the sensation of their own interpretation and it doesn’t always have to be a positive one. The problem lies if there’s no reaction at all, if it’s easy ignore; think of elevator music, plane movies or shows you fold laundry to. I’m not talking low-brow. I’m talking just plain forgettable. The purpose of intentional ugliness and bad taste seems to be a reaction of humor or delight. To quote John Waters:
“Good bad taste can be creatively nauseating but must, at the same time, appeal to the especially twisted sense of humor, which is anything but universal.”
Perhaps the pervasive craving for joy and delight is why low-brow has reached its proverbial summit. Bleak times deplete all of our seriousness, such that we have none left for leisure, pleasurable pursuits or basically anything that’s within our control to take or leave. I don’t want to sip a dry Syrah and discuss Rembrandt when the world is on fire, the upcoming election making me want to pretzel my body permanently into Eagle Pose. I want to listen to “Espresso” and smooth the folds of my orbitofrontal cortex for 2 minutes and 55 seconds. My Spotify already knows to fire up “Good Luck, Babe” or “Von Dutch” right after that. Thank you, Spotify. When the world is so extremely dark, the easier the culture goes down, the better.
Yes, trends are cyclical and it would be logical to assume the bad taste of the 2000s would eventually return. But it feels like what was happening in the world created the ideal opening for that to happen and blow up exponentially, more than it would have otherwise.
The timing of this low-brow fever pitch feels like a reaction to the pandemic and the hangover that came after, of social anxiety, burn out, prolonged isolation not to mention the other global threats casually looming: climate change, nuclear war, and AI to name a few. During lockdown and following the murder of George Floyd, we had no choice but to be in our most vulnerable, our most present, our most sincere, asking neighbors “how are you, really,” writing heartfelt social media soliloquies on injustice and banging pans for healthcare workers. We’d depleted all of our solemness on real life issues, so that the media we consumed needed to be lighter and more playful in the fallout. An escape and nothing else. And yet nobody was desiring total emptiness after what we’d endured: just something ornamental and pleasing in its presentation.
We cannot consider low-brow taste without first considering Camp, which has in the last decade emerged from the cultural fringe to the cultural zeitgeist. Perhaps the most effective piece of media demonstrating what is camp without spelling it out like Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” would be Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, a documentary about ball culture in 80s New York. Our fascination and simultaneous misunderstanding of Camp often leads to confusion between it and the low-brow taste dominating our culture now.
From “Notes on Camp”:
“The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance…Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much.’”
The advent of Camp in the mainstream consciousness began well before the global pause, when RuPaul’s Drag Race revolutionized television and delicately spoon fed the concept of drag to the masses. Then Harry Lambert recreated Harry Styles’ post-boy band image with epicene styling reminiscent of 70s Elton John and finally as the apex coda, the aforementioned 2019 Met Gala theme was announced as “Camp: Notes on Fashion.” But that was our sudden fascination with a sensibility that had been around for centuries (Sontag named the late 17th century and early 18th century as “the great period of Camp”); the low-brow descendant that exists today feels like an evolution into a more accessible, less passionate version everyone can enjoy, despite its departure from purity. Most importantly, as Sontag wrote: “pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp is usually less satisfying. The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious.” In other words, our current indulgence in tackiness isn’t necessarily Camp; it doesn’t quite meet the criteria. Even more, “Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous. Not extraordinary merely in the sense of effort.” Low-brow culture can be cute, fun, intentionally garish or cheap (even vulgar!) in an attempt to be charming. But glamorous it is not. It lacks the fantasy and theatricality (unless we’re talking about Chappell Roan); it lacks the visual reward. What Camp does share with low-brow is “an element of artifice,” an emphasis on stylization with no content, of “aesthetics over morality,” of irony over seriousness.
The greatest misconception about low-brow art is that it doesn’t have anything important to say. That if you love pop music, for example, you have no depth. But why does something need to be difficult in order to be meaningful? Really. Is it because you had to earn the meaning rather than be presented with it? Or that the meaning has to be abstract or layered to manufacture nuance? Couldn’t that self-edification come from sitting with what the artist has plainly said as opposed to having to excavate it? Can’t you enjoy how you feel rather than what you think? Art doesn’t have to feel like homework to be important; the low-brow version isn’t all fluff, it’s just friendlier wrapping. It feels like empty calories but there’s often a multivitamin hiding in its center, a trojan horse for depth and complexity with presentation resembling pure dopamine. Not always, but some pop artists expertly accomplish this.
“One cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture.”
- Susan Sontag
The best recent example is Charli xcx and Lorde’s collaboration on “Girl, so confusing.” In an electro song that’s surely time traveled from a Misshapes party, Charli and Lorde have an unarmed back and forth about a tenuous, competitive friendship that’s all too familiar to any breathing human woman on the planet. If you’ve ever sat at a restaurant across from someone in your friend group who everyone thinks should be your best friend because you’re “so similar,” feeling forced and awkward because she sort of short-circuits every time you succeed, the lyrics inevitably send shivers down your spine:
“I don’t know if you like me.
Sometimes I think you might hate me.
Sometimes I think I might hate you.
Maybe you just want to be me…
People say we’re alike.
They say we’ve got the same hair…
Can't tell if you wanna see me
Falling over and failing
The catharsis comes when Lorde confesses all of her own projections, her body dysmorphia and the self-loathing reclusiveness that results, her inability to recognize how she has the power to hurt someone who she deems so “awesome” with her perceived rejections, all of which were ultimately about her.
“‘Girl, you walk like a bitch.’
When I was ten, someone said that.
And it's just self-defense, until you're building a weapon.
She believed my projection and now I totally get it.
Forgot that inside the icon, there's still a young girl from Essex.”
Every girl I know cried. I say “girl” specifically because no matter your age as a woman, the girl inside felt it.
To pack the complexity of this dynamic, set the scene, present the issues to a degree of such chilling familiarity you can feel the discomfort of those hangouts, then clear the air through raw admission all in auto-tune (!) against a bouncy club track (!!) with a general ethos reminiscent of indie sleaze (!!!) is against all yardsticks, a Herculean feat. It’s a season of Couples Therapy packed into a banger that transports directly to Cinespace (complimentary) (IYKYK). It’s an entire generation’s friendship trauma exorcised through a watershed moment that’s sure to be pop canon. It’s beef ten times more interesting than Kendrick and Drake, respectfully, because women really know how to work it out on the remix. The expression gets thrown around a lot but it must be said: “Girl, so confusing” was a cultural reset. I cancelled therapy - I’m fixed!
Against all these criteria (and much like many aesthetics in the Millennial pantheon) I suppose you could call mine and Rachael’s evening drinks in the Manhattan rain, Camp: a moment of total earnestness, of exaggerated romance, of seriousness that ultimately fails in its ambition. Because while we want life to feel like a movie, in this moment at large, it doesn’t. The uphill trudge following 2020 has left a collective feeling of exhaustion, tedium, and discouragement. So the styling and artifice is romantic but the content is anything but.
The other option is just to surrender to the cringe and call it what it was: beautiful. Sorry. Because who’s to say that in that exact snapshot moment in time, the artifice didn’t overpower the content. I’d go right back to listening to “My Kink Is Karma” the moment I got on the train anyway.
sontag is nodding in her grave reading this
“So the styling and artifice is romantic but the content is anything but.” THIS. Basically tagline for Brat summer ⚔️