Tag: vibe shift

Pondering A Publication Of The ‘Vibe Shift’



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

This is all very moot for various reasons, but it is fun to idly daydream about this idea again. Listening to British duo “Wet Leg,” I can hear a deep music echo of the last time there was “good” music on the radio — that gauzy era known as “the 90s.”

Anyway, I keep thinking about the idea of a “vibe shift” and if it’s even possible for there to be one for various reasons. It’s a lot harder for a real vibe shift to happen than you might think. The reason is simple — for a vibe shift to happen, everyone has to be exposed to the same thing at the same time and make a collective decision as to what it all means.

So, yes, there may be the occasional general vibe shift, but I just don’t see there being a huge swings in vibes that happened up until the rise of social media. But, having said that, I was reading New York Magazine’s personality profile of the new Executive Editor of The New York Times, Joe Kahn, and it occurred to me we desperately need a new Spy-Gawker type publication to record this surreal post-Trumplandia world we live in.

I will note, as an aside, this passage from the piece, which definitely gives one some insight into who gets things published in New York Magazine.

Until last fall, I spent four years working at the Times, as a clerk for the columnist Maureen Dowd, whose only real input on this story was that she’d personally strangle me if I didn’t give Kahn a fair shake.

I mean, where’s snark?

The answer is, of course, snark is all over Twitter and no one cares about blogs anymore. Yet, it sure would be fun to have a blog that was obsessed with Julia Fox and mixed silly celebrity snark with biting media commentary. That’s just not going to happen. And if it does, I will be no where near it when it does happen.

But having said that, it continues to be extremely frustrating to me that I know that I could do something really interesting given the resources. We need a blog in the tradition of Late Night With David Letterman, Spy Magazine and Gawker. I just don’t see that ever happening again.

If it happens, it’s going to happen in, I don’t know, the metaverse or something. The era of print blogs is over. Long, long over. That will be the real vibe shift, when we’re so consumed by the metaverse that some snarky application of it will become popular.

Anyway, it is fun to think about.

We’re Overdue For A Culture ‘Vibe Shift’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It feels like on a certain level that American pop culture is stuck on the morning of Sept 12, 2001. There have been gradual “vibe shifts” now and again over the last 20 years, but for some reason the last two decades have been rather meh on the pop culture front.

As I’ve written before, the 80s were so rambunctious that the early 80s were very, very different from the late 80s. But in real terms, American pop culture is still in a hazy-post 9/11 world. Superhero movies are huge. There really hasn’t been an technological advancement since the advent of the iPhone. And, for all intents and purposes, pop culture is rather bland.

Now, I don’t know how much of that is just I’m old and grumpy and how much of that is real. But it definitely feels as though American pop culture is ripe for a dramatic shift of some sort.

Of course, it’s possible that all of this will be very moot starting 2025 when we we either have a civil war or slip peacefully into autocracy. That’s something we really have to keep in the back of our minds going forward. But it is possible that between now and then popular tastes will change.

And the way we’ll know it’s happened is when a comedy or a war movie or whatever that was released without any fanfare becomes huge out of the blue and Hollywood (and pop culture) turns on a dime and embraces the new the cultural zeitgeist.

But, like I said, it could be that I’m just old. It could be that pop tastes have changed for good and this is just the new normal we have to live in.

‘Vibe Shift’



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

When it comes to the notion of a “vibe shift,” one has to look no further than the 1980s. The pop culture of the early 1980s was very, very different of that of the late 1980s. In a way, it seems like the 80s were the last decade to have real personality.

I mean, can you off the top of your head think of what the 90s were “about” other than grunge and the Dotcom Bubble? Compare to what we have now, the 90s were a regular Era of Good Feelings. A lot this, of course, came from how racist White People did not have the looming prospect of scary brown and black people dominating the nation’s demographics.

Both the 00s, the 10s and the 20s (so far) really haven’t been about anything other than vague things like “the War on Terror” or “the Great Recession” or “Trumplandia.” The 80s, meanwhile, had a lot of personality. True Grit.

The 80s were the last decade where everyone in the United States was on the same cultural page. When there was a “vibe shift” everyone did it at the same time.

And, really, it could be that it could take WW3 globally and civil war in the USA for there to be some sense of unity again when it comes to a “vibe shift.” WW3 would force everyone to sit up and take notice that a huge event was happening around them, that history was wide awake again. The fact that a limited nuclear exchange would fry everyone’s electronics might aid in that unity of vision, too.

But, lulz. What do I know. I’m just a nobody in the rural part of a flyover state.