BLM=Hipsters of This Decade? This Celeb Actually...Understands Foreign Policy? The Sports COVID Launched. Late Night TV Died, You Didn't Notice (The Five for 05/07/21)
[one]
One of the major trends I haven’t seen covered well is the decline of the Black Lives Matter movement in the eyes of the general public. Rather than try to take a “moral” stance on this, I want to look at the factors that have caused the decline among white Americans.
Stats site Five Thirty Eight tracked BLM support for three years:
My shoot-from-the-hip observations:
A). Much of the drop happened as riots hit Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and Kenosha, WI last summer. Whether or not looting the local target was carried out by true BLM activists, people who used the BLM protests as cover to get a free TV, or some mix of both, the public doesn’t tend to respond well to buildings being burned.
B). Questions arose as to where the money was going, and a lot of the donations were being funneled to ActBlue, a political SuperPAC buying ads in the 2020 election. Anecdotally, I’ll say that as someone who lives three miles from downtown Fergeusn, MO, where much of the BLM movement solidified after the death of Mike Brown in 2015, I can’t point to anything in Fergesun and say “BLM donations paid for that.” This is a pretty radical difference from the Black Panther movement in the 1970’s, which fed local schoolchildren and were hyper focused on local community vs. national politics.
C). Also with money, it doesn’t seem to have helped for BLM founders to describe themselves as “trained Marxists,” which put the movement in a place to be judged as a group seeking national political power rather than local justice. The organization’s reputation seems to have been damaged further when co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors when on a real estate buying spree in March, snapping up a home in L.A. as well as ultra-premier vacation real estate in the Bahamas adjacent to properties owned by Justin Timberlake and Tiger Woods…again raising big questions about where the money was going.
D). All social movements follow a life stage pattern, and my gut tells me that we’ve passed the point of “bureaucratizing” happening in BLM (that would be last summer when major companies and entertainment outlets, pro sports and celebs were all sharing a similar BLM-themed message…which took the movement from something cool and underground in many ways to a quite literally corporate talking point).
Now, we seem to be at the place where the effects of BLM will be felt, and I have no idea what those are. Will changes in policing be permanent or temporary? Regional to major cities or national? Will the voice and tone of pop culture entertainment be changed forever, or was this a two-year trend during rather boring Academy Awards?
I can’t predict the future, just point out the pattern, which is well illustrated above. BLM in May 2021 seems to be somewhere in the red circle, with the long term effects still unknown. The purple circle (decline) is inevitably next…it’s where all social movements go eventually.
If you want some evidence for this case, just look at the hipster movement.
During the last decade (2010-2020), hipsters went from an underground phenomenon to being found on every major metropolitan street corner to being disliked by much of the general public. And the rise and fall of hipsters over the course of 10 years follows the above craft almost exactly.
What came after the hipsters? Hype Beat fashion (flashy and slick compared to the drab, thrift store look of hipsters) and mass adoption of ideas (hipsters were trying to be unique…as you’ll see in the next story, Gen Z don’t care if all other Gen Z’ers skate).
If BLM is fading from organic movement to stodgy institution, that doesn’t mean we’ve seen the last of movements around race and justice in the U.S., just that the next generation will likely do something more punk rock….which will, in turn, become institutionalized as Gen Z ages into adulthood and replaced yet again.
[two]
A couple of sports trends I wanted to point out, as both have been accelerated by COVID. Up first, eSports (competitive video game playing in front of audiences), which has quietly grown to selling out the Brooklyn Nets Barclays Stadium for championship events with a market value at $1.1 billion, meaning eSports is more valuable than many NHL teams and the bottom of MLB teams (looking at you, Kansas City Royals).
This week, the first “training gym” for eSports pros and amateurs alike opened in Japan.
Japan is opening its first gym for esports in Tokyo, a space for both amateur and experienced gamers to train and get professional coaching, according to Japan Today.
The competitive gaming space, which is set to open on May 19 and will be known as "Esports Gym," will include a lounge and gaming PCs outfitted with some of Japan's most popular games, including Valorant and League of Legends.3
Screens are not just keeping kids indoors, they’re also shaping what sports are played outdoors. During COVID, skateboarding hit an all time high.
The pandemic led people to rediscover the outdoors. Meanwhile, social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are bringing greater visibility and representation to skateboarding. And to top it off, the Olympics are including it as a sport for the first time this summer. All of these planets have aligned, Kendall says, to fuel what might be the strongest demand the global skateboarding industry has ever seen. The market was valued at $1.9 billion in 2018. Before the pandemic hit, it was projected to reach $2.4 billion by 2025. Now, it's likely to grow even more.
NPR also points out that “skater girls” like Latosha Stone are using social media to make skating chic and fashionable, as much a Gen-Z lifetyle accessory as a sport. And “skatetok” (the skateboarding subculture on video platform Tiktok) has been a gathering place to teens to connect during a year where they were kept from doing that normal teenage thing…gathering with friends.
Observations:
A). Whether or not you like these things (I like video games but not skateboarding), the biggest Gen-Z influencers may come from these arenas.
B). The popularity of sports has risen and fallen with technology. Baseball, boxing and horse racing were the most popular during the heyday of radio, then were replaced by football and basketball, which play to TV better. Hockey became more popular when HD TV technology hit the market and you could actually see the dang puck. Now, the the culture of “highlight reels” going inspire a new era of kids to choose an activity that could create a viral moment. In part, kids have always played sports for attention and social status…and now it’s possible to gain both of those things with a global audience.
C). Team sports can’t survive ongoing lockdowns and restrictions that crush free play for children. Even New York Magazine is calling the CDC’s summer camp retulations “cruel and irrational.”
[three]
One of the more puzzling trends in the last decade is that the American political left and political right…just quit caring about the poor internationally.
Today, the American Right is heavily focused on lifting COVID lockdowns, gun rights, and free speech (particularly when it comes to social media) while the primary goals of the American Left seem to be tax policy (particularly in regard to the super wealthy) and a variety of issues surrounding various sub-groups.
Somewhere in there…we seem to have completely forgotten that the rest of the world exists, and much of it is quite poor.
Whatever your opinions of Dubya and Obama, they were the last American Presidents to advocate for aid to Africa, and without talking points from a major political pulpit, the rest of the country seems to have lost interest.
Which is why I was so surprised when Ben Affleck dropped this (at least seemingly) well informed statement in an interview with the McCain Institute:
One of the things that I’m advocating, most broadly, is to develop a different perception of Africa. If you have any real value in terms of being able to use a microphone or loudspeaker and project to a large group of people, it’s to help share your understanding with them. It may be a little too complex to explain to a broader audience but I will mention here that this notion that we’ve thrown a lot of aid at Africa and nothing’s worked is a profound and dishonest way of looking at the situation. What Europe and North America have in fact done is extracted a great deal of wealth from Africa, disenfranchised Africans, oppressed them. Even in Congo, for example, the only country ever owned, owned by a human being, which [sic] is King Leopold, in the 1900s, during which the ownership period of which country 10 million Congolese died, and the gigantic amount of wealth in terms of rubber was extracted for advancement in terms of the economy of Europe during the Industrial Revolution, that alone so far dwarfs all the aid ever spent on Africa in its history.
So it’s extremely disingenuous to suggest that somehow we’re frittering all this money and we’re not doing anything with it. That’s just dishonest. What we’ve done historically, and what we continue to do — and when I say “we,” I mean the Chinese, who are making unfair deals with the Africans to extract minerals today, or the Russians, and so forth, that historically, this kind of exploitation is in fact what has continued to happen. A small amount of aid has been spent, granted, some of it spent not very well.
Many (most?) celebrities use their “platforms” to just parrot talking points they heard elsewhere, which is why it’s so refreshing to see someone who’s had incredible success in the entertainment industry approach a topic with knowledge of actual policy.
While we’re on the topic, I simply have to drop in this conversation with Ben Affleck at Mosaic Church in LA, where Ben deep dives into his recovery from alcoholism and refreshed perspective.
[four]
One of my most distinct memories of high school basketball was the occasional overnighter for a tournament. The night would usually end with half the team piling onto couches in the lobby of a Holiday Inn to catch Jay Leno before dispersing to our respective rooms for mandatory lights out.
Late night TV provided a mix of comedy, interviews and live music…all there and gone in the era of dial up internet. If you wanted to be a part of the pop culture banter, you’d better turn on NBC before bed. Discussing late night TV was a teenage bonding experience…and one that past it’s expiration date without much of anyone noticing.
When I saw that Conan O’Brian was exiting from his late night show on TBS, my first thought was “Conan is still on” and my second was “who even hosts late night TV anymore.”
When Amanda and I were dating, I spent hours one night trying to get tickets to Conan’s “Chicago week,” to no avail. There was probably a moment in 2014 or so that I watched a late night show for the last time in my life, and just didn’t realize it was happening. A decades old pop culture mainstay sucked in oxygen for the final death rattle while most of us were binging Netflix.
Barstool Sports ran this excellent take:
You see what Jimmy Fallon and James Corden have been doing, they're not all too concerned with hosting traditional late night talk shows, either. They're constantly hunting viral moments to be shared by your aunt on Facebook three weeks after they aired live. The Beatles aren't making their American debut on Jimmy Kimmel, you know? That's dead, and has been dead for some time. David Letterman's original show was groundbreaking for its era, his modern counterpart isn't on ABC, CBS, or NBC. It's Eric Andre on Adult Swim, openly mocking the entire genre. It's Joe Rogan, only talking to people he wants to talk to for three hours at a time on his schedule in his studio. In an era where authenticity is being used as a selling point, a seven minute interview between perfect strangers in an attempt to sell something isn't cutting it anymore.
On one hand, the world today is infinitely better…there’s more interesting content than I’ll ever have time to watch on a couple of streaming services for $35/month or so than I would have ever had interest in from a $150/month cable package from a decade prior.
On the other, shared moments are a glue of society, and we have less common experiences each year. Now that sports have become highly political (left wing—NBA, right wing—UFC) and TV has become an uber-personalized experience that spans close to a dozen major streaming platforms…what’s left? Awards shows? Nope, those are in the ratings gutter.
Tentpole MCU theatrical releases and the Super Bowl are becoming the last “blockbuster” events that most Americans experience.
I’m not advocating for going back to the days of $18 CD’s at Best Buy and $5 rentals at the local video store, as the democratization of distribution has given the world infinitely more and better art and entertainment…but I am noting that we did have more to talk about back then.
[five]
The unstoppable Marvel Movie Machine has announced the next 10 movies. Much like a Biden budget, money machine go brrrrrrrr. Although I don’t understand the premise, Eternals boasts a cast that includes Angela Jolie, Salma Hayek, Brian Tyree Henry (Atlanta, Widows) Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick) and Kit Harrington and Richard Madden (reunited for the first time since playing half brothers Jon Snow and Rob Stark in Game of Thrones).
Stranger Things just dropped a new trailer for season 4. No release date yet, but it’s rumored to be early 2022.
The latest crime thriller from Jason Statham and Guy Ritchie, Wrath of Man is getting pretty solid reviews. Not that they matter, you’re either the kind of person who tunes in to see Jason Statham kill people, or you aren’t (and I am).
I’m filing this under “huh?!” Oscar winning director Barry Jenkins adapted the novel The Underground Railroad in which a literal (not metaphorical) subterranean railroad carries slaves to freedom from the Antebellum South, which this NY Times article can probably explain better than me, because it seems like a very odd premise. The entire miniseries is on Amazon Prime Video Today.
Entertainment weekly published an interesting history of The Fast & The Furious, which started out as a mid-budget summer flick about an undercover cop (Paul Walker) who infiltrates the the crew of an illegal street racing crew (led by Vin Diesal). Based on a 1998 Vibe article documenting the New York underground street racing scene in New York, summer throwaway flick somehow spawned nine sequels (and one nuclear sub), as well as one spin-off movie (and counting) to become one of the blockbuster franchises in history while turning Diesal and the late Paul Walker into bonafide superstars. As a fan, I’ll be the first to admit that some of the F&F entries are downright terrible, but the brand is as big as ever two decades in. F&F 9 hit theaters June 25.
This is a weird one. A man has come out against the 2002 Steven Spielberg/Leonardo DiCaprio hit Catch Me If You Can, claiming the story of a grifter who passed as a doctor, airline pilot and lawyer while cashing more than $2 million in bad checks…is completely made up. I’d take that news with a pretty massive grain of salt, considering Frank Abagnale worked for the FBI after being released from prison. I’ve got a couple of friends at the Bureau, and they’re not the type to overlook falsified backstories. But hey, it’s not every day you see an author come out and try to destroy twenty year old Oscar nominated film, so I thought it was worth a mention.
MUSIC: Coldplay is back with a new single. The new album from British blue eyed soul singer Rag’n’Bone Man dropped, and I got through half of it on my commute—left a strong first impression. This live performance of his single Crossfire is worth a listen as an intro. Miranda Lambert’s anticipated joint album with Texas songwriters Jon Randall and Jack Ingram, The Marfa Tapes, is out today, with a documentary on the making of the album in tiny Marfa, TX (pop: 1,625) will debut tomorrow at 7pm EST on Miranda’s Facebook page and will only be available for 24 hours. Alt-country troubadours American Aquarium debuted a surprise album of 90’s country covers, and 90’s country star Travis Tritt released an album of 90’s sounding country originals. Texas country singer Cody Jinks, who I refer to as this generation’s Johnny Cash, is recording a new album, as is alt-country pioneer Jamey Johnson who hasn't released a project since 2010 due to a decade-long running legal entanglement with his publisher and a traumatic head injury from slipping and falling on ice. In hip hop, J. Cole released his first single in three years, a return to his early Friday Night Lights era mixtape form, and Detroit rapper Tee Grizzley continues his excellent run with Built for Whatever, a pop-punk-meets-rap pioneer KennyHoopla killed it on a new single with Blink 182’s Travis Barker. In CCM, Switchfoot and NEEDTOBREATHE offered up new singles and newcomers CAIN released an album that’s clearly the result of some label guy saying “what if we took Little Big Town and replaced the booze references with Jesus.” I like it though, rip off or not (and it is).
[epilogue]
A state-by-state look at where marijuana is now legal, either as a “prescription” (aka to anyone with $200 to give a doc in a weed card via virtual visit) or for recreational use.
Quick reminder that teens who smoke weed are at a greater risk of developing psychosis later in life and can lead to increased anxiety and paranoia with heavy use.
Beyond that (speaking as a non-user/never tried it), it seems like we’ve pretty much accepted that nationwide legalization is coming…and this certainly isn’t the hill I’m going to die on.
But while the Devil’s Lettuce isn’t as nearly as bad as it was portrayed in D.A.R.E. when I was growing up, and certainly has medical uses…society seems to have relaxed the other way, assuming that recreational use poses no risk to anyone. At the very least, we can say that weed isn’t for kids, and we should do all we can to prevent teens from toking up when long term use can have harmful effects in those who start early.
Until the next one,
-sth