Can hating consumerism be the next TikTok trend, please?

At any moment someone was going to shout out “I love shopping!”

Before I get into a thing that bugged me last night, may I remind you that I’m doing a live set for All Around The Campfire with Long Neck tomorrow, September 11, and it kicks off at 7pm ET with Chris Farren. It’s on Twitch and I think I’ve worked out the kinks since I last tried that. I haven’t done a livestream like this in a while and probably won’t do something on the fly again for a while, so tune in!

I don’t consider myself to be an obsessively tidy person, but I do find joy in well-organized spaces. My desk is currently a mess, but I’ll probably clean things up this afternoon. My art supplies and sketchbooks and guitar cables and adapters find their way all over the place until I have the time to wrangle them back into their homes.

At the risk of sounding incredibly boring, I enjoyed that Marie Kondo show, follow minimalist day planner layouts on Instagram, and am the person in my band who handles the gear Tetris because an ill-balanced guitar case will bug the hell out of me. It would be logical that my next guilty pleasure would be that new show on Netflix Getting Organized: The Home Edit, letting my brain drift off into the sea of tidy closets full of labeled plastic bins. I even got slightly excited about it. BUT I WAS VERY WRONG.

I wanted a glorified Ikea hacking show but instead, I got tacky script fonts and high pitched squeals from women who probably have a wine-o’clock sign in their kitchen. The women who run The Home Edit and their teenage sidekicks remind me of every mom and lacrosse-playing daughter at the Bridgewater mall who would look at me like I just crawled out of a garbage bin. They sport an all-black uniform on the show but we are not the same. I was only able to finish one episode before my adolescent trigger kicked in and there were just too many white women with loose curls and balayage for me to handle.

There’s something calming about orderly design and grids and a lack of clutter but wow…WOW I am 100% not on the side of retail therapy, making sure you have custom plastic hangers for your 50 purses or a walk-in closet for your collection of fast fashion. Hard pass. Big no. Absolutely not. I refuse to even link the show here. Doesn’t matter.

There’s a specifically capitalist element of shows like Getting Organized or Queer Eye that I can’t support, suggesting that self-care is directly connected to re-furnishing your living room or having a walk-in closet to reorganize in the first place. I’m all about helping folks clean up or get their life in order, but I felt like at any moment someone was going to shout out “I love shopping!”. There’s a part of my brain that will always react like the following gif when I sense that someone cares too much about fitting in with the Kardashians or keeping up appearances.

This does not spark joy.

Maybe it’s why I’ve chosen to go on tour a lot and be a bit of a workaholic, so I wouldn’t have the time to watch this stuff.

I live on a coast that is almost entirely on fire. A new and superficial show on Netflix is not important. The fact that Emo Night Brooklyn was planning on having a party is marginally more urgent, but we already got worked up about that yesterday. They’ve since canceled the party, but I wish that the punks on twitter could rally an end to consumer culture in addition to calling out people being reckless during a pandemic. Now’s the time, right?

I want to think that I’m past the point of having a lot of angst and investment in the whole punks vs. norms thing but I guess I’m not?

ANYWAY, here’s a video of Algiers performing The Underside of Power on KEXP. On top of the fact that I want more mission-driven rock in my life and their singer is amazing, their drummer was the original drummer in Bloc Party, and their bassist is wearing a Millions Of Dead Cops shirt. 🥳

Now back to work. Thanks for reading!