Once more, with feeling‼️

In a world of numbness, here are the cracks.

Welcome to the first week of once more, with feeling. Each week, you'll get a round-up of moments that cut through the fog of indifference. From poignant articles to fleeting TikToks, songs, texts, memes, places, objects—no thing and no feeling is off limits. Since everyone's infinite scroll is curated to their own little universe, each edition will include one pick from me and a few from guest contributors. Hopefully, something in here opens your cold heart too.

This week, without meaning to, every contributor (myself included) ended up writing about the same thing: music. The accidental theme. The great connector. The universal language ;) Somehow, each of us circled around moments where sound collided with the greater context of culture (today and of years past).

It probably won't stay this cohesive. But for week one, it feels right.

Let’s begin.

Bryce, TV writer

Alex G recently released a single called “Afterlife” along with a corresponding music video. In the song, he ponders his newly minted fatherhood, likening the experience to an afterlife of sorts. He toys with the idea that being a dad is an analog form of time travel, an opportunity to dance with the eternal. It’s sunny, tender, songwriting that culminates in a chorus that tears into a room like a joyous exorcism. “Son, son, son” he sings before belting a youthful, barely on key “eeee.” It’s simple yet perfect in its primitive nature — the thinking man’s answer to the “la la la”. It’s all I want to sing, all the time.

The song’s message has stuck with me this summer perhaps because so many of my friends and relatives are becoming new parents themselves, rearing children into a world of inept fascism and climate peril. Strange-faced JD Vance is encouraging women to become baby machines. Elon has 147 children and thinks every man should do the same. None of it feels nice. But something about Alex G’s outlook gives me hope, if not for a better world, at least for more Alex G’s to be born. And to my friends, I’m glad they’ve discovered the gift of eternal life — they’re exactly the people I want to be around forever.

Isadora

These days, taking anything at face value feels nearly impossible. Given how tethered we are to media in every form, it's rare to encounter pure, unfiltered humanity online. Especially in the realm of celebrity, where every post (or non-post) feels like a strategic move. Even us normies curate our “unfiltered” photo dumps with the care of a museum exhibition—eight to fifteen images designed to look casual, spontaneous, real. All of this to say: when something genuinely authentic slips through, it can make a bitch cry!

I was raised by crunchy, granola, ex-hippie artist parents, which meant a constant and aggressive rotation of their music (my dad hitchhiked to Woodstock on a school bus). When my mom finally figured out the internet (more than a decade after dial-up and AOL chatrooms), she stumbled upon a video of Stevie Nicks in her dressing room. I don’t remember when she showed it to me, but I was in high school. Like most teens, I rolled my eyes. I was too busy shuffling between weezy’s No Ceilings mixtape and The Lonesome Crowded West on my iPod.

But this week, I rewatched it. Admittedly after being reminded of it by everyone’s fav bro coastal elite podcast (take a guess). And this time, it hit different.

Stevie is in what looks like a high school auditorium, getting her makeup done by someone clearly close to her. There’s an ease, a comfort—she’s slouched. She’s giggling. She has no ideas she is being filmed. As she absentmindedly sings “Wild Heart,” music begins to swell from somewhere off-screen. She air guitars. She sways. Someone else, unseen, starts to harmonize. Her face glows, her voice is raw, her body moves like she’s (sweetly) possessed. She's not performing. She’s just lost in the thing she loves.

There’s so much about it that makes me tender. Maybe it’s the setting—cramped, casual, and definitively no-frills. Maybe it’s how grainy and imperfect the footage is. Maybe it’s her unaltered voice, no mic or monitor in sight. But more than anything, it’s the fact that nothing like this can happen today. We will never again live in a world where a global star can lose themselves in their art, in front of others, without the pressure of performing. No phones. No “content strategy.” No self-awareness. Just a moment.

It’s beautiful. It’s heartbreaking. It makes me question everything. Still, somehow, it gives me hope.

James, Designer & Web Developer

In the early 2010’s, there was a group of writers in the Alt Lit scene called the “New Sincerity.” Their work, appearing on sites like HTMLGIANT, reacted to the irony-drenched, Urban Outfitters-wearing hipster. One popular writer and YouTuber, Steve Roggenbuck, would upload raw videos of himself while on book tours, talking to the camera with poetic rhythm about mainstream, trendy or low brow things like the internet, Lil B, YOLO, and Justin Bieber. The work from the New Sincerity in part had the zeitgeist all over it, even from these big, corny commercial projects. On the commercial side, Justin Bieber released the music video for Beauty and a Beat (feat. Nicki Minaj) in 2012, his most popular song on Spotify just last week, 13 years later. The song’s video was styled in the same handheld selfie POV, and it was framed by a story that Bieber’s laptop and camera had been stolen. The video release was preceded by a short Twitter campaign that attempted to impress that Bieber’s property really was stolen, and raw footage of the star was leaking imminently.

This year, stories of Justin Bieber being “unwell” started to percolate across TikTok and YouTube channels, while traditional tabloids and TMZ ran troubling stories about him and his new family. “I’m standing on business” became unavoidable. After weeks of percolation about Bieber’s well-being, SWAG drops — and it includes the very clips of his viral supposed breakdown. It’s not hard to imagine the clips were added last minute, but it begged the question to me: was the public’s obsession with Bieber itself a coordinated PR campaign?

Since 2012, watching YouTube on your laptop or PC has given way to the ubiquity of smartphones and the ability to stream video basically wherever, whenever in the US. It has transformed how we digest information on the screen, and also how we understand ourselves in front of and behind the ever present camera. Developed by the capital "S" State over decades, omnipresent surveillance footage has been normalized into, at worst, creating training data for the police and military and, at best, into the ability to monetize your own or other’s lives through TikTok, YT, Only Fans, Twitch etc. Using the decentralized network of cameras in every pocket, a coordinated stunt could plant some well placed stories to rile up fans and activate a surveillance machine of Beliebers.

Years after the release of the Beauty and the Beat video, its stunt is a cute relic compared to what’s possible in a post-truth era. Maybe we were totally bamboozled into bringing Bieber into the cultural consciousness — more people will surely know the “standing on business” clip than hear the whole album. Ultimately, did most interested people care about Bieber’s health? Do I? Was he ever unwell? What does that even mean? Perhaps it's post-sincerity: whether the press tour was sincere or not, listening to SWAG made me feel like none of it was really relevant to the music. To my ear, the album is unironically good — if you're into that sort of thing — and helped put aside the complicated feelings I had around whatever that rollout was.

That’s a wrap on this week’s dispatch of fleeting feelings! If any of these sparked something in you, good!! And if they didn’t…there’s always next week (and a big, crazy, beautiful, terrible world out there to either piss you off, cause tears, or make you laugh.)

Once more, with feeling is a weekly installment and anyone is welcome to submit. Send something that broke through your feed, stopped you in your tracks, etc. A song, a scene, a text, a tweet, a food, a person, a weird object on the sidewalk. Anything is fair game! We’ll include a few in next week’s roundup—an ever-expanding archive of the unfiltered, the uncynical, the accidentally profound.

DM, Email, or shout into the void. Just don’t keep it to yourself.

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