Dingecore

Coolness is OUT

I went to the nail salon today and had the lady paint my fingernails bright green. It’s an offensive color. Upsetting to the senses. It makes me look messy and frantic, like I’m perpetually running late, reeking of synthetic rose perfume, and wearing a worn down pair of Havaianas, foam sole so cracked that the thong pops out and you end up stepping on the concrete with your bare foot.

I very much picked this color on purpose. I even went to a different nail salon down the street from where I usually go because the first one didn’t have a color that was quite confrontational enough. My usual spot is nothing fancy, $40 for a regular manicure pedicure, but it’s airy and has big storefront windows that let the light in and they take Venmo. All that adds up to a green selection that’s nothing but gemstones and gourmands, only mints, seafoams, teals, matchas, pistachios, forests, emeralds. But I wanted a chemical green, cheap looking, toxic waste vibes. So I walked three blocks down, to the other nail salon that plays violent world news from an obscure network on a TV with the image quality of the 1980s that’s mounted way up in the back corner, so once you’ve spent your hour there you’re not only very worried but also your eyes and neck hurt from straining it to watch. Obviously they had the right green.

the toxic waste in question

Speaking of the 1980s, I also updated my prescription a couple weeks ago and my new glasses arrived today. What a thrill. Nothing like updating your NPC outfit. Unlike the green manicure, I genuinely think the glasses look good. Multiple people have told me something about me “just gives 80s” (shot in the dark, it’s because I have curly hair and a bold energy) so I have decided to lean in. Dress up as myself. Say what you want about Kibbe types, color seasons, generally typecasting yourself, etc., sometimes one must play their own character to understand their own character, and fuck with it with a healthy dose of objectivity.

i am actually quite happy with them

Slime green nails and porn producer glasses, a confusing vision of ugliness. How marvelous! How refreshing. For at least ten years culture has trended toward Extremely Beautiful and Incredibly Perfect, and recently I’ve felt it reach a head. Monolithic coolness has congealed and become suffocating. What is it that they’re saying? It’s the age of the Instagram face? Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny? Everyone’s a celebrity? Everyone’s a sellout? It’s obviously the phones? Well I’m just about donezo with all this sanitized pornified living, all this sedation and curation and influencing. The urge to manufacture beauty in a harsh and dingy world is deeply understandable, probably innate, but this obsession with aesthetics seems to me to be increasingly cloying. Even dealings that are supposed to be “ugly” are really supposed to be hot. Photo dumps. Cluttercore. Crocs. EVERYTHING must be vibey, EVERYTHING must be cool. EVERYTHING must sell something. Bleh. Enough. The body craves a break, so I’m seeking out the dinge for the same reason people turn their phones black and white: Blunt the pleasure centers, save one from oneself.

A few weeks ago I started freelancing for a local alt weekly, and it’s actually shocking how little I think about myself when I’m reporting. When I’m on Substack, all I think about is myself. Makes me feel deep down like a nervous dog. When I’m writing for the newspaper, I actually have a job to do. There are real stakes, no glamour, and ego is adjusted to scale. My sources all have angles, I have an angle, my editor has an angle, the readers have an angle, and we’re all part of an ecosystem that benefits when this article gets published. Perhaps the best part for me is that the writing doesn’t even matter; my only job is to research and interview until I understand what’s going on well enough to be able to tell it to someone, and then write that down. In comparison, the New York San Francisco zillennial Twitter-famous media party flavor of rat race is pretentious and dissociative. A total mind prison. It’s like everyone’s trying to get an invite to the coke room, which is always the best part about doing coke, except in this case the coke is actually just a fidget spinner or something ridiculous like that.

But ay, sometimes it’s not. Even if we’re all talking about things that don’t matter to people outside the bubble, the externalities are real. Reputation is real, money is real, insofar as anything to which people ascribe meaning is real. I can only write for the alt weekly because I also have a full-time job copywriting; if I’m trying to work in media/art to live, it can boil down to perform cool or make no money. Act like you’re excited about that fidget spinner or write advertisements forever. From that perspective making sure one’s brand is “hot girl on the pulse” appears to be serious business. But I can’t decide. Every time I zoom out another frame things go serious, unserious, serious, unserious. The essential weight of life eludes me.

here are the nails. straight up unappetizing lol

One thing I do know is that curating a vibe takes a lot of time and energy. Even just the couple minutes it takes in the morning to plug your phone into the car, open Spotify, identify the vibe you’re going for, find an album that hits just right, lalala. The self-awareness is exhausting. So all last week I listened to the radio on my commute to and from work. Just turning on the car and let the radio play Foo Fighters greatest hits at me has been extremely liberating. No longer am I trapped within the never-ending narrative where I am the star. The radio says to me, you are just a random adult on their hour-long commute to work down the freeway, sunny and trash-strewn, ushered by the economic current, which you can do nothing about. The ensuing vibe is concrete and life-flavored.

The interesting thing about the radio, too, is like, at this point, who even listens to these stations? Who are they made for? I can’t immediately work out the marketing strategy behind them, the way I can with most influencers, brands, or any one of the battery of cool new culture magazines (for example, Dirt, Polyester, or Byline, all of which publish essays and criticism on the phenomenon of the internet while also presenting the very type of allure they’ve just analyzed so shrewdly). Virtually everyone/thing that’s cool online today presents a brand persona that is futuristic but, in a way, unimaginative, at their most radical shucking trends that passed only in the essential Yesterday. Pants were skinny, pants are big again, soon they’ll be (say it with me) skinny again. We all know that, the coolest people just know when to make the switch. But the radio still sounds like 2008; surely bad for audience growth, but culturally deviant within the current media landscape, and kind of amazing to me.

And I haaaate to say it, but you know who else is culturally deviant in that way? Jojo Siwa. That crazy crazy girl. I must say, and I mean zero sarcasm here, I’m refreshed by how uncool her vibe is, how she offers it up so shamelessly. If you don’t know, Jojo Siwa is a reality TV star and child entertainer who originally appeared on Dance Moms. She’s known for her huge rainbow hair bows and general loudness, and more recently, for chopping her hair, coming out publicly, and embodying a kind of Hey Mamas lesbian energy on social media. Now, she’s 20 and attempting to rebrand her child star image with a new song, “Karma.” The reception (so far) has generally been bad. The verdict: The song is cringey, her brand still lacks authenticity, and the rebrand failed.

Jojo then, Jojo now

Most of the Jojo rebrand hate online started with a (now deleted) TikTok that went around a few weeks ago, where Grace VanderWaal explains how Jojo should’ve rebranded instead. (For context, Grace VanderWaal, also 20, is a singer-influencer who’s generally known for playing ukulele and singing with the cursive affect, which won her America’s Got Talent when she was 12.) The critique goes: Jojo needs to cut the flamboyant act and be “sophisticated” and “honest” if she really wants to capture the social media cool girl audience and revitalize her career. Rawness is real. “Sofia Coppola-style shaky cam” video footage is real. “Hair down, babe,” Grace tsks.

But Jojo is not, I don’t know, Clairo, or Mitski, or Rachel Sennott. Jojo has never been chic. Understood literally, to be “authentic” or “honest” does not mean to be palatable for today’s internet coolness standards. Sometimes an “authentic self” is actually annoying and unlikeable. Sorry! The visible self is always a performance of some sort, a mere self-display. Jojo is self-displaying no less authentically than Grace VanderWaal is on TikTok, dressed up like Evelyn Mulwray, recording who knows how many takes on her phone; no less authentic than me, choosing the words and photos to go in this blog, which I’ve decided should be purple and broken-computer-screen blue¹. Acting upon one’s own insecurities or delusions of grandeur is an authentic self-display, even if one’s spectators consider it off-putting and weird. Frankly, I love seeing people make faux pas on red carpets, seems hella vulnerable to me! And anyway, look at Jojo throughout her recorded life and tell me “Karma” isn’t her genuine vision, which seems to include a large element of trolling. I actually feel like it makes a lot of sense that this would feel right and real to her, at 20 years old, at her level of lifelong megafame. In a few years, I bet they’re gonna play Jojo remixes in hip clubs and put her on the cover of Vogue, and everyone’s going come around, just like they did on Ariana Grande and Rebecca Black and Addison Rae.

Jojo is the opposite of popular “cool,” and to that I say, do your thing girl. Takes guts. I’m sure I’ll be hearing “Karma” on the radio soon, somewhere between Good Charlotte, Vivaldi, and static.

1. If you’re reading this on email, you won’t see the site colors. You can see it on discussioncandy.substack.com.