As with any cult, the work of escaping American evangelicalism often extends into a lifelong process of acquiring something like a normal frame of cultural reference. As an adult in 2025, I'm fascinated by the canon of the late 20th century less out of a sense of nostalgia and more because brushing up on it gives me context for both the generational experiences my peers wrongly assume I share and the generational experiences my parents chose to leave unsaid because they thought they'd left them behind by getting saved. Some of the church moms I knew would make you cover up a t-shirt with Disney's Ariel on it because of her bare shoulders and midriff - an anti-sex kneejerk to be sure, yet when I saw The Little Mermaid for the first time in middle age I too found it repulsively skeezy; what they would call the consequences of unchecked promiscuity I would call the male gaze emboldened by the ways the sexual revolution transformed rather than relieved gender inequality. Other animated blockbusters of that period did achieve a family-friendly eroticism that this transgender communist thinks ought to be acceptable in general-audiences entertainment - Beauty and the Beast's Harlequin paperback undertones and The Prince of Egypt's sword-and-sandals sex appeal come to mind - but the textually teenage female leads in Mermaid and Aladdin (to say nothing of both films' gaggles of tittering cheesecake extras) are presented with a wink and a leer that feel like bones thrown to adult chaperones alongside the shock jock celebrity casting and Delilah-bait adult contemporary numbers, to the point of uncomfortably calling to mind the contemporaneous softcore boom enabed by cable TV and home video.
In some cases I feel lucky to have the specific displaced perspective that I do - speaking of VHS-era sexual tumult, I was deeply moved by Fatal Attraction's portrait of the wrong/ed woman's despair in a way I'm sure I wouldn't have been if I'd seen it during its original theatrical run, which became infamous for hordes of repeat-viewer misogynists cheering for that woman's studio-mandated execution. Elsewhere, vaunted masterworks fall flat for embodying ideological threads that have since fully revealed themselves as dead ends: I mostly just found Taxi Driver's "provocative" "ambiguity" irritating this side of a million 21st century column inches ascribing everyman sanctity to young white male assassins and spree killers. I've read the phrases "legitimate concerns" and "others say" too many times to afford benefit of the doubt to Scorsese framing blackness as pure exotic menace. I'll grant Paul Schrader that Travis Bickle is written with enough obvious insanity that the fault clearly lies with the chud viewer for misreading him as heroic, but by the same token I couldn't help but notice that every chance his scene partners get to respond to that supposed insanity, they either say something baldly absurd or trail off as if conceding his point. The film's naturalistic style prompts the viewer to assume these characters have context and history, but in Schrader's actual text their behavior registers as unmotivated and intrinsic - the impression you get is of a very Hobbesian world where everyone except Bickle languishes in a "barbaric" "natural" state conflated with instinct or libido.
Hardcore is one of the first in a long line of Schrader's riffs on Taxi Driver, and smack in the center of it he has George C. Scott walk us through TULIP, a mnemonic for the tenets of Calvinist christian theology. John Calvin was in many ways a 16th-century analogue of modern "Catholic"-"convert" tech world buzzards like J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel: a petit-bourgeouis striver pursuing upward mobility through a law career, he took up Protestantism as an adult just in time to parley the Reformation into quasi-governmental soft power. His weaving of law, religion, and politics served as an important stepping stone from the overtly religious governance and knowledge structures of Europe's prior centuries to the ostensibly secular but still christianity-shaped equivalents of the modern West. It's no surprise, then, that there's a heavy precedent for Hobbes' bleak colonial-aplogist social theory (and by extension Taxi Driver's declining-and-fallen Manhattan) in TULIP - the T literally stands for "Total Depravity," which is exactly what it sounds like. Schrader draws the Total Depravity of California's post-Altamont sex industry with a lot more levity than Taxi Driver's Beame-era urban decay, but the deliberate parallels are clear. Where Jodie Foster insists her pimp must really love her because they're both Virgos, Season Hubley gets tasked with two identical laugh lines about worshipping Venus. She tries to turn the ridcule back on Scott when he explains TULIP, but the movie is only slightly less dismissive of her than he is - the truth is that any IRL reformed theology sicko could chuckle through an interaction like this just as easily, and be just as satisfied to simply insist "it's not the same" without elaborating. The script declines to let Jake Van Dorn's armor chip that easily because it understands who this guy is, how he thinks, and where he comes from with startling precision. The second and third acts' cartoony sketches of left coast red-light districts couldn't be a starker contrast to the first act in the Dutch Calvinist Mecca of Grand Rapids, Michigan, bearing a denominational specificity (down to the particular catechism!) that's surprisingly rare in the pop culture of a country so defined by christian sectarianism. Where Travis Bickle's mishmash of Pickpocket and '70s malaise feels blurry in places, Van Dorn is startlingly like several real men I knew growing up in a D.C. enclave of his and Schrader's same faith community - the way he walks and smiles and dresses and prays, the ways and reasons he escalates conflict, the way he deadpans and backhands his way through objecting to a shade of blue that's too fun.
To me it's this precision that lets Hardcore succeed at productively inhabiting its deutragonist's perspective where Taxi Driver fails. Schrader maintains that it's a film for and of his Grand Rapids origins, and even though his hometown scorned it even while he was shooting there it's clear that the lurid content they objected to reflects their own prurient fixations far more than the transgressive vigor of 1979's New Hollywood milieu. Each time the film presents some detail of sex work as particularly shocking, however real it may be it's delivered in the cadence of the Van Dorns I knew scoffing at the secular world's sinful decadence: the brothels accept credit cards! The movies are shot by UCLA students! The prostitutes worship the old greek gods! The theaters are popping up even in our town! The film's linear journey from pornography to prostitution to kink to snuff is a slippery slope straight out of a Chick Tract, and where repressed religious conservatives are common customers of the real sex industry (both this film and Taxi Driver take for granted that a sex worker somehow wouldn't even comprehend a client who just wants to talk) Van Dorn really is the unknowable alien to the Hollyweirdos that he claims to be. God mercifully spared Hardcore from suffering the same fate as Schrader's sublime followup American Gigolo, which got slopped into a Showtime series during the recently waned era of "prestige" IP recycling - this story would be incomprehensible if you tried to temper it with research and grit. It has to follow the logic of a Facebook post or it doesn't work.
The real challenge that Hardcore presents to its target audience isn't an endurance test of their modesty, nor Hubley pointing out that TULIP seems fucked from a step back - on the contrary it gives the Calvinist reactionary everything they want, vindicates all their neuroses and validates all their self-mythologizing, and lets it all play out on its own terms, only to reveal that none of it actually solves the equation of being alive. The Calvinist interprets Jesus' teaching as a mandate to be "in the world, but not of it," a supposedly ironclad principle that the film gnaws at from the moment Van Dorn chooses to keep watching his own daughter's sexual performance and further undercuts when marching down Sepulveda in his sunday best to ask after her only gets him stonewalled. Countless evangelical men, including many I knew, rely on the faith's institutions to shield them from consequences for eruptions of terrifying violence like the ones we see from Van Dorn at key moments in his crusade. Hubley is the victim of his last and darkest outburst, and Scott's sudden pivot to tender fatherly assurances is familiar to anyone raised by the letter of Calvinist champion James Dobson's Dare to Discipline, an anti-Spock parenting manual published nine years before Hardcore which explicitly recommends harming children and then immediately comforting them in order to exploit the resulting psychological distress. When Van Dorn finds his actual daughter, the film grants him his valorous rescue only to leave the viewer on an anticlimactic question mark as both father and daughter seem visibly aware that they can't truly go home again.
Kristen, the daughter, is the weakest link in the film despite Davis making the most of her few scenes; the character shows the limits of this inverted-propaganda approach. (Paul Schrader was never particularly trustworthy with women even before The Allegations surfaced this year.) She doesn't get much subjectivity because cults need to withold subjectivity from their dissidents; her plot arc is mostly ellipses because Van Dorn and his friends have already written it for her. Hardcore does give us a scant few glimpses of who Kristen is when Van Dorn isn't there that complicate his assumptions about her when she is, but a viewer could straightforwardly interpret her as a kidnapped and brainwashed innocent much in the way that Taxi Driver takes Jodie Foster's salvation at face value. And yet - Kristen's absence from her own story is as much a reason the film resonates with me as any of its theological detail, because I've similarly been rendered absent. I've been coerced into her same damsel in distress role, despite (really, because of) the fact that anyone casting me in it thinks I'm a man. There are people in the world, some of whom might be reading this, who I know for a fact have harbored fantasies shaped like the ending of Hardcore about me. There are people in the world who imagine that my hostility towards them would melt as easily as Kristen's does, that if they could just get the chance to reassert their purview over me then whatever grotesqueries they imagine lie beyond it will fall as scales from my eyes. The P in TULIP stands for "Perserverance of the Saints," i.e. that a true christian can't be un-saved; like Kristen defensively hurling obscenities because she knows her father will recoil from them, at some point I realized that the only way to disabuse a Calvinist of my saintly perserverance is to goad them towards its obverse, that by such logic a true apostate can't have ever been a true believer in the first place.
Perserverance of the Saints isn't the only reason that you kind of can't be an ex-Calvinist. More so even than many other cultic Prostestant tendencies, I've observed that Calvinism dyed me and other apostates I know in the wool (few more so than Schrader) in a manner comparable to what I hear from ex-Catholics. It's not just the material or ideological totality of it, although Dare to Discipline and being made to study TULIP at age twelve are certainly the kinds of trauma one dumps for a laugh only to realize she's killed everyone's buzz. The kernel of Calvinism is predestination, the belief that God knew who would go to heaven before even letting there be light. This is exactly as fatalistic as it sounds; most Calvinist thinkers have some kind of sweaty backflip on deck about how this doesn't invalidate free will, but the real perverts will double down with "double predestination," the inevitable corollary that God also created us knowing who'd get eternal torment. Heaven and hell alone will fuck a person up by turning death into a deadline, but predestination means that most people you meet are already lost causes, fomenting the withdrawn and dismissive condescension that Scott so richly embodies. This theology has long been a majority belief among the American intelligence community, by the way - it's a favorite of the West's PMC because of its academic affect, but the appearance of lawyerly rigor is cover for a spiritual and logical dead end that acts as a defense mechanism for their social reproduction. Predestination closes you off to other people in ways that can take longer than you have on this earth to undo, and in like manner closes you off to yourself when disillusionment strikes; Hardcore resonates with me as apostate art because it points directly at that disconnection. It looks like shadows on a cave wall because it is.
I don't think the decade of silence since Joanna Newsom's last album necessarily spells permanent retirement, but part of me kind of wants it to. It isn't that I expect to be disappointed by a comeback - I will admit some trepidation about her returning to the public eye given she'd have to share it with her reptilian second cousin Gavin, but if any American royal has a chance of sticking such a landing it's her. It's more that Divers' love-the-universe-and-everything time travelogue cum death prayer was as definitive a career statement as any artist could hope for, and Newsom's apparently blissful marriage and first child with her biggest fan Andy Samberg felt like resolutions to the barely disguised autobiographical conflicts threaded through the four albums she's given us. Stinger single "Make Hay" was such a neat button on it all that I find myself unbothered for another chapter, not in spite of my love of her work but because of it. I'm not as in the loop with the fandom as I once was, but I think I'm not alone in that sentiment - her surprise set at the Belasco with five unreleased songs has been on YouTube for two and a half years and the Swiftie-esque machine of forums, tumblrs, and transcribers that roared to life when she debuted a number then called "The Diver's Wife" back in 2012 seems mostly dormant.
Live at Bottletree, a near-immaculate board-rip bootleg of a Ys tour stop at the late Birmingham restaurant venue, is a door prize for entering that fandom, essentially akin to a fifth LP. There's a canon tour EP of this same band of future Newsom veterans (minus Katie Hardin on glockenspiel and vocal harmonies) including one of these same arrangements and the Judith Butler-via-Clannad banger "Colleen," but this is the definitive document of Joanna Newsom the live performer, and for that reason an important companion to her studio records for a well-rounded understanding of her artistry. Bottletree doesn't subvert the image of the erstwhile Rodarte model who sings fussy novelistic epics in a heavily affected Texas Gladden impression, but it makes inarguable the earthy sincerity counterbalancing all that artifice.
You hear it right away in her bubbly stage presence - it's a perennial surprise for Newsom concertgoers when all the mystique of her critical reputation melts away to reveal someone who would obviously jump at a walk-on in a Lonely Island movie. Her ebullience is especially remarkable given that even here, in a tiny Alabama venue two weeks after the release of her starmaking album, we can also already hear the tensions with both sides of her growing audience. She shares an anecdote about a misogynistic note she received following a disastrous show the previous night, but maybe more disquieting are the flashes of parasocial posessiveness from this evening's more appreciative listeners. Unfortunately, that habit's only gotten worse - having seen her ten years later touring Divers, it's genuinely a relief to me that someone squeals out an unsolicited song request only once here.
The majority of those moments come in the bookends of the set when she's playing songs that they recognize from her debut The Milk-Eyed Mender, in a much smoother vocal tone and in one case transposed down compared to the studio versions in a way that brings out their tenderness. Mender is a beautiful album with some sharp insights about being a young artist, but by the same token it is a shallower and twee-er incarnation of the ideas that matured starting with Ys - the Narnia-referencing airship ditty "Bridges and Balloons" and vaguely sinister Pynchon cosplay "The Book of Right-On" especially benefit from her delivery here, tinged with the nostalgia of an artist who's revisiting them from the other side of her first true masterwork.
Before she brings out the band to perform that masterwork in its entirety, she plays the beatific Scottish traditional "Ca' the yowes to the knowes." It would be a fitting choice if it were merely setting the table for a full rendition of Newsom's most anglo album to date, but the simplicity of the song belies its deeper connections to her writing. Ys is an album I sing to myself while I do housework, so by the time I first heard Live at Bottletree I knew its lyrics well enough to spot her repeated direct allusions to the folk standard - particularly the phrase "cold clay" as an image of death, which appears in both "Sawdust and Diamonds" and "Only Skin." "Yowes" is the type of pastoral love song where lush nature imagery conveys how the world itself seems to accord with the narrator's romantic and sexual satisfaction; Newsom inverts this device throughout Ys from its first lines describing the sullen dog days of summer, painting overgrown and disarrayed landscapes as omens for the doomed relationship that serves as the album's primary plot arc.
Remember how I was a little uneasy about the idea of Newsom returning to public life now that a peer in her dynastic California family is doing podcasts with Steve Bannon in effort to succeed Donald Trump? Well, here she is introducing her band, in Alabama, as "the rough and ready Secession Day parade." One could pretend to hope she's making a tone-deaf allusion to California's secession movements but let's be real, she wasn't the only folk revivalist doing timid lost-cause trial balloons in the 2000s. It's an ugly moment that speaks to the tensions of race, privilege, and cyclical colonial violence that have plagued American folk music as an idea ever since Alan Lomax arrived in Appalachia with recording equipment in his trunk. I hardly expect Joanna Newsom of all people to have the exact same politics as me, but I do think the worshipfulness she's often treated with by fans has unduly shielded her from criticism of the clear presence of White Feminism in the political dimensions of her work, to say nothing of the wider context of her person and profession.
The six-piece band arrangement of Ys is the main attraction of Live at Bottletree, both virtuosic where it translates Van Dyke Parks' elaborate orchestrations and revelatory where it breaks from them. The most foundational change is the prevalence of Neal Morgan's drums; Newsom's signature polymetric harp technique means her songs have an almost motorik rhythmic sensibility that Parks didn't prioritize. "Emily" and "Cosmia" both arrive at extended improvisatory outros driven by rolling tom grooves, the latter featuring a breathtaking saw solo by Dan Cantrell. For the climax of "Monkey and Bear," Morgan locks into a giant's-footfalls beat that the band rides to a dissonant bluegrass frenzy. The cryptic scene they're scoring reads on paper like an oblique suicide but as sung feels like the titular bear exiting the narrative as if clipping out of a video game map; Parks' cyclone of stacatto woodwinds and portamento strings captures the Beckett vibes nicely but the Bottletree version grounds the metaphysics with outright violence.
Bottletree's warmth and intimacy help underline how personal Ys is in a way that the uninitiated might otherwise miss given the studio version's density and recital-like presentation. "Emily" features two grave-sounding intonations of a mnemonic poem about the difference between a meteor, a meteorite, and a meteoroid; but she deliberately gets the terms mixed up as a tease of her astronomer sister for whom the song is named and whose credited vocal harmonies Hardin stands in for here. Parks' bravura arrangements emphasize the episodic quality of "Only Skin" on record, but the full 18-minute live rendition emphasizes the feats of both its marathon composition and performance and its apocalyptic infidelity narrative. I don't think I've ever heard a song that better captures the fucked, narcotic, and very real happiness that sets in when you think you've buried a lover's conflict that will inevitably prove irreconcileable, nor the loneliness and terror writhing behind that veil of denial - the closest anyone's come to matching it is Newsom herself on the first disc of Have One On Me.
Newsom was one of the first and most famous powerful musicians to antagonize Spotify, and to this day the sole track on her artist page is a session player credit on the soundtrack for Disney's 2011 Muppets reboot film. Her discography is on the other streamers, but I've been thinking a lot about that insistence as boycott efforts against Spotify specifically have ramped up this year. There's a rhetorical utility in describing Spotify as "access to all the world's recorded music" given that we're rightly questioning if that's a worthwhile thing to have, but just as Newsom challenges that desire by witholding four of the 21st century's greatest and most influential albums from that pool, I feel a greater sense of stakes in preserving and highlighting bootlegs like Bottletree - not so much as a way of gatekeeping one's fandom but rather a way of deepending one's relationship to art in a way that Newsom's body of work has always demanded.
At an age I can't pinpoint, desperate for more A Series of Unfortunate Events when 13 novels proved insufficient, I clicked through to Daniel Handler's author page in the public library catalog and found a writers-on-music anthology so forgotten that it's not even on his Wikipedia page called Heavy Rotation from 2009. Handler is a true blue Gen X guy from the Burton picaresque of his YA worldbuilding to his guest credits on three Magnetic Fields albums, and accordingly his chapter on Savage is a pre-emptive defense of pre-emptive defensiveness. He claims not to be striking a hipster pose while also throwing volleys of citations - not to elucidate the context or content of the music but to demonstrate that he knows what does and doesn't have "cred" (his word in spite of himself) - and dissing "Sweet Dreams" for the crime of being the Eurythmics song most readers recognize. At times it reads an awful lot like the bemused thinkpieces from the first few years of PC Music, a similar moment where writers trained to expect art to hold itself at a certain minimum distance from pop struggled to grasp art that instead got its friction from getting way too close.
By then I was a true believer in poptimism, and through that lens Savage is more or less facile. There's some "zomg consumerism" lyrics that are a relic of a time before consumerism had written the entirety of the anglosphere's living memory, but in most other respects it's an early example of "pop music" as a native language, an end rather than a means. I love the way it leans into the paperiness of the sounds of its moment - the gated drum technique rammed all the air and dust around a drum hit until it was just as solid, and this album embraces the fact that past a certain point this just makes everything sound like air and dust. Even something like Scritti Politti wants you to feel like there's some blood flowing beneath the sparkle, but "You Have Placed a Chill In My Heart" is all sand and ice down to the frosty bel canto vocal ornaments. Borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered '80s was all the rage in the 2010s, but Savage is one of the rare albums that sounds like the imagined decade that Pitchfork's faves conjured. "I Need You" has the odd lyrical twists of E•MO•TION, "Put the Blame On Me" the doomed archness of Night Time, My Time, "I've Got a Lover (Back In Japan)" the cloudy giddiness and White Girl Moments of Visions. "Shame"'s sparkling yuppie excoriation feels upstream of Destroyer's synthpop pivot, and "Beethoven (I Love to Listen To)"'s Synclavier chaos feels like a precedent for FKA twigs bringing her Tempest to a Paul Epworth co-write. Savage is as unafraid of unnerving silence and elaborate character-driven vocal schemas as Annie Lennox' fellow statuesque scotswoman SOPHIE, and as full of bizarre split-second synth baubles as anything by Dave Stewart's fellow english nepo baby A. G. Cook. If you get what their fellow hyperpop OG GFOTY is going for, you can get your head around "I Need a Man," the kind of deliriously horny anthem you keep in your back pocket for when you get an unsolicited dick pic and think "shit, maybe" in spite of yourself.
Like all of these heirs, it's lonely and anxious and concerned with performance, and the firework catharsis is all the more vivid because it sounds more like something the narrators are imagining than experiencing. A clearer glimpse of the sincere desire animating the scam, if you like. Handler correctly links the deliberately tacky maneater persona Lennox embodies on the cover and several of the videos in Sophie Muller's full visual album to Dolly Parton's famous remark about how much it costs to look that cheap, but his scenester blinders prevent him from praising the look as anything other than a joke; Lennox certainly has a grand time hamming it up in the costume, but Savage knows the feeling of choosing to don it. "Everything is fiction, all cynic to the bone," goes a line on the title track, but she delivers it with dignity, understanding that while such circumstances are certainly corrosive to the human spirit they're far from annihilatory. It's stony ground, but we can and do adapt our truth and sincerity to grow in it - certainly, this generally works better than insisting on a more facile conception of "the real." That's not just true for poptimist triumphs like "Run Away With Me" and "It's Okay to Cry" - it's true for Jack White, whose Brill Building influences proved shelf-stable long after his godawful Son House schtick turned; it's true for Taylor Swift, who on her re-records found new dimensions to her younger self's romantic fantasies while her contemporary songs about living them grate.
And yet: if you were a skeptic of the whole poptimist enterprise, rightly wondering why the rest of us were cooing over the "surprising" artistry of music destined for Shake Shack branded playlists while the tech industry strangled the underground to the point that now even house venues have to do vertical video, Savage will scan for you too. It's a sincere effort, but so were Damon Albarn comparing britpop to Artaud and Gaga's Proust-for-dummies "Marry the Night" monologue. In some ways the most notable thing about it is that it's an album-length statement from a quintessential singles band in an extremely singles-driven industry environment - and at that one that really slumps in the middle despite such perky sound design; I sat through the whole thing several times before I noticed that "Heaven" doesn't really have lyrics.
Speaking of industry environment, the video album is merely an outgrowth of 1987's MTV oversaturation, hardly a major statement or even ahead of its time - in retrospect Beyoncé was the same for the Vevo era, but at least those 17 videos gave their star more to do. Whoever runs Eurythmics' distro only got HD restorations for the singles, but if you track down fan archives of the whole thing you'll see why they didn't bother with the rest. There's a few inspired moments: "Beethoven (I Love to Listen To)" is a classic slice of the Jung fad among the UK's cultural dissidents in the '80s that also gave us Hounds of Love and Tears for Fears' schtick, while "I Need a Man" sees Lennox nail the feral drag lipsync the song deserves. When "Wide-Eyed Girl" recasts the vamp persona as a resentful single mother, it feels like an empathetic portrayal of a woman punished for seeking liberation rather than a misogynistic caricature or a parent who just doesn't understand. But that's the most narrative you'll get in the whole 40 minutes, and you won't make it halfway through before you get sick of having camera ops, makeup artists, and the edges of sets presented on screen like you're meant to gasp at the Brecht of it all. It would not be unreasonable to call this shallowness insidious, a mark of institutional capture where artistry becomes artsiness; I would again cite the incompetence/malice fallacy and simply call this badly executed art, which Eurythmics albums (to say nothing of the marquee works of the poptimist era) have no shortage of. Savage and its successors compel me precisely because of this clash between the deadening forces of commerce and the stirrings of life in spite of them.
Updated 12/19/2025: style tweaks; fixed embeds
I'm writing this during a banner week for the paranoid style in American politics. I've long since lost track of who in my country's actively toppling government possesses the trove of evidence on Jeffrey Epstein's child sex ring, how they've kept it from being destroyed by the powerful people named in it, and why only a portion of it has just been made public. It's unnecessary and unreasonable to expect myself to retain all this, and yet the fact that I can't feels dangerous because I lived through the last ten years of Q drops and adrenochrome and Russiagate, absurdist collective psychoses that maintained their iron grip on the millions they sucked in by weaponizing that very inability to hold all of their claims at once. Q/Blueanon could be so freewheeling because their content was (is) ultimately irrelevant to their political utility for the ideological blocs that developed them, but that's easy to forget when the actual course of history makes reading coded messages into a pizza order seem less like an outright fantasy than a classic malice vs. incompetence fallacy, in the sense that the real conspiracy of elite pedophiles appears to be far less clever or creative or fastidious than the imagined one.
To make matters cloudier, I find myself seeing what I do recall about Epstein manifesting retroactively in culture, art, and history, as often happens with scandals involving public figures. What once scanned as artful ugliness on Yeezus is now familiar as a radicalization milestone; Dancer in the Dark's ostensibly critical engagement with Björk's star persona now registers as flat antagonism. I have an affection for the erotic thrillers of the late '80s and early '90s: tales of PMC baby boomers who strain against the ennui of a charmed life via sexual indiscretion with a particularly colorful peer, who then reveals a monstrous side and ensares them in some kind of blackmail or murder plot. These movies are better understood as vessels for heterosexual AIDS anxiety, but it's hard not to feel like you're watching a veiled version of the IRL sexual blackmail network that we now know was taking shape around that time, especially because this was a prestige genre whose celebrity filmmakers may have witnessed the real thing themselves.
The most striking of these cases is Adrian Lyne's Indecent Proposal from 1993. The film's premise blatantly attempts to repeat the discourse-bait gambit that got Lyne's Fatal Attraction into history books: "suppose I were to offer you one million dollars for one night with your wife?" asks Robert Redford right at the top of the trailer over "No Ordinary Love." If a sex trafficking conspiracy wasn't visibly haunting the country's entire aristocracy you might forgive a viewer for not making that association, except that in the lead up to Redford's question Demi Moore keeps saying things like "I'm not for sale" and "you can't buy people." And then he calmly replies "I buy people every day." And then after changing her mind she conspicuously shifts to describing what's been bought as "just [her] body." And then she gets flown offshore to complete her end of the transaction. The movie itself subsequently tries to walk back these provocations, repositioning Redford in a more traditional sugar daddy role whose money is an insecurity Woody Harrelson must overcome to win Moore back. And yet even this arc concludes with the movie's most concentrated burst of Epstein particles: seeing that she belongs with Harrelson, Redford concocts(?) a story about a "million dollar club" of previous women who've taken the same deal, provoking Moore to return to Harrelson without looking back.
Redford's tone and language change abrubtly in this scene to signal a feint, but that's not enough to assuage a 2025 viewer who's too used to watching proven pedophiles flex their media training. To me and everyone I've shown Indecent Proposal to since 2020, the movie feels less like the actual events of its text and more like the version of them that this upwardly mobile couple tell themselves to bury a brush they had with something much darker - not least because screenwriter Amy Holden Jones alleges that the male filmmakers heavily softened the plot and characters she'd written. Imagine if this small raven-haired woman had stayed with this charismatic mogul with his forced-looking Robert Redford haircut she met in the early '90s who likes her in a cheongsam - what future, ah, ventures might she have become involved in? At each critical juncture in the plot we're shown Redford and his staff working to tempt, cajole, and manipulate the leads into the titular scheme - what's to stop him resurfacing this legally actionable incident at another precarious time a decade or three in the future?
As with Fatal Attraction and his secret masterpiece 9½ Weeks, Lyne and co. keep Indecent Proposal from being crowded by and written off with imitative dreck like Sliver and Consenting Adults by coloring in the bodice-ripper outline with rich production design, thoughtful performances, and offbeat details. The very next year Redford would direct Quiz Show, another movie that escapes its hoary genre confines by wielding a surprisingly sharp awareness of how corrupt power brokers lure collaborators into exploitable positions. I thought of how David Paymer's game-rigging producer in that film ensares his rich and/or famous stars in different sides of the same trap in the scene where Moore goes to meet Redford on his yacht and sees Herbie Hancock, playing himself, providing music for their evening. I'm struck by the hint of anxiety he gives us in his closeup, offering her a small and tight smile before very quickly looking back down toward the keys. Again the Epstein-addled mind wanders. How little did Redford tell Hancock about this gig and how much can Hancock infer from his surroundings and the pay? What has he had to sign? Has he - Hancock the character in the story of Indecent Proposal, or Hancock the real octegenarian superstar - worked this kind of gig before?
It feels like plausible conjecture for Hancock in particular because he's one of America's proudest and most innovative sellouts. By the time jazz critics were sneering about the commercial betrayal of 1973's landmark Head Hunters he'd already spent almost a decade doing actual commercials. The same year that this guy played on In a Silent Way he also made a fake James Bond theme for a "healthier" cigarette. There's a pop-musician-qua-public-intellectual career path that The Industry now prefers to relegate to "middle-class"-"major"-"indie" status but in the late 20th century sometimes built into a household name, the kind of star who can bring avant-garde credibility to an appearance on Sesame Street. Among these peers Hancock had a crowdpleasing cash-grab '80s rivaled only by David Bowie - "Rockit", a collab with Duran Duran, and getting on camera for advertisements he used to merely soundtrack.
The song in that Pizza Hut spot is "Textures," the closer from 1980's Mr. Hands, an album so fluffy that its cover art was commissioned from children's book illustrator Jane Wattenberg. Crowded by and written off with several records' worth of disco dreck from this period, Hands nevertheless reveals a surprisingly long tail of Hancock's influence to the 2025 listener. He's a pivotal figure in the field of being Big In Japan, so it's hardly a surprise that this album's sound represents a kind of Leibnitz to the Newtons of city pop, Yellow Magic Orchestra, and Koji Kondo. The genre of video game music in its entirety is dowstream of Herbie Hancock. You can practically hear visual novel dialogue scrolling over "Textures," Persona combat foley over "Calypso," Charles Martinet's voice over that random uncalled-for calypso interlude in "Calypso." "Just Around the Corner" is the exact flavor of goofy funk you'd later hear in incidental music on one of those Wii-series titles. Even the mix sounds like late-aughts Nintendo, clean and airy with Freddie Washington's bass slaps, Hancock's keys, and Hancock's synthetic horns all bright and smooth as glass. Despite its ostensible obscurity I've even seen Mr. Hands specifically namechecked by contemporary game composers like digital fusion pioneer Maxo, as well as artists repurposing the medium's musical language for labels like Hausu Mountain and Orange Milk.
I don't have citations for that last part because I first learned about this album from these artists on Elon Musk's x dot com the everything app, which to my knowledge all parties involved have vacated, and which I myself do not have the will to revisit on the off chance something hasn't been deleted, much less link you into what's become of that website since. I've long struggled to understand the idea of light entertainment as escapism because I flee Jeffrey Epstein through '90s thrillers and Mr. Hands all the way to the DIY underground and I'm still running headlong into the same few dozen demons financializing everything I hold dear to underwrite their personal cruelty. In spite of their incompetence, the powerful have a way of obscuring and obliterating connections like this, haunting and invading and capturing things like a social media platform or a generationally talented artist or a "what-if?" psychosexual lark, obscuring it all in a fog of allegations and allusions and NDAs and yet still making it all about themselves. We call them oppressors because they're oppressive, miasmic, infectious. You can pull on a thread of their presence and follow it practically anywhere; you can invent a thread to pull and still arrive at something resembling their reality.
Updated 12/19/2025: fixed embeds
If you're on this website, you don't need me to tell you that Italy loves Madonna. She was rolling out an album both times I've visited. I have this crystalline memory of the 4 Minutes video on a café tv in Vatican City - Jonas and François doubling down on Madonna and Justin's did-they-or-didn't-they bait with a mashup of Body Worlds and Raimi's Spiderman, down the street from the headquarters of a religion whose theology states they'd literally burn for literal eternity if they did, with 80% of its host country claiming adherence - one of those formative moments of feeling without understanding that all this is a lot more messy and mixed-up than I'd been told. A few years later I was messy and mixed-up too, convincing myself that I was merely "half-out" of the closet while listening to MDNA on loop on a schooltrip. The truth was that everyone knew but most people didn't know what to say - a catholic might make a gospel-disco megahit pointing directly at her faith community's contradictions, but evangelicals prefer to quarantine the glitches in their matrix with whisper networks and closed-door pastoral visits, so often their only defense against a compulsively visible fuckup is sweatily talking around it. "Great track, weird video," said one of the boys I was rooming with when we caught the hunks-in-heels "Girl Gone Wild" clip on TV before bed in Florence. My memory gives his voice a retrospectively familiar tone, like he expected me to respond (I knew not to by then) yet feared what I might say.
But retrospection also finds the "weird video" part less interesting than the "great track" part, which dates both of us precisely as preppy 16-year-olds in summer 2012. It was peak brostep: Skrillex was high art in Spring Breakers, brony vanguards waged both sides of the culture war to a soundtrack of sample pack fanart, and every teenage boy (& transfemme egg)'s dream was to go viral with their version of Madeon - Pop Culture (live mashup), mostly so we'd get to hang out with Madeon. The very first DAW production I ever finished was a submission to a remix competition held by brostep OGs Pendulum, which Madeon won. His use of Martin Solveig's Goldfrapp-via-Stockholm death march "Girls and Boys" in "Pop Culture" is unquestionably the reason Solveig wound up behind the boards for Madonna's Big Super Bowl Single and nearly all of her Big Super Bowl Album's deluxe tracks. As mercenary as they may be, decisions like these nevertheless demonstrate Madonna's famed cultural acumen. Pendulum were still years off from hitting rawk-fusion paydirt when she brokered with Stuart Price to make her own investment in brostep's roots on 2005's Confessions on a Dance Floor, and getting in on the ground floor allowed her to leverage the profits by acquiring Benny Benassi himself, right on time for his workout anthems to vertically align with her line of gyms. MDNA sounds like shit because the truest common-denominator music of that era sounds like shit. It is at once adult, and yet contemporary. It is pro forma conservative art.
Mert and Marcus' Girl Gone Wild is the textbook-standard example of the Hag-and-Her-Fags trope in music videos, alongside Joseph Kahn's Look What You Made Me Do. She's in athleisure, she's got her roots showing, the clubbiness is mostly affect. The coolest person of any given moment since 2000 has consistently looked to what Madonna was doing in their childhood. M.I.A. (born in '75) is a brash, tastemaking singles artist with a dual penchant for statement jackets and context collapse; she's two years into her ongoing truffle fry crashout on MDNA. Her co-feature Nicki Minaj ('82) is coasting through a commercial peak in true Bedtime Stories fashion; by the middle of the decade she'll be getting composited into her white lady collabs rather than bother getting the shooting schedules lined up. In 2012, 17-year-old me was enraptured by "Drowned World" and Mirwais and Sigmund Freud, analyze this!; and likewise, the zeitgeist of 2025 is encapsulated by its 13-year-old predecessor in "Superstar," which sounds like it was spat out by a LLM prompted to parody a vertical video ad by making it unexpectedly gory. "I'm your biggest fan, it's true; hopelessly attracted to you; you can have the password to my phone; I'll give you a massage when you get home" - love understood as some mixture of fandom, surveillance, and pornography. "Gang Bang" is about Guy Ritchie but obviously it's (always) really more about American filmmakers, in this case Gloria Grahame, Madonna's fellow recidivist of extremely weird showbiz romances. But the bridge across the Atlantic is there, because she also sounds terrified the way that Ben Kingsley sounds terrified in Sexy Beast, the way my classmate sounded terrified in Florence. It's aggressively heterosexual. It's the repper future my egg self dreaded.
"I'm Addicted" and "Falling Free" are the two keepers from this one - the two songs that actually feel lithe and slippery where the rest trudge hopelessly through a wind tunnel of risers. Now that your name pumps like the blood in my veins, pulse through my body, igniting my mind, it's like MDMA, but that's okay. Her delivery sounds like a scratch take and it's mixed like there's four alternate universe Madonnas fighting for dominance, but here Benassi recognizes that for her these are proven formulae. She carried this deliberately incoherent occultish lyrical mode forward from Ray of Light and it typifies a certain echelon of deep-cut bangers that also includes "Impressive Instant" and "Get Together." I may be the only person to ever think "Falling Free" is one of the finest songs in her career's worth of barnburners. It's a gently grand ballad in the tradition of Céline Dion and Enya, two artists to whom she's really much closer than Britney or Bowie or even Björk. It is complete ambiguity presented as the ultimate baring of the soul. Madonna's truest mirror for each decade of her career is Sade: Capital-P Popular Capital-A Artists of the '80s, commercial trailblazers for middle aged stars in the '90s, and in the new millennium diverging back towards uncomfortably loud or comfortably quiet. That goofy-yet-gory banjo loop in "Love Spent" is a lethal overdose of the tidy tasteful abrasions of "Soldier of Love," oppressively digital, malignant computerized complexity exploiting your hearing against itself kind of like how a cancer exploits your cells' ability to divide. It sounds like the 70th minute of a MrSuicideSheep "Progressive House" mix. It is still the sound of its moment.