Was planning to just hate read this while taking a shit due to it having Normcore in the title, but enjoyed it enough to continue reading after in a chair connected to no plumbing at all. I agree with so much here. I read the original report the month it came out and interpreted it as a form of mischievous cultural engineering, but was confused by the unquestioning embracing of it that followed in the media and even my own social circles. In my daily visit to the Bedford Ave L station, it was bizarre to see people suddenly adopting elements of the report, wearing things they wouldn’t have touched prior to that while acting like they’d done it all along. And that’s not to say there was anything unprecedented going on, it did loosely follow on the existing backpack rapper style of wearing stupid boring dad shit, as well as the hipsters from a decade earlier growing mustaches and wearing wife beaters and trucker hats as they cosplay white trash while doing coke at Max Fish (admittedly this kinda describes me lol). The K-HOLE report took some withering bullshit and repackaged it without any acknowledgment of what made it so insincere and capitalistic, then pushed it through a media apparatus that’s always desperate for the next new thing, herding fashion fools into their new cage, all to reinforce K-HOLE’s own sense of self importance. I’m almost surprised to find out that it wasn’t explicitly a chaos magick spell by some contemporary discordian sect, and I really would have preferred if it was.
Was planning to just hate read this while taking a shit due to it having Normcore in the title, but enjoyed it enough to continue reading after in a chair connected to no plumbing at all. I agree with so much here. I read the original report the month it came out and interpreted it as a form of mischievous cultural engineering, but was confused by the unquestioning embracing of it that followed in the media and even my own social circles. In my daily visit to the Bedford Ave L station, it was bizarre to see people suddenly adopting elements of the report, wearing things they wouldn’t have touched prior to that while acting like they’d done it all along. And that’s not to say there was anything unprecedented going on, it did loosely follow on the existing backpack rapper style of wearing stupid boring dad shit, as well as the hipsters from a decade earlier growing mustaches and wearing wife beaters and trucker hats as they cosplay white trash while doing coke at Max Fish (admittedly this kinda describes me lol). The K-HOLE report took some withering bullshit and repackaged it without any acknowledgment of what made it so insincere and capitalistic, then pushed it through a media apparatus that’s always desperate for the next new thing, herding fashion fools into their new cage, all to reinforce K-HOLE’s own sense of self importance. I’m almost surprised to find out that it wasn’t explicitly a chaos magick spell by some contemporary discordian sect, and I really would have preferred if it was.