91.7 FM Madison on August 14th, 2025 at 4pm
Cardboard boxes are stacked tall and wide on my tired futon and are somewhat blocking the flow of the small window-ac unit. Currently, I share a room with a hometown friend, but she is moving out this week and is to be replaced at the end of the month. So as she takes her half of the apartments clutter and decorations, I am left to stare at semi-blank walls and empty hardwood-floor for two and a half weeks.
I stroll to work in the blazing sunlight pondering the layout of a new bedroom– maybe I’ll take my bed out of it’s little cutout in the wall, however, a very diogenes sleeping arrangement. Scattered on the streets the second weekend of August are the rain-soaked and sunbathed discarded dressers, sofas, lamps, shelving and rugs from apartments cleaned, scrubbed, painted, and turned over. In the midst of this hippy christmas street gathering, a desk with a missing drawer and no corresponding chair is displayed haphazardly. Of course, this is what the space just to the left of my bedroom doorway is craving. My roommate and her boyfriend drag it up six-half flights of switchbacked stairs.
Now my room isn’t empty… but worse… half empty. My head spins with ideas of what else to put next to my desk, or where to put an imaginary rug, maybe even a tapestry in the blank space of the wall… A voice overhead condemns me-
“My friends, keep your old friends. My friends, fear the touch of wealth. Let my example teach you a lesson. Poverty has its freedoms; opulence has its obstacles.
O Diogenes! How you would laugh if you saw your disciple beneath Aristipius’ luxurious mantle! O Aristipius, this luxurious mantle was paid for by many low acts. What a difference between your soft, crawling, effeminate life and the free and firm life of the rag-wearing cynic. I left behind the barrel in which I ruled in order to serve a tyrant.”
Diderot warned me of this very effect: to buy one thing is just a catalyst to crave the next. In 1769, ‘Regrets for my Old Dressing Gown, or A warning to those who have more taste than fortune’ was published by Denis Diderot, and today is quoted and considered and held in the (unopened) wallets of many marxists and philosophers. The only way one can really escape this incessant burning in the chest for a new thing– we’ve seen so many popular renditions of water bottles, amazons basic sets, shoes, bows, rings, denim-jeans, and regretfully mentioned weird stuffed animal keychains that I still don’t understand– is to stop the cycle all together.
Replacing something before it’s truly needed makes us crave replacing everything in our lives. It starts with replacing one’s dressing gown, until one’s entire wardrobe and the wardrobe itself is luxurious and tasteful.
“When in the morning, covered in my sumptuous scarlet, I enter my office I lower my gaze and I see my old rug of selvage. It reminds me of my beginnings and pride is stopped at the entryway to my heart.“
A trend similar to this can be observed in widespread phenomena like pop culture, music, and politics. The swing from minimalism to maximalism, from one extreme to the other. We can look to pop music for a great example. Throughout the 2010’s pop music was in an iconic era of radio ear worms, like 2011’s ‘Somebody that I used to Know’. In 2014 something started brewing, a culmination of early y2k digital nastolgia and catchy over the top pop music.
Around this time A.G. Cook was steadily putting out ‘PC Music’, including ‘Beautiful’ which made Rolling Stone’s list of top 100 songs from 2014. This music, fit with digital and electronic sounds, catchy lyrics, and an over the top pop-y sound made waves in the music scene. Scottish Producer SOPHIE clung on to this wave of music and in 2019 released ‘The Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides’, which received a lot of mainstream praise and built upon the foundation of the genre now called ‘hyper-pop’.
Charli XCX, a longstanding pop artist at the time, iconic in today’s zeitgeist, settled into a hyper-pop sound around the same time with the release of ‘how i am feeling now’ in 2020. In this same year multiple legendary hyper-pop albums came out, including ‘1000 gecs and the Tree of Clues’ by 100 gecs.
Hyper-pop artists clung onto the nostalgic electronic sound, whil incorporating the catchiness of pop-music at the time. A genre, which I sort of see as a parody of it’s parent genre, was born.
Now I can listen to Kero Kero Bonito and Rico Nasty in the comfort of my neon pink zip up, low-waisted jeans, 4 belts, and blue hair. Maximalism as a form of expression, it’s a big thing. I’d love to ask the three girls that order fruit-flavored matcha-lemonades at my barista job about this concept. They have multi-colored mullets, pastel baby-doll dresses layered over skirts and pants, tens of key-chains and accessories and eyeshadow and gems corresponding to that day’s color scheme. I wonder if they’ll ever swing the other way, throw out everything and sit cross-legged on the ground in the middle of an empty apartment in a linen button down dress.
This is what I see more and more musicians doing. Breaking it down to the basics, ditching heavy production and software. MJ Lenderman plays stripped back, with minimal vocals, and has exploded in the indie music scene. Think Nirvana making waves in the 90s.
Maybe it’s time to ditch my blue hair…
full hyper-pop playlist here!
sources: diderot essay, on diderot, & hyperpop video
Feral in the barrel 