Rick Beato on YouTube regularly hates on modern Pop music. He has some musical chops, so he explains how most popular music nowadays uses manufactured pap.
i am always thinking about the part where he talks about how "you can't even make a top 5 beyonce album article" because this process has to imply that some things are better than others, or that some things aren't worth mentioning, and then that is too much criticism for people to hear
I get it, but please - reading this blog has become a recycling bin. There was a time your take on poptimism was fresh, insightful, and interesting. That was years ago. If you just want to say, "I think this TV show sucks" that's fine too, but it doesn't require flogging the poptimism point. You can just say why you think it sucks without any preconditions!
poptimism was for a lot of us a non entity... we never stopped believing... in rock and roll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k8craCGpgs He took a midnight train and the rest was history😎
I don't know if this is serious or not, but S1 was kind of interesting for a mystery box but S2 just got weirder but not in a way that was remotely engaging. It seems like its become a show for people who like to show how deep they are.
I've been watching this with my kids and everyone is kind of over it. My son blurted out something like "Who are these ridiculous Disney channel villains?" at the jocks and we both had a good laugh about Eleven doing The Force obstacle course.
FWIW, the "It: Welcome to Derry" show has plenty of flaws but is much better. There is a lot of overlap in story with Stranger Things, although obviously "It" actually came out in the 1980s and was a source of inspiration for ST. I actually care about what happens to the kids in the "It" show in a way I just don't care any more about the "kids" in Stranger Things, and it is occasionally actually scary.
Okay, I only got halfway through, but as a trailer-park adjacent (we lived in the tiny shitty houses next door to the trailer park) Indiana kid of the same age as this show, some of us ABSOLUTELY knew Kate Bush.
That said, I didn't watch this show because a character in the first season looked exactly like I did in fourth grade at my absolute fashion worst. I couldn't relive that, so I skipped it. Happy for Winona, though. And Kate Bush. And weird 80s kids stuck in Podunk, Indiana.
"This Woman's Work" was in She's Having a Baby in 1988, she was all over 120 Minutes on MTV in the late 80s. She wasn't on the top 40 radio*, but the radio was like half, at best, of my music input. I could pick up a college station, I'm sure I heard her on there, and I had friends from cooler places than Indiana who were kind enough to share mix tapes of cool shit.
*I take that back, she did a duet with Peter Gabriel, "Don't Give Up" that was top 40 in the late 80s.
Running Up That Hill was something of a top-40 hit in the US in 1985, the video on MTV a respectable amount briefly, we played the Hounds of Love cassette in my high school art class. Side 2 "The Ninth Wave" enchanted me. Still does. I searched out her earlier stuff, The Dreaming was wonderful. I don't actually like her earlier stuff before The Dreaming. I find Wuthering Heights painfully shrill. Pat Benatar's cover version with her soaring operatic voice was better.
Kate Bush impressed me immensely. Her music, lyrics were so intensely personal, lyrical, magical. She was her own intense idiosyncratic artist making beautiful music, with a lot of Irish Celtic influence+ instruments. (Her mom was a nurse from Ireland- mine too!, her dad an English doctor.) The breakthrough Fairlight musical computer freed Kate Bush from the expensive pressures of the recording studio; she could take her time and compose at home, make music as inspiration hit her.
A Deeper Understanding from her 1989 album The Sensual World is astonishingly prescient. She sings of the incredible comfort she feels at her computer, which comes alive and speaks to her- "Hello!/ I know that you've been feeling tired/ I bring you love/ And deeper understanding". She was writing about emotional dependence on tech + internet addiction before there WAS a widely available internet. In 1989!
I'll wrap up. Kate Bush is an extraordinary artist who has meant a lot to me.
Extraordinary. Recently I introduced her to my gf, a decade younger than me, who has exquisite taste but did not know her music at all. Which kinda sorta fed my perception that Kate Bush was pretty unknown in the USA. My girlfriend knows LOTS of music.
Very correct about the quality of Stranger Things.
Not really all that true about the nerds owning everything. People have grown very wealthy from tech. But circa about 2010, tech became a prestige target for Ivy Leaguers. Silicon Valley is full of athletes now. They're socially adept and they're who gets funded. It's just another career path to optimize towards, if you have some STEM inclinations it's a good deal instead of law, finance, or medicine.
There's a broader thing where bona fide nerds get mid-tier tech jobs leaving them with higher than average disposable income, so are an even better market for consumer culture. Very true. But this is not the commanding heights of the economy.
Musk and Huang are nerds but they are both fundamentally from 90s Silicon Valley and have stuck around.
Zuck is a transitional figure, he arguably caused the shift. Was a nerd but now has gone to great lengths to train in jiu jitsu etc.
Sundar Pichai was chosen as Google CEO in 2015 after the shift I’m talking about. He’s highly prestigious and educated but also was captain of his school’s cricket team. So fits the smart jock model which you now need.
John Carmack also trained jiu jitsu. And he's still a big fucking nerd. If you have ever been to a bjj dojo there are a lot of nerds there.
In fact I would argue that its an extremely nerdy art, maybe the most nerdy of the combat arts, its about leverage and positioning and counters and making your size and strength matter a lot less. Its the martial arts version of when Foghorn Leghorn has the nerdy kid he's babysitting play baseball and he makes a couple of calculations in his notebook and dings it to orbit.
One of the chief ways the shown has sucked—and it has sucked, terribly, from Season 3 onwards—is because it went from a compelling human-scale set of intimate, affecting stakes to the relentless world-ending catastrophes that now occur like once every nine minutes in the narrative. The first season was about a mother trying to find her son, a brother trying to find his brother, friends trying to find their friend. Very human, very relatable. Season 2 was more or less in the same vein. After that it just became a sort of Marvel Light, just endless stumbling and freewheeling from one harrowing crisis and/or triumphant battle to the next. And of course the bullshit relentless Marvel quipping and GIF-able moments. It sucks so hard now.
The regression of Hopper from an alcoholic yet good-hearted cop into basically a superhero who can endure inhuman levels of punishment is the show's decline in miniature.
I will admit to liking Eddie, who spent all of his brief time on the show complaining about not wanting to go to jail or worse, die. Like a real person would.
Yes! Hopper in Season 1, and somewhat in Season 2, is so obviously weary in a really relatable way, so obviously exhausted with the slings and arrows, some of them extrinsic and some of them self-imposed. He was just so human! Then they turned him into this weird, growling übermensch. Just so dumb.
Eddie was okay, sort of. You're right, he was kind of endearing. But he was so clownishly over-the-top 1980s in so many ways. That's what the first couple seasons got pretty right: They were definitely paeons to 80s nostalgia but they were first and foremost interesting stories that were set in the 1980s. Then it just became 1980s GenX/Millennial Reference Show For Gen Xers and Millennials Inc™.
I agree about Eddie having a lot of Gen X signifiers as well, but... he at least seemed to be more of a real person than any other major character introduced post Season 1. Just the mere fact that he was allowed to be terrified.
But no... there's no way he could play Master of Puppets like that.
I like where Joyce says, "Will's dad says Will is gay," and Hopper asks, "Well, is he?" Cannot imagine the show presenting a character with such unvarnished 1980s sensibilities now.
`To keep portraying nerds as lovable outsiders is to watch the new aristocracy spike the football'
Nerds are not inherently interesting or special and using their pursuits and particular way of thinking as a substrate for one's personality or culture is, to someone very close to actual, socially off-putting and genuine nerds, just beyond superficial and condescending.
I was a nerd into the new Wham! Bam! Pow! Comics Aren’t Just For Kids revolution in the late 80s and while they were undoubtedly a nerdy pursuit, cooler and popular kids were also into them. The lines have never been as clear as were claimed.
I quit watching Stranger Things after season 3, and I'm happy with that decision. I still think seasons 1 and 2 are pretty good.
Speaking of: maybe part of the death of negative criticism is that it's just so easy to avoid stuff that you don't love? There aren't any real push media anymore, it's all pull media. I don't have to see Stranger Things, I don't have to watch movies I don't care about, I don't have to listen to the radio play songs I hate (except when I'm at the grocery store).
So when I do encounter something that sucks, I don't have to spend my time criticizing it, I just move on to the next thing and forget about it.
Push vs pull is an interesting paradigm, I like it! It’s the consequence of drowning in media. 40 years ago we all consumed the same thing; we ALL saw Thriller. Now you can pick and choose
That’s a good point when it comes to pop music or tv. But smart, biting criticism is also dead or dying for art exhibitions, live theater, live classical music, all of which require audiences to show up by choice. In part, I think media are now more timid around losing advertisers or getting sued. But also it takes deep knowledge to write well about eg. opera or Shakespeare (also pop music and tv for that matter). Cash strapped media don’t want to pay for that kind of specialized journalism, and few knowledgeable writers want to do that work for free. Consequently, serious professional arts criticism has degraded into marketing pablum written by media interns, and we’re all the poorer for it.
I don't share your dislike of Stranger Things as a whole, but I agree wholeheartedly that this season sucks donkey balls so far. One of the worst failures of show not tell in filmed media I've seen in years so far. So much of the dialogue is without drama, because it's just one character explaining things to one or more of the others. Either they get weird "hunches" which somehow move the plot along, or there are the ridiculous plans you noted. Three stupid plans in the first four episodes (the "crawl" - kidnapping the family/trashing their house, and then trying to rescue the kids). Though the point I just about lost it was when we finally see Max again, and instead of just letting us experience the surreal journey through Vecna's mindscape, she gives us a narrative voiceover which boringly explains everything that's happening. It's like they forgot that mystery is what brought people in to begin with.
When there wasn't awful exposition, the "conflict" between the characters is pointless, petty bullshit, easily disposed of when it's time for "big plot" to come to the fore. In earlier seasons, the Duffer Brothers would at least take time to set up drama around something (Max causing competition among the kids, say, or Lucas getting elevated into the jocks). Here we just start with half of the characters being mean to one another for no particularly good reason, each of which is slowly disposed of.
Edit: To the extent I came back to the show, it wasn't for the big plot, answers to the mystery, or 1980s nostalgia. It was for the characters. And the show seems utterly disinterested in the characters, which is part of what built up such a massive fanbase. Really giving late Game of Thrones vibes.
For the record, Life of a Showgirl got some decidedly mixed notices. Rolling Stone gave it 5/5 naturally but there were many underwhelmed reviews. So I don't think negative criticism has ended. Cheer up Freddie!
Just here to say the moment in Terminator 2 when, after we’ve established Sarah Connor’s turned herself into a total badass, she sees the Terminator and her legs go and she’s as helpless as when she first saw it… that’s fucking cinema.
For what it's worth, I don't feel any of that allegedly universal fear. I'm totally comfortable saying that things suck and it never occurred to me that I - or you - might not be.
A notable exception to the lack of negative criticism is found on YouTube channels covering the MCU and Star Wars. The Acolyte creator just blamed them for her show not getting a second season. She misstates her case but it’s true The Critical Drinker and similar channels get millions of views for negative reviews of movies and shows.
I actually think social media "discourse" is part of why we don't really get anything new any longer - where derivative or just plain old media is increasingly popular across many forms of media (TV, movies, games, music, etc.).
For example, I'm a dabbler in BookTube. I'm way, way more likely to click on a video reviewing one of my favs to see their take on it rather than something I've never read. I'm sure many people feel the same way, which means the incentives are all set up to cover things others have read before, not expose them to something new.
I think the same thing is true for movie YouTube Channels. There are some reviewers out there who still focus on new movies, of course. But there's still a stronger audience for "analysis" of Iron Man, or classic Star Trek, or the complete works of Studio Ghibli. People want to listen (or read) people talking about their favs (even if it's hater content).
I feel like I need to light some candles and read this in the bath
Rick Beato on YouTube regularly hates on modern Pop music. He has some musical chops, so he explains how most popular music nowadays uses manufactured pap.
I think having musical chops is a very important part of being a critic. Not everybody has it but people need to respect it!
morris had an article about this in 2018:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/03/magazine/morality-social-justice-art-entertainment.html
i am always thinking about the part where he talks about how "you can't even make a top 5 beyonce album article" because this process has to imply that some things are better than others, or that some things aren't worth mentioning, and then that is too much criticism for people to hear
I get it, but please - reading this blog has become a recycling bin. There was a time your take on poptimism was fresh, insightful, and interesting. That was years ago. If you just want to say, "I think this TV show sucks" that's fine too, but it doesn't require flogging the poptimism point. You can just say why you think it sucks without any preconditions!
the details included were more like prosecutorial evidence
I enjoyed the first half much more than the second, repetition notwithstanding.
Learn to read.
poptimism was for a lot of us a non entity... we never stopped believing... in rock and roll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k8craCGpgs He took a midnight train and the rest was history😎
He needs to hate on Severance too, it's terrible 😜
I don't know if this is serious or not, but S1 was kind of interesting for a mystery box but S2 just got weirder but not in a way that was remotely engaging. It seems like its become a show for people who like to show how deep they are.
As a longtime reader, I know what you mean. But poptimism is so relentless that you have to keep beating back at it over and over again
I've been watching this with my kids and everyone is kind of over it. My son blurted out something like "Who are these ridiculous Disney channel villains?" at the jocks and we both had a good laugh about Eleven doing The Force obstacle course.
FWIW, the "It: Welcome to Derry" show has plenty of flaws but is much better. There is a lot of overlap in story with Stranger Things, although obviously "It" actually came out in the 1980s and was a source of inspiration for ST. I actually care about what happens to the kids in the "It" show in a way I just don't care any more about the "kids" in Stranger Things, and it is occasionally actually scary.
Okay, I only got halfway through, but as a trailer-park adjacent (we lived in the tiny shitty houses next door to the trailer park) Indiana kid of the same age as this show, some of us ABSOLUTELY knew Kate Bush.
That said, I didn't watch this show because a character in the first season looked exactly like I did in fourth grade at my absolute fashion worst. I couldn't relive that, so I skipped it. Happy for Winona, though. And Kate Bush. And weird 80s kids stuck in Podunk, Indiana.
I'm surprised. I heard tons of Kate Bush in France & England ("Wuthering Heights," "Babooshka"), but none in the USA, zero.
"This Woman's Work" was in She's Having a Baby in 1988, she was all over 120 Minutes on MTV in the late 80s. She wasn't on the top 40 radio*, but the radio was like half, at best, of my music input. I could pick up a college station, I'm sure I heard her on there, and I had friends from cooler places than Indiana who were kind enough to share mix tapes of cool shit.
*I take that back, she did a duet with Peter Gabriel, "Don't Give Up" that was top 40 in the late 80s.
She was not a secret in the states.
I'm sure you're right. I was thinking about the "Kick Inside" and "Never for Ever" years.
Running Up That Hill was something of a top-40 hit in the US in 1985, the video on MTV a respectable amount briefly, we played the Hounds of Love cassette in my high school art class. Side 2 "The Ninth Wave" enchanted me. Still does. I searched out her earlier stuff, The Dreaming was wonderful. I don't actually like her earlier stuff before The Dreaming. I find Wuthering Heights painfully shrill. Pat Benatar's cover version with her soaring operatic voice was better.
Kate Bush impressed me immensely. Her music, lyrics were so intensely personal, lyrical, magical. She was her own intense idiosyncratic artist making beautiful music, with a lot of Irish Celtic influence+ instruments. (Her mom was a nurse from Ireland- mine too!, her dad an English doctor.) The breakthrough Fairlight musical computer freed Kate Bush from the expensive pressures of the recording studio; she could take her time and compose at home, make music as inspiration hit her.
A Deeper Understanding from her 1989 album The Sensual World is astonishingly prescient. She sings of the incredible comfort she feels at her computer, which comes alive and speaks to her- "Hello!/ I know that you've been feeling tired/ I bring you love/ And deeper understanding". She was writing about emotional dependence on tech + internet addiction before there WAS a widely available internet. In 1989!
I'll wrap up. Kate Bush is an extraordinary artist who has meant a lot to me.
Thank you! Yes!
I do love "Wuthering Heights" though, I'm 54 and I still want to be Kate Bush when I grow up, screeching about Heathcliff like no one is watching.
Extraordinary. Recently I introduced her to my gf, a decade younger than me, who has exquisite taste but did not know her music at all. Which kinda sorta fed my perception that Kate Bush was pretty unknown in the USA. My girlfriend knows LOTS of music.
Very correct about the quality of Stranger Things.
Not really all that true about the nerds owning everything. People have grown very wealthy from tech. But circa about 2010, tech became a prestige target for Ivy Leaguers. Silicon Valley is full of athletes now. They're socially adept and they're who gets funded. It's just another career path to optimize towards, if you have some STEM inclinations it's a good deal instead of law, finance, or medicine.
There's a broader thing where bona fide nerds get mid-tier tech jobs leaving them with higher than average disposable income, so are an even better market for consumer culture. Very true. But this is not the commanding heights of the economy.
Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, the Google CEO (some incompetent whose name I forget), and Jensen Huang are all former jocks?
I think this beautifully illustrates the shift.
Musk and Huang are nerds but they are both fundamentally from 90s Silicon Valley and have stuck around.
Zuck is a transitional figure, he arguably caused the shift. Was a nerd but now has gone to great lengths to train in jiu jitsu etc.
Sundar Pichai was chosen as Google CEO in 2015 after the shift I’m talking about. He’s highly prestigious and educated but also was captain of his school’s cricket team. So fits the smart jock model which you now need.
The heads of Anthropic and OpenAI don't fit your model, though, and they're the newest members of the tech elite.
I'd also argue that training in jiu jitsu does not make one stop being a nerd.
I worked in Silicon Valley from 1994 - 2020. I'd love it if you were right. Do you have any specific examples?
Vlad Tenev comes to mind, good illustration of the type.
John Carmack also trained jiu jitsu. And he's still a big fucking nerd. If you have ever been to a bjj dojo there are a lot of nerds there.
In fact I would argue that its an extremely nerdy art, maybe the most nerdy of the combat arts, its about leverage and positioning and counters and making your size and strength matter a lot less. Its the martial arts version of when Foghorn Leghorn has the nerdy kid he's babysitting play baseball and he makes a couple of calculations in his notebook and dings it to orbit.
They all sell themselves as nerds and nerds don't argue. At some point you have to own it.
One of the chief ways the shown has sucked—and it has sucked, terribly, from Season 3 onwards—is because it went from a compelling human-scale set of intimate, affecting stakes to the relentless world-ending catastrophes that now occur like once every nine minutes in the narrative. The first season was about a mother trying to find her son, a brother trying to find his brother, friends trying to find their friend. Very human, very relatable. Season 2 was more or less in the same vein. After that it just became a sort of Marvel Light, just endless stumbling and freewheeling from one harrowing crisis and/or triumphant battle to the next. And of course the bullshit relentless Marvel quipping and GIF-able moments. It sucks so hard now.
The regression of Hopper from an alcoholic yet good-hearted cop into basically a superhero who can endure inhuman levels of punishment is the show's decline in miniature.
I will admit to liking Eddie, who spent all of his brief time on the show complaining about not wanting to go to jail or worse, die. Like a real person would.
Yes! Hopper in Season 1, and somewhat in Season 2, is so obviously weary in a really relatable way, so obviously exhausted with the slings and arrows, some of them extrinsic and some of them self-imposed. He was just so human! Then they turned him into this weird, growling übermensch. Just so dumb.
Eddie was okay, sort of. You're right, he was kind of endearing. But he was so clownishly over-the-top 1980s in so many ways. That's what the first couple seasons got pretty right: They were definitely paeons to 80s nostalgia but they were first and foremost interesting stories that were set in the 1980s. Then it just became 1980s GenX/Millennial Reference Show For Gen Xers and Millennials Inc™.
I agree about Eddie having a lot of Gen X signifiers as well, but... he at least seemed to be more of a real person than any other major character introduced post Season 1. Just the mere fact that he was allowed to be terrified.
But no... there's no way he could play Master of Puppets like that.
I’ll take crushing-a-beer-at-7am Hopper over late-model-John-McClane Hopper any day
I like where Joyce says, "Will's dad says Will is gay," and Hopper asks, "Well, is he?" Cannot imagine the show presenting a character with such unvarnished 1980s sensibilities now.
Yes, exactly this. Plus all that epic catastrophe requires that the showrunners smother the episodes with gobs of uninspiring mid-level CGI.
`To keep portraying nerds as lovable outsiders is to watch the new aristocracy spike the football'
Nerds are not inherently interesting or special and using their pursuits and particular way of thinking as a substrate for one's personality or culture is, to someone very close to actual, socially off-putting and genuine nerds, just beyond superficial and condescending.
I was a nerd into the new Wham! Bam! Pow! Comics Aren’t Just For Kids revolution in the late 80s and while they were undoubtedly a nerdy pursuit, cooler and popular kids were also into them. The lines have never been as clear as were claimed.
I quit watching Stranger Things after season 3, and I'm happy with that decision. I still think seasons 1 and 2 are pretty good.
Speaking of: maybe part of the death of negative criticism is that it's just so easy to avoid stuff that you don't love? There aren't any real push media anymore, it's all pull media. I don't have to see Stranger Things, I don't have to watch movies I don't care about, I don't have to listen to the radio play songs I hate (except when I'm at the grocery store).
So when I do encounter something that sucks, I don't have to spend my time criticizing it, I just move on to the next thing and forget about it.
Push vs pull is an interesting paradigm, I like it! It’s the consequence of drowning in media. 40 years ago we all consumed the same thing; we ALL saw Thriller. Now you can pick and choose
That’s a good point when it comes to pop music or tv. But smart, biting criticism is also dead or dying for art exhibitions, live theater, live classical music, all of which require audiences to show up by choice. In part, I think media are now more timid around losing advertisers or getting sued. But also it takes deep knowledge to write well about eg. opera or Shakespeare (also pop music and tv for that matter). Cash strapped media don’t want to pay for that kind of specialized journalism, and few knowledgeable writers want to do that work for free. Consequently, serious professional arts criticism has degraded into marketing pablum written by media interns, and we’re all the poorer for it.
I don't share your dislike of Stranger Things as a whole, but I agree wholeheartedly that this season sucks donkey balls so far. One of the worst failures of show not tell in filmed media I've seen in years so far. So much of the dialogue is without drama, because it's just one character explaining things to one or more of the others. Either they get weird "hunches" which somehow move the plot along, or there are the ridiculous plans you noted. Three stupid plans in the first four episodes (the "crawl" - kidnapping the family/trashing their house, and then trying to rescue the kids). Though the point I just about lost it was when we finally see Max again, and instead of just letting us experience the surreal journey through Vecna's mindscape, she gives us a narrative voiceover which boringly explains everything that's happening. It's like they forgot that mystery is what brought people in to begin with.
When there wasn't awful exposition, the "conflict" between the characters is pointless, petty bullshit, easily disposed of when it's time for "big plot" to come to the fore. In earlier seasons, the Duffer Brothers would at least take time to set up drama around something (Max causing competition among the kids, say, or Lucas getting elevated into the jocks). Here we just start with half of the characters being mean to one another for no particularly good reason, each of which is slowly disposed of.
Edit: To the extent I came back to the show, it wasn't for the big plot, answers to the mystery, or 1980s nostalgia. It was for the characters. And the show seems utterly disinterested in the characters, which is part of what built up such a massive fanbase. Really giving late Game of Thrones vibes.
For the record, Life of a Showgirl got some decidedly mixed notices. Rolling Stone gave it 5/5 naturally but there were many underwhelmed reviews. So I don't think negative criticism has ended. Cheer up Freddie!
And yes, Stranger Things is bad.
Just here to say the moment in Terminator 2 when, after we’ve established Sarah Connor’s turned herself into a total badass, she sees the Terminator and her legs go and she’s as helpless as when she first saw it… that’s fucking cinema.
For what it's worth, I don't feel any of that allegedly universal fear. I'm totally comfortable saying that things suck and it never occurred to me that I - or you - might not be.
A notable exception to the lack of negative criticism is found on YouTube channels covering the MCU and Star Wars. The Acolyte creator just blamed them for her show not getting a second season. She misstates her case but it’s true The Critical Drinker and similar channels get millions of views for negative reviews of movies and shows.
Kind of off-topic, but this is an excellent piece on The Critical Drinker:
https://yakubianape.substack.com/p/a-critical-misfire?utm_source=publication-search
very quirky writer, thanks!
I actually think social media "discourse" is part of why we don't really get anything new any longer - where derivative or just plain old media is increasingly popular across many forms of media (TV, movies, games, music, etc.).
For example, I'm a dabbler in BookTube. I'm way, way more likely to click on a video reviewing one of my favs to see their take on it rather than something I've never read. I'm sure many people feel the same way, which means the incentives are all set up to cover things others have read before, not expose them to something new.
I think the same thing is true for movie YouTube Channels. There are some reviewers out there who still focus on new movies, of course. But there's still a stronger audience for "analysis" of Iron Man, or classic Star Trek, or the complete works of Studio Ghibli. People want to listen (or read) people talking about their favs (even if it's hater content).
I try to leave but you keep pulling me back in, Freddie. Top shelf.