idle gaze 049: everything is mid, everything is semi-cool, everything is clapham.
Unpacking the great cultural middling.
“Why does everything suddenly feel so... mid.?” Günseli Yalcinkaya pondered recently. This vague but ubiquitous sensation that everything in culture has been reduced to underwhelming, homogenous sludge is a notion that’s been bubbling up into the public consciousness recently.
How can ‘mid’ be defined? Mid started out as Gen Z-centric pejorative catch-all slang to describe something or someone as below average or low quality (Searches for ‘mid’ currently have 2.8 billion views on TikTok).
And now, with media establishments crumbling and failing spectacularly, and Hollywood screenwriters striking, there’s a cultural vacuum. To fill the space, people lazily churn out increasingly banal images using (the aptly named) Midjourney and rely on TikTok’s algorithms to inform their taste in design, clothes and food. Suddenly, ‘mid’ culture is truly everywhere. As Yalcinkaya argues in the Dazed article, we live in an age of unprecedented quantities of cultural production, sans quality.
Even that which starts off as “cool”, will eventually become repackaged into mid. From eccentric online content getting the A24 treatment, to formerly underground music genres being replicated and repackaged for neatly categorized Spotify playlists and convenient inner-city festivals and fringe fashion toned down and commodified for high streets and e-commerce marketplaces. As Shumon Basar quips on a recent episode of the Logged On podcast: “cool is the lightning, mid is the thunder.”
Another primer on this phenomenon is “Everything is Clapham”; Josiah Gogarty’s essay in the New Statesman that documents the proliferation of semi-cool in contemporary culture.
How can semi-cool be defined? In a nutshell; things that confer status but aren’t too weird or impractical. Some examples Gogarty rattles off:
Reading the London Review of Books, wearing Acne Studios, wearing pleated trousers, going to the Barbican, bouldering, watching films at the BFI, subscribing to Mubi, collecting vintage art gallery posters, collecting mid-century furniture, collecting Fitzcarraldo Editions books, holidaying in the Balkans.
Gogarty also brings up a recent musical phenomenon that neatly fits into this category: Four Tet, Skrillex and Fred again.. (More on Fred again.. in idle gaze 041). Detractors often like to paint this trio of electronic music producers as the three horsemen of semi-cool, an unholy union of cultural midocracy.
Firstly, you have Four Tet (real name: Kieran Hebden), who used to previously be firmly associated as an artist of the more avante-garde kind. In Gogarty’s words:
“Kieran’s varied catalogue includes muscular techno and 20-minute interpretations of Indian raga. The garish build-ups and bass drops of more commercial dance music”.
So how exactly did Four Tet, earlier this year, play to seventeen thousand Americans waving smartphones in the air at Madison Square Garden?
This was a result of teaming up with Fred again.., whose melodic, accessible slant on “underground” dance music has attracted fans who weren’t typically into the genre before, and Skrillex, the American producer best known for his stadium-friendly, bass-drop-heavy take on dubstep.
What this unlikely ensemble had concocted was a wildly successful experience that had just enough edge to feel cool and underground, but watered down enough to achieve the commercial accessibility required to sell out huge arena shows. In other words: semi-cool.
Gogarty’s essay is titled “Everything is Clapham” because the main adopters of this semi-cool in London would stereotypically live Clapham, or Balham, or certain bits of Brixton, popular neighbourhoods for young urban, corporate professionals.
Like Clapham, mid has come to be associated with certain neighbourhoods and cities around the world. I came across a tweet recently that simply stated:
“Mexico City is the new Fred again…”.
It didn’t require further explanation, because everyone already knew what that meant. Mexico City: a popular, culturally-rich metropolis overrun with young but slightly boring digital nomads. Fred again..: a music producer treading the thin line between commercial accessibility and edgy credibility. Both firmly rooted in the trenches of mid-culture.
It’s also worth noting that there are, of course, also subsections to mid. On the cool ←→ basic spectrum, one can also consider the “upper mid” quadrant.
A trend that fits neatly into this categorization would be “hip” creative neighbourhoods and art/fashion/media adjacent subcultures repackaged and summarized via anonymous, “relatable” Instagram meme pages. This includes accounts like socks_house_meeting, real_housewives_of_clapton, and dalstonsuperstoned, that document the fashion-centric micro cultures of East London, with satirical descriptions like:
“litty lengy football scarves around the head cheeky chappies sitting in the corner of The Shacklewell Arms reading neo-Marxist theory 78 ignored Hinge notifications smirks at you as you walk past The Pineapple link-up bois”
This is a nonsensical statement, but annoyingly, makes total sense for anyone who has spent a little bit of time in the eastern boroughs that are dotted down the overground line.
Meanwhile, the expat-centric subcultures of Kreuzkölln in Berlin have Kreuzkölln’s Got Talent, exposing the increasingly singular blueprint of the ironic slogan cap-wearing, orange wine-imbibing Zalando marketing executives that congregate around La Maison on Saturdays.
Just as Clapham represents mid, Clapton, Dalston and Kreuzkölln have emerged as nurturing grounds of upper mid. The distinction lies in slightly higher rates of gatekeeping and codified taste (while still accessible enough for Instagram users to relate to and conveniently replicate).
The emergence of homogenous mid is an unavoidable, logical outcome when culture is algorithmically optimised for mass, global appeal. Back in March, Alex Murrell conducted a deep-dive exploration of why everything in the world looks increasingly the same. He argues that we’ve entered the “age of average” - where an increasing amount of creativity and design is influenced by worldwide, general consensus, and thus watered down into samey nothingness. Murrell argues this can be seen in virtually every aspect of both our offline and online environments:
The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.
All this is not to say interesting or unique culture doesn’t exist. You just have to look a little further beyond the blueprints of mediocrity to find it. As Carly Busta argued in an essay from a few years ago: “the internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram”.
Counter-hegemonic ideas can still be found, they just won’t jump to the top of algorithmically optimized feeds or appear in modern media outlets. They hide away from the semi-cool highstreets of Clapham, Clapton and Kreuzkölln. To find them, you must venture further into the dark forests of the web and deeper into obscure rabbit holes, only then can you reach the white-hot centre of all things interesting, beyond the seemingly endless sludge of mid.
This one was soo good. I recently saw Phantom in a corporate marketing deck and had to laugh at how quickly things filter through <3
We’ve been reading literally all the same things. Good shout re. La Maison.