With equal parts delight and frustration, the founders of MSCHF admit what they do can be hard to categorise.
That is partly the point.
The Brooklyn-based collective operate at the intersection of art, pop culture commentary and consumer pranks.
Also: humour, absurdity and critique.
They have a particular penchant for skewering designer fashion, and our curious and often unhealthy relationship with it.
They are perhaps best known for The Big Red Boot, the bright red, bulky and oversized footwear that was a signature of Astro Boy, the Japanese manga and anime character, which became a viral hit after the made them for real, and released them as a limited-edition, wearable art piece in 2023, priced around £400.
There has been other headline-grabbing footwear.
The Jesus Shoes were a pair of Nike Air Max 97 trainers, modified to include holy water from the River Jordan in the soles, a gold crucifix pendant hanging from the laces, and red insoles said to resemble the colour of Christ’s blood. They retailed for $1,425, a reference to Mathew 14.25 in which Jesus walks on water. “And in the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea.”
The Jesus Shoes were followed in 2021 by Satan Shoes.
These were another pair of modified Air Max 97s, this time with human blood in the sole, an upside-down cross pendant on the laces and “666” stamped on the side. These retailed for $1,018 – a reference to Luke 10:18. “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”.
Sneakers are the tip of the iceberg.
MSCHF’s products/ideas are released in drops, at the rate of one a fortnight.
These have included Puff The Squeaky Chicken, a familiar rubber chicken toy modified to become a bong that squarks when you smoke it. Alexagate, a device that sits on top of an Amazon Echo that may be toggled on and off to shut down Alexa’s always-on listening capability, and hence “stop Jeff Bezos spying on you”. The Free Movie, a frame-for-frame recreation of Jerry Seinfeld’s forgettable 2007 animation The Bee Movie, entirety compromised of crowd-sourced scribbles.
Then there was the Microscopic Handbag, a neon-green 3D-printed take on Louis Vuitton’s OnTheGo tote, that was only visible through a microscope and created for Pharrell Williams – “He loves big hats, so we made him an incredibly small bag”.
And Key4All which flipped the idea of Zipcar on its head, since it was a set of 1,000 identical keys that all unlocked the same car. (To find the vehicle, divers were invited to call MSCHF’s car location hotline, which offered hints to its whereabout in New York City.)
Naturally, there have been lawsuits.
MSCHF’s Birkinstocks were pairs of Birkenstocks’ Arizona sandal made from destroyed Hermés Birkin bags.
It’s Wavy Baby trainers, from 2021, took inspiration from Balenciaga’s Triple S shoes, known for their bulky, exaggerated style, and applied wavy, squiggly contours to the soles and uppers of shoes that were recognisably familiar lines from Adidas, Vans and Reebok.
Nike was understandably displeased about their shoes being associated with both Jesus and Satan.
But those perhaps pale in comparison to the 2020 MSCHF Boston Dynamics controversy.
For this one, the collective released “Spot’s Revenge”, which involved taking the quadruped robot “dog” created by the robotics and artificial intelligence research company, and modifying it with a paintball gun.
The already unsettling droid was then videoed lurching around shooting stuff, a weaponised version of itself, straight out of Robocop.
A “significant” backlash ensured.
None of this has stopped the pranksters from raising a reported $20m in Series A funding, as per 2021, their unique blend of art, marketing and technology, plus their high rate of virality, being catnip to investors.
Quite how said investors hope to get their money back is, you suspect, not MSCHF’s problem.
If getting a handle on precisely what it is that MSCHF do, and why it exists, has proved elusive, a new book, marking its tenth anniversary, provides clues.
As one might expect, Made by MSCHF, published by arthouse book company Phaidon, is a lavish, visually rich almost-400 page doorstop of a book, that surveys the work of the collective, via case studies and thematic essays.
Esquire recently spoke to Kevin Wiesner and Lukas Bentel, chief creative officers at the company, about their work.
The pair were in Tokyo, days away from opening a new exhibition, titled Material Values.
“We’re literally at the back room of a gallery,” Bentel said, as was obvious from the stacks off bubble-wrapped canvases piled up behind them, on the Zoom screen.
“There’s a lot of work ahead of us.”
Esquire: What didn’t you want this book to be?
Kevin Wiesner: We didn’t want it to be a “coffee table book”. Where it’s just pictures and pictures and pictures. Especially because so much of what we’re making are websites – they’re interactive, they’re honestly very hard to print. So, there ends up being quite a lot of writing. Which we hope is sort of describing our working process and how MSCHF approaches executing any of our works. Even internally we’ve always struggled to articulate what makes a MSCHF project. Writing about a dozen projects at significant length was a way to articulate ourselves.
Lukas Bentel: I hope it’s a very educational book. Just in terms of just explaining the thought process, it you read through the projects. Hopefully it leads to other people making work in a similar vein
A number of influential names have contributed essays to the book. The award-winning Pentagram designer Natasha Jen writes about the Satan Shoes, for example. She says: “This endeavour wasn’t merely a dalliance with the absurd, but a meticulously crafted critique of the digital, saturated ethos of our consumer culture and the increasingly fluid boundaries of brand in the contemporary lexicon”. Does that kind of highbrow thinking apply to every MSCHF project? Or do some fall under the category of: “We did this one because it made us laugh?”
LB: I think there needs to be something that brings people in. If it’s humour, or an aesthetic. The thing we often say is “It has to slap in one sentence”. It’s okay to have the fun, as long as there’s some substance to it.
KW: This is something we always navigate. I think people want to look at MSCHF’s work and think that it all can be described in the same way. I don’t think that that’s true. There are things that are primarily meant to be visual. They are things that are intended from the get-go to be specific critiques. And there are things that are much more experiential.
One of the things we have as a pillar of the way MSCHF operates is that we release a lot of things. We hold ourselves to a very strict schedule because we feel like we need to put a gun to our own heads. And that means that… our output varies tremendously. The temptation for people is that as soon as one of them can be analysed as a satire or critique, they go, “Oh, that must be the same for every single project”. But it’s not that homogenous.
But something like Puff The Squeaky Chicken, surely that’s just meant to be funny? There’s no deeper meaning there?
KW: [Laughs] Some of those early ones were us figuring out: “What are we even doing?”
LB: It wasn’t like we had the clearest divisions right from the get-go. It’s been a practice. It’s ever evolving.
KW: The chicken is actually an interesting example. In the context of the rest of the work you can see a thread of sampling specific cultural elements, right? The chicken bong is just stupid and fun, and it was the first physical project that we ever made. We learned a lot from doing it, but it’s derived from the same thought process that gets us to Satan Shoes. We’re looking for things that exist in the world, that we can build other things out of.
The squeaky chicken was culturally ready-made. On the internet, it had a particular connotation. [A meme denoting an embrace of randomness and/ or absurdity]. It was huge at that time, when Vine was still a platform. It was one of these objects that recurred over and over again, in a certain type of content. It was sitting there as something that we could pull from and build on. Would we say it’s one of the 12 case studies that we’re proudest of? Absolutely not. Is it a product of the same process [we used later]? Yeah, I would say, absolutely.
Other ideas, like Key4All, require a crowdsourcing element. You release them, and then its up to other people to figure out what to do with them.
KW: Oh, one hundred per cent. It’s something we do over and over again. We create a set of props or conditions for a performance that’s not going to be done by us. It’s going to be done by as many people who can interact with it as possible.
If you’re keeping up a schedule of a drop every two weeks, how far ahead are you working on ideas?
LB: Generally, a year out. If not longer.
What stops you going cold on something? Ie: A project that got you excited in spring 2024, feeling passé by spring 2025?
LB: There’s been a few times where we’ve “course corrected”.
KW: We make a point not to start working on an idea soon after we have it. You want to put it on a board, and then you let it sit there for six months. And the final test: are we still excited about it? After the initial buzz of coming up with the idea has worn off.
How do you find the people who’ll manufacture all this different stuff? Are you constantly cold-calling companies saying: “Would you be interested in making us an Alexagate?”
KW: The short answer is, basically: yes. But the nice thing is, oftentimes, we’re ringing up manufacturers or companies, and we’re asking them to do something that’s much more fun than what they normally get to do. We have a good hit rate with those with those calls where we say, “Hey, do you want to make…?” Whatever it is.
Is there anything you haven’t been able to get made?
LB: There always is. Or just things that are really hard to do right now.
Can you talk about the process for the Birkinstocks?
KW: The nice thing about Birkenstock, as a sandal company, is they sell every piece of their shoe individually for repairs. Because that’s the kind of company that they are. Hermès does not do that. So, we bought some Birkin bags, and basically, we walked around Brooklyn with the bags. And we went into leather-working shops and asked: “Hey, could you take this apart?” Like, render it back into flat sheets, so we could make stuff? We had several people who point blank refused us. “Get this project out of my shop!” But then, fortunately, we did find someone. We also found a place that was doing small-batch shoe runs. It really was just a matter of coordinating several different suppliers. It took a little bit of convincing. We also did have a bag stolen from the shop.
LB: One person that we worked at the start basically cooked a bag. They did a very bad job.
KW: I think we also had a stack of fake Birkins that we got off [New York souvenir/ counterfeit designer goods mecca] Canal Street, so we could do some test runs on them.
Leaving aside the copyright issues around the actual items you created, you also co opt other elements of a brand’s IP. The Birkinstock product page on your website, for example, is in a font that’s meant to remind people of Hermès. Is all of this protected by the First Amendment rules on free speech? Is that how you get around it?
KW: That’s a good question. We always think it is, right? [Laughs] Pretty much whenever we’re dealing with copyright, we believe that we are operating within our bounds as artists. People who are sampling culture – in the same way that in music there’s a rich sampling culture. I think art history has pretty firmly established that as standard practice. You know, from Warhol onwards, the sort of appropriation of corporate imagery in particular is very – let’s say “normal”.
Now, as far as the law is concerned, that’s a much harder question to answer. And we’ve had to learn more about it than we ever wanted to. And honestly, the thing that was most surprising to us is just how not settled it is. It’s actually incredibly difficult to answer the question you’ve just asked in a way that I feel confident about, because it’s constantly being relitigated. Andy Warhol lost a fair share of these cases. His foundation lost a fair use lawsuit in the last couple of years. Don’t we all feel like he got away with this, several decades ago? Why are we still talking about this?
Apparently, you share a lawyer with Barack Obama.
LB/KW: We do. Yeah.
So, what happens in, say, the Wavy Baby case? Is it a back-and-forth with the shoe companies, until the case is eventually dropped?
LB: I think that one ended up just settled. I think all the lawsuits we’ve had have just settled, ultimately.
Meaning, you had to pay out?
KW: Ultimately, it was decided outside of trial, right? So, we reach an agreement with – in this case – Vans. They do “X”, we do “Y”, and we mutually agree to drop the suit. We don’t have to do a formal resolution.
Is all publicity good publicity?
LB: It’s all been better for us, publicity-wise. I think a lot of people also think that there’s some sort of point with us trying to get sued. But as artists we’re never trying to…
KW: …it’s not like it’s trying to make us look cool, challenging a large brand like that. It’s a huge pain in the ass. It’s not the point of the work. I don’t think any of the major lawsuits that we’ve ever had has come from a project where we were expecting to have them. We’ve been shocked.
What about the Boston Dynamics robot dog?
LB: That never resulted in any lawsuit. Although they did release some statements…
KW: We bought that thing. We can do whatever we want. Honestly, it’s shocking that they could deactivate it. Like, can Apple nuke my laptop right now? Because they don’t like that I’m talking to you?
That was a project with a serious point. It was an anti-war protest.
KW: Yeah. They got their start with military funding. [In its early days, the company received significant funding from the US military, notably the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA). It has since pivoted to commercial sales.]
The Satan Shoes had your blood in them. Did that present manufacturing difficulties?
LB: The blood actually came from all of us [ie: the MSCHF staff]. And it was early on enough that we were personally making all of the shoes ourselves.
You’ve made a point of not repeating yourselves. Except, maybe, in trainers and fine art. What’s the appeal of those categories?
LB: I think fine art is much more understandable [for us]. We’re coming also from more of a fine art background, so it was a way of looking at the world that made sense. And then footwear was something we completely stumbled into by accident. And then, to be honest, because we got sued by Nike, it seemed there was a reason to continue making shoes.
You weren’t at all sure that the Jesus Shoes would sell, is that right?
LB: That was shocking as well. That was only, like, our seventh project.
KW: In no way were we conceiving them as products. No one would ever wear these, right? We were very far outside of the sneaker world at that time. But there was this whole secondary market dynamic to them. This idea that they were these pseudo-investment vehicles. At the time we were working on the Jesus Shoes, we were kind-of like blindsided by it. I think there was a sense that sneakers as an object were in some kind of cultural ascendancy. But we really did not understand the mechanics of it. I also think there was a bit of making fun of that whole space.
The idea being: who would be the ultimate collab? Well, that would be Jesus?
KW: Yeah, exactly.
Do you like it when celebrities wear your stuff? Drake, for example?
KW: I guess, yeah. It’s a good way to get an idea out there.
Do big brands pitch to you now?
KW: Every once in a while. It depends how big we’re talking. It’s rare that a big brand has any idea what it wants.
Would you be open to collaborating, or is it a flat no?
LB: If you have a good idea that needs an outlet, and someone’s approached you that seems could make that idea happen, maybe it makes sense.
KW: If we’re ever going to do stuff like that, usually the way it works is that if we’ve had an idea, and the only way that we could get it done is to work with a partner to execute it, then we figure out how to make that happen. You were talking about the fine art world earlier. That’s actually how we ended up getting gallery representation. We had this idea for an ATM with a leaderboard on top of it, for your bank balance [the MSCHF ATM Leaderboard, from 2022, displayed participants’ photos, plus their accurate bank balances, on a ranked screen above the cashpoint]. We thought that the only space that could really live would be Art Basel in Miami. So, we had to figure out how to get into Art Basel. And it turns out the only way you can is that you have gallery representation.
LB: We tried to do it by contacting the Basel organisation directly. And they were, like, “Do you want to pay us a lot of money for a corporate [space]?” They didn’t understand what we were trying to do. So, then we went and found somebody that would let us show.
How does MSCHF make money?
KW/LB: [Laugh]
Do you actually make money?
LB: Sometimes!
KW: The line that we always use, which is the most accurate, is that at the end of the day, we make and sell objects. And that is how MSCHF makes money. What are those objects? Well, obviously, since we have doubled down on sneakers, that’s a line that has been a recurring vertical with MSCHF. Sometimes it’s, you know, car keys.
Can you talk about the Big Red Boot? Did you have any inkling it would go as nuts as it did?
LB: I don’t think anybody could have ever expected it to go as nuts as it did. Because I don’t think any shoes have really gone as nuts as quickly. It was one of the greatest peaks, and then declines, of any object I’ve ever seen in my life. I think we thought it would do well. I don’t think we had any idea where, how big it was gonna get.
KW: We thought it was an image that could travel. It had a lot going for it. Did we think that people would buy it as a product? I mean, again, no. There’s always a question of how people are going to interact with something like that. One of the things that we have often talked about is the difference between putting images into the world and putting objects into the world. And the Big Red Boot is like a great example of the extra potency of objects. Which is basically: that other people can then make more images of them, right? It’s a pretty interesting case study from that perspective.
Although, for us, it was one of these things that rapidly escaped our control. Like we were talking about with the car keys, and some of these other things. There’s a performance that is done not by us, right? There’s a life to these things that’s in the hands of the crowd. So when Lukas is talking about the incredible peak-to-valley contrast of the Big Red Boot, we were trying to take what was originally, you know, a cartoonish form, and basically execute it at a very high production standard, and position it as a fashion object. And it had this spike where it was sort of being perceived in that vein. And then, as it proliferated everywhere, it became this inescapable meme. It was just so saturated onto Instagram that people really got annoyed by it, and it sort of roughly collapsed back into this jokey thing. It was a real whiplash moment for us, where we were trying to do this context transposition, and it sort of like jumped into a new context and then like slingshotted all the way back to where it started.
LB: It was interesting! You get to try to elevate it, and then it just imploded.
KW: Right. We were sort of upset at the time.
Because people had misunderstood it?
LB: Well, I think at first, they didn’t. As soon as it launched, it had a lot of interest as an image. And was really put on a pedestal. I’ve never seen so many inbound people asking us to give them stuff to take a photo with, and how much they would offer to buy it for. And then the fakes started being made of it. As soon as that happened, it just it devalued the image so much. And people started wearing it in ways that were really bad.
KW: It was very briefly this really highly desirable thing. And then it very quickly became this “avoid at all costs” thing. What’s the opposite of a desirable commodity? Anti desirable?
You can’t honestly be grumbling that someone has bootlegged one of your products?
KW: We do think it’s funny now, actually. Because as we sat down to write about it for the book, the more we came to appreciate its whole life cycle. And now when we come to The Free Movie project, with the hand drawn frames… We initially ran it with Bee Movie with Jerry Seinfeld. And not just because the pun worked with the name, but because this intellectual property that has this second life that has only been shaped by the way the internet relates to it, right?
Like it was a completely forgettable, stupid movie. But the one line where [Seinfeld’s character] Barry B. Benson says “You like jazz?”, out of context, just proliferated so heavily online. Like nobody has seen that movie, but basically everybody knew that one little five-second snippet, right? So, it had this totally crowd-mediated life. So, I think we had a knee-jerk reaction that, we lost control of the Big Red Boot. But it’s also that encapsulation of a particular way that the internet owns things that, generally, we really like. So I do think we came back around to it, when we had some distance.
Is your job as fun as it looks?
LB: Yeah, it probably is.
My favourite MSCHF fact is that one of your employees, Josh Wardle, invented Wordle. It sounds like something you’d make up. But it’s true, right?
LB: He did that before joining MSCHF. Literally, the two weeks before he joined. And then it exploded. And then he worked with us for, like, two years, and then he left. Honestly, he had some pretty big, pretty big things to work on himself. But, yeah, it’s totally true.
Made by MSCHF by Lukas Bentel and Kevin Wiesner with Karen Wong is published by Phaidon priced £59.95.
Newspapers and magazines used to carry perceived authority; the way an academic paper in the form of a book outweighs the same research presented in a dot com article. Published material certainly tends to convey itself as a piece of legitimate zeitgeist thanks to how such mediums previously conducted themselves. Keyword being: previously.
It's not so much about credibility these days, though. Especially when most of us can discern digital scams, fake news, and now the work of AI (…mostly. Check the fingers!). Nonetheless, the modicum of sensibility seems to stop at the factual bit.
Emotional judgement is where it gets tricky. It's why influencers—sorry, content creators—wield that influence. They marry the best of word-of-mouth marketing and blatant advertising; straddling layman relatability and celebrity endorsement. It’s why Micro Influencers have skin in the game.
It is pretty much a Black Mirror moment, however, when the subject of a shaped impression extends beyond a product or service. Like concerning, oh I don’t know, governing policies? I observed this erring in my social media behaviour: Opening the comment section of a reel merely seconds into it.
For context, sure. Yet everyone’s take on the matter inevitably colours mine. Worse still, diving into the exchanges. It almost becomes a way to check if I’m on the “right” side, regardless of content. No, that shouldn’t be called art. Yeah, definitely bring back bullying. If the top comment possesses a reigning number of likes, it must be a popular view and therefore right, right?
Try to pinpoint when we as a collective decided Justin Timberlake stopped being cool and when Anne Hathaway suddenly was. Try doing the same for fashion brands. Apart from outright felony (*cough* Diddy), it’s hard to tell when the narrative will sway in or away from your favour.
When did we stop forming individual sentiments, and sticking up for it? Is it that daunting to stand alone in a belief (that does not advocate hurting others)? Getting cancelled is probably the most direct effect of online groupthink, but how much weight would you give a hivemind as fickle as the Internet?
At this point, it’s almost a fantasy to access space to express yourself while having the openness to listen with respect. Most just want to do the first half while expecting others to do the latter for them. And if we keep this up, all we will be left with is varying degrees of dictatorship or civil war.
We get it. You've just been so busy and practically have no time at all for anything these days. Even frivolous pop culture news need to be presented in bite-size portions because who can afford fIvE mInUtEs ReAdInG aN eNtIrE aRtIcLe? You're barely making it through this introduction.
To help you keep up with this fast-paced world and its fast-paced memes, take this summed-up recap of what the kids be talking about this past year. 2024 gave us a healthy serving of beefs, eloquent GenZ brain rot speak, an industry of body positivity turned Ozempic junkies, and cringe personified—Jojo Siwa. Beginning from the most recent, here are your unfortunate signs of the times. Thank you Beyoncé.
Well, this is not the first time we got thirsty for a killer. That's an editorial "we" where by "we" I mean you feral hoes simping over the murder suspect of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson. While many are charmed by the unibrow, it's the shooting then leaving on a bikeshare for me. Either way, from green hoodie to burgundy sweater, the dude is having so many moments, it wouldn't be a crime to call him a hit man (HA). Lately, he and fellow felon Diddy allegedly share prison space, and the attorneys for both are apparently spouses. Not sure what to do with that useless bit of information so until the verdict is out, Alexa, cue "Criminal" by Britney Spears.
Press tours seem to be the rage this year; from publicity dressing to just poor publicity [someone enlighten me on the whole Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni saga and why has it still not ended with them (double HA, I'm on a roll)]. This movie adaption of the hit musical has doled out viral moments thanks to its stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo being ultimate theatre school kids. At the peak of their overdone reactions comes this special interview where not only space but also fingers were held. Next time you see someone looking overwhelmed, hit them with that emotional support index clutch.
Of course this one began with eternal IT boy Timothée Chalamet. Possibly because this one was graced by the actor himself, the movement spread across the globe like wildfire. The most notable celebrity contests being new IT boy Paul Mescal, Jimmy O Yang and ol' rat boy Jeremey Allen White (get someone else to explain Hot Rodent Men to you, I can't be doing it all).
The Guardian sums it up best: "The moist, ungovernable hippo combines the aesthetic of a potato and the iron will of a toddler—and her name means ‘bouncy pork’." 10 July 2024 marked the day the human race was blessed the existence of true Brat Girl Moo Deng. The female pygmy hippo was born in a Thai zoo, and her international appeal is best explained by her sigma female energy (i.e. innate sass, for the dinosaurs that roam among us).
TikToker Jools Lebron gets the credit for this catchy phrase of how to be respectful yet "cutesy". Timely, considering how unhinged everyone appears these days. The irony is not lost on us that the person bestowing advice on proper feminine behaviour is someone who was assigned male at birth. Offended? Please, cancelling is so last season.
Another accidental meme queen is Vice President Kamala Harris, not just for not understanding how cloud tech works, but this infamous phrase that is now emblazoned on our minds: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Which, again ironically, is wild without any context. Fun fact: The speech the line was taken from was actually from the year before. Talk about being unburdened by what has been (someone get the extinguisher YOUR GIRL'S ON FIRE).
A personal favourite because frankly, that level of audacity to believe in yourself is downright inspiring. To be so unapologetically terrible at a sport you're representing your country for that the Olympic committee officially deletes the new category is certainly worthy of worldwide attention. Okay, so the decision to remove breaking was supposedly made prior Rachael Gunn's stellar performance at the 2024 Paris games, but we wouldn't put it past them that the Australian breakdancer and her sick outfit convinced anyone who was on the fence. It only took this 37-year-old academic to show us that in life, delulu could just be the solulu.
Once again reinforcing that anyone can be famous in this social media hopped up era, Haliey Welch gained her misguided popularity via her fellatio advice in a street interview. The entrepreneurial young lady then went on to capitalise on her catchphrase with her own branded merch, podcast, and cryptocurrency, because are you really an Internet star if you didn't? $HAWK coin reportedly surged to USD490 million market capitalisation on the Solana blockchain, before plummeting 95 per cent within hours. Now who said meme coins weren't viable sources of income!
You gotta be living under a rock if you don't know about this feud. Your TLDR? Two rappers can't stand each other and put it in song. Diss tracks, if that sounds cooler. The over decade-long simmering beef and subtle shots fired finally culminated in a heated hip-hop exchange that not only gave us spectators memes aplenty, but lyrically poetic hit "Not Like Us".
Who else could make domesticity look so simultaneously fun and creepy than Nara Smith? The 22-year-old model and mother of three is making husband Lucky Blue Smith relevant again with her uncanny ability to bake everything that exists on this planet from scratch. Almost enough to make us forget that he has a daughter with Stormi Bree named Gravity. Anyway. Nara Smith, who claims to have wedded at 18, is nearly single-handedly putting all career women to shame with her accidental anti-feminist content. Now, is it too much to ask for a TikTok of the dishes being washed in the same style though?
Trump Rally Shooting Memes Are Trending
The Paris 2024 Olympic Opening Ceremony, In Memes
If Kendrick Lamar and Drake Settled Beef Like Charli XCX And Lorde
Pop music is supposed to be popular, right? So we shouldn’t be surprised when the biggest artists actually do turn out to be the most interesting and acclaimed. But it doesn’t always work out that way, so when music from Beyoncé and Billie Eilish is lauded by critics, Taylor Swift has the biggest tour of all time, Charli XCX levels up to superstar status, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan shoot into the stratosphere… well, at least it makes life easier for Grammy Award voters.
Speaking of the Grammys, you might recall that it was only a few years ago that their (since-dismissed) top honcho said that women needed to “step up” if they wanted to win the big prizes. We now live in a world where Spotify’s top five most-streamed albums of the year were all by women. Music may never have truly faced its #MeToo moment, but it’s pretty remarkable how dramatically the power has shifted.
Not that pop in the 2020s is all good times, as struggles with anxiety and racism and sexual identity ripple through so many of these mega-projects. And 2024 had plenty of extra-musical darkness, too, from the chilling and seemingly endless accusations of abuse against Sean “Diddy” Combs to Liam Payne’s gruesome death to the Kendrick Lamar-Drake beef, which definitely added some listening excitement but got creepy as it plunged deeper into the pedophilia allegations.
If the genre’s defining figures right now are Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, and Shaboozey, something bigger is going on. Other than a single from Billy Joel, his first new music in decades, the surviving boomer icons (the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen) were all on the road but had no 2024 releases. Or maybe that territory is covered by biopics now; this year, we got Dylan and Bob Marley movies, with subjects from Springsteen to Michael Jackson to Linda Ronstadt currently in the works.
And out of that, somehow, it turned out to be a pretty great year. The albums that made it to the top represent a wide range of styles (sometimes impressively diverse on the same record) and the continual blurring of genres in a shuffle-and-playlist universe keeps pointing to a fascinating future. Trying to guess where it’s going? Good luck, babe.
She said it when she announced the project: “This ain’t a Country album. This is a Beyoncé album.” Still, the battles raged on, the Grammys said yes, the CMAs said no. But the category debate actually did matter, because what Ms Knowles pulled off with Cowboy Carter was something bigger than just a genre exercise; it’s a consideration and commentary on American music across a broad spectrum, a triumphant and far-reaching statement and a joy to listen to. Remember that it’s only part two of a trilogy examining and reclaiming Black musical traditions. I’m dying to know what comes next.
The surprise of the year. For those of us who kinda sorta knew Carpenter as a one-time Disney star and as the other woman in Olivia Rodrigo’s 2021 masterpiece “Driver’s License,” the range, humour, and sophistication of these twelve songs was a revelation. “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” were the irresistible smashes, but a song like “Juno,” simultaneously evoking ‘60s and ‘80s pop, is built like a tank, stuffed with hooks and one-liners (“God bless your dad’s genetics,” “I showed my friends and we high-fived/Sorry if you feel objectified”) and somehow turns getting knocked up into an irresistibly flirty metaphor.
One day in July, an unlabelled vinyl album was quietly slipped into the bags of all purchases made at Third Man Records’ stores in Nashville, Detroit, and London. It turned out to be Jack White’s sixth solo album, and online instructions to “Rip it!” and share soon followed. The album got a more proper release a few weeks later and rather than a toss-off, it was an unexpected triumph. White’s last few records have had their moments, but they’ve also suffered from trying a bit too hard; No Name places him firmly back in the scorching, sparse garage-blues territory he staked out with the White Stripes.
Robert Smith said that the Cure’s first album of new material in sixteen years would be the band’s “most intense, saddest, most dramatic and most emotional” ever. It’s a lot to live up to, but Songs of a Lost World doesn’t disappoint. The eight gorgeous, atmospheric, sprawling songs, most of them familiar from the Cure’s recent tours, are more melancholy than bleak, and while there’s not a lighthearted “Friday I’m in Love” or “The Lovecats” to be found, the deep sense of commitment and yearning in “A Fragile Thing” reveal the unwavering passion of a band that remains entirely true to itself.
I’m not sure if Johnny Blue Skies is an alter ego, a band name, or just a loophole that allows Sturgill Simpson to work around the retirement announcement that followed 2021’s The Ballad of Dood and Juanita. After moving to Paris in search of himself and watching his influence take over the country charts (Zach Bryan, Chris Stapleton), Simpson has emerged with a gorgeous, expansive set of self-reflective songs, revealing both humour (“Scooter Blues”) and deep introspection (“Who I Am”). He also reassembled his killer 2010s band, and the sound—dipping into ’70s country-rock and soul and tilting toward psychedelia—may be Simpson’s most alluring yet.
There’s only a glancing mention or two of Drake on GNX, but the year’s defining beef gave K.Dot the fire to fight for old-school rhyme skills, his hometown of Los Angeles, and his place in hip-hop history. (Shout-out to whoever out there said this is the first time someone followed up an album about going to therapy with an album that was even angrier.) Some were disappointed that this surprise release (apparently a surprise even to his label) didn’t have the thematic scope of To Pimp a Butterfly or Mr Morale & the Big Steppers, but the gunslinger mentality showed that comparisons to Tupac, who’s sampled on “Reincarnated,” are more apt than ever—Lamar has that same kaleidoscopic effect, encompassing poet, outlaw, activist, loudmouth, and introvert.
What’s immediately apparent on Billie Eilish’s third album is the sheer musicality. It’s the most range, stylistically and vocally, that she’s displayed so far. After the electro-goth of When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and the intimacy of Happier Than Ever, she (and her increasingly impressive collaborator/producer/brother Finneas) leap from the acoustic ballad “Wildflower” to the explosive twist in “L’Amour de Ma Vie,” often shifting gears and genres mid-song. It’s a striking display of boldness from the two-time Oscar winner, whether that means more singing and less of her signature whispering or going with the queer anthem “Lunch” as the first single. Remember that Eilish is still only 22 years old; just think of the places she’ll go.
The latest indie-rock sensation lives up to the hype. After three albums and work with the bands Wednesday and Waxahatchee, North Carolina native Lenderman hits his stride with a record that wears its influences on its sleeve (Neil Young, early Wilco, Jason Molina’s Songs: Ohia) but creates something distinctive and affecting. With a sharp eye for character and detail—playing an Ozzy song on Guitar Hero gets turned into a moving metaphor—and impressively sharp guitar playing, Lenderman’s songs might feel raggedy, but everything is in its right place.
Is Niger’s Mdou Moctar the greatest living guitar hero? Quite possibly—the soaring, screaming, psychedelic solos on his seventh album are unlike anything rock ’n’ roll currently offers. During his 2023 North American tour, a military coup back home made it impossible for Moctar to return to his country, and he resorted to a GoFundMe to enable the band to stay in the United States. Out of this incident comes Funeral for Justice, his most political album yet, excoriating both the impact of colonialism on African nations and the corruption of the local governments. You don’t have to speak the language, though, to understand the rage and confrontation in Moctar’s hypnotic, blazing fretwork.
Coming barely a year after her impressive debut, Lucky, these 14 songs prove that Megan Moroney is for real. She blends classic country wordplay and twang with the language and details (and anxiety) of a young woman in the 2020s. A title like “No Caller ID” risks sounding dated fast, but instead Moroney creates a truly distinctive and specific point of view. The catch in her voice will slay you, and the closing “Hell of a Show”—just verse, chorus, and out, barely a minute and a half—seals the deal.
Originally published on Esquire US
When Chelsea Monroe-Cassel began chronicling the foods of Games of Thrones for her punnily named cookbook A Feast of Ice and Fire, she looked for culinary inspiration in the recipes of the Middle Ages.
We’re talking properly medieval stuff. The sorts of recipes that assume you’ll be killing your own goat and will know by habit how to roast it, and that you’re already equipped with a kitchen where meals are prepared in cauldrons and curing salt is on the cutting edge of cooking technology. “They don’t have timings, they don’t have ingredients, they don’t have quantities,” Monroe-Cassel says. “So you have to pore through all kinds of related material to treasure hunt for details.”
It’s exactly the sort of offbeat gastronomic excursion that Monroe-Cassel has become familiar with throughout her career as a fictional-food creator. Alongside feasting at the tables of Westeros, she has tasted the snacks of the USS Enterprise and drunk the soups of Tatooine. She’s eaten the lembas bread beloved by the hobbits of the Shire and tucked into the pies and stews of the fantasy world of Azeroth. She has travelled to places with her stomach that most people go only with their minds. Yet in making these journeys, she’s been far from alone.
The past decade has ushered in a wave of such fictional feasting through a genre of cookbooks that reverse engineer the foods of popular movies, television shows, books, and video games into recipes for the home kitchen. Thumb through The Official Harry Potter Cookbook and you’ll find instructions for whipping up a batch of Hagrid’s Dragon Eggs. Open The Unofficial Stranger Things Cookbook for a method of turning figs into Demogorgons.
In The Official Witcher Cookbook, you’ll learn how to brew a Sorcerer’s Beef Stew, while Friends: The Official Cookbook breaks down how to make Monica’s Onion Galette. Pixar: The Official Cookbook includes tips on creating Toy Story 3’s Jelly Bean Burger, and The Unofficial Simpsons Cookbook reveals the secrets of the Flaming Moe (or as fans will surely know it, the Flaming Homer).
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can find recipe books for Godzilla, Ghostbusters, Titanic, Alien, Back to the Future, Avatar, The Lord of the Rings, Jurassic World, The Godfather, The Hunger Games, The Wizard of Oz, Home Alone, The Princess Bride, The Big Lebowski, Seinfeld, Doctor Who, The Walking Dead, Peaky Blinders, Bridgerton, The Office, Ted Lasso, Mad Men, Happy Days, Parks & Recreation, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bob’s Burgers, Gilmore Girls, Adventure Time, Naruto, Lilo & Stitch, Rick and Morty, Pokémon, Minecraft, Street Fighter, Stardew Valley, Assassin’s Creed, Animal Crossing, Halo, The Sims, The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and many, many more.
The biggest of these books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, retail bookstores often dedicate entire displays to them, and the appetite for the genre has grown so large that Monroe-Cassel has written a second Game of Thrones cookbook due to release in May. Some are officially licensed, meaning that they carry all the branding, artwork, and high production value that their properties afford. Others are humbly titled “unofficial,” inching tentatively up to the line of copyright infringement. Many are hefty, hardback tomes created with immense detail and genuine love for their source material. And then there are the less convincing releases, stamped with the name of a popular franchise to warrant a glossy cover and high retail price.
All, essentially, are merchandise, designed to entice enthusiasts of whatever pop-culture license they’re tied to. Usually, that’s a franchise of some kind—one that commands a loyal audience and for which a branded recipe book doesn’t look out of place next to shelves of T-shirts, plushies, hoodies, action figures, coffee-table books, board games, and everything else publishers release to the baying delight of eager fans. But the best of them are extensions of the worlds on which they’re based, letting readers engage with their favourite fiction in a new way by getting a little physically closer to it.
“It’s just a whole other way to cosplay,” says Elena Craig, a recipe developer who’s written cookbooks for the worlds of Harry Potter, Deadpool, and Hocus Pocus. They allow readers to bring their favourite fictional world to life, she thinks, and enlarge it to the point at which they can partake in it themselves. For Tomb Raider superfan and fan-site owner Michelle Harris, Tomb Raider: The Official Cookbook and Travel Guide does more than just handily collect recipes from hero Lara Croft’s travels—it deepens her connection to the character’s journey. “You get to taste the food the locals would eat,” Harris says, “and by doing this, it gives you a little more insight into the areas Lara travels.”
Fantasy and science fiction stories are natural candidates for the model. They’re rife with imaginary foods to playfully re-create, and their expansive world-building often gestures toward the cuisines of their fictional peoples. “If the cookbook is for a TV show or movie, I rewatch it over and over again looking for food references,” says Jenn Fujikawa, a food writer who’s authored Star Wars, Ghostbusters, and Avengers cookbooks. “I really study the shows to build a proper backstory so that the recipe makes sense in-world.”
Monroe-Cassel says the trick to re-creating fictional foods often lies in finding real-world ingredients that can convincingly pose as imaginary alternatives—which may sound rather straightforward until you’re staring down the culinary canon of World of Warcraft and have to whip up dishes with names like Chimaerok Chops. With foods as made-up as these, where do you even begin?
“So a rok is a bird, and a chimaera is a lion-eagle-goat thing,” says Monroe-Cassel. “I can work with goat, but I can’t find goat.” Anything else, then? “Let’s do lamb!” The result is a lamb-shoulder chop marinated in a nutmeg-and-Aleppo-pepper-flake rub, served with couscous or rice. Not bad for a dish that appears in the video game as only a small, vaguely food-shaped clump of brown pixels.
This is, of course, half the appeal. Not only do these foods offer new sensory gateways into fictional worlds, but when they’re cooked, you get to eat them. “I want my cookbooks to be fun to use at home for watch parties, so I like to make sure the food isn’t too daunting that people wouldn’t even want to try to make it,” says Fujikawa.
The more children-oriented cookbooks often contain novelty dishes, like the Dobby-shaped cupcakes of the The Official Harry Potter Baking Book, or the Splash Zone cocktail of Jurassic World: The Official Cookbook that arranges marshmallows around the rim of a glass to (sort of) look like the toothed mouth of a dinosaur. “You want to make sure everyone feels included, especially in comics,” says Michelin-star chef Paul Eschbach, who created the recipes of the upcoming Marvel: Spider-Man: The Official Cookbook. “We’re not making up a cookbook for Noma here. What is Peter Parker going to eat?”
It’s exactly the sort of question we’ve been asking of our favourite characters for decades. Pop-culture cookbooks may be enjoying a newfound popularity, but the genre is hardly new. Cult soap opera Dark Shadows received a cookbook tie-in back in 1970, and Marvel put out a collection of superhero-inspired recipes a few years later. Trekkies got their first recipe book in 1999, and The Sopranos Family Cookbook followed in 2002.
These early titles, though, were few and far between, and it wasn’t until the 2012 publication of Monroe-Cassel’s first Game of Thrones cookbook that the genre took off in earnest. She and a friend had started a blog the year before to showcase their take on foods from the beloved book series; then they sent a tongue-in-cheek email to author George R.R. Martin suggesting they team up for an official collection. “Not only did he write back,” Monroe-Cassel says, but he told his publishers to get on it. “Turns out that whatever George Martin wants, George Martin gets.”
It helped that the Game of Thrones TV adaptation had just started airing, enthusing a fresh audience to the lore of Westeros and creating a new batch of fans to lap up merch of the hottest prestige television show of the moment. At the same time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was inching toward its eventual domination of the Hollywood box office. Suddenly, sweeping imaginary worlds became the commercial tentpoles of pop culture. Understanding their expansive lore was no longer lazily seen as the purview of geeks, nerds, and other unpleasant stereotypes but instead practically necessary if you wanted to keep up with the latest watercooler chat in the office.
“Everyone can be geeky these days, and it’s not frowned upon,” says Nicolle Lamerichs, lecturer in creative business at University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, who specialises in studying fandom and media. “That even your average uncle is watching these shows and is super invested in them helps to see how fans are part of the mainstream.”
Bertha Chin, lecturer in social media and communication at Swinburne University of Technology and coeditor of Eating Fandom: Intersections Between Fans and Food Cultures, remembers when fandom was chiefly expressed and enjoyed at comic cons, clubs, and other underground events. Fans would meet up for a weekend to enjoy their shared interests before returning to their normal lives come Monday morning. “Now everywhere you turn on Twitter or TikTok, people are just sharing their fandom,” she says. “A lot of it has to do with social media making everything more accessible.”
With like-minded people just a few clicks away, it’s easier than ever to find a community that shares an interest in whatever characters, worlds, or creators you love. And with potentially thousands of other Internet users always ready to chat, speculate, argue, and share memes online—anonymously or otherwise—you need never stop. A burgeoning interest can quickly become a hobby, and it doesn’t take that much screen time for a hobby to become an obsession.
It’s music to the ears of publishers looking for an easy payday. To some degree, fans are the perfect consumers: They’re loyal, dedicated, and have at least some level of preexisting interest in branded products. Pitch a product right and you’ll open the door to a ready-made audience. Or try an outlandish idea like, say, a tie-in cookbook and you’ve got a good chance of finding a gap that fans have been waiting to fill.
As a big Star Trek fan, for instance, Lamerichs owns various bits of merch, including things like fictional travel guides to the planet Vulcan and other locations in the show. “But the nice thing with a cookbook is that in a way it’s interactive,” she says. “It’s about re-creating these dishes and fantasising about these dishes. It’s about thinking, If this had existed for real, how would we go about creating it? There is more creativity to it than wearing a T-shirt.”
Yet there’s also something undeniably peculiar about it all. It’s a strange, almost amusing exercise to reduce the world’s most commercially and critically beloved franchises to items that can fit on a kitchen shelf. It’s not only that these blockbuster worlds seem too big for the pages of a recipe book but that recipe books themselves sit in an altogether different domain. They belong to the mainstream.
Pop-culture cookbooks, then, seem to straddle the divide, extending fandom to the very consumers who are typically thought of as outside it. Or to put it another way, while you probably won’t catch many Downton Abbey fans walking around in graphic tees or adding to their Funko Pop collections, a great deal of them will be exactly the sort of people to enjoy a good recipe collection.
For food historian Annie Gray, there’s more to it than just business savvy. When she was asked to create the official cookbook of Downton Abbey, she was most interested in how the format could be a useful vehicle. She remembers thinking, “I can use this to put across the actual history of the period tied into a series that people really love. This is a really good opportunity to get real history in front of an audience of people who are already receptive.”
Much like the television shows on which they’re based, the recipes in Gray’s Official Downton Abbey Cookbook and Call the Midwife: The Official Cookbook are inspired by the ingredients and tastes of their eras but tweaked to be more palatable for a modern audience. Every recipe is introduced by an explanation of its origins and development, and sections are interspersed with short essays discussing the trends, industries, and forces that influenced English cooking of the time.
It’s a far cry from some of the other pop-culture cookbooks Gray remembers reading in preparation. Many, she says, made basic historical errors, while an unofficial Downton Abbey cookbook seemed to think the fictional stately home was somehow connected to England’s monastic “abbeys” dissolved in the Reformation of the 16th century.
Errors that egregious are thankfully rare, but it’s still not too hard to spot the cash grabs of the genre. Cast your eye across a random selection of pop-culture cookbooks and you’ll quickly see brands so devoid of culinary material, or so infertile for expansion, that slapping their name on a recipe book seems little more than cynical.
Will fans of 16-bit video games really get much from Sonic the Hedgehog: The Official Cookbook? Will Fast & Furious: The Official Cookbook have anything to teach a burgeoning gourmand? And does Catan, a nearly 30-year-old board game that includes no mention of food other than the odd picture of a bushel of wheat, have much to offer a home cook? For obsessives, maybe. For those looking for an easy birthday gift for an obsessive, probably. And for publishers, certainly.
“These books have been really selling well and getting really great placement,” says Casie Vogel, vice president and publisher at Ulysses Press, who published Catan: The Official Cookbook last year. Picking recipes for that book, she says, involved choosing foods that could tie into the game through wordplay or could be shared by a group of friends during a board-game night. But selecting the license for a cookbook is more business minded.
“It’s a lot of discussion about who do we think the audience is for these shows, movies, or whatever the pop-culture tie-in is,” Vogel says, “and going from there to see if those are people that we think are book buyers who kind of get this stan-fan culture.”
Brenna Connor, manager of U.S. books-industry insights at the market-research firm Circana, says that such licensing is now an important part of the book market at large. In the U.S. between 2013 and 2023, the number of published licensed books more than doubled, and while cookbook sales are down from their pandemic peak, licensed cookbooks of all varieties represent one pocket of growth. Many are tied not to pop-culture brands but to individuals who’ve made a name for themselves on TikTok, YouTube, and other social media platforms, including B. Dylan Hollis, Joshua Weissman, Nick DiGiovanni, Barbara Costello, and Joanne Lee Molinaro.
These authors are effectively the modern incarnations of the TV chef. “On average in 2023, cookbook sales for these TikTok stars outperformed the top 100 cookbooks by 600 percent,” says Connor. In fact, looking at licensed books across all adult categories, the licensed cookbook is the top area of growth, with sales reaching 2.2 million books in 2023. “The titles driving the most growth are coming from licenses with strong brand loyalty, like Disney Parks, Yellowstone, Dungeons & Dragons, Minecraft, and Hocus Pocus,” says Connor.
It’s a trend the publishing industry has fully embraced. Consider the case of UK imprint Expanse, which was set up by mega-publisher HarperCollins to specifically focus on the biggest properties across gaming, TV, and film. Its mantra is “books for fans, by fans”—a motto that couldn’t better summarise the way publishers are betting on the ever-growing appetite of fandoms. Says Expanse publishing director John Packard, “I think there is a lot of nostalgia for these brands, either for something you played or watched as a kid or spent hundreds of hours of your life immersed in. People want to carry on that experience and continue engaging with that world, and cookbooks are one fun way of doing that.”
It’s not like their creators are going to run out of material anytime soon. “We’ve got other offshoots of it, whether it’s baking, cocktails, or entertaining,” says Vanessa Lopez, who oversees licensing and partnerships at publisher Insight Editions. “And there’s always new media being created that gives us opportunity for this sort of publishing.”
Are we set, then, to wade through ever more of these novelty recipe collections, created with varying degrees of quality and love yet published ultimately for the reliable financial return promised by the brands and characters and worlds to which we’ve grown loyally attached? Yes, probably. But is that so bad?
When writer and comic historian Jermaine McLaughlin was approached to pen the words of Marvel: Spider-Man: The Official Cookbook, the whole project seemed a bit of a head-scratcher. But after going through the process and seeing the final collection of recipes —taken from across the five boroughs of New York as seen through Spider-Man’s mask—he understands the appeal. “There’s something pretty fun about being able to marry people’s culinary interest—even if it’s, like mine, a surface-level interest—with these characters,” he says. “It makes the read a bit more fun, and it may help people discover recipes that they may not have even known they were interested in.”
The best fiction has always challenged conventional taste. Now it’s just doing that in more ways than one.
