It's almost Brat Autumn & Ferreira Fall
Mikaila #1 fans, fake Britney photo, Polly Pocket Airbnb, Auntie Anne's perfume 💓
I thought I’d be ready to share my FWB FEST recap with you today, but alas, I’m not!!!! Heart full, head empty. So we’ll get to that next week. TL;DR my life has been changed! Another LA highlight was finally meeting Chet IRL (who you may recognize from last week’s newsletter!) for an exclusive #1 Mikaila fan dinner. He made me a custom Mikaila shirt 🥹🥰 and I’m rightfully obsessed!!!!!
If you don’t know Mikaila, her song “Emotional” (2001) is, in my opinion, the best bubblegum pop song of all time. She was also a former child actress on Wishbone, the iconique and educational kids’ show where a cute little Jack Russell Terrier dreams about being the main character of stories from classic literature. Incredible. “Emotional”, as well as the songs on Britney’s Oops!…I Did It Again album, also inspired the Nicstalgia podcast theme song. While she is long-retired from the entertainment industry (good for her), Mikaila’s music lives on.
If you are new here, WELCOME!!!!!!!! Some housekeeping:
The structure of the newsletter generally remains the same week to week: mini essay(s)/deep dives and links. I talk about pop culture, music, and the internet, with a nostalgic twist.
I love deep diving into all things concerning digital anthropology, the diffusion of innovations, compensatory consumption, aesthetic labor & AI, media literacy & AI, media ephemerality and memory, and the fandom economy. Nicstalgia lives up to its tagline, “Deep conversations about superficial things.”
While I sometimes get into current events/brand collabs/internet sensations, this is not an algorithmically-driven roundup of big stories from popular media outlets; it’s a reflection of literally whatever happens to pop into my head or whatever I’m inspired by on any given week.
I’m a big proponent of emerging tech, but fwiw, I don’t use any AI-forward software to write or fact-check this newsletter. (Chat GPT is actually really bad at providing pop culture statistics; in my experience, it’s wrong 100% of the time.)
This newsletter is free and none of my content is paywalled. I get asked “wait, you give all this away for free?” more often than I’d like lol, but I love writing this letter. It’s the gateway to amazing conversations with amazing people. With that being said, if you’d like to support my work, you can do so for $5.99/month or $59/year. If you do, I will love you forever, just like Jessica Simpson.
If there’s anyone you know who will get a kick out of this newsletter, please send and recommend it to them! Past issues all live online here, and the podcast (on hiatus) lives here.
In today’s issue:
🤳🏼 Debunking the fake Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian, and Paris Hilton Oktoberfest picture
📲 Cake, Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl, Polly Pocket Airbnb, Auntie Anne's perfume, Brat Summer continued, looking toward Ferreira Fall
ICYMI, last week’s issue included a music video from The Corrs and a quick recap of the latest & greatest Nicstalgia newsletter editions.
Support Nicstalgia with a paid subscription for less than a vintage Polly Pocket Strollin’ Baby compact from 1994.
Huge thank you to Nicstalgia supporters who I will love forever: Janine, Marie, Liv, Mitra, CY, and Aleena! 💐💐💐
🤳🏼 It’s *not* Britney, bitch
Time for a ✨media literacy✨ lesson !!!!! I recently saw a pic in my feed of Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, and an unenthused Britney Spears on what looks like a carnival ride. I know for a fact that this picture is excellently and skillfully photoshopped (a la Stop Being Poor), but I guarantee that most people who scroll past this image don’t know that. Let’s dive into the origin of these photos.
The one of Kim and Paris is from Oktoberfest in Germany, 2006. I find it very funny and entertaining that Getty Images called them “Socialite/actress Paris Hilton and her girlfriend Kim Kardashian.” This time period – one year before KUWTK first aired – is the absolute peak of Kim’s relentless, crude, desperate, outrageously tacky and extreme pursuit of fame. Despite having zero perceptible talent, she positioned herself as a leech on Paris Hilton and did truly anything and everything to be seen. As we know now, this persistence, propelled by the business savvy of her mother, continues to work extraordinarily well in Kim’s favor.
The Britney picture was taken two years later in 2008, at Christian Audigier (of Ed Hardy and Von Dutch notoriety)’s 50th birthday party. This picture has been heavily memed over the last 15 years to express discontent and boredom, often with Britney’s face photoshopped into various expressions. This picture makes me sad, as we now know this was only 3 months into her 13-year-long conservatorship. The amount of photographs of her at this party, taken from every angle imaginable, is an accurate reflection of the ubiquitous paparazzi presence in her life. Imagine if every single time you shifted your position in your seat, turned your head, blinked, or even took a breath, your photograph was taken to be bought and sold. My heart hurts just thinking about it.
Why does all of this matter? Media literacy! Media integrity! Media awareness! The doctored photo was posted on a pop culture account where the audience takes what they see at face value. It’s a superficial, unexamined source of truth. Does it matter that this pic is photoshopped? Not really. Is it meant to be taken seriously versus just being a meme that makes people laugh? Not really. But does it matter that the general population doesn’t employ critical thinking skills when navigating social media and the online space, making them more susceptible to consuming and propagating information they don’t even know is inaccurate? YES!!!!!!
📲 I’m just a simple girl in a high-tech digital world
My fav things from the internet this week:
❌ “Is this cake?” ✅ “Is this Cake???!!”
“Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl” feat. Mona Lisa Vito feels like it was made for me. If I were to do this trend, it’d be with Michele’s Post-It Note monologue that I have memorized for some reason.
This is not a drill: There is a Polly Pocket Airbnb in Littleton, Massachusetts!!!!! Friends of Nicstalgia were on the scene! Jenna visited the life-size Polly Pocket compact and Elizabeth took its epic glamour portraits! As a Polly Pocket Girl™ myself, I’m so obsessed with this. Mentally, I’m here. Shoutout to my sister for kickstarting my vintage PP collection with the compact that she found in the wild at Brimfield!
Earlier this year, the lovely Terry Nguyen wrote a delightful piece for Dirt x Are.na’s Scent Access Memories (SAM) series about the scents of the mall!! Auntie Anne’s was listening – they are launching Kneads, a new fragrance, on 8/14. I actually need it….
🚬🕶💚 Brat Summer Corner 💚💊🩲
The brilliant MJ Corey went viral on X for talking about Charli XCX’s Cobrasnake-lensed 32nd birthday photos. I could (and do) talk ad nauseam about Millennials crossing The Chasm™, no longer being the focal point and generation representative of youth culture, having our lives being packaged for consumption and sold back to us as aesthetics, reunions, revivals, etc., but I need to read Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image and then we can pick back up on that conversation.
You know I love SATC edits with music that has absolutely no correlation to the clip: Charlotte and Carrie are apparently having a Brat summer!!! I’M WORTH A MILLION.
Planning ahead: It’s time to consider Brat Autumn, and I will be celebrating Ferreira Fall in full force.
Me teaching the “Apple” dance, taking it far too seriously:
🦋 Social butterfly
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I love the media literacy mini essay!! I didn’t realize those photos were taken three months into her conservatorship. Heartbreaking.