they are dead they are gone nothing lasts forever they are dead

One of my favorite things that would happen over and over when I lived in Atlanta was spending part of the night in a strangers' house either in between bars or not letting a night out end when it was still going strong. Atlanta is a wonderful city where, yes, there is a downtown core (located in Midtown) with dense high rises, restaurants and bars and other fun activities, but it truly is a constellation of neighborhoods spread out through a wide geographic area, each with its own unique centers and hubs of activities. That means nights often required traversing from neighborhood to neighborhood to hang out at the special spots all over the city. This kind of journeying sometimes leads to side quests, like stopping to do shots in a strangers kitchen half a mile from the bar as the uber is going to take 10 minutes to pick you up and you don't want to lose the buzz, or following someone home because the conversation and friendship you made is just that good and you don't want to leave it on a hanging note.

These moments are blips in time of a decade and a half littered with fun anecdotes and impossible stories that you really had to be there for. The tales make great asides in conversation, and remind me of a carefree time where it was much less irresponsible to be living in the moment and not planning ahead for the future. But that's what most of these moments boil down to whenever I reflect on them: ephemeral experiences that produced some great stories but nothing much more. I like to think of myself as a gregarious person and love meeting new people, and routinely ending up in strangers' houses definitely has made it easier for me to talk to strangers just in life, be it at the playground with my child or at a concert or other social event. But that's about it. There were no grand revelations, just fun moments woven into the fabric of the city.

I flashed back to many of those nights out when listening to the new Charli XCX album "Music, Fashion, Film" this week. It's a reflection album, for an artist trying to figure out where they stand after a career defining moment. Instead of trying to double down on the moment, the lyrics are almost freeing and wrestling with the question of what is the point of art, if once we put it out there we no longer can control what happens to it or how its received.

Littered throughout the album are guitar rhythms, a marked departure from Charli's normal sound. "I think the dance floor is dead / So now we're making rock music," she announces on the first track of the album.

Brat, my personal album of the decade, was always positioned to be more than an album. It was supposed to be trapping the listener in the cycle of the music industry, showing a personality that can create narratives and a vibe shift on its own. The album was littered with guests, and listeners were quick to parse the deeper meaning behind the lyrics, like many do for the entire time in between Taylor Swift album cycles. In a meta-commentary one of brat's standout tracks "Sympathy is a knife" was posited to be about Swift herself, who took Charli on tour towards the start of her career.

Instead of letting the album stand on its own, Charli invited guests to reimagine every track creating "brat and its completely different but also still brat." Everything was done with the purpose of extending the album's life cycle, showing how cynical marketing could be when not used for an artistic purpose. Instead, the album actually serves as a conversation between artists showing the vulnerability behind the brash flavor that is the artistic persona known as Charli XCX. Brat was designed to be all consuming, coming at you from all angles, but forcing you to listen to what everybody had to say as the machine left them to their own deepest insecurities. It was in a sense, a cultural reset.

In the aftermath of brat, the pop star forever entwined with Charli's career Taylor Swift released her latest album "The Life of a Showgirl," to mostly disappointing reviews. Her hardcore fans swarmed to buy every limited edition of the album, but if any thing the album cycle showed for many that Swift had transitioned from just being a popstar to being a lifestyle brand. You were not buying Swift for the music, you were buying her to be part of the Swift universe.

As a fan of her music for a long time, I found the album at first fine, but it aged horribly. She clapped back at Charli with a pixies-sounding song called "Almost Romantic," where she laughed off someone writing about her as a one sided affair and she promises she doesn't actually think about other artists. Summed up it read, "Its cute that you do it though, I know you don't kiss girls, but it feels like you want to kiss me, which is kind of romantic if you think about it? Even though I am engaged to a man who I love and I make a spectacle out of loving. I even talk about his privates on this album!"

Which is sad because the title track, and last track of the album had something really interesting to say about fame. "Wait, the more you play, the more that you pay / You're softer than a kitten / So you don't know the life of a showgirl, babe And you're never gonna wanna," Swift says in her chorus after introducing one of her trademark characters that she writes in such depth.

Instead of reflecting on this, Swift says she knew this all along, and still chose the path she's been on. She worked her ass off to get to the top and she's proud of that.

I thought a lot about that track when listening to the closing track of "Music, Fashion, Film" appropriately titled "No One Lasts Forever." The track is a standout for the artist in her career, delving into the themes of having the entire world thinking they know exactly who you are as a person, because you share your art with the world. What is the meaning of that when art is inherently ephemeral and once you release it, it is no longer yours. On the track "persona," Charli discusses how she and an unnamed person are "under the influence of life imitating art / And we both know it." Nothing lasts forever, and even if you are honest to a fault you are donning an artistic mask.

Then, to close the album out, the only guest comes in the form of a spoken word outro by film maker David Cronenberg. Discussing a near death experience, Cronenberg discusses how death and oblivion are the purest form of freedom. Immortality is offered to certain artists, but "experientially, for them / They are dead, they are gone, they are not experiencing that / These are true things and thank goodness for them."

Cronenberg's films deal with psychological and body horror, pushing the limits of what can happen to someone's humanity. I love them. They speak so deeply to the trans experience, its hard to put into words what some of them truly mean. But I just cannot help think of his monologue while thinking about how much everything Taylor Swift does is to position her legacy. Her fans paint her as someone who wants to be known for changing the music industry forever, even if she's just as much a myth created by a ruthless pr strategy, along with being a good artist.

Comparing the two stars feels like a disservice to the artistic evolution of Charli XCX, who has moved beyond being just a critical darling for her use of homage to past genres of music to a cultural force on her own. But, here we are.

I couldn't get Cronenberg's words out of my head as I read Homeric scholar Emily Wilson's review of Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey." Wilson's 2017 translation of the famous poem has been catapulted into the mainstream consciousness thanks to the movie, a stunning achievement for a scholar.

While that's genuinely incredible for her, and for the classics in general, I could not help but find a lot of the review poorly written for film criticism and unfair to what she is trying to visualize in the medium. Then, at the same time I remember this is someone who dedicated their entire adult life to the study of art that is thousands of years old, of course a modern, blockbuster interpretation is most likely not going to please her. That's not to say her opinions and criticisms don't have merit, the opposite in fact, but its hard to view this attempt of film criticism as anything but watching someone who has devoted to themselves to one kind of study forced to confront how an entirely different field intersects with it.

As someone who's written about the intersection of sports with culture, I've scoffed when writers of other beats attempt to write about something I've written about most of my adult life! They don't see the subjects I write about in the same light, or with the same context. Of course its going to be different. That's what makes art so ephemeral and beautiful. Once you let your words out they belong to those who receive them, not who writes them. There is nothing you can do to truly convey the entirety of your meaning to someone. A part will always be received in a unique fashion because that's what makes us human. And that's what makes art, well art.

So, Charli is right that "nothing's going to save us not Music, Fashion, or Film" but that doesn't make any of those things carry less weight in our reality. Maybe we're reaching a new cultural reset, where everything we do isn't defined by its legacy. As ai becomes more ubiquitous in our lives because the powers that be have a financial interest in that, the more its used the more things that get spat out it will be flattened. The words that we put in may be different, but the machine will flatten culture and dictate how things are contextualized. That is fundamentally the opposite of art or what art is trying to accomplish.

I think a lot about those nights where I ended up somewhere I had no idea where I even was, a lot. Not for what exactly happened to get there or what I even discussed with strangers, but for knowing that there is a world out there where spontaneity can produce something so wonderful that I remember it a decade later. It doesn't matter I can't remember what it produced, just that it happened. And it will happen again because I'm open to it.

Maybe we can all start to reach oblivion, appreciating art in a world where people are trying to devalue it. Maybe we can set ourselves free. Hell, even LeBron decided to make a decision for short term basketball decision instead of a long term financial and strategic mindset. Maybe we're finally getting that cultural reset.