Pink Hair, Blue Steel, Pure Hatred

An apology is owed. Several, actually—to friends I called hipsters for playing Game Boy Color in bars, for wearing a single large ring, for owning a fixed-gear bike they’d never ridden. I was wrong about all of them. I understand this now because I’ve watched Charlotte Free and Gryphon O’Shea in a video for Dazed & Confused and I finally know what the word actually means.

Charlotte Free: pink hair, model, visibly indifferent to everything including the camera pointed at her face. Gryphon O’Shea: her half-brother, involved with fashion in some capacity, wearing a butterfly shirt and doing Blue Steel into the lens while holding a plastic guitar in an arcade and talking about the "crazy sound" he’s into. Between them, an unintelligible mumble about their "weird connection," laid over a beat that sounds like it was generated by a bored algorithm in 2009 and never updated since.

Every second of it produces something I can only describe as clean, uncomplicated hatred. Not irritation—hatred. The specific kind that comes from watching people perform an aesthetic assembled from ironic thrift-store particles without any apparent understanding of or interest in where any of it comes from. The flat cadence she speaks in, like roadkill on acid, the way he nods as though the music is profound while gripping a toy. I wanted to sign something. A petition declaring that the era of performed cynicism over borrowed retro signifiers was finished and we could all go home.

I know this reaction is passé. Everyone lives how they want. I’ve internalized that. And yet the hatred arrives fresh every time, like my immune system encountering something genuinely foreign. In the interest of honest accounting: part of it is probably that Charlotte is objectively striking and I find it irritating that I’d look at her twice on any street. That’s not a defense of anything. It’s just an accurate inventory.