2019 Signs

Social media has rhapsodized about the magic of 2016 since January 1, 2017. My coworker told me the other day “every good movie came out in 2007.” On his most recent album Danny Brown proposes that the world ended in 1999 (a year that Charli xcx has indicated she would like to return to). It’s childish but I still conceptualize years as capsules inside a steel hole in the ground. There are years that have energy around them I can’t unsee. 2019 is one of them.

Covid immediately put 2019 into relief, but there’s so much more to unpack about that weird, uncomfortable year. It’s not dissimilar from the viral tweet formula that goes like, “Notice how every headline ends with ‘…since 2009’?” I’ve seen seeing a lot of “…since 2019” in my feeds. We know what happened next.

In 2019 I was having a bad time at my job and was underpaid, overworked, and over it. I thought it was glamorous to have a job at a print magazine even if the hours were destabilizing and the only thing glamorous about it was sometimes going to concerts for free. My closest friends there had moved on and I felt like I should do the same but never could bring myself to do it. A mental image I have is spending my afternoons sipping Monster Juice while browsing the Nike website surreptitiously in a different browser window. I was over-caffeinated for no reason, subsisting on liquid calories (the worst kind, as everyone says) and M2K Teknos.

Corporate trends in 2019 were pointing toward the future we live in now, of extreme wealth and power consolidation (Disney bought Fox, CBS and Viacom merged, Zaslav became CEO of Discovery, and Warner Bros, like it is today, was seen as attainable prey). Every IP imaginable was being lit on fire in a bid to chase dollars and attention spans.

2025 has been a banner year for Pattern-Seers and Sign-Noticers and there were Signs in 2019 like ones I’ve seen this year. (The Luka trade is a Sign but unsure for what yet.) The Signs in 2019 of things that felt off to me then looking back feel inarguable now.

In no particular order:

Nationals win World Series

All-time choke job by Houston. This is on par with the 2016 Warriors losing the title or the Falcons 28-3 lead dissolution in the Super Bowl (the humiliation was different, however). Washington deserved it but there’s a universe where the series is over in five and a legacy is cemented that continues through 2022 and beyond. The worst sports loss of my lifetime, when it was over I felt right away it was an overture for something. Harden dropped like 60 the same night against the Wizards as retribution

Uncut Gems

A good movie that was a Sign before legalized sports gambling helped re-elect Trump and is assuredly sending thousands of young men to AI-assisted self-harm. Reached a zeitgeist fever pitch frequency not unlike Spring Breakers, but where that movie was gleeful and high on its own fumes, this one is designed to make you feel bad. Entertaining, but so nihilistic and of-the-moment (an achievement for a movie that takes place in 2012) as to timestamp it as from the before times

Bon Appetit test kitchen mania

Harmless (?) videos that were a Sign of us having too much time on our hands, too much comfort, too much willingness to be bowled over by things designed to go down easy. Predicts the Everything is Content era (chicken wings, chicken shops, et. al [some of which I indulge]) and the YouTube lab of endless content

The (Sandy) Alex G era

Not a comment on his musical output during this time—Rocket and House of Sugar remain some of my favorite albums of his. This is a Sign in the sense this feels like a hallucination after the fact—he was once battling a basement-tier popstar for the name and now Alex G can sell out arenas full of teenagers. It’s a Sign of transition, of an era that is gone gone gone

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Tarantino’s career ended after Inglourious Basterds. His next three movies are so self-indulgent they make my eyes bleed, none more than this one, a movie that casts two movie star leads and asks, “what if I gave them nothing to do for three hours?” It’s definitely accurate to say the depiction of Bruce Lee is capital-R racist. Sharon Tate is infantilized. The Manson family is played to be gawked at; while not inherently offensive, in context it diffuses any tension or drama or intrigue about them as historical figures and leads to an interminable finale whose lasting image I have is of scumbag Emile Hirsch smiling. A movie that radiates evil

Brockhampton

Their whole thing seemed destined to age poorly. Fresh off a fleeting taste of mainstream success, one of them got canceled, their ubiquity led to resentment, the major label debut sort of flopped, and covid stamped their fate to be a relic sooner rather than later. Not a Bad Vibe but nonetheless a Sign

Russell Westbrook to Houston for Chris Paul

The second-worst sports loss of my life in 2018 led to a 2019 playoff exit that smarted (Klay Thompson Zaza’ed Harden’s landing space on every shot attempt and Silver’s NBA allowed it), but still, an owner with more patience would run it back one more year to give Chris Paul a chance to get healthy under contract. Tilman Fertitta, Trump’s ambassador to Italy, had no such patience and insulted CP3 on the way out the door. D’antoni/Harden ball was second cup-of-coffee caffeine hitting the cranial fluids; “PJ Tucker at center” was downing a Celsius; series finale “Westbrook at center” was smearing fingerfuls of cocaine directly onto your gums at 1 am. A draw overall results-wise, but a Bad Vibes inducer when the trade happened summer 2019, a logical dead-end and a prelude to a reimagining of professional basketball brought on by the onset of the bubble

Marriage Story/The Irishman/Always Be My Maybe

The emergence of Netflix slop. In order: a decent movie from a fine director that lacks any texture or grit and ends with a sing-along; a four-hour behemoth I still haven’t seen but whose length is indicative of the Slop Era (sure it might change my life but I’d rather go to the theater for 2.5 hours); finally, a true-blue example of slop, all Signs of things to come

Roky Erickson/David Berman/Daniel Johnston dying within three months of each other

High school sophomore-me sees heroes die tragically, throws off my inner moral compass, leads me to question things. This would happen again five years later when Rich Homie Quan, Ka, and BeatKing died back-to-back. Tragic coincidences, of course, but also, I can’t help but feel like the sequence is some kind of Sign

DaBaby

All-time example of a Sign that things were Not Great. Transitioning away from the mumble-rap era, someone using hard consonants was seen as a breath of fresh air. But there was no message, no charisma, no swag, just attempts at all three that succeeded off pure persistence (to be sure he had some good songs). I almost respect DaBaby in 2025 for being literally the only man not writing a victim narrative about his cancellation, seemingly at peace and unaffected by it. I cannot respect his artistic choices because they are tasteless (content warning—graphic, dumb, exploitative), yet audacious enough to prove some people live in an alternate reality

Euphoria, season one

Occasionally brilliant show oozing with bad vibes. Sam Levinson is a bad artist and probably a bad person who was able to intermittently lasso whatever talent he does have for moments at a time (a common trait among these personality types). Sweeney has fallen; Angus Cloud died; Barbie was exiled; Alexa…not sure what happened to her. We convinced ourselves season two was watchable but that is so not true looking back at it. What we really had was in total maybe five hours of lighting in a bottle (I still like those standalone episodes from 2020) and six years of the worst vibes imaginable. A definitive 2019 Sign

Caroline Polachek, Pang

Polachek represents one of the biggest 180s I’ve had with a musician; she has a deeply off-putting aura. I thought this heralded a moment of arrival for a major artist, but I now view it as a harbinger of the post-woke shape-shifting white person, which became a new archetype after the summer of 2020

“Old Town Road”

The moment when virality became its own end, the thing to chase towards. A good half-song, but the start of a commercial ethos that has yet to bottom out as well as a Sign things could always get more ephemeral. It takes talent to compose 90 seconds of genius, which this is (I don’t consider the Billy Ray version my personal canon). But does one need more than that to matter long-term? Arguably, I say yes. He exposed the damnable underbelly of the country music establishment which was a net positive, and I wish nothing but good things for Lil Nas X (the only good Barb) but I never viewed this as a Soulja Boy-esque vision of a new paradigm, more of a right-place right-time phenomenon, one of the clearest examples a Pattern was emerging through the Signs

Avengers: Endgame

Marvel slop reaches mass hysteria. People recording themselves in the theater to hype up a prefab cultural “moment” is the definition of slop in a bucket before the farm. Single-handedly responsible for most of the worst entertainment trends of the past 15 years; it couldn’t die soon enough. We deserved to be punished for giving this billions, and we promptly were

Epstein murdered

Self-explanatory

Solange, When I Get Home

Still a great album and even better movie, but what felt like a bittersweet love-letter to home now feels like a bittersweet goodbye to not just her hometown, but the idea of it, an era of it, an innocence to it, a wistfulness for a concept of Houston that died after Harvey in 2017

End-of-the-decade retrospectives

Not to disparage anyone I respect/admire that contributed to end-of-the-decade content, but I found it lacking because the ‘10s is a decade that doesn’t make sense until after covid. 2008-2012 is the end of the Facebook/Blog era which is fundamentally different from the culture of the rest of the decade, which splintered into a million directions when corporate money consolidated after Trump. Then culture curdled as folks raced to pump money into videos/podcasts/other gimmicks without knowing what was awaiting them on the other side of 2019. It’s a decade that made no sense and makes even less sense now, trying to parse it out in the fall of 2019 was an impossible task and I felt adrift and split from time itself in trying to read it all and contextualize a dam that had yet to break

Young Thug, So Much Fun

“Hot” as a fun single aside, after many Signs, this was the Sign my goat was washed

Astroworld festival

Two years before ten people were dead on a concrete parking lot next to a football stadium I saw DaBaby and Marilyn Manson on the same day of semi-joyless appearances from Pharrell and Kanye and Playboi Carti. The entire spectacle was hollow to its bones but I pushed it aside because this is what the culture was giving us and Houston needed a music festival. One of the darkest Signs of 2019 in a year defined by casual nihilism (see also the Joker phenomenon, Uncut Gems, Kawhi’s triple-bounce, the 13-3 Super Bowl)

Us/Midsommar

Classic examples of the sophomore urge to Do Too Much. Us’s “We’re Americans” is a defining line of the year because it is the epitome of Saying Too Much while accidentally stumbling into a mission statement for a time when there was no coherent mission, people were confused and angry and looking for someone to blame and this aimlessness would all come to a head a year later when one million Americans died. We’re Americans, tethered to death

Charli xcx, Charli

When this album flopped (less an outright disaster more a platter of mid from a scene in transition) it threatened to derail an entire class of almost-popstars. In fact, it was easy for me to view it as proof this entire class was never going to get to the mountaintop. While that prediction was obviously wrong, I felt it Signaled an end of an era, especially with the inclusion of Lizzo (a definitive 2019 Sign) that would suggest a sea change in who was becoming a popstar. In reality this is merely the close of a chapter—everyone involved would regroup, but still a Sign we were about to take a fork in the trail

Weyes Blood, Titanic Rising

A great album but a Sign when even the best records were openly grappling with existential questions that tend to arise in a vacuum of manufactured comfort. While waiting for the decade and the administration to end, we were looking ahead to what there was to anticipate which was (and remains) climate-induced apocalypse. An album of breathtaking beauty that also succeeds because of how it stands in contrast to the dark and ugly era out of which it rose, which is of course something Natalie Mering had absolutely no way of planning

Tuca & Bertie

A funny show that felt like the first time a genuine millennial experience was translated into fiction; the millennial fiction shelf-life would prove to be extremely short when covid changed the arc of aging for young people forever

Popeyes spicy chicken sandwich

Obvious, but not any less insidious. Beanie Baby/Labubu fever in the “fried chicken space,” which demonstrated the nadir of demonic corporate speak as well as predicted the slop churn hollowness at the center of our lives, setting up a never-ending future where one is only as funky as your last Certified Banger and nothing exists beyond the everlasting present tense which gives us no future, no history, but an expanding on-ramp to entropy. Morgan Spurlock—consummate grifter—highjacking the momentum of this to slap together Super Size Me 2: Chicken only to cancel himself is sort of like a computer getting a virus, or the Simulation skipping, all to say—A SIGN ON A SIGN IS A PATTERN

What are you Noticing today???