Herb Sundays 111: Lauren Oyler

The critic let(s) loose + SV4 on the year in hate, scrounging for pleasure, and Trance.

Herb Sundays 111: Lauren Oyler (Apple, Spotify).

Art by Michael Cina

“This is my GOOD MOOD NOW dance music playlist; I'm told I'm crazy for this, but I listen to this stuff while writing, and during any activity that requires momentum and stamina and may be improved by mild euphoria/mania. (Exercise, plotting revenge.) Some tracks are what the French novelist Guillaume Dustan refers to as "totally stupid, all HI-NRG with the beat in double time" in his 1997 novel I'm Going Out Tonight; others fall into a long and somewhat spurious list of genres and subgenres that are popular in smaller Berlin clubs right now and are best summarized as "fluid." It's all incredibly fun. In her 2013 essay “Joy,” Zadie Smith writes about being "overwhelmed by delight" by the surprise appearance of what I call capital-S “Songs” in a club, and I suspect what draws me to this music is that, beneath the fun, or bound up in the fun, it constantly reproduces a sense of release or even relief. After acclimating to minutes and minutes of repetitive sounds you simultaneously realize and get what you've been waiting for: a sample from a song you recognize, a swell of romantic crescendo, a beautiful, if fleeting, human voice. What this can teach a person about patience and endurance more broadly is probably why I also listen to dance music while writing and exercising. If I'm using it to write in particular, a goofy German trance track ("My head is empty") might also remind me of the very loud, dark room at the end of the tunnel (which I prefer to visit on Sundays, per the local custom).” - Lauren Oyler

Lauren Oyler is an American author based in Berlin and has written two books, this year’s No Judgment, a book of essays, and Fake Accounts (2021). Her essays on books and culture appear in places like The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, and the Guardian.

To say Lauren’s had a wild year so far would be an understatement. No Judgement and Oyler are at the white-hot center of literary criticism this week, which has rolled its (I imagine) Spring-weight Oxford sleeves up and is getting pretty raw in reviews and on social media. Maybe it is always like this, but it’s rare to see this stuff start to spill over into my filter bubble.

I don’t know Lauren personally, so I don’t feel comfortable asking her, “How are you holding up?” Plus, I would guess she’s sorta built for this type of thing as a professional critic. In race car driving, the common advice I’ve heard is “Focus on the road, not the wall,” or it's inverse if you’re a Stoic Bro, where one calls upon Negative Visualization to imagine worst-case outcomes, steeling your nerves. Oyler definitely seems to gun it for the Wall; damn the torpedoes. The first two essays in No Judgement are about revenge and gossip, no less. If you want blood….

But I’m not a literary critic, and we do things a little differently around here. I was connected to Oyler’s work by the publisher of No Judgement, whom I linked with to cover Michael Azerrad (Herb 108). My lack of lit cred is showing, but I didn’t know who she was at first, and the book hung around for a few weeks. Then, I finally dove in. The idea of a cultural critic is interesting to me and the rise of a new class of public intellectuals like Dean Kissick (Herb 60) or

Joshua Citarella

who help make sense of the moment while we’re still in it.

The TLDR story I’m reading is that Oyler has pissed off more than a few people, both with her opinions and her success. People are lining up to take shots at her, some seemingly warranted, some potentially more vengeful. I’ll be honest: there was a minute I considered putting a pin in this, but I don’t love pile-ons (I covered The Dare (Herb 83) at the peak of his slander), and it wouldn’t be very Herb to worry about losing a few subs. I feel like the nebbish substitute teacher who arrived halfway through the fight; I don’t know who bullied who first, etc.

The plight of the writer, especially the critic, is normal stuff in this weblog, from the music side, but to make sense of this kerfuffle, I asked another writer I admire, T.M. Brown, to share why he thinks Oyler is getting so much pushback:

“People—especially freelancers—are mad because the landscape somehow keeps getting more precarious. There are like 4 magazines left that land at the intersection of prestige and scale, and all of their budgets have been cut to the bone so when middling, half-assed essays from freelancers show up in the New Yorker or Harper's it activates a lot of frustrations that the "wrong" person is getting the extremely limited opportunities to succeed. A lot of the pushback is steeped in insecurity and envy, and writers as a rule are deeply insecure people already. It has always felt like a zero sum game, but in this environment it's especially apparent. Chances are so limited, of course we get angry when someone we don't think is worthy pilfers a ration.”

But I think we're also here to talk about music. This is indeed a pumping playlist; it is a Sunday mix for a cycling class or an open-air Berlin Sunday afternoon, both of which Oyler seems into. Alas, it's still a Sunday playlist and a rare worked-up Herb Sundays entry at that. Oyler, who loves some good quotes and references, drops a few breadcrumbs. The opener is a cover of a Chicago House perennial, E.S.P.’s “It's You,” and there’s even an edit from Tony De Vit, the late DJ/producer whose contributions to club culture and gay culture are getting new looks. Whether or not this level of footnoting is intentional, I’ll also never know.

Berlin is a big part of Oyler’s brand; it allows her to be in but not of her American literary peers on the coasts, and allows her a level of dislocation to observe. Also, the music. As Oyler is a self-described snob, you could see her reaching for headier fare but has chosen some sort of uncritical music, which I dig, coming from the school of Simon Reynolds’ (Herb 32) “dumb is good, sometimes” (that’s not a real quote) when it comes to dance music. The Berlin essay connected with me most cause I, too, have felt what it means to be there as a tourist (with many such cases of friends moving there) and observe my Americanness. The F.T.’s review of No Judgement by Chris Allnutt says:

“Oyler’s observations are plagued by paranoia. She worries variously that she is no different from the tourists in her adoptive home of Berlin, that she will be mistaken for her characters, that she reviews for the wrong reasons. For such a confident critic, the essays speak to a constant crisis of individuality: her mind is always on where her behaviour fits in with that of those around her, and quotations can read as though she is looking over her shoulder rather than at her direction of travel.”

I agree with this observation, but I also admire the honesty with which she gives voice to these inadequacies. There is the mild, humble brag of “I live in Berlin,” but it is quickly consumed by Oyler's overthinking in the pursuit of pleasure and meaning, perhaps documenting the core anxiety of ambitious young people in a post-Maslow age.

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The year in hate

Culture needs friction, and boy, could you feel it in Q1 2024.

Shawn Reynaldo

set the stage for me this week with “I'm Ready to Read Some Negative Album Reviews” which sticks to music but eerily mimics the tensions over in Oylerland. For me, the kick-off was the Shannon Sharpie/Katt Williams interview which had the closest level of honest ire I’d seen since Quincy Jones briefly let it fly around 2018 (New York Mag: “What were your first impressions of the Beatles?” QJ: “That they were the worst musicians in the world. They were no-playing motherfuckers.”) where you were kind of shocked, but also sort of relieved not to be fed the same platitudes from a major figure.

I think the fun of cultural spats is that the stakes are relatively low. There are a lot of things that are actually high stakes, but arguing about a book or record is not really one of them, unless we’re talking about banning them. The other big Takes this year are from the rap world, which Yasiin Bey kicked off this year with a Drake dis in an interview. We stand at the precipice of an all-out rap war amongst the heavyweights, which feels akin to WWE kayfabe and fandom, or a regulated state of play.

Back to Oyler and the pursuit of pleasure, No Judgement is showing us where the land mines are in enjoying things. She has chosen a hedonic playlist, but the book doesn’t really traffic in it. “Boyfriends” are a blurry commodity, never transformative, and nothing really clicks, which is how culture sorta feels if you’re not a smooth-brained Stan or safe in a chosen niche, free from reprisal. Indeed, real pleasure is hard to find, like sifting through the bins of the over-picked Goodwill or realizing your fave diner is now TikTok runoff. We’re all desperate for a taste of the good stuff, but it keeps selling out before we can line up. The battles Oyler lays out are not aspirational, but they are true if you’ve once thought about where to be.

I was half expecting to feel a huge gulf between myself and Oyler’s world, but the tensions were mostly the same. Our musical taste overlap is modest, but I am an admitted Trance fan, so maybe we're just from opposite sides of the dancefloor. Trance is both utopian and existential, as it presumes the ends of things. It’s quite a severe way to source pleasure. One major tell is how Oyler calls any party a “rave,” which may just be generational but is like when the soldier ordering drinks holds up his fingers the wrong way in Inglourious Basterds (2009). A rave must be semi-illegal, says me, the old head.

I was sort of heartened that the anxieties of Berlin Oyler discusses were nearly identical to when I first started visiting around 20 years ago: That Americans were dumbing it down and not making an effort to learn German, that rents were surely going to go up as a result, and of course, that it was nearly over, which Oyler ruminates on. Writing about Berlin or Berghain in 2024 is well-trodden territory, and is about as Herby as it gets, deeply uncool stuff to still be hung up on, but I dig her zeal. To be fair Berlin is a good place for Americans to act wacky. In my own Oylerian self-owns, I’ve had near dalliances at Panorama Bar, laid in the grass like a wannabe, and even once went to the hospital (calmly) to replace the SSRIs i left at home, at the advice of my German host. The bill for the pickup arrived at my Ann Arbor home a few weeks later, cooly and judgmentally filed under: “psychotic episode.” The Herb charges just couldn’t be beat.

Or as Oyler would say: "This is also not new. Nothing is."

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