Herb Sundays 144: Sean Monahan
8Ball soothsayer, newsletter writer, and K-HOLE ("normcore") co-founder cooly admits "a substantial portion of this list came from Shazamming songs in television shows and movies."
Herb Sundays 144: Sean Monahan
Playlist: Apple Music / Spotify
Art by Michael Cina
“I have an embarrassing admission or maybe not embarrassing when you consider the current options for music discovery: a substantial portion of this list came from Shazamming songs in television shows and movies. For example, the first song “Dur Dur d’être bébé!” by Jordy was a recent find when I was watching The Real World: London. The song introduces Australian model and actress, Jacinda Barrett. She’s from the era when reality TV didn’t doom one to be a reality TV star. She would go on to play Bridget Jones lesbian love interest in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.
Other sources for songs include I’ll Be Home for Christmas, “Doctor Jones” by Aqua; Industry, “Feel the Drive” plays during that scene where Yasmin does coke in a barrister’s wig; Yellowjackets, “Seventeen” by Sharon Van Etten; “I Want You” by Lindsey Buckingham plays when Jamie Lee Curtis’ character has an alcoholic breakdown cooking Christmas dinner in The Bear; Peter Yorn has a track in 40 Days and 40 Nights, the movie where Josh Harnett tries to avoid all sex (including masturbation) for Lent—but I think “For Nancy (‘Cos It Already Is)” is a better song.
Other songs come from discreetly Shazamming while driving around Los Angeles—or rather being driven. I don’t drive. I remember listening to “Voices Carry” by ’Til Tuesday and “Eyes Without a Face” by Billy Idol whipping through the chill Hollywood streets on the way to Chateau with my friend Andre, top down in his beloved convertible Beamer—which he has detailed weekly. “Bling bling bling” by Sexy Sushi I snagged in another German automobile leaving the Getty with a friend visiting from Paris on our way to Sawtelle for okonomiyaki.
Some of the songs are not Shazammed. The “post-drainer” tracks, “In My Head” by Snow Strippers, “Makes You Wonder” by bassvictim, and “GOD” by 2hollis came from house parties or Instagram or who knows. (I’m not sure if this genre label makes sense, but all three acts have aesthetic and social connections to Drain Gang.) “Stunn” is from The Hellp’s debut album. I wouldn’t call them “post-drainer,” but they’re also ambient fixtures in Los Angeles.
The rest are collected from my very long favorites list in Apple Music. I’m a one-repeater. So two or three songs might dominate my listening for a month or so. When I get tired of them, I tend to just dig back into the list, going further back to see if there’s something I was once obsessed with, but had forgotten.
It’s a process that works for me.” - for Herb Sundays, 2025
For over 15 years,
has been in the business of cultural trends. He co-founded K-HOLE, a trend forecasting group that popularized the normcore term and since 2020, he has operated an independent consultancy and its corresponding newsletter, , which maintains a cool but precise tone in seeking out how things work now in terms of culture and its various readings.This year, for me, big dog Marshall McLuhan has re-entered the group chat; perhaps it’s because when things feel overwhelming, we return to the essential texts. 9MM has been popping up almost everywhere I look, from this
interview with Reddit’s head of foresight, to musings on middle school by music producer , and then I saw the posting of this quote below by (“I think about this McLuhan quote a lot; to some extent we’re all facing being in this role right now”) which sent it home:
If information anxiety is on the rise, or what we should make of all that is in front of us, then the ability to sift through it has also become a key attribute for writers and thinkers this decade. The ability to read the tea leaves is now considered a core virtue, worthy of direct patronage and posts like mine below, and people like Sean, maxxed-out link rakers like
and (who just interviewed Sean), and writer/curators like Jonah Weiner (Herb 77) of and Dirt Media’s (Herb 123) have become part of a new cohort of young public intellectual, and while we were convinced that the world had pivoted-to-video, most of these folks exist mainly in text form for fans.
In the Summer of 2014, I was introduced to K-HOLE co-founder Greg Fong (email entitled: Sam meet Greg) by my friend Benjamin Palmer after their “Youth Mode” report dropped, a PDF co-written with Brazil’s Box 1824, which had gained global awareness for its use or semi-creation of the term Normcore.
I had wanted to reach out and ask if they would catch up and maybe consult on the startup I co-founded called Drip (TLDR: a proto-Patreon type platform), and I met with Greg and another co-founder Chris Sherron (aka the artist/producer Galcher Lustwerk, Herb 59) at Nom Wah Tea Parlor, where we quickly got along. The other founders, Emily Segal (now of forecasting firm/newsletter
) and artist Dena Yago, rounded out a formidable brain trust of young talent, who would disband in 2016, perhaps under the weight of Normcore’s success, much like an indie band whose big hit single challenges the premise of the group’s origins. spoke to some of the crew last year for SSENSE, where Fong explained some of the thesis: “Every consumer experience in the early 2010s was obsessed with authenticity. For us, normcore was born out of thinking about the end state. How far does authenticity go? Where does it become taxing? What are some strategies for opting out?”
What I loved about K-HOLE was its ambiguity, catnip for my Art History focus in the origins of modern: All slippery meanings, moving focus from the academy to the street with subversion and the use of common, secular themes, a lyrical forebear to Pop art 50 plus years later. Was K-HOLE an art project, a send-up of marketing culture, or, depending on your worldview, a coastal elite grift? All answers would be perfect for its time and place. Looking back a decade later, it also perhaps signalled the crossover from heritage and prestige media to the internet or more particularly the individual. While it took a New York Magazine piece by the ace
to spin it up (and inadvertently move it into more of a fashion concern), the fact that this idea hit the market from a crew of 20-somethings first, was exciting.It helped me to listen to Segal’s
interview from last year, which dropped me back into the moment about what made the Normcore thing stick. Segal reflects that it was still a Facebook-centric world in 2013, and the Youth Mode report, which was popularized by Normcore but perhaps even more prescient, included the concept of Mass Indie, which feels even more chilling in 2025, as a sort of flattening of meaning and political power that subcultures once held. If everyone is unique, no one is.The world was catching up to the internet, or vice versa, and even the doyenne of Pop culture at that moment, Rhianna had just grabbed the aesthetics of the nascent “seapunk” scene for an SNL performance, symbolic that subcultures would be now ripped from the cradle by mass culture before they could blossom underground, an idea that seems quaint now, where Mass lives in tandem with Niche, two snakes in a basket, both chasing the Nirvana Nevermind baby’s elusive dollar.
My heart sank a little when I saw he wrote a MSCHF essay. Even though he’s absolutely the right person for the job, MSCHF, indeed, is a spiritual child of K-HOLE. I see/saw their work as beneath Sean and Co., not really trying to figure it out, just cutting up expensive stuff, like those guys who broke Supreme accessories on TikTok or that annoying kid in class who says “copyright is just an idea” and thinks it makes them exempt from scrutiny or grades. Much of it runs eerily horseshoe close to a Rogan-brained anti-art sentiment, something banal to little old me. But of course, he nailed the reading on them as a transferable entity (depending on which enthusiast you ask, they are a faux company, a streetwear brand, or a capital A Art maker), indeed the idea of a well-funded nihilistic living meme generator, and just as importantly a production line marvel, which is indeed the sacred art of the times. Rock Paper Scissors, his Art History MFA beats my meager BA. “It’s fun to be sonned” in 2025 (more on that in a future post).
Monahan’s central worldview, from what I can tell, is that actual trends take about 5 years to hit escape velocity, and while its commonly held wisdom that the world is faster than ever, the truth is that culture doesn’t move at the speed of information. Since 2020,
Sean has covered topics such as the existence of Gen Z at all, and perhaps most catching, the vibe shift, which sat atop a meme posted by another Nü public intellectual/Art critic, Dean Kissick (Herb 60), which was then popularized by another New York Magazine piece (history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes…said someone) A Vibe Shift Is Coming, will any of us survive it? by Allison P. Davis (Herb 57) in Feb of 2022, which captured the moment in cultural confusion better than almost anything I had read.
A lot of Herb Sundays is about aging, memory, and the like, which is why Sean’s work connects with me most of the time. If Normcore was the Wanted: Dead or Alive poster for the Millenial Dream, the Vibe Shift was its death certificate. Another generation had emerged post-pandemic, even younger than Millenials, and as James Murphy’s 2002 eulogy for Gen X’s reign signaled twenty years before, with a lament for its safe gatekeeping of all the bibliographies and discographies in a cool guy Library of Alexandria, yet another pillar had fallen.
Monahan also accounts for a go-to-hell factor to his trend views, or the resultant anger that will arise from the work he and his compatriots do, as its announcement can be inherently threatening, both to the dialed-in who are afraid to be left out of the musical chairs of Cool and the clued-out who think all of this stuff is fake. In reviewing this work, I was reminded that Normcore was sort of a damning outcome to the valued individuality of Millenials and even X forged in the ‘00s into something more meh, no longer was the arcane knowledge of my generation or even, ahem, a personal style that helpful, when the Endless Shrimp of cultural globalization of the internet has flattened things.
This stuff is indeed threatening to people who read pieces like this, as it renders our place in the culture or hierarchy potentially invalid, or perhaps because we think it is snake oil, assuming that we are somehow immune to trends, but like The Devil Wears Prada (2006) Cerulian sweater monologue, we are all kinda sucked into the moment, whether we think we are participating or not. Today, I woke up to a NYT piece about Gen Z’s own exhaustion with trends. As Sean’s crew discovered, youth culture and a sense of freedom are no longer mutually exclusive; in fact, quite the opposite.
Monahan’s current trending single is boom boom aesthetic, which dovetails with the re-emergence of bad guys, greed, flash, and more. It also means double-breasted suits, dark wood, or maybe will drift to mean something else, but it is finding its place in the world as we speak. Monahan’s Herb 144 playlist trades in flashes of boom boom, of course, lots of 80’s (Billy Idol is a fixture for me recently, too), and a fluoro continuum streak (see my Trance posts for more of that) from Italo (Doctor’s Cat) to trunk-popped Freestyle (Pretty Poison), EuroDance/NRG (Aqua), and into the contemporary pop sound (The Hellp), it is profoundly seductive stuff, indeed slippery when wet.
Bonus Beats:
New (again) on Ghostly: The aforementioned Galcher Lustwerk’s (co-founder K-HOLE, and other internet phenoms Are.na) 2019 opus Information gets a sturdy new pressing.
The incredible designer Eric Hu delivered a new capsule, and a few pieces remain.
And on the drink sum wtr record label, LA’s soul kids Your Grandparents are dominating my long drives. RIP Roy Ayers and D'Wayne Wiggins.
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That is such a beautiful and bitter essay, which resonated with me perhaps more than I wanted. I remember being enamoured by “K-Hole” reports and thinking that this way of subtle manoeuvring may tank the marketing industry and lead to wild, beautiful things - and while beauty indeed was ahead, so was the flattened world. Thank you for inviting Sean and writing your thoughts out!