Listen: Donuts Mind If I Do by CHAI
While we’re out here taking ourselves seriously, CHAI is bubbling up enough irreverence to cleanse our souls. Case in point: as college buddies in Japan, they incorporated as a band not necessarily because they all played instruments, but so they could hang out more. As a result, this band is a vibe in a box, with music built around their particular group dynamic (one which notably eschews beauty standards— the group refers to their aesthetic as “neo-Kawaii,” or “new-cute”). Fast forward to now, and while Japan doesn’t necessarily “get” CHAI, they’re gaining steam internationally with an album and a slew of delightfully weird singles. Take “Donuts Mind If I Do,” which distills pure joy into a video where the band bops around a mountainside as they absolutely fucking RELISH eating donuts. These are my kind of gals. Watch now and improve your day drastically.
How’s your body image today?
Welp, the low-rise pants discourse has come full circle. What could have been just some Tik Tok nonsense made its way all around the news and now we’re onto the newsletter thinkpiece phase. Anne Hellen Petersen of Millennial Burnout fame just assembled what she’s calling “The Millennial Vernacular of Fatphobia,” or a callback to the life tips (celery is calorie-negative! fat-free’s the way to be!) designed for an era where this person‘s presence on a magazine cover broke boundaries. Righteous indignation and all that, sure. But to all the white women just now realizing we were wronged by the establishment…. how nice that it took this long. Per Folu Akinkuotu, an endless source of twitter wisdom: “the sudden introspection about 90’s/2000’s pop culture images that shaped how millennials related to their bodies then and now is just…so fucking white and myopic.” Turns out it can all be summed up in a line.
Free your mind
If you’d like a preview of the next crop of thinkpieces, here’s Niki Renee on the latest Tik Tok thing: “White women who didn’t know they have curly hair watching Black and Brown women’s curly hair videos has shown them that Eurocentric beauty standards have driven them to fucked up hair for their whole lives. That’s wild.”