WHITNEY RICKETTS

Never has the nightclub seemed so dreadful, a sort of strobe-lit, bottle-service purgatory. It’s one thing to describe acts of epic self-medication; it’s another to perform booziness and offer the clarity of a spinning room as lure for an audience mortified on your behalf. But this correspondence to real life seems important, since life itself has become fully subsumed as part of a blockbusting album, movie, or sitcom’s promotional campaign. In this age of total exposure, it becomes near impossible to disassociate the work from its creator, which is why fame itself has become such a ready-made topic for our most clever pop stars. We know too much, even if we don’t know better.

HUA HSU on Drake’s “Take Care”