Influencerdämmerung
Jojo Siwa and the Twilight of the Influencers.
It began on November 27th, 2024, and, like many great shifts, began in the most unlikely of places, by the most unlikely of people.
I have no idea who the TikTok user Heemaw is. I presume her name must be Anita, because that’s her subheader. How many followers does she have? Is she, in any way, a substantial figure on the platform? I don’t know, I don’t think it matters, and I’m not polluting my phone with TikTok to find out. For what it’s worth, she seems like any other person on TikTok who uses the app to post quick snippets of whatever might be on her mind, with little in the way of a substantial or dedicated following.
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. I’m not sure what possessed Miss… Heemaw, I suppose we should call her, to upload the video she did, in which she’s simply laying in her bed, staring at the camera with an inscrutable expression not unlike that of a vacant-eyed grouper absently floating in an aquarium tank, saying nothing, doing nothing, accompanied by the following text:
Bruh imagine if we all just started ignoring celebrities
Like how hilarious would it be if they posted and got like 13 likes
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As of this writing in January, 20241, the video has close to eleven million views and over two hundred thousand comments.
Despite the lack of production value to Heemaw’s video, or any real reason to either watch it or for her to have uploaded it, the idea of simply ignoring a celebrity tickled those for whom the algorithm shunted into their For You feed.
Now, the idea of ignoring a celebrity is not exactly a novel one. I’ve been making the claim that we should probably just look the other way when someone like Sean Penn or Barbara Streisand decides that their opinion is worth sharing for, like, years now. But no one ever listens to me. Perhaps it’s because I’m not a twenty-something white girl on TikTok. And we should all be grateful for that, because, in another, more grim time-line where I’d been born with two X chromosomes, facial features that could best be described as Mid, and a birth year that began with a 2 and a 0… well, let’s just say if you saw how I used to play Sims when I was in my later adolescent years, you’d know why it’s imperative that I never reach a position of unbridled power or influence.
That all being said, Heemaw’s proposal is not exactly a proprietary one.
Yet, for whatever reason, Heemaw was the one to see the masses of TikTok finally listen to reason. People were curious - what would happen if they didn’t pay attention to influencers and celebrities. A voice lost to time boldly made a suggestion, and named one JoJo Siwa as the first individual that should be collectively, roundly ignored.
The consensus was unanimous - starting in December, Jojo Siwa was persona non grata.
On TikTok, Jojo Siwa has over forty-eight million followers. Collectively, her videos have accumulated over two billion likes. Routinely, her videos receive views around the watermark of her follower count.
After TikTok declared that they were going to ignore her, her view count took a plunge. Though she was still receiving tens of millions of views on her videos, the likes and engagement said videos received plummeted into the tens of thousands. To us plebeians who get excited over a single like or comment, I understand that tens of thousands of likes, comments, and other forms of engagement may seem unimaginable, if not overwhelming, but for someone who was enjoying millions of likes on every single upload they made, the tumble into the five-digit range is a precipitous one.
To rub salt in the wound, most of the comments were not complementary of Siwa, but rather TikTok users posting STICK TO THE PLAN or IGNORE THE VIDEO and, my personal favorite, REMEMBER THE MASTER PLAN.
If it was any more oblique, they’d be posting memes like this.
Even if she was averaging sixteen million views on her videos post-damnatio memorae, the fact she wasn’t getting those sweet, succulent likes and every comment was reminding her that everyone had unanimously decided to ignore her did not sit well with Miss Siwa.
I’ve said it before, and I’m certain I’ll say it at least a trillion times more before I’m finally let down by my friends one more time into the cold, hard ground, but there’s a golden rule when it comes to the internet, and dealing with the commentariat of any given website: don’t feed the trolls. While I’m of the opinion that the trolls, in this case, were objectively doing the right thing, it’s still, y’know - trolling. To quote the ever-prescient piece of 80’s kino, War Games: the only winning move is not to play.
And do you know what Jojo Siwa didn’t do?
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There’s a number of videos Siwa posted to TikTok voicing her displeasure over the fact that she had been labeled Public Enemy #1 by the TikTok laity. Most of them involve her sitting in her car, red-faced, eyes swollen, and crying.
Needless to say, this was nothing but delicious red meat to the ever-growing horde of TikTok users that were relishing in her downward spiral.
One user, Momo_Reaghan, stated the following:
This trend of ignoring celebrities is actually so fun. Why didn’t we start this sooner.
My, my - that is a good question, Ms. Momo. There were other people - cough cough - suggesting this before. Why did you all just start doing this?
I mean… it’s not like I’ve been saying we should ignore celebrities on social media since I was, like… in middle school, or something.
I suppose we’ll let it slide. Strange bedfellows, and all that.
Other TikTokers chimed in with their opinions, making statements like, We just don’t realise2 that it actually us who have power. Like we literally decide their salary, and, They depend on us.
Say what you want about TikTok, but it seems as if the users are beginning to ascend to some sort of level of basic self-awareness. The dirty little secret about influencers and celebrities is this - they do depend on you.
Yes: you.
Every time you utter a celebrity’s name, every time you open an article pertaining to them, you’re giving them your attention. Ah! Put your hands down… yeah, yeah. I see you going for the keyboard. You were gonna write, But Yakubian Ape, you fiendish caucasianoid, you’re writing about Jojo Siwa right now! Which, yes - yes, I am. But I have a point, so just cool your jets, sparky. We’ll get there.
To my point, for instance… well, I’ve admitted before, and I admitted it on
(relatively) new panel-style podcast, The Digression Sessions3, I like the NFL. Yes, yes, I know - sportsball! You can laugh. It’s fine. I get it. When I was younger, I hated football. Why? Because I’m a natural-born contrarian and I was convinced that it was something only stupid people pay attention to, which, er… well - football fans (and I) may not be beating those allegations, but I digress.But, when I was a teenage dirtbag simian, and I’d sit there and kvetch about the NFL, the MLB, the NBA, and every major sports organization down to Jai-Alai and Competitive Underwater Basket-Weaving - I’d still be talking about it. I was still giving it attention. Believe it or not, I bitched so much about the NFL that it got a good friend of mine so interested in professional football that he now works for the Dallas Cowboys. Still waiting on that finder’s fee, by the way, pal. The point stands that your attention is precious energy, and where you invest it, whether it’s love or hate or anything in between, gives that energy to whatever you afford it to all the same.
Hell, I’ll take it one step further. Look at the occult.
Whenever it comes to any kind of paranormal issue, whether it be ghosts, demons, bigfoot could be uprooting your turnips to make a salad or a wendigo could be mean-mugging you through your bathroom window while you’re dropping the kids off at the pool; do you know what the general advice you’re gonna get from a quote-unquote professional on the matter?
You know why? Because all these little ghosts, goblins, and ghouls - yeah. You know. Ghouls? Little green ghouls?
They want your attention. These things - assuming they’re real - thrive on attention. And the more of it you give them? The more of a problem you’ll have. They want you to piss your pants with fright. Now, yes, you might want to invest in some holy water, maybe get your local medicine man to do some throat-singing and smoke some sage in the dark corners of your house, perhaps consider buying some real estate that isn’t on cursed land, but by and large, if you act as if nothing is going on… is anything really going on4?
If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s around to hear it, did it really make a noise?
Real ones know what I mean.
To bring this back around to the bête noires du jour5, an astute friend of mine once told me, Attention is currency, so be careful where you spend it. He’s absolutely right. And that currency is valuable. Attention is, in a sense, tacit approval. After all, the old adage goes that bad attention is better than no attention.
That’s basically the defining praxis of the entire advertising industry; they couldn’t give less of a shit if you like their ads, they just want you to see them and get whatever subpar product or service they’re hawking beamed into your eyeballs.
This, in turn, is why cancelling celebrities usually - but not always - is a fruitless endeavor. Case in point:
You don’t need to have read my extensive and in-depth look at the United Kingdom’s most successful, celebrated, and perhaps detested modern author to know that the left-most reaches of the political spectrum has been trying to claim her scalp for the better part of a decade, now. Whenever a new Potter-centric project drops, you can rest assured a new wave of virulent anti-Rowling polemics will be hand-delivered to your news feed in short order. #CancelRowling sentiments rise and fall so regularly that they’re almost as predictable as the coming and going of the tides or eclipses. Yet, each and every time, Rowling skates past her naysayers mostly unscathed, collecting a fat paycheck in the process.
During the last iteration of this cycle, when the Wizarding World-centric Triple A video game Hogwarts Legacy dropped in 2022, the vehement push by critics of Rowling to tank the game - despite her playing no direct part in its production - served less to knee-cap the sales and more as a free advertising campaign. Right-leaning culture war stumps like Jeremy Hambly6 and Stephen Crowder bought multiple copies of the game and encouraged others to do the same… because I guess throwing money at things you don’t care about and don’t particularly like at people who probably don’t agree with you ideologically is an effective way of owning the libs.
When popular Vtuber Silvervale was blackballed and harangued by some of her own co-workers at the “talent” agency7, VShoujo, for just saying that she wanted to play the game, the resident malcontent and shit-stirrer of the Vtuber world, Pipkin Pippa, streamed herself playing the game to her sizeable audience just to spite the political partisans in her own community.
I know most of that terminology and most of those names mean nothing to most of you, since I’m assuming most of you are well-adjusted enough to know very little about the perpetual-motion engine of clown-on-clown hyperviolence that is the Vtuber scene, but it doesn’t really matter; I’m only bringing it up here to prove the point that when you give something attention, you’re often going to bring it to other people’s attention, in turn. People who may have had no idea that it existed before you made them aware that it did. I mean, I do it all the time. I love exposing the unwary to the horrors™ they’d never know about otherwise.
You’re welcome, by the way.
Now, Hogwarts Legacy was always destined to make beaucoup bucks, regardless of what anyone said or did. It’s a Potter Project - you could slap Harry Potter iconography on a bag of desiccated cow pies and someone would buy it. When I was in England, I found out there was a whole fucking cottage industry of shops that do nothing but hawk Potter paraphernalia to tourists. There’s, like, three in the Shambles of York alone.
But I truly do believe that Hogwarts Legacy’s built-in success was elevated to blockbuster status - grossing over a billion dollars in revenue within less than a calendar year of release and moving over thirty-million copies in less than two - from the sheer amount of press coverage the shit-storm of one-sided controversy surrounding it.
The best thing anyone who truly wanted this project to fail could have done was simply… not talk about. Don’t feed the fire. Don’t spend that lucrative currency of your attention on it.
Don’t think it. Don’t say it.
In one of my first articles I ever published, I even said as much about the culture wars themselves. This publication takes its name from the legendary home of the mythical hydra - there was a time when I had planned on making this kind of motif around it when I was more invested in and writing about culture war stuff, but the analogy between the multi-headed, serpentine beast of old and the snarled, tangled, and dangerous den of vipers that is the Entertainment-Industrial Complex are still apropos. I said, then, that this is not a beast that can be defeated by trying to fight it; the Hydra of Hollywood has more heads, more resources, and infinitely more money than anyone trying to slay it. The best thing you can do is simply ignore it and let it wither away in ignominy.
That attention you waste on bitching about things that you don’t like would be better invested in talking, discussing, and building up things that you do like, and hopefully bringing more eyes and attention to that instead. I know this might sound a bit ironic coming from someone like me, who routinely writes about things they don’t particularly like or care about. I’d make the argument that I’m trying to make sense of these things and analyze them in a way that’s more educational or, at least, constructive and productive than simply mindlessly railing against something or someone I don’t like. None of what I put to digital paper is intended to be senseless, inchoate rage bait intended to harvest clicks… but I’m also trying to diversify my output so it isn’t strictly cultural studies or exposes on those sorts of things. It’s why I spent the whole month of October, 2024 writing about the paranormal, instead. You did read those articles, right?
Right.
The TikTok users are correct when they say that influencers like JoJo Siwa need people to pay attention to them. It’s their lifeblood - metaphorically and literally. Attention pads JoJo Siwa’s bank account. It paid for this mansion she just sold. But it isn’t just about the money. People like Siwa are specialized breed of intense narcissists and histrionics who need attention the same way the rest of us need air to breath. Good attention. Bad attention. It doesn’t matter. If Siwa was averse to bad publicity, she wouldn’t have gotten CEO OF GAY POP tattoo’d on her arm as a failed jab at the critics who lambasted her for making such an outlandish statement. Some would say it’s a light-hearted attempt to poke fun at herself. I think she’s just attempting to rankle feathers; she knows it’s gonna piss people off all over again, but you know what?
They’re gonna talk about her. And that’s exactly what she wants.
So, how do you win against someone like her?
You just don’t talk about them. You don’t acknowledge them. At most, you point, you laugh, and you move on. It’s really that simple.
Unfortunately, it seems that the attempted refutation of JoJo Siwa has done little to damage the longevity of her career. Ultimately, it was a TikTok trend, which, like anything else on a platform that’s quite literally designed to shred your attention span into a fine, watery puree with micro-content, it was quickly forgotten as users leapt onto the next shiny thing that caught their eye like a bunch of coked-up magpies with ADHD.
But I also wouldn’t say that JoJo Siwa’s social media presence is as robust as it was a year ago. About a month ago as of this writing, she dropped another single that slipped almost entirely under the pop scene radar.
I believe that the tepid reception has less to do with a dedicated boycott of Siwa and more with the fact that there’s bigger fish in the industry that are more interesting than eye-catching than she is at the moment. Girlie Pop, as it’s been dubbed, and its icons like Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter are all dominating the pop music scene at the moment, and I just don’t see a picayune presence like Siwa knocking them off their pedestals. She doesn’t have the legitimate vocal talents of Billie Eilish, the campy and kitschy artistry of Chappell Roan, or the sex appeal of Sabrina Carpenter. Whatever you think about the women I just rattled off, you can’t deny that they all have a certain je ne sais quois to them that elevates them to a tier above Siwa, who comes off as less of a genuine pop star and more of a little kid dressed up in their parents’ clothes, tugging at coattails and trying to get adults to look at their macaroni art.
This puts Siwa in the unenviable position of someone who has to be an incendiary firebrand with a big mouth just to stand out. And I do believe she’ll light up the headlines soon enough when she makes some out-of-pocket statement such as claiming she’s God-Queen of the Gays or whenever she drops another tasteless, ugly music video for a completely forgettable pop song that sounds like it was written and composed by ChatGPT. It’s all she can do.
I’d say that the dividing line that separates a, say, Chappell Roan from a JoJo Siwa is that, ultimately, one is an artist, one is an influencer. Yes, Roan is backed by a small army of producers, assistants, writers, and musicians, and she’s more of a product than a person, but at the core of her operation, I do believe there’s a glimmer of sincerity that shines through the caked layers of pop varnish. Her entire schtick is drenched in the ephemera of drag queens and sense of camp that I can only describe as Zoomer John Waters.
It’s eye-catching, yes, but not in the same way that Siwa’s garish, technicolor aesthetic is. It’s kitschy, it’s campy, it’s a little horror b-movie trashy, but Roan takes the most compelling elements of those aesthetics and does them well. There’s a subtlety and thought to Roan’s imagery that is completely absent in Siwa’s that speaks to the fact that those scenes, subcultures, aesthetics, whatever are all something she appreciates and understands. Roan’s image is inexorably tied to queer subcultures, drag, and other such things, but she doesn’t need to paint her face with rainbow stripes or staple a pride flag to her chest to get the point across. The content of her lyrics and the simple aesthetics of her imagery speak for her.
Compare and contrast -
The word insecure comes to mind when I see Siwa in her rainbow vomit outfits. It feels as if she’s wearing a costume that she is not confident she should be wearing. It doesn’t suggest, it screams at you, I’M GAY! I’M GAY! I’M GAY!, and one feels distinctly as if she’s trying to compensate for a lack of anything other than flashy colors and hollow pandering to a demographic you can absolutely tell she doesn’t feel accepted by. At least, not in the slavish way she I believe she wanted to be, by which I mean she would be elevated overnight to Lord of the Queers after her coming-out.
More importantly than their aesthetic differences, I also think that Roan is someone who’s, first and foremost, concerned with music. Even if she wasn’t the bonafide pop princess that she is right now, I think she’s someone who’d still be making music - she was doing so well before she ever got a hit on Spotify.
I don’t think the same could be said for JoJo Siwa, for who music is a tertiary medium through which she’s looking to amplify her brand. She’s got nothing to say. No statement to make. If she did, she wouldn’t be surreptitiously covering songs and passing them off has her own, she’d be writing original pieces. She’s just… there to be there and remind you that she exists. She’s there to sell you the Jojo Siwa brand.
The reason I juxtaposed Roan and Siwa is that I think Roan is who Siwa wishes that she was - a veritable icon of the Rainbow Bloc, a consummate entertainer, and a genuine creative with a solid grasp on both the art of music and visual imagery. She doesn’t need to seize you by the cheeks, dig her manicured talons into your flesh, and wrench your head in her direction to get you to look at her; she’s got that kind of magnetism that a lot of successful artists have that draw the eye naturally.
Meanwhile, as much as Siwa wishes that she was some sort of queer icon, she seems to be on precariously thin ice with the Rainbow Bloc. Her music is entirely outsourced to a faceless record label committee. If Roan’s imagery evokes certain aspects of Rainbow subcultures, Siwa’s “artistry” is like a technicolor sledgehammer to the face. She has to act like a yapping chihuahua and bite your ankles because, otherwise, you’d never think to look at her twice. Both are tacky - Roan herself describes her image as such - but one is calculated, while the other is a slapdash mess cobbled together by witless office stiffs with no working knowledge of what actually made tacky work for people like Chappelle Roan and John Waters.
I don’t say all this to baselessly glaze Roan. I do like some of her songs, and I think she’s very… interesting, but I can’t say I’m a, uh… what are they calling her fans? Like, Ariana Grande has Arianators, Nicki Minaj has her Barbs. I think Katy Perry had Katy Kats back when people cared about her. Are there Chappies out there? Roaners? Croanies, maybe? I dunno, but the point is, you won’t find me at the local gay bar in assless chaps singing Pink Pony Club8.
But it’s not really about Siwa and Roan. I could be doing the same comparing and contrasting an influencer like Jake Paul, who’s currently pretending to be a boxer, and an actual athlete like Canelo Alvarez, who would probably knock one of Paul’s eyes out of his sockets if they were in the ring together.
It’s the difference between Pipkin Pippa, who streams herself playing video games because she’s most likely certifiably insane but genuinely seems to enjoy what she does, and Pokimane, who only streams because she knows horny simps will throw boatloads of money at her; while Pippa seems to enjoy bullshitting with those watching her, you can watch clips of Pokimane’s streams and practically feel the smoldering resentment she harbors for her audience radiating through the screen. It’s not a leap in logic to say that if she could be doing something else, she probably would be, but her collection of luxury cars (yes, really) ain’t gonna pay for itself.
JK Rowling is still writing books that aren’t getting nearly the traction her Potter pieces ever got, but she’s still turning out novel after novel. How many published authors will still be writing BDSM-adjacent supernatural smut when that fad inevitably goes the way of the dodo? How many will still be writing at all?
What I’m talking about is the difference between a guy like MrBeast, who had refined the production of slop into an industrial-grade science, and literally anyone on YouTube who does what they do because they enjoy it rather than seeking financial gain.
Jimmy Donaldson has never shied away from the fact that he’s in the YouTube game to make money. For him, it’s all business. He’s admitted that he spends an unhealthy amount of his free time researching trends and studying social media algorithms to perfectly calculate how to game them. It’s impressive, to be certain, and no one can question his work ethic, but he’s made it abundantly clear that providing a product of value is secondary to making a product.
Hilarious as this sounds, I’d contrast him with Jon Townsend of the Townsends channel. Now that’s a man who does what he loves and loves what he does. You know he would be dressing up like a Colonial-era peasant and cooking up plum pudding for an audience of fifteen people and a dog pro bono because he’s just that passionate about history and cooking. I’m sure he enjoys the money he makes from his channel and the related businesses he operates, but you can watch Jon Townsend and hear the love he has for his craft in the way he speaks alone.
You can fake a lot, but enthusiasm, affection, and passion are inimitable.
What I’m trying to drive home here is that people like Roan, Townsend, and even Alvarez do what they do because they have a passion for their respective art9. You can watch MrBeast’s oldest videos and see that there was a time he had a genuine passion for filmmaking. I don’t doubt Paul had a sincere fondness for combat sports. I imagine Pokimane probably enjoyed streaming, at some point. As a dancer, Siwa must have been interested in music to some extent. But their content is… well, it’s not art, it’s content.
It’s slop. They’re slop. They don’t make art. They don’t make music. They don’t even try. They make content that is, on an artistic and fundamental level, no different than brightly-colored, spastically edited YouTube content farm videos that are filled with deafening, royalty-free music and rapid-fire fart sound effects.
It’s tasteless, it’s bland, it’s disposable, and the only way they can get you to engage with it is by slathering it in eye-catching colors, acting like fools, and grabbing your attention by force rather than intrigue. In Siwa’s case, her music is quickly and brainlessly produced on the cheap, bereft of any real merit or quality, made less to serve as legitimate art and more as a piece of noise to clog up the airwaves in between better, more substantial things that people actually care about. It’s meaningless sounds and colors to keep you distracted and, more importantly, consuming.
In my opinion, that’s what slop is; it’s just there.
And that’s what influencers do - peddle slop. They have nothing more meaningful to offer.
A lot of ink has been spilled on the matter of slop. Specifically slop generated by “artificial intelligence” programs. This is justifiably warranted. But it’s imperative that we remember humans are capable of making slop just as miserable as any large-language model or chatbot. I think the problem is largely one in the same. Our world, our culture, our society is being inundated with low-effort, low-quality, mind-numbing content that no one wants and no one is asking for, regardless of where it’s coming from, being blasted out into the world for the sole purpose of stealing our attention and siphoning what money can be sucked out of our pockets. The ever-prescient
made the following comment on my article on the sports gambling crisis:And I think that’s the rub; the influencers are the rent-seekers of culture. They take and they take and they take without ever offering anything of quality, all the while crowding out anyone with anything sincere to say through noise, noise, and more noise.
And, if it sounds as if I’m being uncharitable towards some of these influencers, I very well may be. But I don’t think the influencer class is to be loathed; rather, they’re (mostly) pitiable figures. MrBeast may have more money than Mansa Musa, but what good is all that cash worth if he doesn’t even have the time to enjoy what it can do for him? As I said in my previous article on Siwa, I don’t see her as a malicious actor, but rather a hurt young woman desperately attempting to assert her agency over her life and career. If these influencers live lives as empty as they seem from the outside looking in, I hope that there comes a time they find a more fulfilling path to follow. As much as I wish these people would just… go away, I don’t wish them ill.
I don’t think these are evil people. Immoral? Debatable. But evil? Not truly. They’re only doing what they do because we’ve allowed them to do it. We, perhaps mistakenly, afforded them their fortunes. We, similarly, have the power to collectively revoke it. All we have to do is politely and calmly state, no, thank you.
Even though the boycott of Jojo Siwa ultimately petered out into nothing, I think it’s a good indicator that an increasing amount of people are growing wise to this. A lot of them are removing the proverbial wool from their eyes and beginning to ask how we can save ourselves from this seemingly unending deluge of exploitative and predatory mediocrity.
And, to them, I would remind them that attention is currency; can a merchant sell a product that a customer is not willing to buy?
We’ll see how long it is between now and whenever this is released.
I was going to put a [sic] here, but apparently realise is an acceptable way of spelling realize in British English.
Shameless plug, anyone?
I have to give the disclaimer that I am not giving professional advice on how to handle the paranormal. If you are having your house thrashed by something unseen and malicious, please seek out your nearest priest.
Jay parlay frahn-say.
Better known by his nom de guerre, the Quartering.
I have to put scare quotes here because streaming video games for twelve hours… well, it’s a talent alright, but not a particularly good one
I have had more than a few cocktails while morosely listening to Good Luck, Babe at my watering hole of choice, though.
And yes, Townsend’s cooking is an art.
"perpetual motion engine of clown-on-clown hyperviolence that is the current Vtuber scene"
Standing ovation for that prose marvel.
I think back to one of the many brilliant bits of this tour de force UCLA address from the great Ray Bradbury (https://youtu.be/R1Q0k1k43-Y) and around 17min mark, he says in perfectly exasperated tones: "I don't care if you want to go out and make the best pair of shoes in the world; for Christ's sake, go do it. But give QUALITY to the world. Good GOD, there's so little quality."
In 1968.
I really do feel like we're turning the corner on this influencer-era of the internet. Not just because of the democratization of media, but because when you have access to so much from across history, it is hard not to notice how much great work has been made. And while some turn to automated curators, and get sent down a whole host of other problems, I think those who are starting to care are going to grow in number and start demanding more of this system. More than what it can currently deliver. The old guard will wither, and the new, however scattered, will supplant them in due time. It would just be lovely if someone could give a final shove to get people over "Brand ___" not being good anymore. I wonder who that will be...