We are living in a post-Haim world
Millennials in the age of ADDISON
Ben Allen’s GQ profile of Haim is laugh-out-loud funny. “Walking around California’s San Fernando Valley with the Haim sisters is like touring Compton with Kendrick Lamar” leads into “...there used to be a diner they would go to after some of their first ever gigs. (It’s now a Sephora. “I don’t like to talk about it,” says Alana of this particular act of gentrification).” And then Ben Allen says:
We meet for breakfast in the kind of Italian restaurant you can imagine Tony Soprano destroying some ziti at… On the journey here, I listened to I Quit in the way God and the band likely intended: riding up Santa Monica Boulevard in an Uber with the windows down, the tang of LA exhaust fumes filtering into my lungs.
The rest of the piece follows this oxymoronic, 2017-Twitter-friendly pattern to its end; Tony Soprano “destroying” ziti, an Italian restaurant that Tony Soprano might frequent being an innate part of Haim’s LA rootedness (?), Haim being so LA that they walk everywhere,1 one of the Haims claiming she’s “like a frat boy trapped in a girl’s body (“My house turned into a fuckin’ Animal House”) before talking about her therapist. This particular Haim, Alana, wraps it up best: “pop isn’t a bad fucking word. Rock isn’t a bad word either.”
Ok, but what is bad? It sounds like it might be men, but you also love frat guys and Paul Thomas Anderson, apparently. What are your influences beyond LA Italian food (?), your interests beyond making TikToks?2 Chappell Roan is at least honest about how fame and its discontent overshadows music for her, Taylor Swift about how endurance and vengeance might do the same. This profile claims Haim is “less encumbered by their audience’s expectations,” yet the Haims frame every statement they make as if they are on a post-cancelation recovery tour; these girls FUCK men, but men also SUCK. 🤘
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Such catch-all characterization—attempting to cover every possible cultural basis while attending to an impossibly narrow subject, straining to impart celebrity with identity-specific yet painfully vague altruism—reminds me of another recent embarrassment: The New York Times’ 100 Best Restaurants in New York City in 2025. This is a milestone year for the institutional tradition, being the first without iconically insane Pete Wells doing stuff like calling an Israeli restaurant on St. Marks something “I don’t mind as much as I might.” In the wake of his retirement, the NYT have appointed two influencers as interim chief critics: Bon Appétit alum Priya Krishna and NYT-YouTube-Content regular Melissa Clark.
This seems like a good thing, because these ladies seem too scared to say anything about an Israeli restaurant called SPICE BROTHERS, at all, and because two younger people on the task should give it more character. It has been well documented that I am pro-influencer, and was initially excited when the Times announced its severity would temporarily become more audience-facing. Ultimately, though, it turns out the audience-facing element has made the reviews more corporate—not fun like J Lee of Feed Me becoming an editor at Interview (read his review of the Top 100 here). And, being too scared to say anything about anything is in fact at odds with the very practice of “criticism.”
This hand-off from the most legacy Man there ever has been to two INTERIM women who simply are not critics but—in the words of the press release about their appointment— “well known from their videos and public appearances” to the point of making anonymous criticism difficult is, in other words, neither fair to the women or good for the cultural posterity of a legacy media company. The move obviously comes as a play toward both influencer media aesthetics and vague efforts to be more “diverse,” but what we’ve ended up with is a Top 10 Restaurants in New York City that are all on Manhattan.3
More frustratingly, though, in the “behind the scenes” video feature produced about this list-making process, Clark talks about it as though she’s a politician—“the pushing of the innovation is on a higher level”— and the only thing Krishna says about any of the places or food is that some flavors and chefs are “dialed in.” Alanna Haim is really dialed in to gentrification in the San Fernando Valley.
When you search “nyt top 100” on Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok, the first thing to pop up is still one of my favorite influencers Kaitlyn Lavery, who visits all the restaurants and re-ranks the lists. And the punchline is that Kaitlyn Lavery has a far more refined perspective in TikTok voiceover than most post-Wells New York Times food reviews. She’s not mean or sycophantic, approaching a restaurant as the convergence of food, atmosphere, and broader geographic and social contexts that might make its aesthetic or gastronomic projects annoying or appealing. At first pass, her white girl affectation might make her seem ditzy and unqualified, but she eats so much food and spends so much time traversing New York, that that either isn’t true or doesn’t matter. She doesn’t have a corporate responsibility to evaluate the “levels” of “pushing of innovation,” so even though she posts pictures of her outfits and gets PR packages or, whatever, her videos are criticism. The new New York Times list is an advertisement for the New York Times.
Years ago, I was friends with someone who was completely committed to a “Brooklyn dad” aesthetic: hipster for the Trump era, IPAs, unironic Bernie bro. This was when Father John Misty got popular again and the Haims started wearing wife beaters with no bras. This guy said to my face once that Danielle Haim was one of the hottest women he had ever seen.
Haim makes fine music. They don’t really do much, with their sound or lyrics or aesthetic project or celebrity, and they look fine, too. Danielle is attractive, yes, in the way Alana Haim’s character is to Cooper Hoffman’s in Licorice Pizza; Cooper Hoffman plays a teenager who hasn’t seen very many other women in his life. None of them are unattractive, and they are stylish, sometimes. If I looked like Danielle Haim that would be great, but that’s not a very aspirational fantasy. My point is just, like: this guy only said that to signal to himself he was cool. Politically, sonically, and sexually, we need to THINK BIGGER!
You know when a Millennial guy on Twitter is scared of making his girlfriend mad or objectifying women, so to call someone hot he’ll quote a picture of them with, like, “Can I say something?” or “man…”? That is over. The Brooklyn dad thing, the 2017 Twitter thing, talking about pasta too much, show-and-telling that you know what “gentrification” means as a white person: all of this stuff is majorly played out. That’s too bad for Haim, which was an early cultural beacon for the kind of people who invented those colloquialisms, and who uses the TikTok app in the same way we used Twitter ten years ago. FORM: MISUNDERSTOOD.
Haim makes the same album every five years—that’s fine... I like the songs!4 But Haim is not “cool.” They are not “underestimated,” either, in Ben Allen’s words; they are friends with Paul Thomas Anderson, Harry Styles, and Taylor Swift. The Haims are successful rock musicians, but, despite what they say, I’m not sure that’s what they want.
If the concept of Sean Price Williams directing two Addison Rae music videos made you feel anything other than warmth or laughter, I have some bad news: I just spent a couple paragraphs making fun of you. Whenever Addison Rae does anything, there is a chorus of apprehensive capital T Thinkers waiting to say she is “inauthentic” or “trying too hard,” or to act dumbfounded that her music is good. The complaining is in explicit reference to her relentless pap walks, but implicitly an aimless gripe about a 24-year-old pivoting off TikTok. In my circles, though, it all also means: “Sean Price Williams is mine, not people who use TikTok’s.”
Addison Rae can be annoying sometimes, and the pap walks are a perfect example. They are a performance for Zoomers, but Zoomers are already buying Rae’s schtick, so what is the point? Lorde’s performance of baby’s first idea makes way more sense, because her last album totally alienated her from listeners who are young and cool. What is not annoying about either of those people, however, is that they use their phones.
This isn’t terribly interesting to lament, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there is nothing inherently new, confusing, or dumb about legitimate entertainers coming from apps on phones, which have supplanted other, older goldmines of personality like reality television. Interview Magazine can and should hire an alum of a Substack publication, and Addison Rae can and should collaborate with the best working producers and cinematographers. It makes perfect sense that my favorite food critic is a girl with a phone; all anyone does is go on their phone, it’s only Millennials with a false sense of authority over intellectualism and coolness that resist the impulse or handwring over phone culture. Haim can and should make pop music. They should be posting TikToks outside of an album cycle, and bringing their buddy Taylor’s cabal of hitmakers to take them from innuendo jail to Sabrina Carpenter freedom!
Addison Rae is one of the hottest women I’ve ever seen. In GQ, Haim is weaving tales about overcoming invisible hardships to become respected in the “rock community,” and Rae is saying this about her time on TikTok: “When I reflect back on that time, I’ve recognized how much choice and taste is kind of a luxury… How am I going to get out of here?” Of course, she left the confines of “dancing on TikTok,” but still posts a million Instagram stories a day (I would know), a practice that gets her goodwill and aesthetic footing to become a real pop star. There is only so much “leaving” one can do. What she did is grow up.
Addison Rae is cool, and a legitimate artist working with legitimate musicians. Her album is—this is me saying this—better than Lady Gaga’s, more thoughtful and topically engaged with the makings of pop artistry. Haim is not cool, and their album will not be so hard hitting. Neither was Vampire Weekend’s last album, a sleepy renewal of their most 2010s sounds, not really saying or doing anything new. That’s fine, though. I still love Vampire Weekend. And someday, like listicles, Addison Rae won’t be cool, either.
“ ‘We’re really fucking good at walking’…‘Sorry, we’re walking, sorry!’…‘Haim lore!’”
“Haim is so good at TikTok that they actually have their label asking them to help with social media strategies for other artists.”
In J Lee’s words: “We will not name names, but it gives the impression that there is one reviewer who is an expert in Korean food and Trinidadian doubles, and another reviewer who favors pasta and Jean Georges. In the top-ten, it's not hard to guess who contributed King, and who contributed Szechuan Mountain House… Maybe that’s just the nature of lists, they’re a fool’s task. But a list that truly impresses me is one person's perspective of New York City dining.”
What I really like is Rostam Batmanglij!
Being millenial zoomer cusp is so awesome
the gq profile is so awesome. its like a twitter fan account writing about how they won a meet and greet contest