The truth about 2024 – part 2

Bang. Brat. Rat. Hippo. Trio. Who?

Mood Ring – my waspish roundup of what’s been going on lately – is back for another go at kicking 2024 up the butt and on its way in part 2 of my three-part look at this festering sh*tcan of a year.

BRAT

Congratulations to Charli XCX – whose entire career has felt like an art installation set up to embezzle lottery funding (complimentary) – for finally getting the recognition her fans have been waiting for. All she had to do was release an album with one of the best/worst covers since Olly Murs released that one that labelled him as ‘Oily Murs’ and fill it with bangers that felt both brand new and excitingly vintage.

Brat Summer was such a success because its whole ethos – girls (and gay men) in strappy vests and jeans, smoking, a clipper lighter in one hand, keys to their flat (likely in a gated community) in the other, not giving a bronze f•ck about anybody else – was largely achievable and yet somehow aspirational too. Almost every girl and gay I used to haunt dancefloors with in the noughties was having a Brat Summer before it was even invented.

RATS

The roster of desirable celebrity men this year was a broad church aesthetically: if you breathed while wearing a Loewe cardigan in 2024, randoms would get the horn for you. There was the ‘builders who would pee in your bathroom sink while you were downstairs making them a brew’ genre led by Paul Mescal and the ‘is he hot or just really tall’ splinter group helmed by Jacob Elordi (pre-John the Baptist beard).

But the leading trend was the ‘ratboy’ – a rather unkind term, really, for supposedly ultra-desirable angular features, a pointier nose than average, eyes like currants rolling around a granite worktop, and a litheness that was somehow furtive rather than graceful. Their kings were that guy from The Bear who looks more like an aardvark tbh (complimentary) and Timothée Chalamet.

The ratboy slur didn't stop scores of wannabe sex vermin showing up to a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in New York that got so out of hand, NYPD had to down doughnuts and make some arrests. Pest control, I assume, were too busy catching real rats. A copycat lookalike contest in London that hoped to lure Harry Styles out of hiding succeeded only in revealing how many young men with dark hair have been allowed to remain preserved in the aspic of delusion by well-meaning friends and family.

GOD CRAVE

If 2024 taught me anything, it’s that the only breaking news sources we actually need are social media spies Pop Crave and PopBase. If at least one of them doesn’t confirm a rumour, it NEVER happened. My strong belief was that nobody was officially famous until anointed by Pop Crave in a gossipy social media post.

And then, it was over, when Nicole Kidman murdered Pop Crave in cold blood:

That’s showbusiness.

OASIS OPEN, POUR, ARE THEMSELVES ONCE MORE¹

Musical reunions are usually a joyous occasion – think the original Sugababes tearing up Glastonbury or Girls Aloud coming together to celebrate their beloved, much-missed bandmate Sarah. And then you get the long-awaited (by their mother, perhaps) ceasefire between the brothers Gallagher. Once announced, this lucrative detente between Manchester’s own Zig and Zag (complimentary) unleashed endless reassessing of the nineties, which were both the good old days and the very, very bad old days depending on who you happened to be at the time.

I’m not a fan of Oasis’s music at all – too football adjacent, and I haven’t worn a parka since primary school – but I did once enjoy a piece of art created by a Gallagher brother. Christmas Day 2016: news breaks on Twitter that George Michael has died. Liam Gallagher is at home, lightly sozzled on Bailey’s perhaps and clearly devastated. When one of his followers makes a homophobic joke about George, Liam calls him a ‘massive c•nt’ and ‘nobody’ and threatens to come down their chimney and punch them in the face. Definitely maybe my favourite thing anyone from Oasis has ever done.

MEN STRIKE AGAIN

A viral moment that actually got people talking for the right reasons was the delightful Saoirse Ronan’s small interjection to a blinkered lads-lads-lads banter fest between her friend Paul Mescal (the most stylish man of the year apparently, despite all those cardigans) and Eddie Redmayne (if you recast Bianca from EastEnders using only people who’d been to Eton) on the Graham Norton Show.

The guests were discussing how one can kill a person with basically any object and Redmayne said, in training for whatever he was promoting, that his coach’s self defence tip was to whack your attacker with your mobile phone, which Mescal, especially seemed to find ridiculous. Who, they questioned, would think to reach for a phone in the immediacy of a violent attack? Along with fellow guest Denzel Washington, they laughed together, harmonising like three vans reversing down Regent Street.

Ronan’s viral infamy was assured when she sat back and allowed the laughter to tail off before pulling the pin out of the grenade and saying, actually, women think about that kind of stuff all the time. The air in the room changed and her comment was met by the briefest of silences until she called out to the women in the audience to back her up, which they did, with loud applause, while television’s leading soft-bois were left with faces like tangled duvets.

ACHINGLY HIPPO

Nothing sums up 2024 better than its main pinup: a pygmy hippo celebrated for looking like she wanted the hell off our garbage planet within hours of being born. All hail Moo Deng, who sounds like a Bedales-educated fashion influencer whose aristo landlord parents met in Annabel’s, and who wears floor-length wool coats with quilted winkle pickers poking out underneath.

Sadly, Moo Deng is unlikely to grace the society pages of the Evening Standard – largely because they and it no longer exist – and is unable to read out the benefits of vitamin gummies or disposable humidifiers to a front-facing camera for sponsorship coin. But the tiny, slimy beast captured the hearts of all who gazed upon her livid, shrieking face while she violently assaulted whatever happened to be in her path, proving you don’t need endless ‘new skincare drops’ to be an influencer – you just have to look like you really hate it here, and the rest of the world will immediately relate.

TRI-CURIOUS

Just as straights properly discovered Jonathan Bailey (see part 1), they also got their first taste of mainstream, airbrushed polyamory since all those straight-to-video threesome comedies in the nineties. It was all thanks to the smokeshow triumvirate of Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist playing tri-curious tennis players in movie hit Challengers.

This being Hollywood, this was a very different type of threesome from the ones we’re usually subjected to on late-night documentaries on Channel 5. Oh, you know the ones: they happen in a UV-lit guest house in Swindon, featuring couples called Geoff and Maureen drinking flat cava in an inflatable hot tub while their bank manager tries to unthread his fingers from a pair of edible knickers that have melted to the front of his lurex gimp balaclava.

The soundtrack was all right, though, if you like the kind of music your ‘cool uncle’ turns up loud in the car and says ‘I took six speckled doves to this at Creamfields in 1998’ while he’s dropping you off at the station.

HOT SHOT

Living proof that you shouldn’t do your end-of-year lists until the bitter end because, yes, stuff still happens in December: Luigi Mangione. Rendered infamous in the most Warholian way possible – killing someone – our 2024 Velma Kelly had it all: a backstory that, to our eye trained in absolutes from decades on social media, would be deemed ‘too complex a narrative’ by Netflix – not that it will stop them! – and a physical appearance that had the collective loins of the internet frothing like the North Sea during a hurricane before even his full face was revealed.

Perhaps that will be Luigi’s greatest gift once the inevitable trial is underway: the reminder that nuance exists. He offs morally reprehensible CEOs, but he likes weirdo tech bros. He’s anti-establishment, but horny for McDonald’s breakfasts. He’s good-looking, but… shot someone dead.

As the story unfolded, one could divine a dawning realisation in the timbre of right wing commentary that – uh-oh – this wasn’t as simple as crowing out the word ‘woke’ until the sun collapses in on itself. People with room temperature IQs began battling over whether Luigi was the hero of a culture war, or a class war, or good old left vs right when, if anything, his motivation transcended politics; it was a comment on the human condition. Namely pain, and the lengths you will go to to take it away or avenge its presence. And, of course, there was the thirst.

P•rnHub is already being combed by the internet’s finest Poirots for Mangione’s inevitable self-tape. What will it take for his admirers to be turned off? A wonky phone camera panning away from his mini Vesuvius to a signed photo of Musk? The revelation he preferred the post-Mutya lineup of Sugababes? Perhaps the biggest countdown of 2024 is not the 10, 9, 8 down to 2025, but the reveal of his nudes.

---

Thank you for reading me in 2024. Please buy one of my books or become a paying subscriber to this ‘stack’ so that I can carry on eating/turning on one of my radiators in 2025.

Part 1 of my 2024 roundup is here. Part 3 coming soon. Next week: something else.

1. A very niche joke for those who remember the old adverts for Oasis, a sugary and strangely dehydrating ‘juice’ drink you only see in leisure centre vending machines these days but was very popular in the 1990s. Watch: