Volume 5, Issue 82: The Circle

"Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know ... they'd trade it all to know they've been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered."

The book is out. People tend to like it, I think. I hope you have bought your copy. If you have not, there is no time like the present: Buy now. If you have already bought the book, you are encouraged to leave it a review on Goodreads or Amazon, or both. It helps.

This week: You can find me in Bethesda, Maryland, at Wonderland Books, Wednesday, July 30, 7 p.m. ET. The bookstore is at 7920 Norfolk Avenue, Bethesda, MD. Find full details here.

It’s free, come on out, we’ll have a blast.

Every year since 2018, my son William and I have made a pilgrimage to Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri, just like my father, after whom he is named, and I have done every year since I had a stable enough life to pay for my own plane ticket home. This was something I imagined doing with my son before I ever had children, before I was ever married, and it’s a tradition I hope he continues with me when he’s an adult. But I’ll confess: I’m a little worried we’re going to have a bit of a break in the coming years. He’s a teenager now, with school about to start again, and all he wants to do is text and hang out with his friends; the dad who used to hold his hand as we crossed the street to walk up and touch the Arch, who high-fived him when Tommy Pham homered into the left-field bleachers, is now kinda lame, an uncool old guy whom he has to live with and tolerate, whose rules he has to still follow, but mostly is getting in his way and causing a seemingly endless string of eyerolls. This is fine, this is the process, this is how it works—I went through this stretch with my own father as well. I came back. He will too. But we are very much entering this stage. I wonder if next year or the year after there’s a trip with friends he’d rather take, and then there will be a girl, and then there will be college, and then these trips will be something he looks upon with nostalgia, back when it was just a baseball weekend with his dad like it used to be, back when it was all so much simpler. I hope he will be grateful for it.

2018.

2025.

This year’s trip has been planned for a while, sneaking it in in the middle of a semi-book tour, right before school starts back up again. This summer was so busy that it wasn’t until our flight landed yesterday that we realized that Friday night’s game was more than just a baseball game between the Cardinals and the Padres. It was also part of the Cardinals’ Friday Night Summer Postgame Concert Series, a transparent (and, I’d argue, not entirely successful) attempt by the team to boost flagging attendance numbers during a period of transition for the franchise. All fans in the ballpark, 30 minutes after the last out, are treated to a free concert by a popular recording artist. Back in June, they featured Cole Swindell, who is a country music singer I have never heard of.

Last night, they had someone I had heard of.

Flo Rida was, at one point, one of the most popular rappers in the world. He was certainly never one of the most respected—I enjoyed this very smart and pretty damning Justin Charity piece, from Complex a decade ago, which includes the terrific line, “hearing Flo Rida deploy his tongue-twisters so shamelessly in the service of pop and teen-bopping is rather like eavesdropping on a snitch’s sworn confession”—but Flo Rida was a pretty big deal there for a while. While his legacy will probably be most associated with “My House,” a song that felt like rap Muzak the second you heard it, I’d argue his most lasting contribution to culture will end up being providing the backing music for Tom Cruise as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder.

It has certainly been many a moon since Flo Rida was at the center of the cultural conversation, and because his music isn’t particularly good, and he’s an easily mockable character (with a very stupid name), the notion that he would be playing a free concert at the end of a regular season baseball game pitched by Miles Mikolas is an inherently comedic one. This is even more true when you look at Flo Rida’s current tour schedule, which just included the Northern Wisconsin State Fair, in Chippewa Falls, playing the day before Foreigner; the idea that Flo Rida, the guy of the forever party, the guy on a boat surrounded by expensive champagne and women in bikinis in every video he ever made, is in his REO Speedwagon at the Country Fair Era, well, it’s a funny one, and it can even feel like a strange sort of cosmic justice. Some pop music stars are lasting, the ones with real artistry and juice, but most of them go through this circle of life. They have a couple big hits, they feel like they are on top of the planet, but then they can’t follow it up, so the culture moves on without them, forever dooming them to haunt the earth, soulessly droning through the chorus of songs from decades ago for people who just wandered over from the 4-H dairy conference. “Flo Rida?” people will ask on the rare occasions your name comes up. “He’s still around?”

That’s certainly what we were doing: William and I spent most of the game making jokes about Flo Rida, him because he thinks Flo Rida is an “unc” who makes lame music, and me because I am now old and washed enough that I am desperate not to seem like a huge dork in front of my teenager son and am happy to use an aging rapper as a comedic foil in that quest. It’s irresistible: Flo Rida reduced to playing a free show after a Cardinals game? How far has that guy fallen?

But I dunno. The more I thought about it … well, jeez, what else do you want Flo Rida to do? Doesn’t Flo Rida get to be middle aged too?

Say what you will about Flo Rida—and so much can be said—but however pathetic a middle-aged pop star might seem, well, there are people who, when they hear “Low,” will have positive memories attached to that song, a harkening back to when they themselves were young, when the world felt a little less terrifying—when they danced to a stupid pop song by a kinda lame rapper but didn’t care about any of that because that’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to do when you’re young. The world comes, with all its responsibilities and fresh daily fears, and that time when you could dance to a stupid pop song feels further away—like it was a different life entirely, someone you once were but will never be again. Maybe you hear that song and, if just for those few minutes, you’re back there. You’re that person again. That’s what music can do. It can bring you back to when you first heard it—where you were, who you were. It doesn’t even have to be good music. It just has to transport you back.

It’s pretty silly that Flo Rida is playing a free postgame concert after a Cardinals game. But it should be said: There were people there, and they were enjoying themselves. If I tried to set up a book event at Busch Stadium after a Cardinals game, no matter how high-minded I might consider myself, no matter how Super Serious my Super Serious Novel is compared to “My House” …. no one would show up. Mock Flo Rida all you want. But he’s out there, still. People are still showing up. Not that many. Not nearly as many as once did. But there are still people there, in St. Louis, in Wisconsin, even at Gronk Beach.

Flo Rida didn’t disappear when we stopped thinking about him, and I don’t know why he is supposed to. Again: Flo Rida gets to be middle-aged too. We have our moments in our lives when we surge, when we are at our peak, and then there are moments when the waves crests, and we recede and come back to shore. Our lives keep going regardless. I’m old and lame, Flo Rida is old and lame, we will all someday be old and lame. And yet on and one we go, still picking them up and setting them down, living our lives, remembering times when everything seemed so much simpler. I hope we will be grateful for it.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Caitlin Clark Is Basically Where Michael Jordan Was in His Second Season, New York. A WNBA check-in, which I’ve deep dived into more this year than ever before.

2. The Best 25 Sports Comedies, Vulture. A new list from Grierson and me.

3. Emma Stone Movies, Ranked, Vulture. Updated with Eddington.

4. How Are the Brewers Doing This? MLB.com. They’re very good.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Eddington,” “Sorry, Baby” and “The Muppet Movie.”

Morning Lineup, I did Monday’s and Friday’s shows.

Seeing Red, Bernie Miklasz and I gave up the ghost.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Teen-Agers in Their Bedrooms, Before the Age of Selfies,” Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker. A famous book from the 1990s, which simply features photos of teenagers in their bedrooms, is getting a reissue. It is not difficult to see why.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“It’s Too Bad About Your Girl,” The Donnas. So at the Book Soup event in Los Angeles last week, someone asked me what kind of music I listened to while writing Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride. I then told a story about how, when I was writing the action scenes in the book, I listened to The Donnas, which provided me the exact right mix of propulsion and earnest good cheer that I was looking for. Well, it turned out that someone in the audience is in fact best friends with the lead singer of The Donnas, and I signed a book for her, telling her about how perfect her former band’s music was for what I was trying to do. Los Angeles, there’s always somebody famous or famous adjacent nearby!

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!

Back out to Busch tonight, I haven’t given up on the Wild Card chase just yet. Go Cards. And hopefully see some of you in Bethesda this Wednesday.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will