Hello and welcome to the first Guide of 2023 – I hope your year has got off to a great start and, well, if it hasn’t there are still 51 more weeks to go.
The new year is, of course, typically the time when we think about resolutions, sometimes publicly humiliating ourselves into change as we do so. And, when it comes to culture, it’s a time when many vow to read more books, to keep up with the cultural conversation beyond skimming headlines on Elon Musk’s hellsite, or to finally watch that mountain of cult films you’ve been vowing to watch for decades.
As with most resolutions, set the bar too high and you’re sure to fail; set it too low, and you might not get past the “scrolling through the Netflix landing page” bit and just end up watching trailers all year. With that in mind, here are five pop culture resolutions you can almost certainly keep, with a little bit of help from Guardian culture writers and beyond.
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Make your own trends
Ironically, trying to keep up with culture can sometimes lead you to switch off from what you’re actually interested in (shout out to Emma Garland for this great piece from last year about ditching “compulsive consumption”, and Emily in Paris, in favour of culture she actually likes). Says culture journalist (and one of the writers of the Guardian’s What’s On newsletter) Micha Frazer-Carroll: “I do think we should question whether we need to constantly gobble up new ‘content’ – something that increasingly feels like a social requirement, especially online. There’s always something to be said for rewatching old shows, even if it gives us less fodder for small talk and memes”.
Similarly, culture writer Ammar Kalia suggests “[ditching] a show after two episodes if you’re not gripped by then. No matter how many times something might have been recommended, life is too short to watch six hours of a series you’re only lukewarm about”. Ammar is, like me, a creature of habit, who also suggests leaning heavily into your own niche. “If you find something you like – follow it,” he says. “Apple TV+ has had an excellent run of high-budget originals, from thriller Slow Horses to dystopian drama Severance, so I tend to give their new shows a shot. Favourite actors and writers are also worth following to introduce you to new shows you might not have heard of. If you liked writer Mike White’s The White Lotus, for instance, you should check out his excellent 2010 show Enlightened”. But, he adds, “If none of that works, you can always take a leaf out of my book and try to watch less TV …”
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Stay organised … to an extent
Goodreads. Letterboxd. IMDb. Spotify and Apple Music folders. Extremely untidy Google Docs with eight question marks next to things (my own personal favourite). Whatever your form of cultural cataloguing, if you do a lot of it you probably get a lovely warm glow from keeping all of your want-to-reads and just-watcheds in neat and tidy online boxes. If you feel like you’re struggling for something to watch or read, leaning into this is a good thing. “Just keeping a running playlist or document with every recommendation you get or name you see can be helpful,” says acting deputy music editor Shaad D’Souza. “Next time you’re tempted to chuck on something old and reliable, choose something from the list instead”.
However, if you already feel like your cultural consumption is ruled by lists and ratings then allow yourself a little freedom to occasionally do something wild, like watching a film you haven’t already put in a spreadsheet, or deleting things you’re pretty sure you only added to impress a Hinge date in 2016.
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Stick together
They say there’s safety in numbers. Nowhere is that less true than in a book club, where you have to at least attempt to finish the book and express an opinion about it, and where it will be totally obvious if your source material is the Wikipedia page for A Little Life rather than the book itself (by Hanya Yanagihara, above). I’m not saying that you should use a book club to force you into reading more books, but it can be helpful. Bonus points if you and your friends choose books you already own and are covering dust, or ones that are a couple of years old so can be bought secondhand.
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Quality over quantity
“I am slightly puzzled by people who set a number of books to read as an annual target,” says books commissioning editor Lucy Knight. “Why turn reading into a task?” If you must set an aim, says Lucy, “a better challenge than an arbitrary number might be to change the type of books you read. Read authors from different backgrounds to you, read translated books, read a genre you’ve never tried before. Ask for recommendations from someone much older than you, or someone much younger”.
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Kill two birds with one phone
If 2022 was the year you said you were going to get into podcasts (and 2021, and 2020 …) then I think that maybe you can live the rest of your life without getting into podcasts? There are some good ones, though, and there are now so many that you really don’t have to feel beholden to trends (see above). The best way, says Hannah Moore – a producer and presenter of the Guardian’s Today In Focus podcast – is to weave them into your everyday life. “I like to use podcasts to motivate me through any tedious or messy tasks I’ve got to do that day, like scooping out the cat litter, queueing at the bank, mopping the floor, ironing shirts badly etc,” she says. “It’s nice to feel like there’s someone with me on my mundane little journeys through life.”
There’s no point “storing them up as some sort of intimidating lecture series that you’ll never get round to listening to,” she adds. It’s a sentiment echoed by Guardian podcast reviewer Hannah Verdier: “Scare yourself with true crime on your rainy walk. Have a Song Exploder for your tea break. Let Kathy Burke soothe you to sleep. And never get in the bath without a podcast. Even more relaxing than Netflix and well worth your time”.
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Find something new
Even if you’re leaning out of trends, you’re likely going to want to discover some new things this year. Luckily, as well as having your favourite websites and newsletters (cough cough) on hand, you don’t need “militant planning or hours dedicated to trawling music blogs for your next big discovery”, says Shaad. “Online community radio stations such as NTS, No Signal and EHFM all broadcast regularly and have deep archives to trawl through; put one on while folding laundry or washing dishes and you might stumble upon an artist you can note down and dig deeper into later. NTS has an excellent app that makes it easy to switch between its stations and its archived shows and playlists”.
Standup comic Chloe Petts (who is performing her critically acclaimed show Transience until June, as part of her extended debut UK tour) says her new year resolution is to listen to more music she hasn’t heard before, both old and new, and has found a novel way to do so: “I’m doing a small project I made up called Companion Pieces where I find a new album I haven’t heard before then google the artist’s name and ‘influences’. I’ll then listen to the major work of their most prominent influence. So an example might be: if you’ve been dwelling under a rock you may never have heard Little Simz. If you’ve been dwelling under a rock since the 90s (firstly, congratulations on your stable housing situation), secondly, you may never heard of Little Simz’s influence, Lauryn Hill. So you might do a double bill of Little Simz’s surprise album drop at the end of 2022, No Thank You, and Lauryn Hill’s seminal 1998 work The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. I’m going to try doing this at least once a month”.
If you’re looking to broaden your cinematic diet, you can also lean into supporting your local indies, which – in many cases – are arts venues and cultural hubs as well as cinemas. “Become a member of your local independent cinema, or even the boutique chains, and get down there regularly,” says film writer Andrew Pulver. “You can even buy shares in some of them. Small cinemas, with ambitions to show classy films, are really hurting – I am still rattled by the sudden closure of one of the UK’s finest, the Filmhouse in Edinburgh – so making the effort to get there in person not only gets you in front of a rich variety of material, but also supports places for the longer term. Not that I am knocking the big chains, but the real heart of cinema is in the indies and smaller places. They deserve your support”.
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