Watering My Industry Plants
And growing my garden of grievances
It’s the summer of the middle-class pop star, and the buzzword on everyone’s lips is industry plant. Industry plant allegations are old hat for a certain subset of stan Twitter that lives in Pop Crave’s replies, but in recent months the term has broken containment and become ubiquitous. The more people sling it around, the more its meaning dilutes and warps – instead of signifying preordained success courtesy of C-suite machinations, it’s now used to dismiss anyone who has the gall to get famous without your consent, context be damned. Calling a singer an industry plant lends a veneer of righteousness to otherwise good old-fashioned hating – it’s not enough to just dislike a celebrity, now you have to pretend to object on moral grounds. Using industry plant as a pejorative betrays an underlying assumption that fame is a value judgment, when in fact fame has no correlation to virtue and is not awarded on the basis of who’s more deserving. Devoting any energy to anointing certain people with a purer strain of fame than those who supposedly came by it the “wrong” way is not only futile but also just really boring, much like the whole nepo baby conversation that went stale months ago.
Not that delusion is proving to be much of a deterrent to the industry plant police. The plot has been thoroughly lost by this point, so why not lean in and really let the accusations fly? Forget Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter – we have fresher fish to fry, and under the most widely used definition (if not the most accurate) that means any phenomenon that’s pervasive but remains stubbornly unappealing or perplexing qualifies.
A Non-Exhaustive List of Everything I’ve Decided to Call an Industry Plant
1. Retinol
The fact that I continue to buy and use retinol on my face despite not understanding how it’s supposed to help my skin is an unequivocal victory for Big Skincare. I smell a conspiracy.
2. Adding “Girl” Before Every Word (Dinner, Math, etc.)
Being a girl does not mean being a helpless baby who can’t do long division or digest solid foods. And even if it did, you’re not a girl – you’re an adult woman. Grow up!
3. The Reylo-Fic-Writer-to-Published-Author Pipeline
One of my most deeply held beliefs is that fanfiction authors form the backbone of our society. Regardless of the quality of the writing, to do it for nothing more than the love of the game is a noble pursuit. I just wish the fic writers getting major publishing deals and movie adaptations of their work weren’t overwhelmingly white and horny for Adam Driver’s big lightsaber. Where was this energy for the visionaries who penned hundreds of thousands of words about Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s characters in Inception sucking and fucking through time, space, and (un)consciousness? The type of mind that can extract eroticism from between the lines of Christopher Nolan’s clinical-to-a-fault movies is one I personally want to hear more from. Surely we’d get something more ambitious and provocative than the one-dimensional “Man Large, Woman Small” slop that the Reylos keep pumping out.
4. Cartoon Covers for Romance Novels
At least clinch covers are honest about what to expect inside: rippling abdominals and heaving bosoms. Are you a coming-of-age YA story or a steamy romance? Because these cutesy little illustrations are giving identity crisis and false advertising.
5. The Supreme Court Justices
A lot of people are complaining about how Spotify adds “Espresso” to every playlist under the sun, regardless of genre, and I’m sure that’s really difficult or whatever. But if we’re talking about external forces wresting agency over your choices out of your hands and subjecting you to the consequences of someone else’s decisions, the biggest industry plant has to be the Supreme Court. On the scale of power and influence, music streaming platforms autoplaying “Good Luck, Babe!” after every song is leagues below stripping a country’s population of its reproductive rights and expanding presidential authority beyond the purview of the law. At least there’s a way to neutralize payola’s impact on your listening habits – just mute any artist you don’t want to hear from. The Supreme Court justices, on the other hand, present a much more challenging obstacle with their lifetime tenures and apparent immunity to any consequences no matter how obvious their conflict-of-interest problem is. Lavish gifts worth millions of dollars from Republican donors keep stacking up on Clarence Thomas’ ledger, flags representing right-wing dog whistles wave shamelessly on Samuel Alito’s properties, and still we find ourselves at the mercy of their whims. Not all industry plants are made equal; these are destructive, invasive weeds that must be pulled out by their roots.
6. Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day Liquid Hand Soap
You guys don’t seriously think this smells good, right?
7. Love Triangles Where Two Brothers Fight Over the Same Girl
Girl: Hi!
Older Brother: [ignores Girl]
Younger Brother: Hi Girl, when did you get so hot? I am in love with you now.
Girl: Oh, ummmm thanks buddy.
Older Brother: [gazes at Girl intensely through his eyelashes while climbing onto his motorcycle]
Girl: I’ve never ridden one of those. I’m too clumsy and quirky and innocent …
Older Brother: Get on.
Girl: [literally salivating]
Younger Brother: What the fuck! Older Brother, you know I called dibs on her!
Older Brother: Your dibs don’t matter because of how tortured and sexy I look in this leather jacket.
Girl: [sobbing] Don’t make me choose! My one true love is actually pitting the two of you against each other!
Older Brother and Younger Brother: [playing tug-of-war with Girl while a Taylor Swift song plays in the distance]
Wattpad Sickos: Yeah we’ll take 50 more of these, stat.
8. The Chicken-Based Interview Industrial Complex
In a few years, the lineup for every celebrity press tour is going to be:
Hot Ones
Chicken Shop Date
Late Night With Seth Meyers and a Bucket of Popeyes
WIRED Autocomplete Interview, Sponsored by Buffalo Wild Wings
LADbible’s Snack Wars: US vs. UK Chicken Sandwiches
Variety’s Actors on Actors (While Both Actors Eat Chicken For Some Reason)
9. Ballet Flats
Whoever invented ballet flats was on a mission to torture short girls with flat arches who also sweat a lot and blister easily.
10. Underwritten TV Girlfriends
Help! I’m a female character with no inner life who only exists to further a man’s character development, get me out of here!
Claire LastName from The Bear and Jade LastName from Ted Lasso should unionize and demand at least one scene each where they pass the Bechdel test.