RENAN BORELLI - JANUARY CULTURE



Who am I, and what am I doing here?

I’m Renan. By day, I’m a journalist, but I’m largely here because of my preoccupation with movies and TV and books and music, as well as a mild-to-moderate problem with collecting things. Most importantly, I’m a lifelong friend of the founder of this company, which means I’m here thanks to nepotism, which I’m absolutely thrilled to take advantage of for the first time in my life. As your occasional nepo-columnist, I’ll share some recommendations for things that I’ve watched, read or listened to that I think more people should know about.


RENAN BORELLI - JANUARY CULTURE | RENAN BORELLI - JANUARY CULTURE | RENAN BORELLI - JANUARY CULTURE | RENAN BORELLI - JANUARY CULTURE



I’ve long been obsessed with producer Todd Terje’s 2014 album, It’s Album Time. EDM isn’t typically my thing, but I loved DFA Records and the dance-punk wave of the 2000s; LCD Soundsystem broke up in 2011, and I was constantly looking for electronic music that could scratch the same itch. When I heard the bouncy disco vibes of Terje’s "Inspector Norse" for the first time, it was clear he was doing something completely unlike anything else I’d heard. I’ve never been able to find anything that resembles Terje's masterpiece — until now.

Late last year, I stumbled onto Mind Enterprises on Instagram. I was certain these two dudes were doing a bit, jumping on a meme of some sort, soundtracked by a Terje-esque song I'd never heard before. I had to learn more. It turned out the finger-wagging clowns were actually geniuses: actual Italian guys trying to keep the sound of "Italo disco" alive, who had written the song ("Burn It!") themselves. I subsequently fell straight down a rabbit hole, learning how Europeans continued to make disco long after Americans had decided that disco sucked, and discovered a whole new class of artists who originated the sound Terje and Mind Enterprises are drawing from. Make a playlist to listen to while drinking an Aperol spritz.



If you’ve reached the end of Netflix’s streaming options and haven’t yet jumped on the physical media bandwagon, there are several boutique Blu-ray labels whose releases are worth following — especially if you’re dedicated to hunting down movies that have long been difficult to see in the U.S.

In 2025, Shout! Factory reissued several of John Woo’s legendary Hong Kong action films from the ’80s and ’90s, produced before he came to the States to make movies like Face/Off. These films — especially Hard Boiled and The Killer, starring Chow Yun-fat — are bonkers and blood-soaked, full of Woo signatures like slow-motion gunplay, church shootouts and doves. These were nearly impossible to watch for years; now you finally can, in 4K.




Blank Space , the new book from Tokyo-based writer W. David Marx, is a pop history of the 21st century in which Marx explores the trends that brought us to our current cultural moment. He argues that those trends led to the stagnation of artistic innovation, driven by selling out and mass popularity becoming the primary measures of success. He tracks this through the lens of concepts like rockism and poptimism, Pharrell and Kanye’s journeys from Polo shirts to luxury fashion, and the emergence of Vice magazine as a conservative-leaning countercultural force. If you’re already extremely online, the stories he recounts may be familiar, but the way Marx ties these threads together to make a comprehensive argument about our recent history is compelling — and convincing.



 

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