The Popularity Cost of Becoming Mainstream
When niches go viral, context gets left behind. An exploration of “The Popularity Cost” and the slow erosion of cultural capital.
In a fragmented digital zeitgeist such as ours, the question of what “fame” and “popularity” really mean is constantly up for debate. But beyond definitions and metrics, there is a more familiar feeling that seems to persist. The bittersweet taste of watching something once specific, once yours, become everything.
It is not a new experience, but it feels sharper now. In a culture shaped by algorithms and constant visibility, niches do not just grow. They dissolve into the mainstream, often losing the very context that made them meaningful in the first place.
As I sat on the train home from the office, my brain in its usual overdrive, I came across a TikTok about Ryan Coogler disliking soda but “getting involved with that” once he realised you could mix the flavours. Among Black Americans, that phrase has now taken on a life of its own, and I liked it immediately because it reminded me of a similar Nigerian expression, “involve me.”
While I was enjoying that connection between diasporic speech, it brought me back to something more familiar: the bastardisation of AAVE (African American Vernacular English) as “Gen Z slang.” A dialect shaped by generations of Black speakers gets picked up on TikTok, stripped of context, and reintroduced as something new, something unserious, something disposable. The people who built it are left out of the conversation entirely. It is nothing new in a society that consistently leans towards whiteness as the default and treats origins as optional.
A similar pattern has played out more recently with Charli XCX and her “Brat” era. What began as a specific world, NYC and London party girls, small circles, a kind of cultural intimacy, quickly expanded beyond itself. These were girls who built identities in exclusive spaces while still holding a quiet influence over the cities around them. As she puts it in ‘Von Dutch,’ “cult classic but I still pop.” It is a very particular position to occupy, or at least it was before the album reached a new level of virality through the TikTok dance trend for “Apple.”
As Pierre Bourdieu wrote in 1979, “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”
With the scale of the Brat rollout, the “rich model partygirl” aesthetic became just another one to try on. And in her own words, “if everything is Brat… then what really is Brat?” At this point, it is fair to ask whether Charli and the people who shaped that world still have the authority to define it. Sarah Thornton (1995) describes subcultural capital as something that confers status within a specific group. Once that group disappears into the mainstream, that same capital starts to lose its value and cultural cache.
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