(Surprisingly, he sat the recent ‘Super Blue Moon’ out: “lots of planets are in retrograde,” he explains). Madonna posted herself reading it, something Kazemi visualized, and he attributes much of his career success to his practices. His first book, 2020’s Pop Magick, detailed the experience of visualization, rituals, and sigils in order to bend reality to your will. These chance encounters are due to the occult study of magic - he’s an open practitioner of Kabbalah, and allegedly manifested the Swift meet-up, a creative partnership with Marilyn Manson and Ellis, and more. He no longer keeps in touch with Del Rey, but in recent years, has expanded his celebrity repertoire - he’s on a first-name basis with Bret Easton Ellis, whose American Psycho feels like it harbors New Millennium Boyz as a prequel, and in 2018, Taylor Swift invited him to come backstage to chat before her blockbuster Reputation Stadium Tour. People like Marina Diamandis, Lana Del Rey, Charli XCX, the trifecta of melancholy sad gay pop. ![]() New Millenium Boyz first showed up on Tumblr as a snippet titled “Yours Truly, Brad Sela,” where it attracted the praise of artists who were online at the time and took notice in Kazemi’s drive and pivot to artistry after working as a music journalist. ![]() “So much of cultural camaraderie came from that glue and that system of pop culture being simplified,” he says. Everyone gets their different cultural reality, and it never really merges people together.” Whatever I scroll past daily is likely completely different from my friends. You might not know a Twitch streamer your friend really likes, or even a porn star your friend really likes from OnlyFans or Twitter. It’s not like your generation with a billion different algorithms brainwashing you and separating the culture around your peers. “I was trying to capture this last moment of adolescent culture that was controlled by an arena of systems. Brad and his friends constantly call each other up, ask if they saw what just happened on MTV. The early 2000s, Kazemi says, was the most recent period we were all tuned into the same content. “Probably the reason why it took ten years was the fact that it was a period piece and the research was done in libraries, university databases, messageboard archives,, YouTube home videos, pictures.” It’s bursting with pop culture references - what song is playing on the radio, food items the characters eat, what band is on everyone’s shirts - one reference took about two or three hours to fact-check, he says. I’m dealing with very intense, dark things,” he tells me. “It’s not a happy thing every morning to work on this. Kazemi’s characters are horrendous and heavy to read, and it wasn’t easy to sit with them during the book’s long writing process. “I took out this new book on Hitler at the library, but I got too hard reading it,” Lu, the worst of the three, admits. Each shocking action escalates as they attempt to surprise themselves, and the sheer plunge Kazemi must have done to create each grotesque thought is one of the most consistently astounding facets of the book. Constantly watching MTV, idolizing people like Marilyn Manson and the aforementioned Columbine shooters, the three boys gaybash, hurl racial epithets at students, mutilate rats on their Handycams, all in an effort to escape the blandness of suburbia. A teen drama set at the beginning of Y2K, the book follows Brad, a senior who meets two new students, Lusif and Shane, during his last year of high school. ![]() “A lot of my decisions of creating immoral, unlikeable, repulsive characters was because I feel like that’s more real,” Kazemi says of his debut novel New Millenium Boyz.
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