Tucking In with Sliced Bread
SAINT. tucks into pop culture, using music, film and television to make sense of the world that produces them.
Tyler Perry: Notes on Black Camp
SAINT reconsiders Tyler Perry’s work through the tradition of Black camp - from its visual artifice and moral melodrama to gender performance and the complicated place of sexuality within his work. Moving through Madea and Netflix sensation Beauty in Black, the speculation surrounding Perry’s sexuality and E. Patrick Johnson’s concept of “quareness” - the essay asks what camp might reveal about the strange, contradictory world Tyler Perry has created.
Episodes
Glee: The Beginning, Middle and the End of Twerk
Using Glee’s infamous “End of Twerk” as its unlikely starting point, SAINT traces twerking from its roots in Black cultural expression and New Orleans bounce to its transformation into a mainstream symbol of vulgarity and moral panic - asking what gets lost when Black culture becomes pop culture. Along the way, he reappraises Glee itself: its handling of race, sexuality and difference, its spectacular contradictions, and why one of its most hated episodes might also be one of the clearest expressions of what the show was always trying - and often failing - to do.
Black Panther and The Miseducation of Africa
SAINT revisits Black Panther to question the film’s flawed understanding of Blackness, Africa and the diaspora. Through Afrofuturism, Afropessimism and the history of colonialism, the essay examines the contradictions behind Wakanda - and what it means for this fictional nation to have become one of the defining images of Blackness in 21st-century popular culture.
The Death of Pop Music
What happened to the pop star? SAINT traces the unraveling of the traditional pop machine, from Beyoncé and Rihanna rejecting the album-promo-tour cycle to hip-hop and streaming rewriting the rules of commercial success. Through Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, stan culture and the growing importance of physical purchasing power, The Death of Pop examines how a changing music economy made the kind of mass-market superstardom that once defined pop increasingly difficult to create.
How the Transatlantic Slave Trade Became the Music Industry
SAINT traces the birth of the modern music industry through the commodification of Black music, from minstrelsy and jazz to the rise of mass popular culture. Following the transformation of Black cultural expression into a product to be packaged, sold and consumed, the essay asks how the legacy of slavery became embedded in the business of popular music.
Does A Black Doctor Who Really Work?
Doctor Who has always imagined itself as a show about freedom - but its relationship with Black people has been considerably messier. From its Black companions and recurring racial politics to the arrival of the first Black Doctor, the essay examines the contradictions between Doctor Who’s progressive ideals and the world it actually creates.
Striking Vipers: Black Mirror’s Homiesexual Episode
SAINT reads one of Black Mirror’s most misunderstood and divisive episodes as “unintentionally intersectional”: a story that becomes something far more complicated because its two protagonists are Black men. Through Black masculinity, DL culture and queer fantasy, “Striking Vipers” becomes a story about two men searching for forms of intimacy they can only fully inhabit once they escape the identities demanded of them in real life.
Madonna: Transgressive or Privileged?
Madonna built her career by transgressing the boundaries of sex, gender, religion and respectability - but who actually gets to transgress, and at whose expense? Through an intersectional and oppositional reading of the Queen of Pop, SAINT examines the uneasy relationship between Madonna’s radicalism and her privilege, where liberation, appropriation and exploitation are rarely as black and white as they appear.
Whitney Houston: An Intersectional Perspective
How did Whitney Houston become the biggest Black female pop star in the world within an industry that demanded her Blackness be carefully managed? Through an intersectional reading of her career, SAINT traces Whitney’s journey from the sanitisation of her early image to The Bodyguard, Waiting to Exhale and Brownhouse Productions - revealing how she gradually claimed the freedom to present herself on her own terms.
BREAK MY SOUL: Beyoncé Reborn
Through Black queer musical traditions, Christianity and the queer lineage of Uncle Johnny, SAINT reads Renaissance as Beyoncé rebuilding the self from her inheritance. The extreme self-affirmation of “I’m That Girl,” “Cozy” and “Alien Superstar” becomes a negotiation with the power and mythology of being Beyoncé, before “Break My Soul” offers the resolution: liberation through accepting every part of who you are.
New Beginning (1996): SWV’s Best Album
After the success of It’s About Time, SWV entered their second album amid pregnancy, personnel changes and a rapidly shifting R&B landscape. SAINT traces the making of New Beginning (1996), from the group’s evolving image and relationship with producer Brian Alexander Morgan to the music itself, arguing that SWV’s overlooked sophomore album might actually be the finest record of their career.
Mou Mou: The Crown's Crowning Failure of an Episode
Watching ethnic minorities endure systemic injustice isn’t inherently inspirational or aspirational. Through Mohamed Al-Fayed and Sydney Johnson, SAINT argues that The Crown’s “Mou Mou” fails to interrogate two men as victims of imperialism - turning their pursuit of acceptance by the British establishment into aspiration without confronting the colonial forces that produced it.
The Harm of Original Sin
What happens to your sense of self when you’re taught that humanity is inherently broken? Tracing Original Sin from Augustine to the beliefs we inherit about sex, childhood and human nature, SAINT examines how Christian ideas of unworthiness can become embedded in the way we understand ourselves - and argues for reclaiming the love, power and worth we so readily place outside ourselves.
High School Musical 2: Disney’s Communist Manifesto
High School Musical 2 might just be Disney Channel’s great study of capitalism. Through Troy’s seduction by privilege, Chad’s search for community and Sharpay’s relationship with wealth and power, SAINT reads the film as a coming-of-age story about entering the working world - and the choice between material success and the relationships, creativity and joy that make life worth living.
The Politics of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
What does colonialism look like to a nation that was never colonised? Through Wakanda, Talokan and Riri Williams, SAINT reads Wakanda Forever as a three-pronged exploration of imperialism: contrasting an uncolonial African state, a civilisation born in resistance to colonisation, and a Black diaspora still living with its consequences - and asking what each can understand about the others.
IN LOVE: A Critical Analysis of Beyoncé’s Discography
Across Beyoncé’s catalogue, love is more than a recurring subject - it becomes an unfolding narrative. SAINT traces her relationship with JAY-Z from the romantic idealism of Dangerously in Love through desire, marriage, betrayal and reconciliation, reading their interconnected discographies as a decades-long saga about how love changes as the people inside it change.