Lance says:
>If there was one thing that I do see a bit differently is the idea of irony
>as a '90's development (of course, if you weren't suggesting that, Carl,
>please call me out). In point of fact, irony seemed to be a fundamental
>part of punk the moment rock came down with its case of arena-goggles.
Oh, no, this is exactly what I was trying to address, Lance. My point was
that irony worked as a counter-strategy in the late 70s and then became
pervasive in the 80s. There are myriad examples but Letterman to me is the
clearest marker of the shift - started off doing what seemed (when I was 12)
almost like punk-rock television and then quickly became the most mainstream
of forces. Spy magazine had a good piece about "The Irony Epidemic" in about
1989 that talked about the retro-kitsch and scare-quotes culture of urban
hipsters of the era, and I think there was a confluence of the yuppie and
the punk attitudes in all this. (Think of the emblematic young adult of the
80s as someone in a Hawaiian shirt, a house decorated with Flintstones
memorabilia, working in advertising - and listening to the Cramps.)
As David Thomas of Pere Ubu now argues, the weird thing about punk rock is
that from a certain point of view, punk "won". (Only a certain element of
punk but the dumb-is-smart part, for sure.) Thomas argues that Everything Is
Punk now - politics included - and commercials being the best place to look.
Nirvana's ascendance, though deeply well-deserved and also a complex
cultural phenomenon, cemented the victory. My personal sum-up of Cobain's
suicide is that the resulting paradox was unlivable for him, and I
sympathize; one of the disturbing things about his death was that it seemed
so logical, so much the inevitable outcome of the narrative.
Which led precisely to this:
>sincerity had become the new alternative, and into that vacuum stepped
>alt.country.
And that doesn't just apply to music. The younger folks I know have none of
the same conflicts about all this that I do - the sorts of conflicts expressed
in Jake's essay. They have so highly developed a sense of irony that it is
useless to them - and as a result they have a lot more energy about just
moving ahead and trying to find something meaningful to them despite how
fucked-up they know the world is. There's an ingrown surrender to that
attitude: mostly they don't see any point in opposing or rebelling against
anything, and just want to pursue their own passions. "Selling out" is hardly
an issue anymore. Which disturbs me, but since it's the same point I've come
to after some 15 years of punk-rock-style anger, far-left politics and irony
debilitation, I can hardly blame them. I almost envy them. And the drift of my
musical tastes as I neared 30, toward "purer" forms - pop, country,
experimental composition, jazz - and away from punk-based music was a fairly
dramatic indicator of that sad, but necessary and liberating, attitude
adjustment.
carl w.
