The reflexive pose of the needlessly hip

They’re out there, you know, in their grim multitudes. The needlessly hip. They have some of the nous of their cooler, more effortless cousins, enough to figure out, at any rate, what the lumpen masses are into at any given point in time. But they are not so far removed from the majority as they’d like to think. In fact, the advertising industry regards them as part of the majority, their particular niche being the early majority, the ones who adopt the language, the dress, the music, the whatever, of the early adopters.

They are constantly trying to work out what they think about, say, a new band, a new type of music, a new way of cutting one’s hair. It is hard for them to do this, because ultimately the decision has been made for them by ... well, other people. Specifically: the people who they regard as below them on the status ladder, the majority, and the people who they acknowledge, at least unconsciously, as being above them on said ladder.

Being a member of the needlessly hip means suffering constantly from a peculiar kind of status anxiety, one that expresses itself in a positively toxic disregard for most forms of popular culture, as well as a perplexed attitude towards anything that isn’t quite in that particular fishbowl, what one hesitates to call highbrow or higher culture. It means not being able to have an honest reaction to anything, because one is always looking over one’s shoulder, either shoulder, in order to get one’s cue about whether a thing is lame or not.

The band was laying pretty heavily into the disco canon: Donna Summer, early Jackson 5, and horror of all horrors, Abba. It was by any objective measure, well, pretty corny, except, and this is a pretty big exception, you were out there on the dance floor. ‘Man, this is so lame,’ one said to the other. They were kind of standing there, a few metres removed from it all, drinks in hand, bored expression manifest. ‘Yeah man. I mean Abba? Come on.’ You wondered how they could ever enjoy a single thing that they passed through, wished they would muster up the courage to, you know, join the party; they were acting so cool that the whole point of being cool had escaped them. It was a black tie event, so all the guys were kind of dressed the same, and they had worked out their reflexive pose, but ... but you wanted to tell them, come on, man, there are three girls to every guy out there on the parquet at the moment, you’re kind of missing the point.

Or then there was this: he’s at a barbeque, and all he can talk about is this CD that he has discovered, he will tell anyone who will listen that the music on it is ... life changing. The kind of mannered monomania that is amusing for a couple of minutes but beyond that becomes the acme of tedium. You think to yourself, thank god for the bloke that told him, actually, mate, I didn’t really like it, and then refuses to get into an argument with him about it.

Or how about that guy that yelled ‘Judas!’ at Dylan, all those years ago? This is the reflexive pose of the needlessly hip taken to its logical extreme; the only thing that gave the sentiment any weight at all was it was backed up by a small but earnest group of Right-thinking individuals who thought they were onto something but who couldn’t have been more wrong. This, sadly is one of the dangers of the reflexive pose: it is hardly worth voicing one’s opinion about any given work of art, because the correctness of any such opinion ... yes, the correctness ... is frequently in inverse proportion to the vehemence with which it is held and/or expressed.

van halen

Here is the thing, see: there is an entire generation out there right now who just have no idea who Van Halen were.

I realised this while talking to my kid brother, who as fate would have it is a decade younger than me. I was driving him to see his girl friend, and as it so happened the music that was on was 1984, by Van Halen, you might know it as the album — oh, hand on, that’s right, see, back in the day there were these things called albums, and you put them on or in your stereo while you were driving/cleaning the house/having a dinner party, and then you got on with things.

Damn. Where was I?

Oh yes. That’s right. The music. The music was having quite an effect on the kid. He wanted to know what it was and could I burn him a copy for his iPod.

I told him to go jump.

I said that if he wanted, I could tale him to the 2nd hand CD store and we could by a fully depreciated copy of something by the band there. He asked why. I mumbled something incoherent about artist royalties and such like, and before we knew it we were there, managed to pick up a copy of Live: Right Here, Right Now for cheap.

My education continues.

untitled

It's always easier to talk your way into something
Than it is to talk your way out of it

Talking about my generation

In generational terms, I’m a ‘late’ Gen Xer, meaning I was born when between such and such a date. I really am getting these t-shirts printed up. They will say ‘I am not part of your target demographic’. My generation. Oh boy. I feel stupid, and contagious. We are probably best summed up by the palm muted strumming that kicks off Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’. There really isn’t that much more to say, you know. On the cusp. Hello, hello, hello, how low. And so on.

Middle Class Values

My old man is forever telling me that the chief way in which I am perverse is in my reverence for the middle class and their values. This perversity is borne of having descended and ascended the socioeconomic ladder more times than I would care to count. But he is right: while I am by temperament somewhat of a radical, I see no sense in waging a war against la petite bourgeoisie.

It is in this somewhat playful spirit that I relate the following anecdote, which, although in and of itself may not be that interesting, was, as these things go, at least mildly entertaining.

It all happened at a party I was at the other week or month. I found myself assailed, in the corner of the room, by another young man eager to a) tell me who I was; and b) tell me that my whole way of living was wrong. When I deigned to disagree with him on this second point, he exclaimed, ‘That’s just bloody typical! Typical middle class scum, you are!’, at which point I had the baneful duty of pointing out to him that a member of the middle class is, by definition, not scum.

I think the point was somewhat lost on him, however.

And so on.

A short pome about axl rose

If you find your arms growing shorter
As your pockets are getting deeper
Then perhaps it is time to begin
Removing their contents
And placing them on the dresser
Before you next leave the house,
Mate

in d-fens of uh-merica

In Defence of America

America. Uh-merica.

The excesses of American Culture are well-documented and so ubiquitous as to not need seeking out.

They probably don’t need much talking about, either, at least from me.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time with Americans can reel off probably half a dozen cliches about them: loud, friendly, don’t understand irony, insensitive to other nationalities and cultures, and so on. And then are the terrible things that Americans do when they do go overseas: like invading sovereign nations in the middle-east, the far east, and so on, in the name of peace and democracy (to this you might add a somewhat unscrupulous attitude to the regimes of their near neighbours, I suppose). And, you know, setting up Starbucks and McDonalds franchises based on the Wal-Mart business model. Things like that.

But this is not the America that I know. The America that I know has given us Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, Dorothy Parker, Martin Luther King, Jazz, Hip-Hop, about eighty per cent of rock and roll, Don DeLillo, Ani DiFranco, Gil Scott-Heron, Hunter Thompson.

At any rate, these are some of the people I think about when someone who is talking to me is complaining about America. I do this because such complaints are often voiced in this country and are so tedious as to not need thinking about. Yes, the War In Iraq is a Terrible Thing, sure, W. is a joke, boy, it sure does suck the big one that our own government are such toadying lickspittles.

Of course, these are all valid opinions, and I suppose that a healthy disrespect about The Great Satan is a good thing in a country like Australia.

At any rate, there are these people, usually in my acquaintance pretty solid members of the bourgeoisie, who are not really in a position to do anything about their grievances, and at any rate are so much a part of the ‘system’ that some part of them has to realise that a strong United States is a necessary but not sufficient condition to their Quality of Life.

And then there are the people for whom talking about all of this is not a joke. I have the greatest degree of admiration for them, and I wish them the best in their continuing struggle against global capitalism and to a lesser extent middle-class values, and whatever else is on the agenda.

But I also wish America the best, too. I hope that it can be a country that lives up to its promise, and that its manifest inadequacies don’t continue to overwhelm the better parts of its nature.