A few months ago I attended a Billy Bragg gig, or - I should say - a Billy Bragg sermon. Now, I don't agree with everything Bragg preaches about, but there was one particular point he was making that hit home for me. "Our greatest enemy is cynicism. Not the cynicism of our enemies, but our own cynicism". And, according to him, the internet brought forth a surge of cynical assholes, complaining about everything. He is right of course, it is uncool to care about anything, and the Internet has only strengthened that sentiment. David Berman once wrote in a poem: "the pressure to simulate coolness means not asking when you don't know, which is why kids grow ever more stupid." While this concerns knowledge, it applies to fighting for a cause just as well. Or, as Camille de Toledo puts it:
How long do we have to go on apologizing for being romantics? Why not stop right now? Here. Boom! All of a sudden. Let us make the desert green with lyrical trees and mocking jays. Let us abandon irony and the fear of naïveté. The cliché is not kitsch. It's merely pretty. So, what do you think?
And just today, in an interview with Dan Deacon, once again this came up:
I grew up with bands like Beck and Sonic Youth and Nirvana-- it was cool to not care. But we live in a time period where you have to give a fuck. If we just allow the destruction of our lifestyles, our habits, our cultures, our movements, our environments, our relationships to other cultures-- it's going to be a time of dark ages. How are we going to stop that if we shrug our shoulders? That is insane to me.
The fact that I've run into this subject so often recently could be merely a Baader-Meinhof thing, it could also be my specific focus on it (but I don't think De Toledo, Bragg, Berman and Deacon frequently have dinner together). I do not believe this is accidental. Instead, I really want to believe in a new momentum starting, that we will slowly start to believe in the rejection of modern values again. In his Coming of Age at the End of History, De Toledo explains how modern capitalism stifles any attempt at rebellion by means of co-option and assimilation. If you've ever been inside an H&M store and seen the London Calling and Sex Pistols t-shirts on sale there, you'd know this to be true. If the anarchy and complete nihilism of punk can be sold to the masses at the very heart of capitalism, what possible way out is left? Every subculture that blossoms is co-opted, centralized, signed, sealed and delivered to your local stores, thereby defining the culture not as an ideology, or a spirit, but simply as a set of fashion rules - a look and an attitude.
In his song Take Off Your Sunglasses, American singer/songwriter Ezra Furman proclaims his own confusion and insecurities and is not sure whether he wants to see clearly or keep living in a subdued word of anonymity. This can be linked even further, of course, to our Western values of peace and civility being made possible by the constant exploitation of the non-Western world, and in turn leads me to a line from a song by The National: "I know you put in the hours to keep me in sunglasses, I know". Our Raybans are the best possible metaphor for the inability of us twentysomethings to come to terms with our place in history. The question would be whether you want the Raybans or not? I think a lot of us are not quite ready for this yet, Ezra at the very least was not when he wrote his song:
I don't want to think about
things I don't want to think about in the middle of the night
In the middle of the day I don't want to think about
things I don't want to think about in the middle of the night
I don't want to think about it
I don't want to think about it
I don't want to take off my sunglasses
