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Kids these days continue to suck
Warning: It’s hard to consider this a political post, but still, I think it’s an issue of great importance
This article is well-intentioned, but kind of gave me an uneasy vibe. It’s about a trend I was blissfully unaware of until very recently, when I went out bowling with some friends to a place that plays loud music and videos, and suddenly this song came on—I can’t tell you which one—and like half the people at the bowling alley started to do some kind of line dance. As I stood there appalled, my friends explained that this is some new thing that’s really popular, and later one of them emailed out a video of a bunch of middle aged men doing the same dance in kilts….at a wedding of course.
In other words, you can blame the patriarchy for shitty dance crazes, at least in part. The craze for big weddings has created an engulfing need for songs that can get every rhythm-free and shame-laden guest at a wedding onto the floor after a couple of glasses of champagne, and line dancing really fits the bill. As long as weddings have been with us, so have line dances, because everyone can do them and get applause and recognition for it, and doubly so if they are usually considered terrible dancers. Everyone’s just pleased to see them capable of something. This guy spends a lot of time uncomfortably dwelling on how he, white boy from Iowa, looked to hip-hop from a young age to inject some cool and some masculinity into him, but what he fails to realize is that the widespread nature of that desire in this country made the hip-hop-to-gaudy-wedding-music road an inevitability. Who has these big weddings with a strong need for line dancing but the young men like our author here, who listened to NWA on the bus to the Iowa schoolhouse? And with the pressure to both have a picture perfect wedding and to express your “true self”, goofy employments of pop music on the wedding dance floor are de rigeur. I’m not denying that this can sometimes be fun, to watch the old folks shake it to Outkast, but it’s also the source of really goofy dances.
I’m not sure a two page analysis of how hip-hop began to suck is necessary, though. Of course, that never stopped me, so I can’t blame the guy. But after two pages of trying to figure out where things went wrong, he stumbles onto an analogy that suggests that cosmos will not allow anything good to last untouched by the massive suck.
Look, I’m not confused or annoyed by hip-hop, like older rock fans are of, say, Fall Out Boy. And there you have it. I remember the day that Dee Dee Ramone died. I was driving along listening aimlessly to crap radio talk show stuff, and the DJ announced that Dee Dee had died, and, to give the audience some idea of who this was and why it was important, cited the Ramones as an influence on Offspring. The problem with great music is that its very popularity is often its death knell. Innovation initially alienates all but the adventurous few, and then people get accustomed to it, and there’s often a period where the music is still good and really popular. But the flattening inevitability of mediocrity kicks in.
This article also suffers from the selective memory process that is nostalgia. If this guy was 8 in 1989, then that means I’m 4 years older than him, and I remember yes, that NWA was popular….but so was Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer. You can’t just skip over that shit; the Hammer dance was everywhere. You can still start the rap to “Ice Ice Baby” in a roomful of people my age, and at least two or three will overcome their natural, Disco Ball-given shame urges and will start to rap with you. The mediocrity creep set in on hip hop the second records started to go gold. I remember seeing a commercial for Flintstones vitamins where Fred and Barney were rapping when I was a kid. Hip hop and I are about the same age, give or take a couple years, so that means that even in its childhood, it was facing the Flintstones kids obstacle. Not that you give up hope on continuing to make good music in a genre after a setback like that—punk survived the Chipmunks punk album. I remember going to games and dances in high school and hearing “Whomp! There It Is!” a lot more than all the golden heyday-of-the-90s hip-hop that makes this guy wax poetic.
Everyone goes through this guy’s struggle in their mid-20s. It’s easy to say, “Oh, the music changed,” because it’s easier than facing up to the fact that you changed. Responsibilities creep in. You start watching more TV rather than spending your time scouring record shops. Your friends don’t have time to make you mix discs anymore. Looking for good new music becomes hard work, and you slowly start doing it less. And thus you see something shitty on MTV and you think, “That’s what the kids today like?” and you forget that there’s always been a mass of people indulging in The Suck on MTV, and that you only remember the good stuff, because back then you could be up at 1AM aimlessly watching MTV during that one hour of the day they play good music, because you didn’t have to be in class until 11 the next morning.
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"Innovation initially alienates all but the adventurous few, and then people get accustomed to it, and there’s often a period where the music is still good and really popular. But the flattening inevitability of mediocrity kicks in."
That parallels Thomas Kuhn analysis of paradigm shifts in science, which he describes in Structure of Scientific Revolutions. You forgot the part where there is another innovation at the end of the boring period.
Frank Zappa described the musical phenomenon as one that stemmed from what I'd call the corporatization of talent recruiting. A lot of experimental acts (innovators) are hired by people who don't know what they're doing, and some become popular. People at the record companies then go conservative and start looking for more of the same -- it's a safe bet, the sure thing. When they hit a point of diminishing returns, then they are forced to return to a more experimental mode.
Zappa had a nostalgia theory, too. He posited that we were going to face death by nostalgia before long, with people becoming nostalgic for past events and fads in every-diminishing periods of time, to the point where people wouldn't be able to take any action without being immediately overwhelmed with nostalgia for it, resulting in total paralysis.
There's an authenticity issue here, too. Rap became a new urban mode of expression to be coopted by white youth looking to rebel, etc. As marketing tools and market research became more sophisticated, MTV and its cohorts were able to exploit this relentlessly.