The Kids Were Never Not Alright
If you told past me that present me would be paying five bucks per adult head to enter a manicured park with a playground so my kid could run around in the closest thing I could think of to a child-utopia, I probably would’ve believed you, but then would have had a lot of other questions like: “Is the Sam of the future, AKA the present Sam, still curious about culture and art like he was before? Is the Sam of the future committed to the idea of trust in youth culture like he was before? And if not, what happened?”
I’ve been thinking a lot about what “the kids” (heretofore defined as people younger than me who have some stake — tangible or intangible — in the shaping of culture, whether they’ve gone viral on TikTok and now live in some hellhouse with a bunch of other TikTokers, doomed to create mime-esque (I didn’t mean meme here. TikTok is filled with people essentially performing mime routines) content on loop in a luxury flip until their five seconds are up and they’re replaced by another younger person who has a more expressive face and is marginally better at doing dances that were created in the real world and then subsumed by Fortnite avatars in a rhythmless approximation of real life, or whether they’re creating homespun music/films/chapbooks/comics in their parents’ attic or whatever) are into, and how they shape pop culture. How writers of all ages need to pay attention to what kids are doing because it points to a future of culture that is constantly under fire by the extant concerns of the world. Like, should we each be waking up every day and asking ourselves “does the art I plan on consuming today do anything for me in the face of a boiling planet? And if not, what is wrong with me that I don’t get it?”
This is not to say that all youth art is automatically good, or that nothing bad exists. Criticism is more valuable than ever, etc. etc. I just often catch myself when I’m doubting a thing that a lot of people love with cult-like devotion, and realize that I don’t doubt it because it’s bad, I doubt it because I haven’t taken the time to get it, or at least taken the time to understand it enough to know that I don’t factor into the world view of the thing.
Thanks to Twitter or just the prevailing mindset of human beings in North America in the 21st Century, we are now a society of Rube Goldbergian misunderstandings. Entire scenarios of missed connections, misunderstood irony, and a general haze of confusion play out in real life every single day. We are doomed to live in an episode of Three’s Company, or, to pull from a show that is available on Netflix (where the new canon is created whether you want it to be created or not), Frasier.
This type of confusion, of misunderstanding, of not getting it, happens when no one has time, resources, or, like, inclination to understand the world around them. It happens because information is moving too fast and we’re all just trying to form opinions on things before they reveal themselves to be racist, unexpectedly popular, or both. In culture writing, it manifests when writers don’t get proper access to the artists they’re writing about, so they have no chance of even pretending for a couple days that they’re insiders.
So anyway: getting back to that first question. What happened to me? I got older. I ran out of time, except for when I actually have the time. Still, I have a kid, so I have to spend a lot of music listening time listening to something called Blippi Songs Volume 1. It tells me nothing about teens. It tells me nothing about adults. It tells me that my son loves trucks, listening to songs about trucks, and pointing out trucks when we see them. It’s all valuable, and I love the joy he gets from this art, but it is a few years too early to influence the great morass of culture that exists in the world.
Chet Haze didn’t just conjure that patois out of nowhere, you know?
Which is to say that we, as adults, are largely failing at properly engaging with pop culture (if you are angry about this and think that you are the exception, then yes, you are the exception. Keep doing what you’re doing). At least in the music sphere. When something like 100 Gecs crushes genre in a blender, we should all jump into it wholeheartedly, especially when its being done with joy and genuine curiosity. And, like, 100 Gecs isn’t exactly without lineage, it’s just a lot of the acts that paved the way for 100 Gecs — and I don’t mean sonically so much as in their approach to art, and in their perspective — have been (hopefully temporarily) written out of history.
The Tough Alliance begat Salem who begat Elite Gymnastics who begat 100 Gecs, despite none of these artists having much sonic similarity, their very existence is commendable, though not without flaw. Music as messy as Salem is worth paying attention to. Music as emotionally honest as Elite Gymnastics is worth riding for. Music that plays with the concept of pop idolatry the way The Tough Alliance did should never be forgotten, but it all is because music is the lens through which we live, not the thing we engage with. Songs are allowed to be pleasant and in the background until it turns out someone has Bad Opinions, then they’re banned from our lives forever. Intentions matter.
Back in the day, when I worked at the FADER I championed witch house trio Salem really hard. Somewhere on a hard drive I’ve got a lot of unreleased Salem music. Most of it is very good, some of it is obviously just the germ of an idea. Some of it features bad rapping. But the way that group was so preoccupied with synthesizing their interests, regardless of the formal barriers around genre is admirable. That they became a punchline because of a bad performance and the awful music by imitators that came in their wake is understandable but still a bummer.
Earlier today I went for a run and put on Salem’s King Night. That album’s final track, “Killer,” is more guitar-focused, more song-driven than the songs that precede it. It’s a downer track built on guitar grit and out of tune vocals. It points to an alternate world where we gave Salem the chance to move past their dubious ideas and explore the sonic world they’d created. It stopped me in my tracks.
Less than a year after that catastrophic FADER Fort performance, I was at a bar where one of the members of Salem also happened to be. It was winter in New York and he was wearing white tennis shorts. Someone introduced us, and he fake-kneed me in the balls and made a self-aware joke about how my enthusiasm for Salem had ruined his career. I didn’t take it personally, and I don’t think he meant it seriously. But still…something had happened there, right? I was, in some small way, responsible for amplifying their sound, for letting my enthusiasm push them into places they maybe didn’t realize they weren’t ready to go yet. The difference between now and then is that back then, if I hadn’t done it, someone else would have. Now, I’m not so sure anyone gets the chance to be enthusiastic in the same way, with the same platform. I would say it’s a loss, but the kids keep making wild shit so maybe it doesn’t matter at all.