OK Go Boomer Computer

Billie Eilish

Pop singer Billie Eilish’s recent admission that she doesn’t know who Van Halen is, has reignited the generational debate that apparently flares every two weeks anymore. Van Halen’s fan base of older Gen-Xers have to admit they’re officially as old as they once thought their parents were. Since Van Halen never much spoke to me, I wouldn’t much care about this faux controversy, if it didn’t come so soon after the now-obsolete “OK Boomer” joke.

When I was 16, I  desperately wanted to be a Baby Boomer. Looking around, I saw the cultural and political power Baby Boomers possessed, the authority they held over my choices, and the simple ubiquity of their presence. When you're a kid, you have two options when faced with authority: you rebel against it, with the moral incoherence for which teenagers are justly famous, or you emulate it. I chose column B.

While still in elementary school, I remember watching PBS documentaries about the cultural milieu in which Boomers grew up, from the images of wealth they witnessed on shows like Leave It To Beaver and Bewitched, to the socially acceptable rebellion they helped create at Woodstock. Based on the exposure I received in childhood, I believed Boomers won the Civil Rights conflict—although Malcolm X and Dr. King were both born in the 1920s.

We didn’t have that. As a member of Generation X, I struggled with communal identity. We didn’t even have a generational handle until about 1993, nearly thirty years after our generation began; we bounced among “Latchkey Kids,” “the Baby Bust,” “the MTV Generation,” and “Generation 13” before Douglas Coupland’s novel gave us a name. If television documentaries gave me a false impression of Boomer unity, media treatment convinced me that my generation barely even existed.

However, we did exist. We test-marketed the claims many Millennials now use to make bank, including the claim that wages were flat while work was up, meaning we faced the likelihood of a chronically impoverished future; the claim that cultural institutions treated us exclusively as consumers, and demonstrated little patience with us as makers; and the claim that the economy was saddling us with debts we’d never be able to repay. History has vindicated us.

So you understand my frustration when, several weeks ago, New York radio host Bob Lonsberry tweeted that “Boomer is the n-word of ageism.” After forty years of constant saturation with the idea that Boomers were cultural innovators, political liberators, and better musicians than every subsequent generation, somebody purporting to be a Boomer spokesperson claimed Boomers are oppressed equally to African Americans. This takes oppression chic to a new level.

Eddie and Alex Van Halen
(don't ask me which is which)

The “OK Boomer” tag, like every other fad in our media-drenched environment, had a remarkably short lifespan. In November, it pushed people born between 1945 and 1965 to heights of spittle-flinging rage; but it’s already getting used ironically by comedians and basic-cable news commentators. Just like “MeToo” and “Black Lives Matter,” overexposure defanged the monster in its cradle. Yet the reaction it generated speaks volumes about its intended audience.

I have one problem about the Billie Eilish controversy, though: approaching fifty years since the Beatles released their final album, their music still appears timeless and relevant. Van Halen doesn’t. Van Halen’s peak album, 1984, is larded with okay songs like “Jump,” and shitty pieces of self-indulgence like “Hot For Teacher.” As the movie Yesterday recently demonstrated, playing the Beatles moves many generations equally. Van Halen sounds very early-1980s.

People slightly older than me feigning distress that a 17-year-old doesn’t know Van Halen, is like demanding a 17-year-old when 1984 was released, 25 years ago, remember Frankie Laine and Perry Como. I sure didn’t when I was 17. In both cases, the Billie Eilish faux-controversy and the “OK Boomer” outrage, we see people old enough to be parents or grandparents demanding they be treated as permanently, eternally young.

Essentially, we have two generations publicly demanding to act like Peter Pan, and it’s embarrassing. Boomers and their first-generation offspring expect history to freeze, their childhoods to be treated as sacrosanct, and post-Millennials to treat them like peers. They want congratulations for the innovations they nurtured, and then, they want all innovation to stop.

And making a teenage pop singer the embodiment of this desire for nothing new to happen, is the height of irony.

When “OK Boomer” began, I thought we were seeing old people refusing to get old. But clearly my generation is refusing to get middle-aged, too. Here’s hoping we can all stop being narcissistic, and appreciate that the world keeps growing and blooming, even when we’re not in the center of it.

Why Is Making a Superman Film So Hard?

Henry Cavill in Man of Steel

DC’s continued struggles to create an economically viable cinematic enterprise have reached a new low. Writing in Forbes, pop-culture critic Dani Di Placido describes DC's struggles to find something for Superman to do. You’d think an alien living in America, believing in justice and honor, would have important resonance in today’s divided cultural landscape. Perhaps movie studios, notoriously jittery about public opinion, find this too pointed.

The rush of armchair critics on FaceTube and InstaTwit have readily condemned this timidity, for obvious reasons. I’m tempted to echo these positions, because that’s low-hanging fruit. Superman’s backstory would seem ripe for utilization in today’s America. His historic connection of “the American way” with “truth [and] justice” should address our trend toward conflating Americanism with untruth, subjectivity, and avarice. This shouldn’t be a hard sell.

Yet considering the economic landscape responsible for controlling this discussion lies hidden beneath the cultural issues. Superman, Batman, and the MCU don’t just objectively exist; they are properties controlled by media conglomerates, which make remarkable money off their holdings. The rentier economy allows DC and Marvel to get wealthy by owning and licensing their intellectual property, but that wealth makes them risk-averse.

DC Comics is owned by WarnerMedia, so naturally Warner makes DC movies. WarnerMedia is America’s second-largest media conglomerate, controlling about sixteen percent of America’s media revenue. That’s slightly under half the revenue controlled by America’s first-largest media conglomerate, Disney, which owns Marvel Comics and Star Wars. Following its Fox buyout, which reduced America’s major media conglomerates from six to five, Disney controls approximately one-third of America’s media revenue.

Superman on the cover of Action Comics #1

So the continued runaway success of the MCU, and DC’s inability to compete, isn’t about the competition between these two comics companies; it’s a proxy feud between America’s two largest media corporations. As I wrote recently, talking about Martin Scorsese’s condemnation of the MCU’s box-office domination, this is somewhat misguided. Yes, major-studio franchises control America’s box office. But only two franchises, Star Wars and Marvel, are currently very successful.

And both are owned by Disney.

I’m loathe to offer suggestions to major media conglomerates for controlling their more lucrative properties, since history suggests they’ll misuse that power to further limit the government. These corporations have a history of kissing tyrannical ass to ensure their continued revenue flow: Disney itself has become particularly risk-averse since it temporarily lost China’s import market following their 1997 dud Red Corner. Conglomerates suck just fine without my help.

Nevertheless, Superman has loomed large enough in American culture for so long, that abandoning his principles to corporate timidity resembles a form of surrender. So I’ll weigh in anyway. Let’s start by remembering what made children embrace comic-book superheroes over eighty years ago: they embodied American moral convictions. They believed in the same things we believed in, and then followed through.

The runaway success of Wonder Woman should instruct DC what audiences want. The titular protagonist, who believes moral right exists as an objective force, and sets out to kill war, in the midst of history’s most pointless war ever, demonstrates what traits audiences reward with money. We want moral confidence, and a will to act upon this confidence. We want characters who remind us to do what’s right.

Christopher Reeve in Superman

Following the immense, brooding darkness of Man of Steel, many critics, including me, condemned the movie’s bleak, ends-justify-the-means attitude. Charles Moss, writing in the Atlantic, pointed out that Superman’s origins were remarkably grim and violent. But I’d suggest that misses the point. Early Superman had lite-beer socialist leanings, and his willingness (in a White, urban way) to confront slumlords and corrupt bankers, reflected America’s unexpressed urge toward revolution.

Christopher Reeve’s Superman expressed the morals of another time. Flush with cash in the post-WWII years, before media conglomerates began hoovering everything upward, this Superman reflected an era whose proletarian values were less communist, more communitarian. Reeve’s Superman busted villains whose machinations interfered with everybody’s desire to live well together, rather than punishing criminals by forcing them to live under the conditions they created.

Superheroes today must express contemporary moral sentiments. What do Americans fear today? The political insurgencies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders bespeak distrust of political and economic establishments, including media monopolies, that serve themselves, rather than the people. Both Trump and Sanders campaigned against a fossilized social order stealing from the people. What if Superman, and the Justice League generally, fought the same fight?

This would require WarnerMedia to turn against its business model. But whose hand feeds them, ultimately? The shareholders? Or ours?

New Millennial Pop-Folk Blues

Sharon Van Etten, Remind Me Tomorrow

“Sitting at the bar, I told you everything,” Sharon Van Etten sings mournfully to open this album. “You said ‘Holy shit. You almost died.’” Van Etten doesn’t much explain what “everything” means in this song, “I Told You Everything.” But it clearly involves a youthful sexual experience that leaves her shaken and scarred, yet, she implies, compelled to eternally repeat. That sets this album’s mingled themes of dread and disappointment.

If, like me, you encountered this album through its advance singles, particularly “Comeback Kid” and “Seventeen,” you probably anticipated these themes. Heavy with melancholy and a sense of mortality, these songs reflect an artist who, thirty-seven years old when she recorded them, recognized an unmet need for pop music with a grown-up audience. But they don’t really reflect the album’s larger soundscape, which is unremittingly grim, verging on bleak.

Previously noted for a substantially acoustic singer-songwriter sound, Van Etten’s fifth album shifts to an atmospheric electronica sound notable for its minimal guitars. And by “atmospheric,” I mean a minor-key bass chord on Farfisa organ runs through nearly this entire album, making your teeth vibrate like a 1980s horror movie soundtrack. This chord is so understated, though, that you may only notice its persistence on the fourth or fifth listen.

Yet this isn’t a horrific album. Sad and pensive, perhaps, often preoccupied with the past despite the pressing imminence of the present, but the only scary thing is how we interpret it. I noticed this on “Jupiter 4,” which has lyrics of unalloyed love—”Our love’s for real, how’d it take a long, long time to let us feel?”—played ironically against chords that sound like a breakup song.

Put another way, Van Etten does the opposite of Hank Williams, who often played gloomy lyrics against bouncy tunes. Van Etten, like Williams, puts her words and music in direct opposition. Listening to this album, you may feel a growing sense of dread. Not only that somber chord, but Van Etten’s contralto voice, which contrasts with the music but doesn’t oppose it. Her voice seems separate from the instrumentation.

Sharon Van Etten

This has good and bad qualities. This album’s first three tracks are so uniform in sound and tempo that, if you’re listening with half an ear while driving or studying, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s one fourteen-minute song. Only with “Comeback Kid” does the sound become differentiated enough to feel a change. This is also where Van Etten’s vocals become distinct enough to follow without a lyrics sheet.

After that point, however, everything opens up. Her dynamic changes, and her voice becomes a more prominent instrument. Though still atmospheric and dense, she becomes more willing to step up or fade back, appropriate to the message she conveys. Yet she never loses that reverse-Hank Williams trick, because her songs remain sonically stark, regardless of how optimistic or despondent her words.

Please understand, this isn’t a timeless sound. My previous reference to 1980s soundtrack music isn’t flippant. Her foregrounding of Farfisa or synthesizer on every track harkens back to the music that dominated the soundscape of Van Etten’s childhood. As the oldest Millennials approach forty, but frequently still can’t afford a down-payment on a house, this lingering backwards gaze will touch their situation concisely.

Hearing this album as a unit, one wonders whether Van Etten intended it to announce her planned retirement. The single “Seventeen,” with its themes of generational angst, became her first to hit any Billboard chart. Like most Millennials, she both is and isn’t an adult, with all the responsibilities of a career and new motherhood, but a paucity of trust from her economy. One suspects she’s touched a nerve.

Motherhood in particular lingers throughout this album, though usually not overtly. On the final track, “Stay,” she muses, “Imagining when you’re inside, when you make those kicks inside. Don’t want to hurt you. Don’t want to run away from myself.” The prospect of caring for a helpless life, when her generation frequently can’t care for itself, scares her. But, she continues, “You won’t let me go astray.” Adulthood persists, regardless.

Pop music often requires artists to remain eternally teenaged and rebellious, because kids have more disposable income. But Van Etten’s compositions reflect a generation that never had economic stability enough to rebel, and now faces impending middle age. I find a kindred spirit in her: grown-up, yet still carrying the unfulfilled impulses of youth. This album starts slowly, sure. But by the end, it’s pop for a newly older generation.

The Happy-Dance of Fake Gender Roles

Rigaud's portrait of Louis XIV
(click to enlarge)

Whenever I get entangled in discussions of gender, my mind inevitably drifts to Hyacinthe Rigaud’s legendary portrait of King Louis XIV. Louis, the “Sun King” responsible for the Rococo atrocity that is Versailles, commissioned several paintings of himself, though Rigaud’s is probably most famous. Rigaud depicts Louis, like nearly every portrait does, wearing high heels, leggings, a fur-trimmed wrap, heavy cosmetics, and a wig.

This painting depicts one of the most powerful men—and, for this discussion, I do mean “men”—who ever lived. Louis commanded a global empire with an iron hand, untrammeled by the oversight of any parliament or circumscribing aristocracy. He controlled France’s political, economic, and even religious culture with absolute authority. And he did so while wearing clothing that, to modern eyes, looks like a woman’s, if not a drag queen’s.

I recalled this painting again recently when a tweet went viral. Ashley StClair, a woman who calls herself a “freedom fighter” and “patriot,” shared an Instagram video of a father and son, prancing happily in off-the-rack Halloween versions of the protagonists’ dresses from the movie Frozen. StClair captioned the video with “The testosterone is being sucked from our men right before our eyes.” Because obviously one Instagram video is a universal data point.

The testosterone is being sucked from our men right before our eyes 🤦🏻‍♀️

pic.twitter.com/SMM4FLgq8K

— Ashley StClair 🇺🇸 (@stclairashley) November 24, 2019

The reaction has been both swift and predictable. Defenders of the status quo have condemned the father for not forcing his son to adhere to masculine stereotypes, by requiring him to play catch or work on a farm. Progressives have called for people to let families have fun, or insisted that gender inclusiveness is sexy. I can’t help thinking they both miss the point: this post is built on entirely wrong premises.

StClair’s whole “testosterone” comment implies that gender, or anyway sex, is biologically determined. If that’s the case, why must we police gender roles, and punish anybody who transgresses? Is biology so brittle that it could be shattered by children being happy while trying on possible identities for size? Of course not. StClair feels compelled to enforce gender standards because she knows she’s protecting something artificial, for artificial reasons.

Louis XIV demonstrates this artificiality. High-heeled shoes, a fashion accessory connected today with women, were invented at Versailles, specifically for Louis, who, at five-foot-five, was shorter than most of his courtiers. He feared his height made him look weak when holding court, so he ordered shoes designed to protect his image. Only after he abandoned wearing them, late in life, did women inherit this formerly masculine fashion accoutrement.

Medieval illustration of peasant dress
(click to enlarge)

We invent gender standards, just like standards of class, race, and nationality, to defend power arrangements. Medieval illustrations show that, though the sexes didn’t dress exactly alike, the differences were much slighter than we expect today. Billowy skirts allowed workers to move freely in an economy where both sexes did manual labor, while lace-up leggings protected workers from nettles and insects. Clothes weren’t gender markers, they simply existed.

So gender standards, as we understand them, are fake. Yet the opposite also isn’t true. I have the same attitude regarding gender that Ibram Kendi has regarding race: the distinctions might be artificial, but their consequences are real and lasting. Working construction, a heavily gender-segregated occupation, I see men rigorously defending their gender identities, because it’s frequently the only credential they have for wage-earning in a stagnant labor economy.

Therefore, gender roles both are, and are not, real. And don’t bring me examples of traditional societies which had more than two established gender niches. Unless they had the same gender definitions, and those definitions never changed—which isn’t so—that doesn’t tell us anything useful. It only reinforces my position that gender roles are socially conditioned. Those who police categories, and those who contravene them, operate from the same expectations.

King Louis adopted his look for specific political reasons. He wanted kings of other nations (Rigaud’s painting was originally commissioned for Philip of Spain) to understand his wealth, power, and eternal youthful vigor. His laborers, wearing skirts to work the fields and vineyards, needed no such cultural reinforcement. They dressed in ways that freed them to work, and made them happy.

Happy. Like a little boy dancing in a dress.

I’m sure the anonymous father didn’t intend a political protest against intrusive gender standards. But he gave us one anyway. He showed us that one needn’t obey somebody else’s socially conditioned categories to be happy. The rules don’t objectively exist; they need self-righteous censors like Ashley StClair to police them. And if we don’t need those rules, we don’t need the rule-keepers, either. Maybe we’d all be happier dancing in dresses.

Classical Folk Fusion for a Discerning Ear

The Arcadian Wild, Finch in the Pantry

Listening to the title track, an instrumental, from The Arcadian Wild’s second album, I couldn’t help noticing something unusual: the fiddle and guitar were playing different underlying rhythms. The fiddle, largely the lead instrument, followed a looping six-beat rhythm suggestive of an Irish seisiún, while the guitarist played a four-square supporting chord progression sounding almost like a chorus of snare drums. They weren’t in different time signatures, in the Stravinsky style, but came mighty close.

This musical erudition characterizes the entire album. The acoustic instrumentation comes straight from the bluegrass tradition, with guitar and mandolin trading roles as percussion and driving force, with a layer of fiddle atop them. But they use staggered arrangements, syncopated beats, and cathedral choir vocals. Clearly these musicians learned their craft from the honored elders of musical lore, but aren’t beholden to it. They have their own story, and their own way of telling it.

From the opening song, “Hey Runner,” the band establishes their impatience with convention for its own sake. Sung from the viewpoint of a volunteer concert organizer dealing with an arrogant showcase performer, guitarist Isaac Horn expresses the disappointment inherent in becoming a musician today. Mandolinist Lincoln Mick does something similar on the more upbeat, possibly radio-friendly “Food Truck Blues.” They occupy a Nashville where dues-paying dependency has become a full-time career stretching out for years.

Clearly this album comes from superior musicians more interested in creating music than kissing record executives’ rings. Complex arrangements that require more planning than today’s common studio jams, and dense, allusive lyrics, reflect artists who spend time thinking about their music. It wouldn’t be accurate to say these artists aren’t listenable, because they emphatically are; but they don’t permit listening with half an ear while driving or studying or cleaning. They write for active listeners.

Tracks like Mick’s “Silence, a Stranger” have intricate expressions reflecting this ethos. If you’re like me, you hear songs several times before you really begin processing the lyrics; initial attention stays on the music, which in this case is ethereal and dreamlike, but never wispy. Only on the fifth or sixth hearing do I catch lines like: “Stillness is a woman I’m too cowardly to kiss / A hallowed thing too holy for my unclean lips.”

The Arcadian Wild, l-r: Paige Park, Lincoln Mick, Isaac Horn

Seriously, I heard this album several times before catching how laden the lyrics are with references to literature, the Bible, and other sources. In today’s Nashville, songwriters tear off tracks hastily inside the studio, building them around radio-friendly hooks, because that’s what makes money. The Arcadian Wild are more contemplative and intricate, reflected in lyrics like Horn’s, from “Oh, Sleeper”: “I wonder who I’ll need to be today / They don’t need to change, I’ll relate.”

It bears noting, though this isn’t a Christian band, they’re clearly influenced by Christianity. Besides Mick’s quoted lyrics above, which reference Isaiah and Proverbs, it’s possible to spot other Biblical references throughout. Mick does this more directly, while Horn’s influence comes from liturgy (his compositions use cathedral vocals more than Mick’s). This culminates in the long final track, “A Benediction,” which includes Irish-style blessings, lyrics in Latin, and the line “Because death has lost already.”

This level of musical sophistication has fittingly won The Arcadian Wild a small but loyal following throughout the independent folk circuit; they maintain a busy schedule of house tours and intimate club venues. That’s how I encountered them, playing a small storefront church. Speaking to mandolinist Lincoln Mick following a concert, I mentioned I’d struggled to place why their sound feels familiar, before successfully placing it: they resemble Nickel Creek. “We’ll take it,” Mick said.

Horn and Mick, as composers and vocalists, have a thread of, let’s say, optimistic disappointment. They reflect the belief that things will get better soon, but they don’t know when, or why not yet. (Fiddler Paige Park is billed as full band member, but doesn’t compose or sing lead on any track; she replaces a banjo picker from the prior album. This band isn’t a boys’ club, necessarily, but the men obviously have creative control.)

Without a clear genre niche, this band may struggle to find an audience. Are they bluegrass? Classical fusion? Americana? My comparison to Nickel Creek isn’t flippant: both bands will enjoy a small but dedicated audience, which will probably spread by word-of-mouth rather than slick Nashville promotion. Maybe a review like this will bolster their public awareness. They certainly deserve that attention, because nobody else is creating music like theirs right now, and that’s a shame.