In 2023, my family and I took a vacation to Alaska, which, if you read this blog, you already know since I posted about it here and here. Before we departed North to the Future from San Francisco, we stopped at the airport store to get some magazines for the flight. I purchased the September 2023 edition of Harper’s. What caught my eye/attention was the cover story by Justin E.H. Smith titled “My Generation: Anthem for a Forgotten Cohort.“
That’s the official title, but, as you can see from the cover, the article was posed as a question rather than a declarative. Since I’m in the Gen X cohort, I wanted to see what happened to us. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure anything epochal really happened to my generation. I was just curious about what one person’s elegy for a generation would focus on. I didn’t start the article until we were firmly on the ground in Alaska. Indeed, I only started reading it when we took a 12-hour train trip from Fairbanks to Anchorage. And because it was a 12-hour trip, I had time to take some notes on Smith’s essay. I found his focus to be more on a cultural-theoretical level — though, he does weave in person anecdotes and laments that, as an older Gen X’er, the world now belongs to the young at a time when there’s “great cultural and political upheaval.”
There’s no doubt about the fact that we are living in a time when there’s immense change — and not all of it is good. Indeed, if there is a vibe that pervades the younger generation in Smith’s view, it’s the yearning to break with the past and be liberated from it. It’s a yearning that’s driven less by a utopian vision of tomorrow than the belief that what came before has let us down. For Smith, it’s the boomers who have let us down. The drug-fueled and imaginative vision of liberation espoused by the most influential members of that generation failed to pass that vision to Gen X. What felt inspiring and grandiose seems to have been that of a hash pipe dream.
In Smith’s eyes, no one exemplifies that failure more than David Bowie.
Bowie gets singled out by Smith for selling out. Let’s Dance and what came after it in the ’80s is an emblem of boomers giving up on their transformative art for the material comfort of a safe, Disney-like capitalism that rendered whatever revolutionary power of art into another faux-edgy thing to be consumed. Or, if you want a shorthand way about what Smith is talking about, look no further than the band Consolidated who, in the album The Myth of Rock (1990), led with a track called “Product.”
These days we just call it “content.”
Where Gen X lost their idealism was not only the way influential boomers, who had a kind of artistic purity, sold out to the system they were supposedly rebelling against, but there were world-changing events that increased the cynicism borne out of Gen X’s heroes taking a fall. You can hear it in songs like Juliana Hatfield’s on-the-nose “I Got No Idols.” However, heroes are one thing. Some of those world-changing events in short order are:
- 9-11
- The Iraq and Afghanistan wars
- The iPhone
- Social media
- The Great Recession
- The climate crisis
- Housing — including affordability and homelessness
- Right-wing authoritarian movements
For Smith, art (the non-sell-out kind) must be transformative to have significant power. However, in today’s culture, he notes that people will gladly trade transformation for virality. That’s because having viral content as an influencer in the capitalist mode has been ingrained in our collective minds as a way to go from economic marginality to economic independence. Selling out pays. Or as that cultural observer Snoop Dogg said, “…with my mind on my money and my money on my mind.” It’s all about making money. Screw values. Screw transformation. Just make sure you get paid — or so it seems.
Overall, Smith’s essay, while chock full of interesting observations about our culture, falls short of making a compelling case for this simple reason: what was this art-inspired transformed world supposed to look like? Well, it all seems to boil down to getting naked and “being able to play the piano with our feet — the long-held hope…for human liberation.” Well, that’s fun for probably an hour tops. After that, I suppose one wonders what’s for dinner.
Another thing that should be noted is that almost all the cultural changes Smith highlights (in the pre-sell-out day) come from a leftish space — a space that has lost its ability to inspire Gen X’ers like Smith. However, there is rightish space in the U.S. and many parts of the world where transformation is sought in both culture and politics. Listing some of what’s trending, we get:
- Anti-liberal, anti-democratic populism
- The unitary theory of the executive branch in the U.S. aligns more with monarch and theocracy than We the People.
- Performative outrage
- U.S. Supreme Court rulings that chip away at the current constitutional order that’s been in existence since the mid-’60s.
Seeing all those world-changing things listed is nothing if not depressing. And even though we tend to silo ourselves in information bubbles, it’s clear the left and right learn from each other’s tactics and strategies and sometimes share a similar goal: getting rid of what is. What ought to be, however, is not always clear. Even in today’s culture, to be redpilled is, according to a New York Times article marking the 25th anniversary of the film The Matrix, misunderstood by those on the right who love their memes of Morpheus holding out a red and blue pill.
In the article, author Alissa Wilkinson notes that the red and blue pills Morpheus offers Thomas Anderson (aka, Neo and The One) are not just the choice to reveal the world the matrix created. Rather, “the red-pilled person is just accepting a new matrix.” Wilkinson goes on to write that the metaphors that are rife in The Matrix are dependent “upon which system you’re most interested in dismantling.” And that, she concludes, is what great art excels at. That’s because great art never has one fixed meaning, which makes it “always a little dangerous.”
The danger, if one can call it that, of using art as a way to liberate one from the shackles of this world is that it may not lead to the utopia glimpsed in a drug-fueled a-ha moment. Utopia sounds nice. We think that there’s a place or a realm where all will be right, pleasant, and without conflict. However, when looking at the original meaning of utopia from the ancient Greeks, we see no such pleasantness. Utopia, as the ancient Greeks defined it, means “no place” — much like the interior of the black star of David Bowie’s final album. Perhaps that’s what Bowie’s final artistic statement was in this world. It’s a bleak one, but one that marks the transformation when we go from living to dead. Is there meaning in that space? Each of us will only know at the moment when that transformation happens.
