Nostalgia

I am nostalgic. There, I said it. I live in the present, but I am fueled by my past. Every day I live, I draw upon themes from the days that have passed before me. Everything from music to TV, movies to snacks, board games to AIM – I ride the cloud upon which I was raised, seeking some sort of associative security, some sort of comfort. Those were the times of innocence, back when authenticity was real. Looking back, we see those emotions as real. And we still feel their effects.

In this post-ironic age, we still remember these feelings. We still remember the rush of our first kiss. We still remember the first time we lost a tooth. We still remember the first time we saw an R rated movie.

-Watching Doug on Nickelodeon?
-Trying to understand Doug’s beatnik sister?
-Eating Dunkaroos and Lunchables?
-Taking Flintstones chewable vitamins?
-JOing to Britney Spears?
-Going to roller rinks holding hands with your girl crush so you wouldn’t fall down?
-Spending the night with your first girlfriend?
-Going to prom in a ridiculous limo?
-Not understanding Rocko’s Modern Life?
-Chatting on AIM all night instead of doing homework?
-Listening to the sound your dial-up modem made?
-Listening to Vitamin C’s Graduation song/Green Day’s Good Riddance before your graduation?
-Slow dancing to O-Town’s All or Nothing/Eve 6′s Here’s to the Night?
-Watching all the girls in your class obsess about The O.C./One Tree Hill?
-When everyone had a Razr phone?
-When everyone had a Razor scooter?
-Getting all your music from NOW?
-Deciding which seat to take?
-Watching Boy Meets World?
-Wearing Volcom/Vans/Quiksilver?
-Crushing on Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap?
-Watching Shia Labeouf in Even Stevens?
-Learning things from the Simpsons?
-Watching the Mark McGuire-Sammy Sosa homerun contest?
-Watching Michael Jordan, Dennis Rodman, and Scotty Pippen play for the Bulls?
-Watching Michael Jordan play for the White Sox?
-Watching Space Jam?
-Flying on planes without the extra security?
-Using VHS tapes and Walkmans?
-Buying CDs from your local record store?
-Hiding puberty boners from classmates behind binders?

I miss those days. But I feel like they weren’t as good as I remember. It was just life back then, just the daily routine. They didn’t have the same emotional weight back then that they do now. And someday I’ll look back at this era of my life, my time at Yale, and romanticize it in some excessively long listicle. But regardless, we still feel the power of nostalgia, the pull of those emotions, the template upon which we live our lives now. These things have made me who I am now, regardless of how real or not they were at the time. This is my post-authentic childhood.

Faithfully,
Miles Wayfarer

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The hyperreality of Rebecca Black

I hate to jump on the buzzwagon and talk about the whole Rebecca Black ‘Friday’ meme. But it probably the most significant even in American music culture since Arcade Fire’s victory at the Grammys.

This video as of this posting has received over seven million views after being featured on the show Tosh.0. According to the buzz, Black’s video was produced by the Ark Music Factory, a studio that signs unknown teen girls and produces crappy music videos in the hope that they ‘make it’ like Justin Bieber. Numerous commentators have ridiculed the video as amateurish and the song itself as downright atrocious. No one really seems to ‘get’ it.

I’m going to go ahead and say that this video is one of the greatest piece of music to emerge in the last year. Yes, it’s true that the video is terribly produced, the lyrics make no sense, and the way Black pronounces “Friday” is cringe-worthy.

But this song is post-conceptual masterpiece. It seems like no one really likes the song. Maybe some people do, but they have to admit that Kim Kardashian’s new single is a little better. Instead, it seems people watch it to mock it. But they still consume it. They love it. Ark Music Factory is probably making tons of money off of the hit they produced. The very name ‘Ark Music Factory’ makes a Biblical reference while at the same time suggesting a sort of mass-produced inauthenticity [via Adorno and Benjamin].

The only reason this song has thrived is because of its position in a hyperreal network of signifiers. It trades on the tropes used by Justin Bieber and the tweenosphere, exposing the artificiality of the pop music industry. Her song is rich with inadvertent intertexuality and irony, reflecting all of the different facets of pop culture and exposing its own absurdity. At the same time, it ridicules the entire fame machine in which one becomes a youtube music sensation not from any musical talent but rather from manufacturing a successful meme. We have entered a hyperreal age of meme culture. ‘Rebecca Black’ is not a real live thirteen year old girl. She is a cultural artifact, an internet meme to be passed around, praised, ridiculed, and then thrown away when a new meme comes along. Remember Ted Williams? Does anyone really care about him anymore?

Notably, the entire internet has ganged up and bashed Black, calling her song ‘one of the worst songs’ in recent internet memory. Essentially, it seems like the music-blog complex is trying to preserve pop music by excluding her song from this realm. By isolating her from the pop music sphere through ridicule, they protect pop music against the same criticism of banality. By making an example of Black, they suggest that Bieber, Gomez, and every other teen star is somehow normal, acceptable, and even good.

While almost every cultural commentator on the internet has weighed in on Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’, there have been several articles of note.

-Carles of Hipster Runoff gives his own unique take on the event, but seems to miss the point that she is a postmodern genius.
-Rolling Stone’ Matthew Perpetua argues that Rebecca Black’s song is in fact  perfect parody of pop music.
-Ned Hepburn at Death + Taxes rants about the internet meme industry.
-One commenter on an online forum gives a beautiful postmodern textual analysis of the song, suggesting that Black is in fact drawing attention to her own lack of autonomy.

Updates:
-Rebecca Black recently released a new ‘unplugged’ acoustic version.
-She also gave an interview to Chris Lee at the Daily Beast.
-Sujay Kumar at Thought Catalog provides another rhetorical analysis, though not nearly as good as the commenter mentioned above.
-And finally, The New Inquiry editors Rob Horning and Malcom Harris give their own take on the meme, discussing it as a symptom of post-Fordist digital sharecropping and looking at it both in relationship to broader class systems and through the lens of the Frankfurt School, specifically Adorno and Horkheimer.

Say what you like, Rebecca Black is probably the greatest postmodern music meme since Bunny Holiday.

Faithfully,
Miles Wayfarer

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The post-authenticity project

Sorry it’s been so long since I last wrote. The past few weeks have been traumatic. I’ve realized I’ve lost myself. I don’t know what’s true anymore. I don’t know what’s good. I have nothing to anchor myself to. How can I be authentic? I authenticity even possible anymore? What does authenticity even mean?

I’ve had these feelings for a while now. When Arcade Fire won a Grammy, I knew we were entering a new age. But the things that have happened over spring break have really changed the way I look at life. Last weekend, I visited some friends from high school at a state university a few hours from where I grew up. I realized I could see myself there living with them, partying with them, studying with them year round. It felt too right. And I met a girl. She was unlike anyone I’ve ever met before. I felt like we instantly connected. But we only had one night together before I had to go back home. We live thousands of miles apart. And yet for one brief night, I felt so at home. I may never see her again. I don’t know.

And now I’m back home in an empty shell of a town. I lived my entire life here until moving off to college. Every street I drive down has a thousand memories. This is the road where the afterparty to my eighth grade graduation was.
And also where I first hooked up with my now ex-girlfriend one year ago. This is where my friend crashed his car while driving drunk and had to spend the summer working on a construction crew to pay for the repairs. This is where I went to eat before prom junior year.

But now there are no more stories left to write. There’s nothing left for me here. At every corner, there are shadows of my past. But we’ve all moved on, moved out. We’re all just visitors, constantly reminded of the past we shared. Everything we do in this town is just a reflection of the times we once had.

Which leads me to post-authenticity. I don’t know what it means to be authentic. Is it about being true to yourself? I don’t know myself well enough. Is it some sort of abstract quality possessed by tribes in Papua New Guinea or Pabst Blue Ribbon? I just don’t know anymore. The hipster generation fetishized the authentic while at the same time undermining its meaning. They were the post-ironic generation. But the hipster died circa 2010. We’re in a new generation. The hipster generation exposed the meaninglessness of authenticity. We can never regain true authenticity. We are the post-authentic generation.

Remember those meaningful times we had as a kid?
Remember pretending that a cardboard box was a spaceship?
Remember the pain of losing your first tooth?
Remember having that growth spurt in junior high and finally being good at basketball?
Remember the first time you shaved? Your first kiss? Prom night?
The first time you got drunk? And how your friends took care of you as you threw up in the hedge?
Remember sneaking home past curfew and trying not to wake your parents?
Remember your first day of college when your sister helped you move in and you met your roommate for the first time?
Remember freshman orientation and meeting the people that would become your best friends over the next four years?

Authenticity is dead. But we still feel pain, love, joy, sadness. Even though we can’t claim to be true to anything, even ourselves, we still have our emotions and our memories, even if they’re tainted with age. With the hipster came the death of authenticity. But with the death of the hipster, we’re left with post-authenticity. Post-authenticity is more than just post-hipsterism. It’s more than just a resurgence of meaningfulness. It’s a new generation born out of the death of the hipster, the economic recession, the state of technology, and the changes in the production of cultural goods.

Over the next weeks, I’ll continue to develop this idea of post-authenticity, exploring what it is and what it means for our generation. While my observations are certainly limited by my own position, hopefully what emerges will be a broader picture of the state of our culture in the years to come.

Faithfully,
Miles Wayfarer

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February playlist

Belong – The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Goats – Stray Balloon
Landslide – Smashing Pumpkins
City Bird – Jesca Hoop
Yellow Brick Road – Angus and Julia Stone
No Excuses – Air France
Blessa – Toro y Moi
Memories – Boat Club
the boy still dreams – acid house kings
Golden Cage (Fred Falke Remix) – The Whitest Boy Alive
Kaputting It Up – The Hood Internet
Cover Your Tracks – Young Galaxy
The Wilhelm Scream – James Blake
All I Need – Air
Vanilla Twilight – Owl City
Kiss the Girl – Ashley Tisdale
Buy Nothing Day – The Go! Team
Think Happy Thoughts – Albatross
Someone – Suicide Machines

Faithfully,
Miles Wayfarer

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