The reflexive pose of the needlessly hip

They’re out there, you know, in their grim multitudes. The needlessly hip. They have some of the nous of their cooler, more effortless cousins, enough to figure out, at any rate, what the lumpen masses are into at any given point in time. But they are not so far removed from the majority as they’d like to think. In fact, the advertising industry regards them as part of the majority, their particular niche being the early majority, the ones who adopt the language, the dress, the music, the whatever, of the early adopters.

They are constantly trying to work out what they think about, say, a new band, a new type of music, a new way of cutting one’s hair. It is hard for them to do this, because ultimately the decision has been made for them by ... well, other people. Specifically: the people who they regard as below them on the status ladder, the majority, and the people who they acknowledge, at least unconsciously, as being above them on said ladder.

Being a member of the needlessly hip means suffering constantly from a peculiar kind of status anxiety, one that expresses itself in a positively toxic disregard for most forms of popular culture, as well as a perplexed attitude towards anything that isn’t quite in that particular fishbowl, what one hesitates to call highbrow or higher culture. It means not being able to have an honest reaction to anything, because one is always looking over one’s shoulder, either shoulder, in order to get one’s cue about whether a thing is lame or not.

The band was laying pretty heavily into the disco canon: Donna Summer, early Jackson 5, and horror of all horrors, Abba. It was by any objective measure, well, pretty corny, except, and this is a pretty big exception, you were out there on the dance floor. ‘Man, this is so lame,’ one said to the other. They were kind of standing there, a few metres removed from it all, drinks in hand, bored expression manifest. ‘Yeah man. I mean Abba? Come on.’ You wondered how they could ever enjoy a single thing that they passed through, wished they would muster up the courage to, you know, join the party; they were acting so cool that the whole point of being cool had escaped them. It was a black tie event, so all the guys were kind of dressed the same, and they had worked out their reflexive pose, but ... but you wanted to tell them, come on, man, there are three girls to every guy out there on the parquet at the moment, you’re kind of missing the point.

Or then there was this: he’s at a barbeque, and all he can talk about is this CD that he has discovered, he will tell anyone who will listen that the music on it is ... life changing. The kind of mannered monomania that is amusing for a couple of minutes but beyond that becomes the acme of tedium. You think to yourself, thank god for the bloke that told him, actually, mate, I didn’t really like it, and then refuses to get into an argument with him about it.

Or how about that guy that yelled ‘Judas!’ at Dylan, all those years ago? This is the reflexive pose of the needlessly hip taken to its logical extreme; the only thing that gave the sentiment any weight at all was it was backed up by a small but earnest group of Right-thinking individuals who thought they were onto something but who couldn’t have been more wrong. This, sadly is one of the dangers of the reflexive pose: it is hardly worth voicing one’s opinion about any given work of art, because the correctness of any such opinion ... yes, the correctness ... is frequently in inverse proportion to the vehemence with which it is held and/or expressed.

van halen

Here is the thing, see: there is an entire generation out there right now who just have no idea who Van Halen were.

I realised this while talking to my kid brother, who as fate would have it is a decade younger than me. I was driving him to see his girl friend, and as it so happened the music that was on was 1984, by Van Halen, you might know it as the album — oh, hand on, that’s right, see, back in the day there were these things called albums, and you put them on or in your stereo while you were driving/cleaning the house/having a dinner party, and then you got on with things.

Damn. Where was I?

Oh yes. That’s right. The music. The music was having quite an effect on the kid. He wanted to know what it was and could I burn him a copy for his iPod.

I told him to go jump.

I said that if he wanted, I could tale him to the 2nd hand CD store and we could by a fully depreciated copy of something by the band there. He asked why. I mumbled something incoherent about artist royalties and such like, and before we knew it we were there, managed to pick up a copy of Live: Right Here, Right Now for cheap.

My education continues.

untitled

It's always easier to talk your way into something
Than it is to talk your way out of it

Talking about my generation

In generational terms, I’m a ‘late’ Gen Xer, meaning I was born when between such and such a date. I really am getting these t-shirts printed up. They will say ‘I am not part of your target demographic’. My generation. Oh boy. I feel stupid, and contagious. We are probably best summed up by the palm muted strumming that kicks off Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’. There really isn’t that much more to say, you know. On the cusp. Hello, hello, hello, how low. And so on.

Middle Class Values

My old man is forever telling me that the chief way in which I am perverse is in my reverence for the middle class and their values. This perversity is borne of having descended and ascended the socioeconomic ladder more times than I would care to count. But he is right: while I am by temperament somewhat of a radical, I see no sense in waging a war against la petite bourgeoisie.

It is in this somewhat playful spirit that I relate the following anecdote, which, although in and of itself may not be that interesting, was, as these things go, at least mildly entertaining.

It all happened at a party I was at the other week or month. I found myself assailed, in the corner of the room, by another young man eager to a) tell me who I was; and b) tell me that my whole way of living was wrong. When I deigned to disagree with him on this second point, he exclaimed, ‘That’s just bloody typical! Typical middle class scum, you are!’, at which point I had the baneful duty of pointing out to him that a member of the middle class is, by definition, not scum.

I think the point was somewhat lost on him, however.

And so on.

A short pome about axl rose

If you find your arms growing shorter
As your pockets are getting deeper
Then perhaps it is time to begin
Removing their contents
And placing them on the dresser
Before you next leave the house,
Mate

in d-fens of uh-merica

In Defence of America

America. Uh-merica.

The excesses of American Culture are well-documented and so ubiquitous as to not need seeking out.

They probably don’t need much talking about, either, at least from me.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time with Americans can reel off probably half a dozen cliches about them: loud, friendly, don’t understand irony, insensitive to other nationalities and cultures, and so on. And then are the terrible things that Americans do when they do go overseas: like invading sovereign nations in the middle-east, the far east, and so on, in the name of peace and democracy (to this you might add a somewhat unscrupulous attitude to the regimes of their near neighbours, I suppose). And, you know, setting up Starbucks and McDonalds franchises based on the Wal-Mart business model. Things like that.

But this is not the America that I know. The America that I know has given us Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, Dorothy Parker, Martin Luther King, Jazz, Hip-Hop, about eighty per cent of rock and roll, Don DeLillo, Ani DiFranco, Gil Scott-Heron, Hunter Thompson.

At any rate, these are some of the people I think about when someone who is talking to me is complaining about America. I do this because such complaints are often voiced in this country and are so tedious as to not need thinking about. Yes, the War In Iraq is a Terrible Thing, sure, W. is a joke, boy, it sure does suck the big one that our own government are such toadying lickspittles.

Of course, these are all valid opinions, and I suppose that a healthy disrespect about The Great Satan is a good thing in a country like Australia.

At any rate, there are these people, usually in my acquaintance pretty solid members of the bourgeoisie, who are not really in a position to do anything about their grievances, and at any rate are so much a part of the ‘system’ that some part of them has to realise that a strong United States is a necessary but not sufficient condition to their Quality of Life.

And then there are the people for whom talking about all of this is not a joke. I have the greatest degree of admiration for them, and I wish them the best in their continuing struggle against global capitalism and to a lesser extent middle-class values, and whatever else is on the agenda.

But I also wish America the best, too. I hope that it can be a country that lives up to its promise, and that its manifest inadequacies don’t continue to overwhelm the better parts of its nature.

That's great, but what are you gonna call it?

was playing a parlour game the other day, with a bunch of Esteemed Reprobates, and we started talking about what one would call one’s memoirs, should the need arise.

I think I would call mine ‘I Hate You All But I’m Only Going to Blackmail Some of You’. There were some other good entries, to: ‘I Tried Jogging Once, But the Ice Kept Spilling Out of My Drink’ (although it was pointed out that this was actually a quotation from David Lee Roth), ‘The Next Time You Are in Doubt About Self-Immolation, Just Go Right Ahead’, and 'If You Are Reading This, You Will Go Blind'.

Readers are invited to come up with their own.

The entries will be judged by a panel of aphorism experts and prizes doled out accordingly.

A smart arse in a dumb shirt

I just had a bunch of t-shirts made up that say ‘I am not part of your target demographic’. I did this because while I usually find those kinds of shirts irritating on other people, for some reason they make me feel like less, not more, of a tool.

The other thing about them is, when one goes to the gym, fit young people tend to come up and say hello, how about that t-shirt you’re wearing. (Other favourites include ‘I hate your band’ and ‘Your product here’).

Anyway, this post isn’t really about all of that. It is more like an open letter to the Public Relations Industry:

Dear Public Relations Industry,

I believe I can save you a lot of time, and generate some positive vertically integrated efficiencies, by telling how it is that the Young People think about the politicians. The truth is that the average young person regards your standard Aussie pollie with a mixture of indifference and disdain, and more importantly as some kind of manifestation of a hyperaggressive media. John Howard? My gosh, he’s on TV a lot. Just like Anna Coren and those Hollywood starlets. Kevin Rudd? Isn’t he that guy with the MySpace page? God, how frightful it is to actually be asked one’s opinion on something like that … usually when the baby boomers & poll wizards want to get some ‘qualitative data’ about said individuals.

Acutally, the funniest thing I’ve read recently was a short article in the Daily Telegraph about some internal polling that Crosby Textor had done on Christopher Pyne, Tony Abbott, and the pharmaceutical and medical insurance industries. While the latter could be expected to be pretty much universally despised, they actually scored a lot better than the two minister. If you don’t find this funny I don’t know and can’t even tell you why you’ve read this far.

The actual thing about opinion poll data is that, as far as predicting outcomes of election goes, it is about half as reliable as seeing what the bookmakers are giving. There have been serious studies done on this, and if the information were more well known it would have to be suppressed … so my suggestion to you, PR Industry, is to maybe combine the most Satanic of your Dark Arts with the methods employed by the gambling industry.

Aside from the dangers of this combination bringing about the Rapture, there could be some opportunities here to leverage … oh, what the f*ck.

yours,

Evan

The Hilltop Hoods, just like that

Oh how it warms the hackles of my callous, hateful heart to hear the Hilltop Hoods on the radio. It some legitimises my Australian-ness, my whiteness, my suburban-ness. Why if these boys can get jiggy with it like this, then anyone like them can. And I am one of the million and a half or so Australians that think that the next one could be one of us. We are aware of each other, we know that while it might not be cool to be an Aussie here right now, all over the world we are treated with respect and admiration. Even in countries in Iraq that is the first thing anyone will say about Australians. They don’t mind us. We are not being ordered to shoot at them by the Great Satan. It’s okay. They understand.

We are seen as like Canadians, only funny. Italians, but more warm. And so on. Our little cult TV shows become cult viewing over there. About every five years or so an Aussie Rock Band will sell a million or so over there. And if they can get away with it, why can’t we?

The only remaining hurdle, it seemed, was this hip-hop thing. In this country, except for an exceptionally few bright souls, the music was mostly regarded in the same way that Country and Western fans might view it.

But now here these lads are. They just released an album with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Before that they had a nice little career as a touring act. Now, when you hear this stuff on the radio, you don’t feel like cringing. You reach down and turn the stereo up, bop your head a little, maybe shout along for a couple of bars. Just like that.

you would not think to look at him, but

we used to have nicknames for each other
i called her cinnamon because
never mind because. it was nice
time went by and she got more and more
cynical
and apart from those two words sound when you
say them together
cinnamon and cynical
there was nothing nice about that

Music was better back then

Music was better back then. Back when? Back then, when I was younger. You know it, I know it. There were really big heavy metal bands, like Metallica and Guns and Roses. Hair metal was nearly dead, but even then people had to admit that bands like Poison and Warrant had some pretty good tunes on the radio. Hair Metal. A concept so alien to youth of today you couldn’t even begin to describe it.

There were bands like Nirvana, and Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam. These were bands who were so awesome that you can’t even try and put their impact into words. Especially Nirvana. But also Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains, and … it was called ‘the Seattle Sound’. And it was amazing. It saved peoples lives.

You could go to a festival and see a lineup including, but not limited to, Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, Rancid, Ani DiFranco, Beck … you could take the bus up from Canberra with your mates and you could work out things about your life, your middle-class Canberra teenage life, you could lie down under a big tree next to some Canadian girl you had just met and puff on a jay and there would be Thurston Moore in the distance, singing about how men are a not alone on the Diamond Sea, and you could feel like you were having some kind of epiphany, even if you couldn’t quite say what it was. Because it was true: men are not alone, on the Diamond Sea. Look into his eyes and you will see.

Siamese Dream, by the Smashing Pumpkins. By now it had gone past the stage of starting a band: even though you weren’t in the band you could play some of the licks from that album, and it was kind of cool that you could do this and one of the guitarists in the band couldn’t, it was even cooler that even though he was kind of a prick he would sit with you and he would say, so how did you do that, and you would show him the lick, it was really simple, you just had to tune it to drop D. Cool, he would say.

Nothing was lame. Every act that was signed to a major label, that was selling CDs in Australia, was simply amazing. I am talking about bands like You Am I, Spiderbait, Regurgitator, the Dirty Three, Tumbleweed, the Cruel Sea, Magic Dirt, you could go along and see bands like these every month and your life would change, probably for the better. Henry Rollins did a show at the Refectory and someone threw a Doc Marten onstage and he stopped the song and bellowed out “Whose fucken shoe is this?” and everyone there put there hand up, and he said “oh, it everyone’s fucken shoe! It’s a goddamn commie shoe! That’s what it is! I fucken hate hippies!” and then he hurled the shoe back into the mosh pit and the band struck up again, right where they left off. I know this because I was there. I was there because someone let the side door open, those big glass doors, and even though me and my friends were underage we ran right it, just in time for Henry Rollins and the Communist Doc Marten. Henry Rollins is principally known these days as a spoken word artist.

There was a band called the Black Crowes. They were like the greatest bar band in the world, a bunch of stoners from Atlanta who somehow managed to sound better than the Rolling Stones and the Small Faces, at least for a couple of albums, managed to sound better than the reference points that the music critics were using to try and describe their sound. I just don’t think you can say that, with a straight face, about any new rock and roll band in the last five years.

So yeah: music was better then. Of course, music is still being made now. This is what people tell me, at any rate. But it isn’t the same. It just isn’t. You know it. I know it. I mean, I realize that this argument is embarrassing and self-referential and so on and all of that, and that Magic Dirt are playing the Refectory on Thursday night, but it’s just different now.

It’s different now for a hundred different reasons, none of which I know how to describe … I mean I could say something like an iPod is just a walkman or a discman but with more, uh, memory capacity, but that when listen to an MP3 the sound is all compressed and shitty, so really it doesn’t matter that you can be walking around with ten thousand songs of whatever floats your boat. It’s irrelevant. You could even have say, the Pulp Fiction soundtrack in there and it wouldn’t matter, because you probably weren’t there when the thing came out. This is not your fault, it’s not my fault. It’s just a fact. I was at a party recently and people were plugging their laptops into the stereo. I can tell you for a fact, people, that ‘Epic’ by Faith No More just does not sound the same when it’s been compressed down to a file on a laptop. Everything is just too close together.

The astrologer in the student paper says that as sure as the Earth revolves around the sun, everyone here hates me because I’m a mature age student. Well, I would just like you all to know that I understand why, and there is nothing I can do about. And I understand. Everything really is average nowadays. I was just lucky, I guess, to have grown up at a time when the omnipresent wallpaper that is popular culture was not an infinitely customizable shade of grey.

Hello

Hello.

Hello, and thanks for taking the time to read this stuff. Really. I know that the world needs another one of these like it needs another Frank Sinatra.

But the barriers for this kind of self expression have apparently fallen. So here we are.