It's Hard to Tell Who Is Real in Here

On being tired of fighting over taste

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the ways that our enthusiasms wind up causing conflicts. It's a steady thrum of agitation, rattling beneath my everyday consciousness when it comes to enjoying and thinking about and expressing my perspective on pop culture. I'd even go so far as to say it's been getting in the way, this sort of low-level but pervasive anxiety about maintaining some level of personal truth and reasonable critique that doesn't just dump a bunch of discourse-roiling hot takes for people to scuffle over. To put it bluntly, I haven't been too happy for a while with the way talking about pop culture online tends to play out. I've been struck by all the ways the dynamics of social media have amplified (albeit not technically created) this air of what I'd call taste policing, where people attempt to assign these personal, arbitrary values to cultural phenomena that they then use to alternately empower or diminish people just for being into those things.

I'm not even talking about actually contentious and morally-charged things like "problematic faves" or "cancel culture" or how to engage with art that expresses uncomfortable ideas or any of that. I mean the way people categorize things, talk about the things they like, and subsequently go to war with each other over some of the most subjective displays of taste. I'm talking about the notion that if I described someone who, in absence of any other moral traits or sociocultural ties to describe them, likes to spend their weekend drinking IPAs, listening to Radiohead, and reading David Foster Wallace, the mental picture that a lot of people would conjure up would automatically have the label "asshole" attached. I sort of know why this is -- usually this kind of Type Of Guy casting is based in, if not an ironclad truth, then at least a certain collective experience shared by a vocal cohort who shows up in a lot of these cultural conversations. But I also know why it's an annoying habit I wish more people would break. And while I don't plan on making this sort of lament over the state of pop culture discourse a regular feature of this newsletter -- my agenda for the foreseeable future after this post is more or less "here's something I think is cool; please allow me to explain why" -- I think it could at least help to contextualize what I want to do as a writer now that I've spent a while reassessing how I want to contribute to criticism and what kinds of conversations I want to have.

Fair warning: this is going to run pretty long and sprawl all over the place like some massive unwieldy cluster-essay, and apologies in advance for that. (The word count is four digits and starts with an 8. Sheesh.) It's a sort of culmination of a lot of issues that've been gnawing at me for a long time and I feel like I have to get it all out of the way before I can go any further and finally move on to the more open-hearted, less oppositional perspective on things I want to establish for this newsletter. So I'll break it up with a few songs in case you get bored or tired. Now let's get to it.

I. The State of Criticism

When Pitchfork was reduced to a husk by Conde Nast earlier this year, it was yet another sign that the marketplace for in-depth music criticism, like most cultural criticism, was in a major crisis. But the reactions and thinkpieces and oral histories that followed in the wake of this implosion also struck some nerves I've been harboring for a while. I wrote for that site for just over a decade, a stretch that encompassed most of my thirties -- steadily from late 2006 through early 2017, with a couple straggler reviews in the singles section briefly afterwards. (My last contribution was a piece about a Parliament single, which my friends would probably consider archetypal Nate Patrin Shit). I put in a lot of work there, wrote a whole lot of reviews and several deep-dive guides and list blurbs and obits. I gave Best New Music to some pretty notable landmark releases, like Flying Lotus's Los Angeles, Portishead's Third, and the first Run the Jewels album. And I advocated for other artists who might not have fit the indie-buzz-chasing Pitchfork Reader stereotype and hadn't been significantly covered by the site before but meant a lot to me, like billy woods and Open Mike Eagle and Ka. I've written some reviews I still think are brilliant, a few I'd reassess or walk back, and probably at least a couple that are still stuck in its subjects' craws over a decade later. I've given pans to good folks and raves to artists who turned out to be the kinds of people I wouldn't want to share a room with. I covered hip-hop and dance music and R&B and funk and the occasional guitar band that could be classifiable as "rock." And almost every album I pitched or accepted as an assignment started in my mind as something I'd considered the possibility of liking, whether it was based on the artist's track record or the promise of a potentially trustworthy co-sign or just a prominent place in a scene I had an affinity for. I didn't always like everything, though I figure there were at least a few albums that would've gotten more benefit of the doubt if I was in a better mood or was more diligent about ignoring the negative definition of well that's not what I expected. But I'm confident in stating that even if not every opinion I put forth for that website is one I still hold, they all at least came from me.

So once people started doing Pitchfork autopsies they presented some narratives that I still have to push back against, even though my time there was a phase I'm well past at this point. The more personal stuff is a bit complicated, especially since it feels like the things I wrote about were more or less written out of the typical narrative of who the site started as a bunch of snarky indie rock snobs and eventually got their shit together after they went poptimist. While I still feel a bit self-conscious about being a Midwestern white dude who wrote about a lot of rap for a site best known as an indie/hipster tastemaker, I do at least want to stop and note that it's frustrating how many people were happy to go around thinking that a site with a history of advocating for alt/artsy/experimental rock and dance music isn't the kind of place where you could do the same for hip-hop's equivalent. The idea that Pitchfork outright rejected it in favor of trendy gangsta/coke/mafia rap is a trope that seems to be bolstered by both detractors and actual contributors -- it seemed like a pretty common sentiment in Slate's oral history, embodied by Tom Breihan's gripe about the site's early '00s years that "'They never write about rap, and if they do, they write about it wrong.' It’s all Sage Francis. It’s no Three 6 Mafia." I'd ask "why not both," but the die seems to have been cast for the whole superficial-white-hipster reputation the site has with hip-hop advocates like Questlove. Andrew Nosnitsky really did nail it: "What hit me quickly in writing for Pitchfork is suddenly I was not a person who had been writing about rap music for a decade at that point. I was an indie white guy on the indie white site, and anybody who wanted to catch feelings about it put me in the same crosshairs as everyone else."

But I think that opens up a deeper question. I stand by my writing, and I had good editors, and there were a ton of other writers on that site who I'm glad to consider friends, the kinds of people whose voices I appreciated and want to stand up for. But since we all wrote for Pitchfork, a site with a very particular reputation as a site people "love to hate" -- a tastemaker capable of singlehandedly elevating or destroying the trajectory of an artist, a kingmaker, a tyrant -- it laid bare something that feels very unsustainable to me. If I wrote so much that I'm proud of for that site, and I got along well with a lot of other people there, and I still feel some measure of happiness at the possibility that what I wrote actually helped some peoples' careers, why am I so ambivalent about having written for them? And I figured it's because I feel like it was hard to figure out if I was able to maintain my individual voice, my particular tastes, as part of an institutional brand. As an online phenomenon that came about when internet discourse was at its most open-ended and wild-west freeform, Pitchfork became permanently associated with a Type of Guy that people tended to resent -- the smirky white indie dude who used his musical taste as a weapon to make other people feel inferior. This was the kind of voice that made me resent music critics before I eventually became one. It existed long before Pitchfork -- anyone who still thinks that site's the nadir of self-satisfied crit-bro snark remembers a different '90s/'00s than I do; Gen X zinester dudes could be really spiteful and resentful -- and it really got on my nerves when Pitchfork indulged in it too. But when Scott Plagenhoef dropped me a line in '06 to ask if I wanted to contribute? I didn't exactly go finally, time to tear things down from the inside, but the idea of being able to present my own perspective to a huge readership felt like it outweighed everything else. It's just that I can't really tell how often it was perceived as my own perspective, and not Pitchfork's perspective -- and where the line was crossed by any given reader from me saying this is what I think to the site declaring this is what we believe you should think.

I'll say this much: I'd be a lot happier about the whole operation if I didn't have to stick a number on everything. Because the older I get, the more I start to think about how institutional voices and hierarchical thinking — even ones that can provide us with some fair-minded and much-needed perspective on the conflicts that can arise from it — wind up being huge obstacles to the ability to connect with other people over something like music that should theoretically be a lot more fun to talk about.

II. Institutions and Canons

One of the artistic statements that tends to stick with me the most is Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter pinpointing the emotional heart of Discovery as the experience you can have as a kid listening to music, and taking it all in without yet knowing or being informed of what is cool and what's tacky. And since I wound up having that experience with an incredibly broad base of music before I even made it to junior high, I get to goof on the whole argument about which generation had the best music because I defined my tastes through listening to several different generations' at the same time. I mean, I hope this doesn't read like me concocting some sort of Kidz Bop "Losing My Edge" or anything, but by the time I was 10 my musical education, while often casually or passively tied in to whatever everyone else in my family was listening to, had exposed me to a range of styles and eras and movements that made everything feel wide open.

There were the classic rock warhorses like Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, soul from Aretha Franklin and Etta James, the Motown continuum from Smokey to Stevie, iconic reggae from Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff, versatile singer-songwriters like Rickie Lee Jones and Joni Mitchell and Joan Armatrading, jazz ranging from John Coltrane to Sun Ra to Anthony Braxton, punk in its broadest definition whether it was Patti Smith or Black Flag, the emergent hip-hop of Grandmaster Flash and Run-D.M.C., an entire canon of Great Blues Men, even the kind of international non-Western/Anglo sounds that were getting categorized as "world music" whether it was Jorge Ben's MPB or King Sunny Adé's jùjú. And, of course, there was the completely overwhelming and awe-inspiring landscape of mainstream MTV-driven early-mid '80s Top 40 pop that still stands as one of the most intensely dynamic musical eras I can think of to associate with my or anyone else's formative years.

Funny enough, I still feel kind of self-conscious about this eclecticism because once I started to read music journalism more closely as a teenager in the '90s I started to get hung up on trying to navigate the rules that'd been set by critical predecessors ten or twenty or thirty years older than me. You're not supposed to like both punk and prog; if you think Black Sabbath is cool you're supposed to think disco sucks; guitars are flesh-and-blood and synthesizers are plastic; you are supposed to either defer to the idea that rock peaked in your parents' generation or reject their music outright. I've spent way too much time battling with and trying to reconcile this sort of binary thinking in criticism (including my own), whether or not these binaries still even exist in a prominent enough form to cause these kinds of dilemmas of "incompatible" tastes nowadays. But I'm also considering the likelihood that I am part of a generation of critics that, being intent on reassessing the old hierarchies of pop music, has done a lot to make the idea of being an eclectic generalist something of a given. Me and most other critical thinkers I know are at the point where saying "it's good to listen to a wide range of music" is an almost head-slappingly obvious statement, and belaboring the point feels like preaching to the choir.

That said: The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame announced their inductees for this year over the weekend. I mean, I wrote that sentence in the past tense even though it hasn't happened yet as I'm actually typing this right now, so I can't exactly comment on the winners from here. But I'm dreading the takes. I used to enjoy Rock Hall discourse as a fun little thought exercise and a way to poke at the canon, back when I thought getting into heated arguments with vague internet acquaintances about music was more fun than exhausting. I even contributed a few ballots of my own, though at this point I don't really remember most of them off the top of my head except for the inevitability that I would just have to keep checking the Donna Summer box and hope for the best. And I don't begrudge anyone their speculative discussions of the Hall's latest batch as long as it's good-natured and chill and doesn't take the whole enterprise too seriously as either a cathedral to worship in or an embassy to overthrow. (There's even a podcast on the subject I've heard good things about, and I should check it out even though the fact that it's called "Who Cares About the Rock Hall?" immediately inspires me to shrug and mutter "well don't look at me.") But as much as I'd like to just have some harmless fun with it and maybe casually brush off the more intense back-and-forths that critics always engage in when this time of year comes around -- I have to tell myself this is an institution that honors Bon Jovi, what can you do -- it always winds up haunted by a seemingly deathless yet still deeply entrenched perspective that winds up distracting me into a state of pure aggravation. By which I'm referring to the arguments over which artists shouldn't be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because they are not "Rock and Roll."

On the surface this is a sort of understandable semantic argument, in that it seems a bit puzzling that there are artists like Mariah Carey and Mary J. Blige being considered as inductees into any form of institution that is associated with the traditional hidebound concept of "rock'n'roll." But this tends to lead to the kinds of essentialist arguments that Bill Wyman's perpetually-updated Vulture listicle ranking the inductees constantly falls into. Sure, his harshest dismissals are aimed at the usual-suspect AOR fish-in-a-barrel targets -- Queen, Journey, Kiss -- that, if nothing else, are very much rock'n'roll whether or not you think they're any good at it. But he still seems to value a fairly doctrinaire vision of rock music as rebel music first and foremost, the kind of conventional wisdom that declares the Ramones as more intrinsically important than any widely-loved hard rock band could ever hope to be, while the more populist crowdpleasing side of music is suspect -- whether we're talking about guitar-driven arena rock or the kind of Top 40 pop that owes almost no debt whatsoever to Chuck Berry. Here's what he said about Whitney Houston:

Should the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame draw lines? There’s space there for the most contentious artists in rap, country, and jazz. Richard Pryor should be in, on general principles. The Carpenters, too — they were a legitimate soft-rock band. But pop is something different. Historically, it’s based on a pretty narrow set of sentimental lyrical tropes, it’s ingratiating not challenging, and authenticity is typically not part of the mix, though it has evolved remarkably. Houston came out of soul and R&B traditions, but she’s a pop singer and not much else. There’s a huge difference between her work and the much more personal emotional journeys offered by, say, Mary J. Blige. There are a lot of acts from the ‘60s and ‘70s who were basically pop acts, but they were plainly countercultural at the time, part of a roiling network of creative people across the country experimenting with sound and taking the music in different directions. Houston was none of those things.

As a personal opinion, I suppose I comprehend it. I don't really agree with it -- I give Houston the verdict I tend to hand to artists who I am not a huge fan of but still can't dismiss outright, which is eh, she has some jams (including a Soft Machine cover featuring avant-jazz sax great Archie Shepp; you're crazy for this one Bill Laswell). But it puts forward some absolutes that I have to look sideways at -- that music has to be "countercultural" to hold meaning, that it has to be "challenging" to be exciting, that there's a necessity for an artist to put some pseudo-auteurist specificity into their performance and their persona for it to resonate and be relatable. I know that there might be a higher likelihood of these arguments being true than the counterfactuals; in the particular specific example of comparing her music to Mary J. Blige's, yeah, I like the latter's a lot more. But more than any other art form, popular music is so mutable and unpredictable and varied and contradictory that even defining it on these terms can be almost suffocating in its limitations if you're not careful. It can lead to dead ends and lost connections, a purism of form and thought that is so codified and inflexible that the most likely end stage is conservatism and stagnation. And the possibility of conservatism and stagnation being the foundation of any institution as noteworthy as the Rock Hall is a good way to make the idea of the popular canon feel absolutely demoralizing.

Of course, we've had this conversation before.

III. Rockism & Poptimism

The arguments over this perspective have been going on for a long, long time -- the concept of "rockism" was introduced to the readers of the New York Times by Kelefah Sanneh nearly twenty years ago, and the arguments against it were rippling through the enthusiast music press and internet messageboards for several years -- hell, decades -- before that. Subsequently, its alternative/opposite perspective, "poptimism," has been a source of relentless controversy in recent years now that it's been positioned as the reason nobody's writing about independent and challenging music as much as they used to. But it's a dichotomy that feels increasingly irrelevant the further we get from the heyday of rock's prominence in and domination of popular music coverage. 

Rockism fails because it judges music by the parameters of a genre not every form of music can or has to meet. And it's a terrible way to appreciate rock because it defines rock against what it's not and can't and shouldn’t be, rather than what it could be, how it could grow and adapt and evolve. And poptimism -- which originally emerged as a necessary effort to give credence to the possibility that even the most "manufactured" pop-by-committee could have some depth and profundity and even rebellion to it -- has been muddled by a misguided perception by both its detractors and its more cynical corporate/fandom adopters that it actually means popularity in itself makes something intrinsically valuable. That's not poptimism, though -- that's just Worthington's Law. And while it felt like a thrill back in '04 to go around proclaiming that Missy Elliott and Kylie Minogue could be every bit as cool and exciting as the White Stripes and the Strokes, poptimism seems at sea now that music criticism's version of it ("[pop star] is a fascinating artist who deserves thoughtful consideration") has not only become something of a gimme, it's also been largely overwhelmed by the more reductive versions promoted by PR-driven access journalism ("[pop star] is famous and beloved and this is how they're getting more famous and beloved") and social media ("I will not hear a bad word against [pop star] and anyone who doesn't pledge fealty to them is my enemy"). I'm not going to celebrate the decline of oppositional counterculture in favor of mass-collective fandom, or alternately bemoan that you can't change the world with three chords and the truth anymore. These arguments are still happening, but they feel stale because they haven't really resolved much of anything.

But I don't really want to relitigate the old-enough-for-the-draft argument over the battle between rockism and poptimism. Mostly I just think about my own framing nowadays, and how much I've actually decentered rock in my own taste. I don't mean writing rock out of the equation, or dismissing it offhand, or pretending that it wasn't all that important or that it can't be important again. And I'm not just saying this because rock seems "dead" at the moment to a lot of people, though from my perspective "dead" mostly just means "not validated by mass culture" and there's a whole lot of amazing vibrant stuff out there that's not validated by mass culture anyways, which is what happens when corporate entertainment decides to divert as much money into as few ideas as possible. What I mean is just that rock is not the standardbearer genre for me, not anymore, and hasn't been for a long time. Given the range of stuff I'm into, it's a lot more useful for me to take in pop music -- the whole shebang from the immediate postwar era through last week -- using R&B as the pivot point. And if you trace "rock" to the lineage of, say, Roy Brown -- whose career and his most influential genre-minting song sits at an intersection of swing and blues while retroactively pointing towards something new that it winds up giving a name to -- then it puts rock into a context where it's less of a cultural fait accompli and more of an unusually successful and now-fading offshoot of a sort of overgenre that's still calling the shots. That overgenre is called R&B, which not only birthed rock'n'roll but the hip-hop and dance music that comprises the vast majority of the popular music zeitgeist whether we're talking about the biggest stars in the world or some teenager messing around with beats on cheap software. Maybe in 25 years somebody will eventually rename that Hall of Fame for it. Even the Rock and Soul Hall of Fame would work, it still preserves the scansion and everything.

The frustrating thing here is that people still want to define rock's success on the terms of how it dominated popular culture in the 1960s and '70s, and the even more frustrating thing is that they kind of have a point. Rock wasn't the only game in town back then, but this was a stretch of time where what constituted rock itself was so unpredictable and experimental and freeform that tying it down to a singular aesthetic or philosophical definition seems, at least in retrospect, completely dysfunctional. While I don't believe that pop music on the whole peaked before I was born -- god, no, are you kidding me, that would be a tragic way to think about culture -- I do think that rock-qua-rock was at its most interesting between the mid '60s and the late '70s. But as much as that sounds like a boomer-ass opinion concocted in some sort of Jann Wenner brainwashing lab, I've got something guiding this idea besides secondhand nostalgia for an era I've never experienced. It's the simple reconciliation of two ideas: one, that this was the closest we ever got to rock being both commercially successful and formally adventurous at the same time, and two, this happened largely because the idea of "rock'n'roll" as a single identifiable sound was no longer enough to sustain an entire musical ecosystem.

This holds true even if you still keep a countercultural approach to rock at the center of your focus. Picture the world of what is now called "classic rock" as it existed back then, when music criticism was hitting its stride as a valuable journalistic institution. You've got your Beatles and Stones and the rest of the British Invasion, Dylan and Joni and Simon and Garfunkel and the folk-steeped singer-songwriters, the fuzz-guitar garage bands that set the stage for punk, the psychedelic revolution of Hendrix and Pink Floyd, the roots revival of Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Band, the blues-rock fusion that ran from Janis to ZZ Top and onwards, the dawn of metal presented by Zep and Sabbath and Blue Öyster Cult, and so on and so forth. You've got a lot of conflicting philosophies and oppositional trends all clamoring for their share, and this berserk free-for-all was encouraged by a wide and adventurous sense of advocacy reflected in everything from format-averse freeform radio to a critical community that appeared to pride itself on some pretty broad tastes, Anglophone/major-label limitations notwithstanding.

The litany of movements and styles I brought up in that stretch of rock history is wide enough before you even factor in how much hybridization with genres considered "not rock" there was. Rock music was rarely rock alone: aside from the aforementioned integral role of the blues, a style that predated rock and continued to sustain itself outside of (or parallel to) it while also being credited as a direct influence, it is pretty difficult to imagine the classic rock canon without the direct and easily traceable impact of music typically categorized as R&B. Take Motown out of the Beatles, Chess Records out of the Stones, Muscle Shoals out of the Allman Brothers, Curtis Mayfield out of Todd Rundgren, Philadelphia International Records out of David Bowie, the Isley Brothers out of Jimi Hendrix (and vice-versa), Stax out of Creedence, and Blue Note out of Joni Mitchell, and you have an arc of rock history that bends towards a cul-de-sac. Hell, even the titans of hard rock and early metal all wound up chasing their own versions of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" sooner or later -- maybe because they knew Jeff Beck helped make it happen in the first place.

So yeah, there's obviously some racial anxiety and white-centered distortion going on when it comes to how rock is centered. There are a ton of things to explore when it comes to the hierarchical nature of this shit and why there's still delineations drawn between Pop Hits and R&B Hits that go way back before Roy Brown or anyone else ever imagined that a phrase like "good rockin' tonight" would create so much trouble. But there's another pervasive problem that clouds the situation even further, another kind of institutional thinking that turns personal taste into a limiting framework that reduces the possibilities for deeper engagement. And it’s everywhere.

IV. Nostalgia

I loathe generational discourse. The false consensus, the I-was-there preening, the mistaking of shared experiences for shared values, the massive self-regard people show in the process of poking at the massive self-regard of some other cohort -- it's real nowhere shit. The only thing more tedious than the boomers deciding they were the protagonists of history is every subsequent generation depicting them as the antagonists. And the only phenomenon that gives those tendencies any competition when it comes to being exasperating is the insistence of the still-culturally-prominent generation that first gave the Web 1.0 internet its most identifiable and foundational voices, for better and worse, on complaining that nobody pays attention to them. (Speaking as someone on the Carter-admin-born ass-end of Gen X: do you really want people to notice that Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Ready Player One are our fault?) Because what this does, whether you're vouching for the greatness of your own generation or talking shit about the loathsomeness of the ones preceding or succeeding yours, is reinforce a monocultural picture of an incredibly large, diverse, massively divided and subcategorized collection of people who you'd be hard-pressed to get to agree on literally anything. And nothing makes this myopia more aggravating than weaponizing this perspective for the benefit of mass-market nostalgia.

Right now it seems like we're in this sort of long-plateau millennial-tastemaker moment, where the lingering effects of their peak Nuts & Gum-demographic sway over pop culture seem to point to a singular nostalgic obsession with the 1990s. And somehow, thanks to some quirk of timing, it's a 1990s that I only vaguely recognize and barely have any really positive feelings towards. My '90s entirely paralleled my teenage years and ended when I would've graduated college if I'd stuck with it, while the basic-millennial version, because it was popularized by people five to ten years younger than me, is heavy on the kind of things that were broadly marketed to and/or primarily enjoyed by kids. My '90s was In Living Color and Casino and Nas, theirs was Saved By the Bell and Space Jam and Will Smith. (We all share The Simpsons, at least, which is cool, though I do kind of wish more people knew what it was like to see it become a huge phenomenon after spending a childhood reading Life in Hell.) And since both my lived experience and historical perspective on much of the '80s can, with some exceptions, be boiled down to "at least we got RoboCop, but ugh," my own take on nostalgia is that it usually feels like trying to appreciate what I actually lived through on someone else's terms. It's a bit disorienting, feeling like I was born too late for Gen X's popular '80s John Hughes vision of teenage angst and too early to see myself in the childhood-steeped millennial funhouse mirror of their '90s. 

And that latter '90s nostalgia fixation seems to stick for one particularly concerning reason: of all the discrete decades that people have shoehorned into cultural epochs, dating back at least 100 years and running up to our current moment, the 1990s that were the closest we ever got to an untroubled and idyllic time. Say what you will about previous generations' nostalgia for their own childhoods and the effect it had on popular culture in those generations' adult years, but you could always counter it with a more pragmatic perspective on how much actual bad shit was happening: the '50s were conservative and repressive, the '60s were existentially terrifying, the '70s were paranoid and adrift, and the '80s were materialistic and cruel. The '90s? They weren't without their problems, even if you were a young person who was only halfway paying attention. Just for starters, third-way Clintonism and the Contract With America accelerated the corporate neoliberal tendencies that are fucking us over now, and a lot of pop culture of the time (especially the later years of the decade) was marked by a callous cynicism and a flippant vulgarity that seemed driven by an anti-progressive backlash that would find its worst forms in the 2000s. But on the whole it seems like conventional wisdom that the '90s was where American culture peaked, a frivolous and carefree moment for the least existentially threatened youth of the postwar 20th Century. And the people who experienced that decade in their formative years are, like the rest of us, currently living through a stretch I think most people could rightly consider a pretty long nadir. 

This worries me. When you decide that culture has a peak moment to turn to when everything about the present feels bad and the future seems likely to be worse, the safest, surest bet in terms of what corporate entertainment will allow itself to give us is more of that old peak instead of trying to take a risk on creating a new one. So now there is very little in contemporary mainstream popular culture that would be completely alien to anyone who was young in 1999. Movies, video games, and streaming TV are dominated by IP and celebrity-biopic subjects that were already a big deal 25 years ago if not longer. It might feel more like a problem to me than other people because a lot of it is attached to the kinds of presumably shared cultural memories I just didn't have. But even if there are plenty of remaining routes to take away from that unrelatable place into something more niche and idiosyncratic, there's something about the way the culture is overwhelmed by this tendency that tends to grind me down. Maybe that's because I've grown to associate nostalgia with the sort of reflective yet reductive thinking that can be easily exploitable by our worst reactionaries. It becomes yet another form of hierarchical thinking: the culture-in-decline narrative that states that things were great then, but they suck now, and whatever changed was inevitably the fault of Certain People (and always the same ones that are usually blamed for this kind of thing and every other bad thing besides). I hope more people are immune to this kind of nostalgia-as-culture-war bullshit now than they used to be, but even if most peoples' nostalgia isn't technically reactionary in itself, it's easy for it to drive the narrative so prominently that it still leaves little room for actual cultural and stylistic progress.

But trying to find a way around all that noise -- the hierarchies of institutional tastemakers and old entrenched aesthetic perspectives and taste-policing false consensus -- also seems like a tough go. Because at the end of the day, even the simplest forms of engagement with popular culture are tied into one of the most fundamental problems with it: the ways we use taste to define ourselves and others.

V. Hipsters, Geeks, and Giving Up on Cool

I don't know if taste itself is a prison, but the intersection of taste, identity, and performance of that identity sure can feel like it. Nobody likes everything, and it's really not that hard to just dismiss something you don't like without having to sweat it or make a big deal out of not being into it. Usually that's the kind of tumultuous relationship with your interests that you're supposed to leave behind in high school, all that looking over your shoulder at where you stand in relation to the Popular Kids and whether you measure up to their standard. And even as someone who has spent more than half my life in the pop culture opinion business, I find it a lot easier to go through life when I spend most of my time contemplating stuff I care about and pleading the fifth on stuff I don't like.

But we are on the internet. On the internet, it is not productive to just sit there in silence and not really have anything to say about something you find unworthy of your enthusiasm. If you really want to get into these conversations, you have to be ready to concoct some whole elaborate scenario around this unworthy thing, one where eventually you start to fixate on the sort of defective sociocultural tendencies of the kinds of people you picture liking this thing. Sometimes it comes from a place of self-effacing, anxious self-consciousness -- I like this thing, but not in the way Those People like it, and if I get mistaken for Those People I could be ostracized. And sometimes it just comes from a place of pure contempt for something you can't even begin to relate to in the first place. But usually the end result is that these fixations just typecast people into easily sortable stereotypes to mock, all for having predilections for things that are, for the most part, ultimately harmless. Have you ever read one of those "satirical" articles premised on What Your Favorite ________ Says About You? They can be kind of witty, and it's sort of like being good-naturedly roasted when it's pulled off carefully. But the thing about the tone of this sort of snarky-internet-voice writing is that can be hard to tell sometimes when it's not actually good-natured in intent. And the lingering effect of this kind of Types of Guy discourse is to make being into an innocuous hobby or a piece of media come across like some real loser shit just because someone with a slightly different subcultural perspective decided it was.

That really is the trouble with cool: it can feel arbitrary, fleeting, imposed upon you by someone you can't relate to or even identify. And it leaves you open to feeling vulnerable about your own relationship to your sense of taste. This is probably why, once the internet opened up a more unmediated free-for-all where the barrier of mass collective conversational participation was drastically lowered, the reputation of countercultural cool took a drastic shift into the negative. Granted, it was tenuous for a long time beforehand. "Cool" as a concept had its origins in adaptation and survival, in being part of an outsider class that had to find its own way in a world that didn't have room for them. Then the subsequent subcultures those people used to express themselves became lucrative and saleable, were siphoned and subsumed into marketable prefab "lifestyles," eventually lost their transgressive qualities, and then what was left of the countercultural impulse came across as arbitrary and alienating and pointless to enough people that a lot of them rejected it as just another way to form cliques. The people who are really about battling a stifling overculture usually do so more directly nowadays, through political agitation and identity-based activism that doesn't see avant-garde or subversive aesthetics as necessarily intrinsic to the cause anymore.

Odds are you already have a pretty solid grasp on what cultural archetypes drove these conflicts over the past couple decades: the hipsters, who were cast as the irony-poisoned and anti-populist villains of this perspective, and the more sincere and enthusiastic geeks that thoroughly expelled them from mainstream culture en route to shaping it in their image. Both these archetypes strike me as kind of dicey, enough that I could never fully commit myself to belonging to either camp despite having at least a tentative foot in both. The hipster as mainstream culture depicts them is an oppositional and outside and exclusionary detractor, and I witnessed plenty of that in the music world, playing on those terms for a while and trying to carve out my own version of this defiant mode that, in the end, could never remain all that stable. But I've also seen (and, regrettably, go-along-to-get-along perpetrated) the same gatekeeping bullshit in geek circles, and I think we've spent at least a decade coming to terms with the fact that it can get toxic enough, at least at the margins, to seem like the whole concept of geek culture is capable of weaponizing its sense of entitlement in the worst ways.

But even at its least exclusionary and most fun, geek culture and its centrality to pop culture feels like a schlep these days to me because its current iteration demands your full, constant dedication. This is more or less in keeping with one of the fundamental traits of geek culture: where the hipster is supposedly mercurial and quick to abandon their short-term enthusiasms as passing phases if they get too popular, the geek is all about the constant study, the long-term loyalty, the endless speculation, the perpetual desire for more -- in other words, complete and total immersion. And while there are some things I feel that way deeply about myself, most of the big-deal geek canon consists of things I just can't relate to on more than just a casual level. It’s often because, and here's the nostalgia conundrum again, I hadn't had the foresight to get into them when I was a kid. The Android's Dungeon can be a fun place to visit; I've enjoyed the likes of the Spider-Verse movies and TMNT: Mutant Mayhem just because they reminded me of how mysterious and dynamic and unusual and, yes, artful actual geek culture used to feel to me when it wasn't omnipresent. But I'm too detached from its childhood-thrilling formative nature and far enough out of the contemporary Nerd Crew content-mill loop to ever comfortably live there.

Here's one example: I burned out on all things high fantasy somewhere between the Lord of the Rings trilogy (which I liked OK) and a game of Skyrim that I put dozens of hours into before I realized I had absolutely no interest in the main story or the lore of the world it took place in. And this burnout has subsequently led me to lose a lot of interest in video games on the whole, a medium I used to spend a lot of time with, because gaming is going through a long stretch where nearly every widely acclaimed must-have title that everyone talks about and socializes around takes place in one of these fantasy settings. Dark Souls and Elden Ring, the Zelda games, Dragon Age, Diablo, The Witcher III, Baldur's Gate 3, Dragon's Dogma 2, Unicorn Overlord -- it just all blurs together in this haze of goblins and halberds and fireballs and skeleton warriors to me and I can't find my way in. And it's bewildering because I was under the impression growing up that this stuff was a sort of niche subculture, and so now its prevalence and popularity makes me feel like I picked the wrong team somehow. This is, frankly, kind of a ridiculous thing to worry about (seriously: the wrong team???), and whatever train of thought led me to believe this is one I'd like to hop off, because I like what I like and I don't have to like what's popular if I don't want to. And yet the way this feeling manifests in the world for a lot of people is pretty messed up.

People still talk about the death of the monoculture as though it is no longer possible to be siloed into a large but otherwise hermetically sealed bubble of lowest-common-denominator overculture. But if I started to write down a list of all the popcult phenomena inside that bubble that I have a hard time bringing myself to care about, it'd come across like the agenda of the dreaded contrarian -- an alienated, out-of-touch crank who refuses to have a good time out of some weird duty towards antisocial posturing. There are few true contrarians who are actually into it for pure trollcrit clout, but if you've spent any amount of time on the internet in the last 20 years engaging with popular culture you will probably have read a lot of complaints that these contrarians are everywhere out there just ruining everyone else's fun, these hipster douchebags who just can't let people enjoy things. Are these incredibly popular things ever in any danger of being diminished in respect or cultural dominance just because some alt-culture weirdo thinks it's all kind of corny? No. But the weirdo's talking about not liking something a lot of people like, and that's just rude. We'll show them: we'll talk shit about the niche and unpopular things they like. You’re bored by the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Then why don't you go watch one of those three-hour '60s Estonian black-and-white films about depressed beet farmers or something? And thus, in their triumph over ostracism and uncoolness, the geek becomes that which they once feared: the bully smirking at people for liking weird unpopular shit that normal people don't care about.

Let's circle back to the hipster's supposed superficiality and oppositional social signaling. Think of it this way: the hipsters I think of, the ones who are into outre music or style or art or whatever, tend to be a bit insecure and sensitive to where they stand in relation to taste and especially in relation to a default "normie" monoculture. This tends to cross cultural and class lines, whether they're the rich gentrifying trust-fund kids of the public imagination or the alienated novelty-seeking young weirdos of the kind that I saw myself as when I was younger. You know why I liked this thing before it was popular became a cliche? Because sometimes liking something quirky or difficult or artsy or otherwise outside mainstream culture could mark you as different in a bad way and get you fucked with, as sure as it used to be the case if you were into anything that could be categorized as "geek shit" back when nobody wanted to be a geek. And then when that thing gets popular among the kinds of people who used to give you grief for it, well, that can often feel more like an insult than a vindication, at least back in the day when one of the worst things you could be was a poseur -- or, to invoke other definitions, what sports fans call a bandwagoner and geeks a filthy casual. Geek culture had its moments where it tried to reckon with that phenomenon, too, and some hardcore true believers briefly feinted at the idea that this was going to lead to endlessly diminishing returns for the stuff that they'd invested their identities in. This was because their interests initially seemed strange and detached from the ordinary world to them, and their popularization meant it no longer felt like a refuge from that ordinary world but just another part of it. But it turns out that the real difference between hipsters (who could be geeks for things that hadn't become popular yet) and geeks (who could be hipsters about who was allowed into their club) was that in the end, hipsters dreaded monocultural validation and geeks craved and embraced it. (If you've gotten this far and somehow feel like you could stand to read another 5,000-ish words on the ways people feel socially uneasy like this on the internet, I like this piece by games writer/creator Doc Burford on how low self-esteem and its more destructive routes can be rooted so heavily in this need for external validation.)

All these elaborate social traps take the fun out of even expressing a unique taste and perspective, and it tends to steer even the most open-minded of us into these essentialist, reductive, hierarchical and eventually tiring conflicts with validation. And while it seems like a confrontational question to ask anyone, it really is useful to stop and think and ask yourself: who are you trying to impress? I think the trick is to realize that impressing people isn't the point. The point is to be true to your tastes in a way that doesn't make you seem like you're using them to judge people (or flatter them, for that matter). This, more than anything else, is what I've been writing thousands of words trying to get at, and spending dozens of years trying to get to. It seems like it should be so easy, and it isn't. At least not yet. Social media seems to be on the decline and an easier thing to opt out of than it used to be, but I still linger in some spaces and watch these battles of taste play out. And a lot of it still feels more like a tense standoff between potentially hostile combatants than fun rapport, because the former gets you clout and the latter is usually personal enough that it only really clicks with actual friends.

But you've probably noticed something: all these references to me coming of age in the '80s, being a teenager in the '90s, spending my thirties writing in the 2010s -- odds are you've done the math and deduced I'm in my 40s. I'm closer to 50 than 30 -- god, closer to 60 than 30 -- and coming to the long-time-coming yet inevitable conclusion that my goal in the greater scheme of things is to have nothing to prove. It's funny, but the easiest way I've heard of to escape this whole scenario is just to get old. I've read it over and over again in interviews with people who've crossed a certain midlife threshold: once you reach a certain age you stop harboring this adolescent-rooted need to care about what other people think of you and just live your life on your own terms. You don't have to be antagonistic about it, either -- you simply stop giving a shit, find a way to be comfortable with yourself, to have some confidence in your interests and your experience even as you remain open to expanding it. In other words, you're not truly cool until you get old enough to stop caring about being cool. And if you wind up aging into amiable mentorship instead of bitter recrimination, that's when the world really starts to open up wider than you could've ever expected.