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Three. Our Turn: On Gen X, Wearing Vintage, and Neko Case
- University of Georgia Press
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65 THREE OUR TURN On Gen X, Wearing Vintage, and Neko Case In our final year of high school, my best friend, Lan Ying, and I passed the time with morbid discussions about the meaninglessness of life when everything had already been done. The world stretched out before us not as a slate of possibility, but as a maze of well-worn grooves like the ridges burrowed by insects in hardwood. Step off the straight and narrow career-and-materialism groove and you just ended up in another one—the groove for people who step off the main groove. And that groove was worn indeed (some of the grooving done by our own parents). Want to go traveling? Be a modern-day Kerouac? Hop on the Let’s Go Europe groove. How about a rebel? An avant-garde artist? Go buy your alterna-groove at the secondhand bookstore, dusty and moth-eaten and done to death. . . . To us it seemed as though the archetypes were all hackneyed by the time our turn came to graduate, including that of the blackclad deflated intellectual, which we were trying on at that very moment. Crowded by the ideas and styles of the past, we felt there was no open space anywhere. —Naomi Klein, “Alt.Everything” (2000) Can’t seem to fathom the dark of my history, I invented my own in Tacoma. —Neko Case, “Thrice All-American” (2000) People who aren’t of Naomi Klein’s generation and class may feel little sympathy or even patience toward the bourgeois anomie she chronicles at the opening of “Alt.Everything,” the third chapter of her popular book No Logo. “After college, should I travel in Europe? But it’s so been done!” Particularly troubling, perhaps, are the elevation of styles to the level of ideas (or the reduction of ideas to the level of styles) and the apparent absence in these girls of any idea that a good, worthwhile, happy, ethical life might be lived regardless of its stylistic novelty. The idea that becoming a teacher has been “done to death” or that being an intellectual bears some necessary connection to wearing black will strike many older or younger and/or less privileged readers as false, beside the point, and shallow. It might seem thus even to the figurative older siblings of Klein and Ying, the hundreds of my own college classmates from the 1980s who dove headfirst into investment banking. It is no accident, however, that “false, beside the point, and shallow” is also how alt-country fans and performers, heavily Gen X, have sometimes 66 Chapter Three appeared to fans and performers of more traditional country music. Again, as Johnny Cash put it, when music people today, performers and fans alike, talk about being “country,” they don’t mean they know or even care about the land and the life it sustains and regulates. They’re talking more about choices—a way to look, a group to belong to, a kind of music to call their own. Which begs a question: Is there anything behind the symbols of modern “country,” or are the symbols themselves the whole story? Are the hats, the boots, the pickup trucks, and the honky-tonking poses all that’s left of a disintegrating culture? Back in Arkansas, a way of life produced a certain kind of music. Does a certain kind of music now produce a way of life? (12–13) As he worried about the apparent devolution of country into a vacuous kind of stylistic commodity consumption, Cash was, in fact, talking about “the ‘country’ music establishment,” but his musings, redolent of class—“I wonder how many of those people ever filled a cotton sack” (13)—apply at least as well to the alt-country music establishment—and, I think, to the bourgeois ennui of Naomi Klein. What Klein’s adolescent dilemma has to do with branding, the subject of her book, might seem obscure, but the connection may undergird a large portion of the appeal of alt.country. Two pages later, Klein explains, “my frustrated craving for space wasn’t simply a result of the inevitable march of history, but of the fact that commercial co-optation was proceeding at a speed that would have been unimaginable to previous generations” (65). She goes on to argue that earlier “scenes were only halfheartedly sought after as markets. In part this was because seventies punk was at its peak at the same time as the in...