Before "Lesley-Anne" finally made its way unto the first blank line of my birth certificate from 1984, my mom and dad apparently fought it out with some passion over what I might be called. My dad never imagined having a child at all, so the idea of naming held way more significance that he'd expected. As the story goes, my mom arrived home from work one day, unceremoniously threw her huge purse (yes, it's genetic) on the kitchen table, said "I think we're going to have a baby, let me take the test," and suddenly his world was going to look different forever. He wanted something classic and elegant like "Sarah" or "Laura." He got these from movies circa 1952. But my mother wanted to go funkier. She optioned for everything from "Colleen" to "Shelley" to various floral-themed monikers. Nothing stuck. I'm sure many tiffs ensued. Minutes before she went into labor, though, she saw the actress Lesley-Anne Warren's name appear on screen, white lettering on a black background, as she attempted to escape from life one afternoon in a movie theater by my childhood home. She said she liked the way it looked in print.
I had the same experience when I discovered a British pop singer who goes by, simply, "Marina." Well, when she tours, she's Marina backed by the "Diamonds." Her American cross-over album cover is a slightly-sultry shot of her leaning backward, brunette hair all wispy, face all flushed. And her named is scrolled in childlike font. A splash of color, forthright, confident. She has a great song called "Hollywood" in which she recounts a starlet's attempts to break into show business (to become an "American Queen"). Is she Shakira? No. Is she Catherine Zeta? "No, actually, my name's Marina." Is it crazy of me to want my metaphorical daughter to have a sassy moment in which she could throw this stellar line in someone's face? I'm not shallow, don't worry. The song has stuck in my head for other reasons.
Marina sings that she's been "living in a movie scene, puking American dreams," obsessed with the "mess that's America." I tend to write about things that boomerang back at me. This song comes back again and again, and every time I hear it I am reminded that I think it's message has everything to do with what I spend my life studying. I was driving down Mopac late the other night when it struck me. Windows down, cool air in my face, her voice screaming at me with that audible Brit-smirk.
We're all puking up American dreams right now. You don't have to be a historian to understand that since the 1950s, Americans have been on a crash course to pop-culture saturation. First came the strip mall and our unabashed love affair with shopping out of designed-obsolescence. Then came the alternative lifestyles--celebrated, with good reason, and decorated with niches in fashion, attitude, music, and artifacts like film and literature. Now we wholly see ourselves in the characters we create, the music we listen to, the blogs we write, the way we relate to one another through cultural reference points, even through the news. The generation Time magazine has deemed the "millenials," we feel it the most...this insatiable desire to be more involved in our cultural moment. Hipsters in Austin enamor me, for example, because of their appetite for taking this entire concept deeper. It's the deeper--more obscure, more random, grittier--constantly at odds with creating an underground culture which can't really be underground at all...because it requires way too much explanation. Let me make myself clearer. It's like a hipster posting a link on facebook. No matter how pretentious the music review they're sharing is, no matter how impressive it may be because of its sheer obscurity, they can't fight the urge to give it out, to publicly make it part of themselves. And in that moment of community, their web of personal, social, and cultural connections grows more complicated and, some would argue, more meaningful.
Recently I've engaged in some great conversations about how to best get students interested in topics they may have deemed rudimentary...or just boring. How do you make the War of 1812 sound interesting? FDR's first 30 days? Doesn't matter what it is, the most effective strategy is to offer them the candy of culture. Make the discussion about a movie or a current news item, and you've got their attention. Hell, that's why I started making a mix tape for my students each semester--a soundtrack for the course, if you will. Mostly it's a nerdy playlist of songs that best historicize the American South, but you'd be surprised how people will get giddily obsessed about the history of sharecropping or environmentalism who you break it down via Bob Dylan or Tina Turner. These days, it might take relating social history to an episode of Glee. But I concede to the hilarity and the pure abandonment of moments like that. Take Glee, anyway. The show recycles songs from our current and past cultural moments by making them happier, faster. I think the best moments of my life have been when every single person in room gets on the same page...jumps up from their seat to partake in a sing-a-long, for instance, that seems so urgent and perfect that you all might burst if the moment is ignored.
What does any of this have to do with the American Dream? A lot, actually. I study a period in American history--the early twentieth century through the 1970s--within which the American Dream was an incredibly tangible concept. It had a definition, iron clad. Go to college, get a good job that satisfies you, get married, have happy kids that will actually turn around and get more educated than you, make more money than you. Do this all in an upper-middle class bubble of mahogany furniture, meatloaf, and Saturdays at the park...and you'd have had it made.
It's not that way anymore. The millenials have stomped on all that on purpose. Sure, we've puked it up. We had to. Life didn't look the way it should have in a post-grad world. We're part of the first generation in America that's NOT on track to make more money or retire as comfortably as our parents. But part of that is self-induced, for sure. I say this with no irony at all: we live now in a cultural milieu that is never satiated, in a world where more of us understand what is beautiful in this life. Puking, yes. Because we finally find ourselves in an American culture that allows us to constantly remake ourselves. No twenty-something is worth their hipster salt these days unless they've messed up and re-started about five times. Judge or not, but we have teenagers coming into their own much earlier now. They'll live three lifetimes by the time they head to university. As long as those fits and starts are set to music, followed by life lessons, made into food for the soul...we're still on the right path.
There's a lot of talk these days about what's good for us. Does technology run our lives now? Kind of. It's how we communicate with one another...through youtube clips, itunes playlists, texts in the middle of the night. More and more we are using snippets to show others what we're thinking about. I think the map of the human brain is changing because of all of this. But I refuse to think it's a narrative of declension. Any great artist will tell you that to get to the rawest moments of creativity one must apprentice themselves first, drive themselves mad. Any great writer will tell you that the wrote 3,000 bad pages before they wrote the first good one. It's the scattered paint cans and coffee-stained pages. For me, it's long Word documents from which a dissertation is trying to peak through.
I'll leave you with a clip from Glee. I saw it the other night and felt like a teenager again myself for a brief moment. People who shun pop music don't impress me. Hooks in pop songs have always created the most memorable shared experiences, decade after decade. This song by Katy Perry might very well represent the adolescent tone of our current American culture, our current American dream. Who cares. If more people would let this kind of joy seep into their psyches every day...we'd all be a lot happier.
xoxola
No comments:
Post a Comment