Is it possible to critique (and disparage) the production and consumption of contemporary youth pop culture without sounding like a crank, a grandfatherly gadfly, a curmudgeon, a technophobe dandy fop contenting herself with a blank room and a Victrola, who speaks only from a perspective of just-not-getting-it and the power of a certain age and class? Does it matter—does my crankiness distort my meaning and message? There are sharp distinctions among the owners, the creators, and the consumers. Many teens create their own media and meanings, which are sometimes owned by corporations. I think there is more of a perception of democratic production than a reality. Throughout, my voice will be lamenting, rambling, nostalgic, self-righteous, aged, I know. I come to this as a not-quite-recovered teenager and someone who spends my workday with young people. The dangers of “those kids today” conversations are well documented. Every generation distrusts and despises the one after it, they say; either we are on a treacherous path of cultural deterioration or we are unable to lucidly view youth culture from the distance of our old age. Is there cultural superiority of my—or anyone’s— youth? Does my ownership of time and experience invest the past with unearned personal meaning?

However, my disdain is well-worn attire, not a new pose. I had disdain for ‘90s mainstream culture as a teen, and craved weird subcultural corners. This seemed to me a rebellion against conformist oppressive middle class status. I didn’t realize at the time the oppressions by punks, radicals, indie rockers—that culture jamming was enacted by the sons and daughters of the system, the recipients of all kinds of privilege. Counterculture teens weren’t interested in ending the game—they just wanted to upend it and assert their dominance and superiority of the underclasses. I place myself here, hidden by a black wing and not being smart enough to end the hierarchy but to win the subcultural version.

Through the passage of time, even mainstream culture in its obsolescence adopts a patina of cool (see the obsession with “old school” and “vintage” everything). There’s the shambling clutch of cassette tapes and pay phones and water fountains—these things that have been taken from us. I recently saw Liz Phair play her “Exile in Guyville” show, an objective failure that was really meaningful to me because of how her music sparked feelings of feminism and pale defiance of nose thumbing (no rock in a cop’s face) in my high school years. Is this narcissism? “Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence”? http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html.

Listening to “Exile in Guyville,” reading eBayed Sassy Magazines, watching My So-Called Life—even as I now realize their poor little white girl failings—still resonates adolescently with my eternal internal outsiderness, unrealized ambitions and my ineffable hopefulness about the future. Megan judged people’s worthiness by their shoes and we all judged people by their music taste. Growing up among mostly white middle class suburban Christians, we separated out by stylistic minutiae. Where it wasn’t always safe to proclaim your political beliefs, we asserted them with hair color and safety pins, which carried their own risks. Remember, this was in the late 1990s when students wearing trench coats (the former uniform of the 1950s white collar worker) were suspended for their subversive murderous dress.

I’ve killed my TV and home Internet access and I listen to music mostly on a blue Hello Kitty walkman or record player (hoping this doesn’t sound annoying even though it’s true...) and therefore have a tenuous grasp of what mainstream teens like. It’s weird to be personally uninterested in mainstream culture and yet work a job that requires this knowledge. Countercultural aesthetics that once signified ideals, values, identities, and affiliations have been commodified. We live in shallow vagueness and shadows. How to know what people really mean when irony and gossip rules? David Foster Wallace wrote precisely about the problem with irony: "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage. This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing.”

Earnestness, enthusiasm, reverence, and seriousness are obscured by irony, gossip, and the pose of rebellion. I remember in the '90s people took selling out a look more seriously. The Internet has further commodified countercultures. Finding information on Riot Grrrl and buying green nail polish were challenging. Zines were traded like samizdat (perhaps a risky hyperbole) and while the underground was lively, it wasn’t as accessible as it is now, in its weakened state. The democratization of the underground opens up subcultural expression to disadvantaged socioeconomic classes but also to poseurs.

Intersections among politics, interests, affiliations, identities, and aesthetics have faded until they simply reinforce social hierarchy and class superiority. Fashion does not offer many points of resistance in the US. While I fondly remember late ‘80s and early ‘90s music and fashion, this era represents the beginning of the end, when youth counterculture for the first time was sold simultaneous with its production, where the hype became mediated by products and not substance, as Naomi Klein points out. Our postures and styles are now substitutes for meaningful action. We can’t wear our activism or correctly identify our politics with our aesthetics. Everything has been sold.

Posted by: Kati Nolfi