A FEW WEEKS BACK, we discussed how the punk rock subculture has changed over the past quarter-century.
One of these changes has been an attitude adjustment.
Back in the soft-rock ’70s and the Reagan ’80s, you weren’t supposed to have what was known then as a “bad attitude.” Conservatives demanded you get with the program and stop feeling so goddamned sorry for yourself. New Agers and aging Deadheads condescendingly pitied you if you refused to conform to a “positive mental attitude.” The radio-TV stations and the newspapers depicted an urban America composed almost exclusively of “successful” upscale baby boomers; and snidely scoffed at anyone too young, too poor, or too dissatisfied with the way things were.
So: Attitude, with a capital A, became a quick and simple stance of rebellion.
A visible minority of young adults who’d spent their adolescence in the ennui days of Watergate, stagflation, and gasoline shortages took their worldview from youths in the much-drearier place that was early-Thatcher-era Britain.
An American punk was somebody who chose alienation as often as alienation chose him or her. Somebody who deliberately picked at any perceived open sores in U.S. society; who scoffed at “positivity” as a means of brainwashing imposed by society’s powerful onto an all-too-supplicant populace.
Century’s end finds the country in a somewhat different situation.
Ad-bloated magazines such as Fast Company and Business 2.0 cheerlead for a supposedly new way of doing business, a new way of working, a new way of living.
And it’s all got Attitude coming out its ass.
You’re not supposed to work your fingers to the bone in quiet desperation. You’re supposed to work your fingers to the bone and beg for more. You’re a “rebel” if you break free from those nasty old-fashioned restrictions (such as a personal life, a mind of your own, or pesky health-and-safety laws) and muster up all the Attitude you can to produce-produce-produce, sell-sell-sell, hustle-hustle-hustle, or schmooze-schmooze-schmooze.
Attitude’s everywhere else, too: SUV highway hogs; Young Republicans on Harleys; cigar bars; Road Rage; “morning zoo” radio; hate-talk radio; potty-mouthed comedians. I swear, you can’t sneeze without infecting a piece of Attitude.
Even that hokiest of entertainment enterprises, the World Wrestling Federation, now uses “Attitude” as its one-word corporate slogan.
So today, any true attitude of rebellion would be a rebellion against Attitude.
That, more than any perceived “death of irony,” could be the reason Those Kids Today increasingly flock to The WB’s hyper-sincere youth dramas, away from Fox (the network that used to boast of “Fox Attitude”).
It could be at least one reason why the sincerely “realistic” horror of The Blair Witch Project took to movie viewers’ hearts in ways the bombast of, say, the Mummy remake couldn’t.
For several years now, black music audiences have been flocking to embrace what someone like me might call sappy love songs, leaving the gangstas to play to the white mall kids.
The heavy youth presence at the WTO protests (in all of the protests, not just the media-beloved “violent” ones) may or may not mean the Post-Blank Generation’s searching for a way to do things that matter, rather than just to show off their own transgressiveness.
But one caveat remains, as it remained in the prospects of a post-ironic age: How’s someone of my in-between generation, who grew up believing in Loud Fast Rules and disdaining anything laid-back or mellow, going to handle the flip-flop of the zeitgeist toward rebel communitarians battling establishment rugged-individualists?
By muddling through, just like everybody in this not-just-on-the-calendar New Era.
TOMORROW: Should Netzines go print?
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