Life Before the Burden of Irony

            Gather up children and I shall tell you a tale… How about a little background first?

            I do not, nor will I ever glamorize the 1980’s.  There is very little from the decade I find culturally redeemable.  I found it mostly soulless, and overshadowed by the baby boomer’s decline and assimilation into the ruling generation.  It was not about anything but looks and money and crass misogyny.  The hair was stupid, the aesthetic was corny and lame, and most of what was created artistically did not influence a damn thing.  Of course, we have hip hop and personal computers and alternative rock and the birth of respectable cuisine…it wasn’t a total wasteland.

            But most of it was either schlock, or embarrassing commercials that were disguised as TV shows and movies.  ALF, The Dukes of Hazzard.  Police Academy, Mr T., GoBots.  Smurfs and Monchichi’s, and Snorks and Care Bears and Cabbage Patch Kids.  Miami Vice and Airwolf, SpaceCamp and Top Gun.  9,000 horror movies.  Madonna’s wardrobe changes and women with shoulder pads.  Mullets and well, mullets.

            This was also the last cultural period before the dawn of the Age of Irony, the sad era we are all stuck in today.  I pinpoint its rise right around 1995 or so.  The alternative wave was over and the Gen X’ers were out looking for jobs.  That’s when I began to feel it.  It was the plague of something I never really dealt with before.  It was an overwhelming sense of insincerity.

            You see, people born after 1985 or so, all of the above crap I just listed above was either liked or rejected by me and my peers.  (So to, was everything made before then.) There were people who watched and enjoyed ALF every week. I had Transformers and GoBots when I was 11.  There were people when genuinely believed that Top Gun was awesome and Back to the Future was the greatest thing ever made. People cried when Whitney Houston sang and lost their minds when Bon Jovi came to town. Conversely, there were kids like me who hated all the Smurf and Smurf-clones.  I really liked a few hair bands but some kids hated them.  I didn’t The Cure, but I liked LLCoolJ.  When we thought something was dumb or crappy or a waste of time, we ignored it.  We moved on.

            To show my appreciation for the things I liked, I bought the records or the movie tickets.  For the things I did not like, I gave them no attention.  Does that sound strange?  Not once in my life did I feel the need to ironically latch onto something, to boost the merits of something that truly didn’t deserve it. I never once thought it would be a good idea to feign interest in something I knew deep down was a waste of energy; solely to just look quirky and noteworthy. I acknowledged the Beavis and Butt-head philosophy: some things are cool and some things suck.  Never in my life did I think everything was cool.

            These blogs/essays I put out there are almost all personal; in that, I detail the observations as I see or feel them.  This sense of the invasion of irony was a feeling; it was out there in the ethos and in the language. I was just unnerved by it. By the end of the 1990’s, I felt I was completely disconnected from the culture. Granted, I was pushing 30 and I had kids already, but I paid attention.  I just felt that everyone was embracing everything, half of it in a tongue-in-cheek manner, or with a wink, and I really had no damn idea what was sincerely loved.  That is what I felt was always important.  I like to know where we are as a culture; it interests me.  What are we embracing?

            I never really heard of hipsters until I moved out to Oregon, and I still don’t exactly know what a hipster is.  I know that people are embarrassed to be called a hipster.  That wasn’t the case with goths and metalheads or skaters or a dozen other groups.  It’s that first grasp at identity, I get it.  But what is an ironic hipster?  What is that supposed to mean?  I guess I have a vague idea, from the clothes, etc.  But I am almost certain they are born out of the age of irony, where nothing is taken seriously and every artistic endeavor and every inane attempt at a social cash-grab are of equal weight and measure.

            Now, in response, we have a wave of internet critics, including myself sometimes, trying to sort through everything and figure out what is genuine and what is bullshit.  What is a true attempt at art or originality, and what is two hours of colors and noises for an undiscerning foreign market? What has meaning, what is substantive, even if it’s a Beyoncé song or an episode of True Blood? We need to know these things in our culture.  American art is forever intertwined with commerce and we have to be able to find the diamonds and gold nuggets of purity; no matter what package they come in.  Throwing everything into the hopper and laughing at it all sarcastically was just a mistake.

            So, what was it like before the burden of irony?  I’ll give you a few snapshots.

            I was 13 when I saw Back to the Future for the first time.  Words cannot express how charged I was by that movie.  I told everyone about it, I bought the novelization; I bought the soundtrack on cassette.  I saw it three times in the theater. Not once did I encounter anyone who shit on the movie or broke it down into the parts that worked and the parts that didn’t. It was a Good Movie.  It made me feel good to think about it and watch it.  When the sequels came, we were excited; we knew they wouldn’t be as good as the first movie because they were sequels.  We had a Good Time.  That was it.  Movie comedies were similar.  When we saw Spaceballs and Ghostbusters, we laughed at the jokes. We repeated the funny parts later that we liked.  We didn’t take time to snark about them.  When we quoted them later , we did not have to discern whether the quotes were done in jest to poke fun at the script, or whether we honestly enjoyed the movie.  We just enjoyed the friggin’ movie!

            When Twin Peaks came on it was insanely popular.  Everyone watched Season One and talked about it all the time.  No one compared it to other things that came before it. No one was above it, or too cool to watch it.  It was Communal.  It was Fun.  That was it.

            I saw Def Leppard live when I was 15.  In 1987, I thought they were cool and it was my first real rock concert.  There were a bunch of screaming fans, and no one was in the back dressed differently from everyone else, giggling and making fun of the true fans. I bought a tour shirt and I wore it because I liked it. I didn’t have to explain why I wore it.  It was a Fun Show.  We had a Good Time.

            I didn’t have to explain why I wore it.  I just wore it.

            Surely I’m revealing my age here.  This often happens to me when I set off to understand cultural phenomena.  That’s okay.  I am certain of the feeing I had of disconnection because of irony; and unlike trends or all sorts, which are basically flavors in an ice cream shop you can taste or ignore, the burden of irony was a horrible exercise in confusion and insincerity. 

            I mean, what is life without some sincerity?