The beauty of innuendoes

On the martyrs and monsters of the worst, most-self congratulatory, most fell off and kept the pretense of rising generation. The generation that gave us Diddy.

One hypocrite after another

High on gummy vitamins and spite, I’m tempted by the zeitgeist to lay down a gauntlet against the re-litigation of cool by roasting the self-proclaimed cool of my least favorite generation. I’m listening to Jonny Greenwood’s One Battle After Another score-as-soundtrack on Bandcamp, fodder on our wings. Jonny of Radiohead, the quintessential Gen X anthemic band besides Nirvana, which died too young to be exactly that, and maybe Tribe Called Quest, which is too black to be everyman’s anthem in the Western tradition. My feeling is this: born in the mid-1960s through the end of the 70s, on the cusp of the dead-end of a discernible counter-culture and revolutionary impulse (1968), and coming of age in the 1990s, when even the mediocre and middlebrow could still “be great” in that delusional American way, by graduating from college and/or buying a house somewhere and setting up a family modeled after the ones on TV or those contrived by politicians who knew it necessary to project normativity to be elected, this generation of rebels with half a cause was imbued with the hubris of stupid royals who don’t realize they fell into their roles as liberal gatekeepers by chance and expediency. And they campaigned for them with scarcity in their hearts like nepo-babies, garnering that nothing-to-see-here wink of amateur tricksters, maybe even changing their names but keeping their inheritance of ladders which could still be climbed, which were not yet the barbed manacles of late capitalism they left Millennials and Gen Z to bleed out on.

Those X- men and women who were deliberate beyond happenstance, were deliberate with the help of Clinton era optimism, absurd codes of silence, and unchecked resurgences of slapstick bigotry never contested loudly or at all, as if we were collectively sounding the laugh tracks used on the popular sitcoms then. It wasn’t so much mirth in unison as frightening unchecked hysteria, more cackle than laughter, dark grieving turned funny by how impossible it would be to come out of it whole. I remember watching In Living Color and wondering what was so hilarious about the self-flagellating comedic style and its unimaginative symmetry, always on beat, in spandex and neon, and imbibing a crudely racialized consciousness. Why was there a minstrel show on prime time television? Clowning was popular slang then and the show had clowns on it and clones of real men turned into half-hearted satire so that it was ok to make fun of derangements no one wanted to evolve past while also engaging and representing them off screen. They gave us Homey the Clown, that man who spoke in the parables of those who read the dictionary page-by-page from jail, the gay-bashing effeminate film critics, while the radio was full of moody and dejected addicts and killers, so that the dominant ‘90s archetypes were the fool and the intentional failure who used his acts of refusal to enchant. Their all-stars were either silly and exploitative or so serious it brings to mind the lyrics of a very Gen X song by Tricky from 1996, She makes me wanna die. That was a turn-on for them, the song was sultry and teasing, a distant cousin of the title track on PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire. An ambient depressiveness and dysfunction prevailed and sold then as inevitable, and the same people selling it were waiting a few years, outgrowing their product, and mastering neoliberalism’s brunch and non-profit industrial activism while leaving the aura of unfinished sorrow to be sorted by the new kids.

Angst and rage were their currency, they created messaging about not selling out but also the glamor spell of the proud sell-out, and pretended to embody both at the same time. They were the liberal disguised as rebel making way for the identity crisis of now with farcical errands like Rock-The-Vote, the early stages of performative environmentalism sponsored by private-jet owning elites, and prison abolition making way for the privatized prisons in which some rich and famous Gen X men now invest. They were willing errand boys for the Epstein-Industrial Complex, which is to say heroin chic supermodels were in style, sex scandals were in style, video vixens were treated as expendable and trafficked through the industry, Trump made celebrated cameos on black sitcoms and was friends with the hip hop community now pretending to disdain him, music videos that depicted life as a series of parties and revenge fantasies were in style, and what was being called alternative was all bound up with the hegemons to such an extent that the establishment needed the faux radicalism for texture and structure, sometimes just for a diversion while they expanded the goals of empire with endless wars we forgot about because there was so much fun hip hop and sad complaint rock to choose from we felt embattled at home.

Diddy was Gen X, alongside Radiohead and Kurt Cobain. The men Diddy may or may not have killed or ruined were Gen X, the OJ case was Gen X coded, Seinfeld, then a chill guy with no moral compass but vibes, now a vaguely proud zionist, was loved by Gen X, thinking Woody Allen was the epitome of deep despite him marrying his step daughter was theirs, what else, Slam poetry, which begins beautifully and becomes formulaic, Friends, a boring show with inflated ratings about that exact desire to be quirky yet normal that plagued the temperament then. It all created dismissive cowards with so much bravado and self-importance and so little accountability for what the self enacted. How did all of Diddy’s Gen X industry friends remain silent while he drugged and violated everyone around him? How did depression and addiction become conflated with disaffected hipness? How were crack heads funny characters on the sketch comedy show and not a conspiracy? How was it cool, then, to just follow some pathetic lazily-appointed leader, to signify in so many directions at once anything of substance was negated by desperate, fawning spectatorship of the idiot-elites? And why were they left, until now, to believe that they were cool and brave?

Cool is a term that came to be through jazz music, was best embodied by Miles Davis, and imitated by many others. It was effortless, helpless, he really didn’t care, composed a song called “So What,” and meant it. And it didn’t mean no effort, it indicated when the effort had prevailed. He did look good and sound good and sing good on his horn. When the term was appropriated and mangled by market forces until in the 90’s we got the hideous term “cool hunting,” it was already over. No one is cool anymore; cool is not cool anymore. And though I’m thinking about this because of yet another can’t we be cool plea on main from the pop star graveyard, I’m redirecting it toward the insufferable cadence of Gen X sanctimony because we have not completed the reckoning with the tenor of frenzied dejection they brought forth and left dangling in the air while they scurried ahead toward the selling out to which they’d been so vehemently opposed when that opposition sold well and could pass for tender sophistication. They are the reason people still believe in the ghost of cool, which uncooly, they fashion themselves to be.

They left us in this barren place where it’s dangerous to criticize them and dangerous not to, that is just now thawing as we’re all coming to terms with how flawed culture was with them as degenerate stewards. Cool died with Miles in 1991, right around the time that extra-vagrant generation was scrambling for its gimmick and found clowning, that acoustics of incessant frowning, and the mainstreamification of marginal attitudes. We’re now in the age of the whistleblower, who competes with the post-9/11 surveillance and mass formation psychosis to reveal exactly why and how nothing we’ve been told is cool actually is, while, as the pop stars are saying they “value coolness,” they are scripting their own irrelevance to everything but the state surveillance and propaganda apparatus, unless you wake up every day hoping to be indoctrinated by those who seek to resurrect Gen X smugness with even less authentic sophistication, even more affect. Intensity and passion, even prayers for awakening and transcendence, are more interesting than whatever cool used to be. It’s been expropriated, it died once with Miles and again when we forgot to remember that cool is how black style is addressed by its glad-handing appropriators and distilled into a shell of itself and brand. Cool came to be as a term perhaps because while those who loved jazz (black culture) could not be black, for a time they could be cool. It is by nature ephemeral, it goes away when you claim it aloud like anything rooted in a quiet erotics. Now, not only is just being black unlikely to save your reputation or social standing (see Diddy again and his loser enablers), cool as blackness’s closest proxy, is over, there’s no appeal and every incentive to avoid association. You have to be your transparent self to be adored these days, you can’t use cynicism or apathy to deflect, you can’t make civility and neutrality your anchor either, you’re not slick, you can’t revere that transverse Gen X escapism nor can you hide behind the compulsive self-surveillance of we who come after them looking to both disavow what they handed down and build a platform on which to blow the whistle when the time comes.

I’m a difficult audience for hierarchies in that I only love heroes and underdogs, real ones. I cannot be impressed once I suspect that a person or group is spiritually obedient to misaligned ideas for comfort, when they know better, or using low-hanging fruit, and the illusion of protest to sell music that fuels the sex and death cults and makes them appealing to hopeful youth who don’t yet know any better. When I didn’t know any better, I gaslit myself into thinking that the stupor of unprocessed grief Gen X carried was a kind of decency and not the selfish decadence and refusal to re-evaluate terrible values until they’ve done their damage it’s become. Their style was more debilitating than liberating. Grunge isn’t cool, Che shirts aren’t cool, sardonic glitter and glam aren’t cool, punk isn’t, the internet isn’t, nostalgia isn’t, movies about black revolutionaries that make the white savior the hero aren’t cool, hip hop isn’t even cool anymore after what we’ve just learned about the architects of the most visible aspects of its culture, and that was jazz’s heir, the last hope for cool’s black survival. It’s not coming back, it can’t be fixed or renewed for the sake of your validation-seeking. There’s no longer a bounty for pretending to be profound while being empty or evil. Noam Chomsky is in the Epstein files. Even the cool nerds aren’t cool at all. Write or utter one true sentence, like Hemingway, who was cool when cool still existed, suggested, and you might have a chance at placing your mouth on a whistle, at being meaningful.