Kids these days, am I right?

A brief foray into pop from AHW

Since my last dispatch was on the somber side, take a jovial vacation with me to the colorful and confusing land of the youths. Short form reviews will return shortly. — AHW

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The nice thing about living in the dustbin of history is the open buffet of styles and attitudes at our disposal, even if the feast has been sitting out under the heat lights for a hundred years and has been sneezed on by a hundred children. At least it looks tasty. 

Doja Cat’s Get Into it (Yuh) looks like 2002 polishing up 1971 imagining 2050. I barely understand a word she’s saying, but it’s delivered with such beguiling staccato and bravado that I believe every syllable. I like this return to vapidity, this absolute conquest of the surface. And the backup dancers with their full asses casually hanging out of their pink space uniforms is a nice touch.

Sex never really departed pop music, even during the erotically anxious twenty-teens. But the overdetermination of it in the great pandemic-emergent WAP had even more over the top, insecure insistence than Justin Timberlake bringing sexy back in 2006. The Doja Cat video isn’t overselling it. It’s a feast for the eyes, not a manifesto for the mind. After these past chaste and wholesome years full of moral conviction, beautiful vulgarity is back again. 

Youth culture, which did not exist until the 20th century, is a product of a society that does not seek to reproduce itself but to be ever newer, to sever the tie of tradition that chains each generation to the last. This is all fun and games when it’s The Beatles or Coachella, but in recent years grown ups have moved toward submitting themselves to the youth with bizarre reverence. The metastasization of youth culture assumes a primordial radicalism of the young uncorrupted by social mores. Popular pedagogical methods insist that it is the children who should be teaching us. Yes, the children are the future, but come on, someone has to teach them to see Spot run or we’re all screwed.

What youth culture has come up with is not primordial radicalism. It is, unsurprisingly, pastiche. Another arrangement of bits and pieces of the past scattered across the flatness of the present. Even youth saint Greta Thunberg channels the dire, inchoate warnings of the oracle at Delphi and is likewise summoned by powerful men. Street style today is a lot like it was when I was part of the youth culture demographic, but now with TikTok instead of Delia’s catalogs. People are smoking and wearing mini skirts again. The kids are dumb enough that we should not take them as oracles, but smart enough to pick up some of the more fun things we left behind. 

But here’s the weird part: art adults seem more willing to take our morals and politics from the kids, an area in which they are still underdeveloped. Yet the playful embrace of surface and style that is thriving in youth fashion and pop seems less enchanting to the aging art world. The opposite arrangement would be preferable.