coldfront III
By Brandon Adamson

So the day of Soundwave I was sick and had a major fever, but I still didn’t want to miss it because it was such a unique event. I definitely should have dressed warmer, and if you know me…you know that I already wear very warm clothes as it is. Anyway, security wouldn’t let me bring in my bottle of ibuprofen of all things, but I managed to sneak a few pills in anyway. Anyway, it was classic anarcho-tyranny at the door.

One thing I’ve been noticing over the last couple of years is that kids and teenagers are starting to dress the way people dressed in the future as depicted in Back To The Future 2; Wild colors with crazy patterns, inside out appearing clothing, funky hats, elaborate tattoos, and gauges that essentially amount to bionic implants. I guess it’s not all that surprising as 2015 is less than four years away.

Almost every young girl that’s not of the dominant counterculture(or what’s left of it) now looks like a Juicy Couture employee… ultra tan with some sort of text on the butt of her pajama pants and sporting all sorts of fake H&M style jewelry and gemz. Not a bad look to be sure, but still.

I never was much into current or contemporary things in my adolescence. I was always in a another world. For a few years after high school though, it I felt like the younger kids right below me would be the ones who “got it” and with whom I would be able to identify with more than my own generation. They seemed to appreciate the things that I would appreciate(old movies, vintage, forgotten ideas, classic novels, obscure books, tape recorders, history etc.) That was a brief period of frozen time though, which thawed quickly. As I looked around at the thousands of peeps gyrating to remixes of other people’s music and cheering on a dude standing behind a laptop pushing buttons, I realized I have little to no connection to these kids. I cannot identify with them at all. They seem to live completely in the moment, totally immersed in today’s commercial world. They buy into every marketing tactic, fall for every gimmick, appear to have zero knowledge of any history that predates the 1980’s, have absolutely no patience or attention span, and communicate with one another at about a 3rd grade level. One could say that every generation feels this way about the younger crowd. They’d be right to a degree. But these kids, through no fault of their own, are living in a world without context. Because they have no context, they are content with whatever platter is served to them on recreated wheels. Since they lack curiosity they will never know the difference. A handful will grow out of it, escape and find their own individualism..perhaps stumbling onto a copy of The Wizard of Oz as Sean Connery’s character did in Zardoz.

Not that I have a problem with electronic music DJ’s or anything. They’re great, and I like dancing to music that goes “bloop bloop bloop bleep bleep bleep” and grinding up on hoes as much as the next guy. But why would anyone be excited about a specific person standing behind a laptop playing nondescript music that has no words or meaning? To see the crowd going crazy, it’s like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” or something.

What else is there to say but that “These are strange times my friend…” as Thallo so eloquently put it in Clash of the Titans (1981 version.)

Salon.com Interview with Whit Stillman(Related)

Filed under: Uncategorized - @ April 14, 2011 7:21 am

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