Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. I suppose there comes a moment in every man's life when he begins to feel he may no longer be fully conversant in the endlessly mutable folkways of his nation's youth. This must be a sensation as old as time itself. As long as there have been younger people, there have assuredly been older people who feel a certain concomitant confusion when confronted by the the younger people's strange and decidedly insular social practices. I have little doubt that twenty thousand years ago, a hirsute primitive gazed abstractly upon a yawning, ice-bound vista only to spy a gaggle of tweens rolling a stone in a thoroughly bizarre, wholly unimagined fashion and felt confounded, lonely and afraid. I'd long thought this realization would strike me rather suddenly, like a chambray bolt of Land's End lightning. I figured I would be old, weak, slow, tired, resplendent in business casual, the faint whiff of creeping cultural death hanging upon my burgundy mock turtleneck like so much Aqua Velva, a willing supplicant in my own inevitable transmogrification. Alas, twas but a fleeting, ephemeral dream. Behold the pale rider of my own private cultural apocalypse: the video for Just Kait's "Sick". What? You've never heard of this song? Consider yourself fortunate.
Who is this young woman? Well, her name is Kaitlyn DiBenedetto and she apparently also performs the theme song to the "hit" MTV series, "Parental Control" which she expanded into a full length tune entitled, "U Suck." (I imagine this song shines an unforgiving light upon the largely unacknowledged and as yet uncataloged vicissitudes of tempest-tossed teen romance in the time of the aughts). According to her Myspace page, she is 17, and "lives for music, but most of the time her life is a little more complicated." When she "can't find the words, she writes a song." When she "feels like screaming or punching a wall, she turns up the volume." Geez. Let's just hope she can find those words (and a lot of them).
Without further ado, behold the offending video:
So much for the hope that this slice of stultifyingly soporific pop would actually be a thoughtful teen-centric commentary on the current state of our nation's failing healthcare system. Congratulations, Just Kait. You have made the worst music video in America. Rascal Flatts, please try harder. What is this world coming to? It is a very sad day indeed when three sensitive, well-groomed Ohioans can no longer be counted upon to deliver the kind of menacing musical cinema certain to frighten small children, excite caged animals and convince foreign nationals to fear the specter of American influence.
Kurt Cobain and Samuel Bayer's heretofore definitive presentation of the apocalyptic high school pep rally run amok has been supplanted as our culture's most terrifying vision of the secret life of the American teenager. Somehow, and with seemingly very little effort, Just Kait has bested them. And how. Avril Lavigne behold your legacy.
While both videos take place in the pedestrian confines of that great center of high school extracurricular life, the gym, so end their similarities. Unlike "Teen Spirit", the video for "Sick" features no shots of hollow-eyed, apathetic youths colliding in what constitutes our generation's savage contribution to the decidedly uneven catalog of contemporary social dance. There are no grainy, sepia-flecked visions of enraptured, inked, and anarchically-minded cheerleaders. No unsettling shots of a transfixed and aged janitor desperately clutching a mop handle and hungrily eying a very damp cloth. Nope. Just freshly-scrubbed, grain-fed, athletically inclined, all-American youths prone to positive choices unloosed in a public space.
The video for "Sick" unfolds like some low-budget, thoroughly manic, phantasmagoric vision of "edgy" teen culture as conjured by Lou Dobbs. It's so excruciatingly wholesome it's warped; a terrifying journey into the savage heart of the American dream as dreamt by the American Coalition for the Family. This video has it all: Graffiti-artists, jugglers, gymnasts, bikes, rollerblades, cheerleaders, hula hoops, an amorous, acrobatically inclined male (seriously, this young man is a menace - He must be stopped), competitive sports. Wait. What? Competitive sports? Seriously. Who directed this video? Dan Cortese?
The music is even worse. Three minutes and fifteen seconds of vapid mall punk packaged as affirmation/celebration of autonomy for a teen horde whose constituents likely view juggling or riding a bike in a crowded indoor space as rebellious social choices. Perhaps "Sick" only proves the point and power of "Teen Spirit"'s high school danse macabre. "Teen Spirit" was and still is an absolute molotov cocktail of boundless angst unleashed upon the that most sacred and beatific of teenage communal experiences: the pep rally.
Watching this video today, it still looks and feels completely unhinged, like the perfect visual complement to a song that would ultimately convince a generation of listeners they no longer needed Bret Michaels to give them something to believe in. For all its inevitable commodification and commercialization, perhaps grunge was so appealing because it was music for angry teens that didn't sound or feel like music made by angry teenagers. It felt earnest and real. It felt like it mattered. And perhaps it did (if the current state of "alternative radio" is any real measure, it never left and the year may very well still be 1997).
It certainly wasn't your typical disposable, pre-fab, foment by numbers (like "Sick") so often foisted upon teens yearning for an empathetic soundtrack. It's purveyors and progenitors were compelling, charismatic, flawed, unwashed, impolite, slovenly and by extension (at least to the untrained suburban eye) dangerous, and it is this combustibility (once endemic to rock 'n roll but wholly absent from teen and rock music today) that perhaps makes grunge the last meaningful gasp of truly rebellious teen culture in a world increasingly obsessed with irony and the next big thing.
I never thought I would be grateful to have lived during the apogee of the grunge era, but upon hearing/viewing what is rocking your average teenager's iPod these days, I count myself fortunate to have tuned in and turned on when heroin-addled, flannel-clad, hopelessly-tortured frontmen stalked the earth. In fact, I feel stupid and contagious.
No comments:
Post a Comment