Chris Willman, “Princess Crossover,” New York Magazine, October 10, 2010 (emphasis added)
I’m not buying this album. But I AM buying the 99 cent single version of “Our Song” on Amazon, because dammit, it’s a good song. And it’s a great song about friendship, too!
This New York excerpt identifies one of Swift’s greatest talents: her ability to vividly describe adolescence with high emotional precision. What makes her so rare isn’t just her youth, but her ability to talk about how own experiences with such clarity. Pop music has had other teen stars, but most teenagers are unable to effectively describe what it’s like to be a teenager — or not in a way that produces great art, anyway.
I understand culture to be a system of shared meanings, and teenage culture has a unique, rarely mentioned quality: there’s a sharp divide between the people who are producing the pieces of culture that impart meaning and the people who consume it.
Other cultural groups don’t have this divide, or not so stark a one. If you’re a young twenty something from Williamsburg, you can hear other young twenty somethings from Williamsburg talk about being a young twenty something from Williamsburg, and you can negotiate those ideas with other young twenty somethings from Williamsburg and together you’ll produce a culture. And the same applies to all kinds of other groups whose members can produce works talking about themselves for people who are like themselves.
But the people who produce works for teenagers are relying on memory, which creates an odd little piece of time-travel. Teenagers who want stories that explore what it’s like to be a teenager have to turn to works in which this information is filtered through memory. Memory doesn’t make the information worse, but it does change its quality. It probably exaggerates certain aspects and elides certain others, though I can’t say precisely what aspects they are, because I’m also speaking from memory.
Since teenagers are having their culture interpreted at the same time they’re forming it this memory acts as a hegemonic force: all those songs and movies and TV shows and books about being a teenager are actually people telling teenagers how to be teenagers based on their memories of adolescence. And because teenagers don’t yet have the skill set required to tell each other about adolescence, their direct experience remains unenunciated.
There are a handful of exceptions, and I think it’s notable how small this set is — not quite a literal handful, but it gets close. There’s Taylor Swift, of course. S. E. Hinton. Supergrass’s “Caught By the Fuzz.” Probably not Superbad, considering it likely changed a lot since Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg first drafted it at fifteen. Even the Brian Wilson example isn’t quite accurate: Wilson was nineteen when he wrote the Beach Boys’ first single “Surfin’,” and in his twenties for most of even the group’s earliest material. Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys — whose lyrical nous is inflated, though not unapparent — was twenty when Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not came out. Billie Joe Armstrong was just shy of 22 when Dookie was released.
So teenagehood is a cultural black spot described a bit like the way astronomers discover planets orbiting distant stars. Scientists work out those planets are there not by directly observing them, but by noticing the gravitational effect their presence has on the stars they orbit. And works about teenagers aren’t direct tellings, but ideas filtered through memory and exaggeration and forgetting.
The exception to this, of course, are those cultural artifacts not commercially distributed: LiveJournal posts and Tumblr reblogs, Facebook notes and MySpace comments. These aren’t unusual because they’re produced by teenagers; they’re unusual because they have distribution. Teenagers have always had a home grown culture alongside their hegemonic one (add diary entries and letters to the list above), but it’s a home grown culture built out of the hegemonic culture, rather than one that exists along side it. So if the Internet frees the home grown culture from the bounds of bedrooms and high schools, what does that mean for an adolescence now defined less by adults’ memory and more by one’s own experience?
(Incidentally, though the last line in the New York excerpt pertains to a particular story related in the article, in general it’s false. Adult life is not at all like high school, which is why this memory stuff creates a disconnect.)
![I’ve snipped some good commentary from ilyagerner, but you should of course click through and read that.
These results support my contention that the famed American dislike for government is not the complete story. When asked which institutions in their lives have too much power, and which should get more, Americans don’t tend to like power accreting with any particular body. So, sure, Americans think government is too powerful, but they think the same of lobbyists, corporations and banks, and are divided on courts, labour unions, and state governments.
Let’s put to rest the shibboleth that Americans dislike government and therefore long for the shackles of financial regulation, social security, and better health care coverage lifted from them. Americans tend to be individualistic, and that means when the government interferes with what Americans perceive to be their individual liberty, they get a bit ornery[1]. But the same goes for when big business or organised labour gets in their way. (That’s why the military isn’t seen as too powerful; it doesn’t tend to get in the way of the average American.) Using the government to stop other large institutions from having an undue nature on the lives of the citizenry in no way runs counter to the American urge for individualism.
Misunderstanding government as the only source of oppression is, incidentally, one of the biggest flaws in libertarianism. Suggesting a one-to-one equivalence between individualism and dislike of all government is simplistic.
Cross-posted at the USSC.
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1. I do believe this to be an American thing, not a Western thing. In Australia, for instance, we have a tendency to get a bit upset if we think someone else is getting away with doing something too out there. See, for instance, this suggestion that would ban exhibition of artwork unless it was pre-approved by the government.
There’s a story about Australian culture that goes like this: We come from convicts. The first non-Aboriginal presence on the continent was a prison. The first government was the British soldiers, and our society has grown from there. As such, to this day, the relationship between the Australian citizen and the government is like a convict to the prison guards. We despise our guards, but at the same time, we depend on them for everything. We like them to take care of us.
And when it comes to matters of individualism, sometimes Australians are just a bunch of jailhouse snitches.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lji9x1xIV81qzr73ro1_1280.gif)
