Ace of Spades and Verum Serum have a couple of interesting posts on what two popular early-’80s songs say about cars, the people who drive them — i.e., you and me, and the artists who wrote the songs. Verum Serum contrasts the Police’s “Syncronicity II” song with Rush’s “Red Barchetta,” for a way to explore a collectivist view of the automobile and the everyday people who own them, versus an individualist view.
The line in ‘Synchronicity II” goes, “Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes, Contestants in a suicidal race.”
To which Ace responds:
That is, all you wage-slaves headed to work each day are lemmings in a suicide machine.
You hear this an awful lot from artists. An awful lot. You see this basic idea — the emptiness and awfulness of normal, quotidian life — in dozens of movies, like the empty American Beauty, and damn, if they don’t win Oscars a lot.
Death of a Salesman was about this. So, instant classic.
This is a silly and solipsistic conceit. Let me define that word, in case you don’t know it:
sol·ip·sism (slp-szm, slp-)n. Philosophy
1. The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.
2. The theory or view that the self is the only reality.Taken out of the realm of philosophy, the word is mostly used to describe a non-thoughtful, non-philosophical insistence that one’s own experience can be generalized to all other’s experience. That is, it’s a baby thing. Like babies who lack any sense of perspective outside their own heads, the solipsist is incapable of using his imagination to guess what the world might look like from other vantage points.
We are all prisoners of our own experience, it is true, but the solipsist is a willing prisoner, and generally refuses to even try to see the world from a different point of view.
Now, artists love songs like this, and movies like this, because these movies speak to them. They are of a specific psychological type, mostly. They themselves could not function happily within the confines of what most people would call “a normal life,” and are driven towards more Bohemian, atypical lifestyles.
I don’t begrudge them that. As someone who’s wound up, whether by choice or by chance, in a sort of Bohemian limbo myself, I get why they chafe at the idea of 9 to 5 and nicely-trimmed suburban lawns, myself. (Actually I don’t get the latter and never have — what the hell is the problem with a nice lawn?)
So these songs, and these films, can be said to be the stories of their own lives and their own choices, the rejection of “normal” life and more common non-artistic dreams and ambitions. And certainly, for any successful or semi-successful artist, their choice to take an oddball path can be justified; if it all works for them, wonderful.
But they don’t leave it at that. The message of these songs and movies is that the Square, Normal Suburban Workaday Life just wasn’t for me, because my psychology was such that I couldn’t hack that would always be miserable in such a state; it’s almost always generalized and universalized as something much, much bigger:
The life you lead (assuming you’re not an Artist) sucks and you’re a fool or a coward for leading it.
What? How did we get there?
Not everyone has talent enough to be an artist and produce art on an occasional schedule (when the Muse moves one) and yet be good enough at it so as not to starve. In fact, the number of artists a society can support is surely hard-capped at no more than, say, 1% at the very most, and only during a period of strong, strong economic activity, when artists who can’t make a living on their art can get paid good wages as a waiter or something.
This is so obvious, isn’t it?
So what the hell is the Artist scorn for all non-Artists?
Actually, it’s not artists; it’s leftists. Musically (for reasons I can explain if you’d like, but that would be a whole ‘nother post), country music isn’t my thing, but a few months ago when I spent a week in Texas, I listened to several hours worth of songs celebrating working hard, living on a farm, patriotism, and essentially being a grown-up. I imagine that once the country artist makes it to the point where he has a recording contract, he’s living a fairly similar and hermetically sealed life as Der Stingle was in the early 1980s, shuttling between the recording studio, the video studio, the stage, the hotel and the tour bus; it’s only the scale that’s different. But most country artists are smart and/or sane enough not to insult the people who buy their records and concert tickets. (See also: furious backlash by country fans against the Dixie Chicks.)
And it’s not just leftwing musicians and actors of course. Other performance artists on the left often express a similar level of solipsism. “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me,” Barack Obama told the AP in the early 1990s, as Joel Kotkin reminds us, in this passage highlighted last October by Glenn Reynolds:
Many of the administration’s most high-profile initiatives have tended to reflect the views of urban interests – roughly 20 percent of the population – rather than suburban ones.
When the president visits suburban backyards, it sometimes seems like a visit from a “president from another planet.” After all, as a young man, Obama told The Associated Press: “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.”
In June of 2008, Jim Geraghty spotted a similar theme in a book by David Mendell titled Obama: From Promise to Power:
“[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. “The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions… that was scary to him.”
And then there was this classic bit by Michelle Obama on the campaign trail in 2008:
“We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”
Or average, everyday jobs — which bore the daylights out of the president, and presumably the first lady as well.
At the Weekly Standard today, David Gelernter looks at “Elites Gone Bad” and writes, “What America needs is a better class of left-winger.” Because let’s face it: when you go into the small college towns, and cloistered artists’ garrets like Hollywood, the smug has been rising for 25 years or so, and nothing’s replaced it. And they were angered by the Reagan administration and the Bush administrations, and each successive generation has said that somehow these elitists are gonna re-embrace their fellow man, and they never do. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to Marxism or nihilism or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-business sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
I think artists and others suffer from an unacknowledged inferiority complex. Think about it… if the oil companies took a month off and produced no fuel, we’d all be screwed. Even the “artist” who lives carless in the city relies on oil-powered transport for his food, fuel, heat and light, etc. Same with so many of the other industries the self-styled elite scorn… food, utilities, retail, etc. But reverse the equation; what if artists took a month or a year or a decade off? Would anything much fail? Most of us would hardly notice, much less care.
And if politicians like Barack Obama took a decade off, we’d have an economic recovery.
Basically the “right” says “grow up” and the “left” panics and votes for the promise that they won’t have to.
As always, it’s far more complicated than that, but it boils down relatively well to such a cliche.
“No, we don’t have to grow up, we can always get more tax money from rich people! We can borrow more, really we can! Anything but growing up!”
“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to Marxism or nihilism or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-business sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Related: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79xcUCf14rM&feature=related
Ed, to get a true feel about how high ‘the smug’s been rising,’ take a fresh listen to two other songs… two of the left’s most famous anti-war songs of the early 70s.
1) “Sunshine” by Jonathan Edwards
The most scandalous part of the whole sordid Anthony Weiner scandal was the admission that Weiner, the personified epitome of the new left’s best and brightest, had _no_ marketable job skills outside of being a congressman. The _only_ thing he knew how to do was to tell other people what they could and could not do, boss them around by passing laws (the effects of which he had neither the training or experience to even hazard a guess). Add to that Timmy Turbotax and a president who’s never so much as run a lemonade stand in his life trying to run the entire economy by dictat.
The phrase that conservatives should be pounding over and over EVERY time they’re near a microphone is direct from “Sunshine”: ‘He can’t even run his own life; I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine.
Like Alinksy said, make them live up to their own standards. Shove their 70s leftist pieties right back down their gullet.
2) “One Tin Soldier” by Coven.
“On the mountain was the treasure, buried deep beneath the stone./And the valley people swore they’d have it for their very own.”
Who in our current political discourse sounds most like those valley people? The leftist Van Jonesian wolf packs baying that the man is hiding his stash, that somebody stole our money, that the rich aren’t paying their fair share, or the so-called neo-cons trying to share our real intangible treasure — Peace on Earth, literally just like in the song?
“Go ahead and cheat your neighbor, go ahead and cheat a friend./Do it in the name of heaven, you can justify it in the end.”
That is the operating manual for entire left from Obamacare to global warming. The left has become the villains of their very own anthems.
Sanctimony was in back then. Remember “Signs” by the Five Man Electrical Band? Poor, smelly hippy can’t get a job or go to the country club because he’s a long-haired freaky person. Poor, poor hippy! Bad, bad society! I always feel a little guilty when I hear that song because not only would I not give the hippy a job, I’d probably sic my dog on him as well. Because the hippy is, in fact, an arrogant sod. He chose to reject “normal” society. At the same time, he expects “normal” society to accept HIM and criticizes it when it fails to do so. There’s something leftish in that, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
No wonder I’ve liked Rush since the 80′s. There has always been something about their music that reached me.
The essential part of the leftist world view is the conviction that the leftists are better than the rest of us. They’re smarter, wiser, more compassionate.
And that’s why they should be in charge. We’re all too stupid and selfish to know what’s best for us.
My nomination for the most irritating Sting lyrics comes from the Police song “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You”:
“I never saw no miracle of science
That didn’t go from a blessing to a curse
I never saw no military solution
That didn’t always end up as something worse”
Yo, Sting, tell it to the parents whose two year old son has just been cured — CURED — of leukemia. I’m sure they will want to wallow in your enlightened gloom. Tell European Jews who survived World War II how their survival is “something worse” than being gassed.
What a smug, vain, insufferable liberal idiot.
From Mr. O’Fama at #1.:
“But reverse the equation; what if artists took a month or a year or a decade off? Would anything much fail? Most of us would hardly notice, much less care.”
I say to you, who would create the transgressive art we need? The art (using our money) that mocks our way of thinking, our faith, our very being? How could we live without Andre Serano’s depictions of crucifixes in his urine? Do you think we would be better off?
Seriously, I save my contempt for the so-called cognescienti who consider this utter garbage as art. They need to be laughed at for being self-deluded fools.
I humbly submit a chorus from Rush’s “Something For Nothing” that I recently re-discovered:
“You don’t get something for nothing
You can’t have freedom for free
You won’t get wise
With the sleep still in your eyes
No matter what your dreams might be..”
Nice turn of phrase at the end there. But a bit too glib. That was the problem with the original, too, it was way too self-serving and not truly analytical.
Definitely rang the irony-bell, though.
Just one point: Sting didn’t insult his audience, he flattered them. Back in the 80s, Euro-Bohemian-Leftism was all the rage. Art school dropouts and faux pomo intellectuals were all afreak about Maggie Thatcher, Reagan, and Apartheid. Just about anyone under the age of 30 wanted a piece of that coolness. Listening to The Police was one way to feel fashionably relevant even though you lived with your parents and worked part time at Kinko’s. Knowing the actual meaning of the word “synchronicity” made you one of the intelligentsia – not like the stupid, uncool, everyday masses in their shiny metal boxes. Music and fashion and self-identification – you can’t separate them. Sting and Bono and the others were selling cool to the masses, not insulting.
In the spirit of irenic conciliation between competing musical automotive policies, let me say this about this: both songs are ROCKIN’. If my iPod had grooves, those two tracks would be worn out.
Anyhoo: Rush’s song posits a dystopian future where car driving is illegal. The Police’s song portrays a only mildly fictionalized present: here in America, living within walking or biking distance of anything else is INDEED illegal in most places, thanks to:
* Restrictive zoning laws, civil-engineering protocols, and building codes
* Lopsided allocation of government funds
* Corrupt local/state DoTs and developers–who are often the same people
So far from reflecting an individualist view of getting around, our current transportation policies are redder than a baboon’s hinder, and have been so for generations. In short: just because Bohemians largely dislike something is no reason to continue using Big Government to subsidize it and manufacture barriers to the alternatives.
Second that. Listen to his insufferable “Russians” — recorded at the height of the “nuclear freeze” ’80s — that takes the moral equivalence cake:
“We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too”
Hey — we’re all human after all! Nothing a big group hug can’t solve!
Sad thing is Sting is only a single, if nauseating, example of this cr*p. Nearly all aging “rockers” who try to “make a statement” are of this stripe. Rush — who even *dedicated* their 2112 album to Ayn Rand — are a refreshing outlier.
As a former working guitarist and tech to a lot of working pros, I’ve got some perspective.
First of all, the most humble performing artist in the world believes that you should hire a babysitter, make time, travel and pay money to hear and see his shtick. That’s the most humble. It’s simply a job requirement, those without a hard core of arrogance will need drugs and alcohol to maintain the stage persona and melt down. There be dragons.
At the early stages of his career the musician spends his working life in bars. This is not good mental hygiene. By necessity you will spend most of your time with people who reject work-a-day hours and lifestyles or have been rejected by the employers of that world. In either case, most will have a bitter grapes attitude toward the occupational success of others who happily enjoy the fruits of regular employment. This is contagious.
Many musicians pick up an instrument to impress chicks. If they are successful they grow up with some intimacy and relationship issues. Domesticity and the suburban lifestyle that has evolved around it are foreign to that world.
Luck is a disproportionate factor in show biz. Right place, right time is only the beginning. Genetic luck of the draw, having the right look all have so much to do with success that like most leftists they believe that success is the result of life’s lottery, not hard work. Too many hard working talented people are left by the way, for them to believe in only hard work.
These are just a few factors that incline musicians toward the left. And this is just in the early stages of their careers. With even some level of success they face outright expectations of conformity to the party line.
Conservatism: Throwing a hissy fit over the popularity of pernicious popular music since 1954.
Leftism: blindly accepting pop culture’s excesses without question since 1885.
Islamistism — Throwing a hissy jihad over pernicoius popular music since 610.
To be fair though, pop culture had gone completely off the rails by the time OBL’s inspiration arrived in America…
Ed, I was thinking specifically of 1949 and the direct line Mark Steyn drew between modern jihadism’s soul father, Sayyid Qutb, encountering American popular music played at a church social in Greeley, Colorado (horrors!) and OBL’s 9/11 attack.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120190688451636621.html
Great parody there at the end. The brilliance lies not in the execution but in discerning the one-to-one parallel. Good job.
I have thought such people only marginally worthy of the air they use ever since the startling venom of Pete Seeger’s Little Boxes became clear to me. For many owing one’s own home was the realization of a dream. But not for ol’ Pete. A box made of ticky-tack. Get it out of his sight before he gets a rash or barfs or something!