The Wednesday Essay: On Nocturnal Melancholia, Men with Two First Names, and People who Sell Me an Inconvenient Number of Lighting Tools

By RM
As the poets say, It's 3 AM, and I must be lonely.

Surely, unless Messrs. Thomas, Doucette, MacMillan, Yale and Cook are mistaken, I must be damn near miserable about now. Also, apparently it's raining. Neither is true at the moment. So why is it that, whenever I listen to that, or any mid 90s alternative song, I feel miserable?

I've been toying with this for sometime now, and have spent all of my funding and most of my scientific good name to reach this conclusion. My generation loves being miserable.

It's true. The Post Generation-X Generation, or Generation Y, or Generation 9/11, or the Information Generation, or Harry Potter and The Generation of Sorrows, whatever you will call us, is a generation that enjoys, occasionally, wallowing in its own misery.

Take the evolution of goth and Emo cultures. As much as they would like you to believe, they can draw no history past our generation. Emo is not the love-child of new-wave and punk. They're just sad, depressed idiots. And Goth has nothing to do with Victorian England. It doesn't. In fact, both movements can be traced to the year 1990, when a cracked out waste-head named Tim Burton got high and thought his fingers looked like scissors and Connor Oberst's sixth-grade girlfriend dumped him because he was "icky".

But surely this is a modern American success story. From such inauspicious beginnings, Emo has become a by word for the weak and emotionally sensitive and insular of the world. Instead of taking pain, and thriving on it, learning and growing from it, they wallow in it; Staying in their basement, pining for their best friend of the opposite sex, wondering why he/she will never see me that way, and listening to the newest from Dashboard.

Goth culture, meanwhile, has succeeded in taking non-conformity to the business world. Through their joint-venture with Abercrombie and Fitch, Hot Topic, they have not only spread wearing black in August to the whole world, they successfully conned everyone into thinking anything can be Goth. A cursory glance at any Hot Topic will find, after the obligatory Tim Burton rack: Care Bears, Transformers, Hello Kitty, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Harry Potter. None of those are Goth. They're not even close to Goth. They're Geek. So admit it, Goths. You're geeks who, afraid being labeled that would get you beat up in high school, hid behind an ugly amount of mascara. Come into the light. Everyone here is a geek and wants to help you. I have a friend who plays for the Virginia Military Institute's Football team. He'd love to talk Hello Kitty with you. I'm dead serious. And I can think of at least twenty people who'd love to talk Care Bears. And Harry Potter is a global phenomenon. Surely you can talk to one of them.

Counter-Culture is a wonderful thing, as is following your own voice and doing your own thing. But don't hide behind a pre-conceived set of behavior to hide who you truly are. Because then, We become the Gothest Generation. And as God is my witness, Cinema Strange will not speak for me.

RM
 

1 comment so far.

  1. Kari October 18, 2007 at 9:24 AM
    I have, for any number of years, been arguing that we are a generation who perceives hope in very few things, and that this is ESP. reflected in the music and "counter-culture" movements of the era--but people always tell me that I'm crazy. So, I agree, way to write about it--and I'm glad that have a blog now.

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