Girl Talk's "All Day" Is the Ultimate Millennial Album
Introduction: All Day Accurately Represents the Millennial Personality
The album All Day (2010) by Girl Talk perfectly encapsulates the millennial experience. What I mean is it is a very skillfully made dance-pop album that exquisitely represents the entire cultural milieu of the millennial generation, what you might call our generation’s default personality. If Boomers (who were originally called the Me Generation) can be described as entitled yuppies and Gen X as apathetic slackers, we Millennials can be described as depressed hedonists. (And perhaps Gen Z can be described as ironic nihilists, although that’s beyond the scope of my funding this essay1.) All Day is broadly inclusive while being explicitly apolitical, celebratory and humourous and hedonistic but ends on a note of faded idealism and hung-over self-reflection, and the man behind Girl Talk, Gregg Gillis, took all of the musical material without permission from other artists and then gave the album away for free as a statement on creative freedom.
Background and Context
All Day is a mash-up album—the ultimate mixtape—made on a laptop, condensing a wide collection of mostly American pop music from over five decades into one extremely catchy party album, composed of hundreds of samples and almost no original material (but it is very far from just being a rip off). I don’t think there is a single person in North America, at least over the age of about twenty, that couldn’t find something they recognize. The oldest song, as far as I can tell, is “Shout” by The Isley Brothers, released in August of 1959; the most recent is “Whip My Hair” by Willow Smith, released 26 October, 2010—All Day was released three weeks later on 15 November. As mentioned, Gregg Gillis (born in 1981 in Pittsburgh, PA) did not get legal permission from any of the artists or their record labels for any of the samples, citing fair use. He has so far not been sued or cancelled. The music label on which he released his first five albums (all mash-ups) is called Illegal Art.
The mash-up genre was originally called plunderphonics, a term coined by John Oswald, a musician and artist, to describe the concept of taking a recognizable “sonic quote” and using it in a new composition based entirely on such quotes, something he’d been doing as a hobby on a reel-to-reel player since he was a kid in the 1960s. The crucial aspect of the genre is that the sonic quote has to be recognizable. The difference between ‘mashup’ and ‘sampling’ is mainly of degree: a mash-up is mostly or entirely made up of sampled music with little to nothing musically original added or changed. This lack of musical originality does not make it less musically creative.
Gregg (possibly Old Gregg) Gillis began his musical career while at university (specifically Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, home of the Spartans and the first American winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Albert A. Michelson, doncha know) studying biomedical engineering; he came up with the name Girl Talk because, “It's a pop culture phrase. The whole point of choosing the name early on was basically to just stir things up a little within the small scene I was operating from. I came from a more experimental background and there were some very overly serious, borderline academic type electronic musicians. I wanted to pick a name that they would be embarrassed to play with. You know Girl Talk sounded exactly the opposite of a man playing a laptop, so that's what I chose.” (Source.)
My qualifications as a millennial include but aren’t limited to being born in 1989 (I’m almost exactly five months older—and ~100% poorer—than Taylor Swift), getting my uncle to take me to see Gladiator (2001) in theatres, matching my high school years (2003 - 2007) with the original television run of The O.C., and graduating high school the same year as Ye’s (as Kanye West) album Graduation was released (it was also the year Chamillionaire released Ultimate Victory, but no one remembers that). I remember N64s, VHS tapes, floppy disks, and portable CD players (the first CD my mom bought for me was Devil’s Night by D12 (RIP Proof and congrats to Eminem on his sobriety)). The first USB stick I bought had 128 megabytes of storage, which was an expensive upgrade over the 64 megabyte option. I remember cigarette smoke in restaurants. I remember getting Pokemon Blue and the clear purple Gameboy Color for Christmas. I remember where I was on Y2K, on 9/11, when LOST premiered, and when Obama got elected. I remember whale tails and wiggers and frosted tips, and when wearing crew socks with sandals would get you called the f-word and your ass beat, and I ‘member metrosexuality. I remember when The Simpson’s was good, Futurama hadn’t been cancelled, and Fox ‘News’ had barely begun destroying America’s (never very strong) ability to think.
Argument One: You’re Invited to the Party But Don’t Tell Me Your Life Story
So, Gregg Gillis is white, while many of the musicians he samples as Girl Talk are obviously not—almost all of the most prominent musicians on his albums are black rappers, and the n-word is frequently used—, but this has nothing to do with racism, only unexamined cultural assumptions (in this instance that racism is dead or at least socially irrelevant, for which our proof was the existence and successful career of Barack Obama). Furthermore, the whole point of his mash-ups is the opposite of erasure: the sonic quotes are supposed to be instantly recognizable, and the majority of Girl Talk’s samples are from extremely popular songs. And even beyond that, it is easy to find a listing of the songs sampled on the album on the Illegal Art website (linked to above), and Girl Talk’s early concerts were notable for the lack of separation between him and the crowd. Like the ‘colour-blind’ era of the late 90s and early 00s—which is the era from which the bulk of the samples are taken—an unhistorical and apolitical inclusion is the perspective of All Day and Girl Talk. Out of our social context I don’t think this is a bad perspective, and it’s obviously better than a reflexively exlusionary one; it just obviously can’t withstand any contact with our extremely (and insanely2) colour-obsessed social reality. And so one of the first things the album does is remove itself from any uncomfortable social context.
The album begins by juxtaposing Black Sabbath’s description of generals and politicians in their song “War Pigs” with Ludacris yelling “Move, bitch! Get out the way!”, creating a call and response that functions as an introduction to the album’s perspective.
Generals gathered in their masses
Move, bitch, get out the way!
Just like witches at black masses
Move, bitch, get out the way!
Evil minds that plot destruction
Move, bitch, get out the way!
Sorcerers of death’s construction
Move, bitch, get out the way!
The mash-up continues with Ludacris’ cartoonishly violent first verse (“I been drinkin and bustin too, and I been thinkin of bustin you upside your motherfuckin forehead. And if your friends jump in, they’ll be more dead. ... I’m doin a hundred on the highway, so if you do the speed limit get the fuck out of my way. I’m DUI, hardly ever caught sober, and you about to get ran the fuck over.”), making the point of the call and response hilariously clear: “Get your military-industrial-complex-looking asses outta here, we’re here to motherfuckin’ par-tay!” (As was the style at the time.) In other words, this is an album explicitly crafted to put partying for partying’s sake ahead of overcoming the banal evil inherent in our social institutions; hard-charging enjoyment that doesn’t care who’s side you’re on or what colour you are, only that you get the fuck out the way if you’re not getting in the fray (on the dancefloor).
The music itself, which is not a reflection of Gillis personally but of our whole culture, is also overtly (hetero)sexual and masculine, and occasionally strays into outright bigotry, such as when he samples Wale’s refrain on his song “Pretty Girls” with Gucci Mane: “Ugly girls be quiet, quiet; pretty girls clap, clap like this”. But Girl Talk more often intentionally undercuts sexism with ironic humour, as when he pairs the Phoenix song “1901” and its frequently misheard refrain of “falling, falling,” (it’s actually, apparently, “fold it, fold it”) with Ludacris chanting “How low can you go?”, playfully mocking the lustful male gaze. Now, is playful—or even pointed—mockery going to bring down a dominant and domineering culture that most often chooses to willfully ignore or dismiss out of hand the all-too frequent catastrophes of rape and sexual assault, and the inevitable dehumanization that results from treating women as little more than sex toys and/or surrogate and unpaid mothers? It seems, at best, unlikely (so sorry Gwen Stefani); but pointing that out kinda kills the vibe, bro. As stated up front, the album is here to party, not wrestle with pressing and severe social issues.
Furthermore, our culture’s widespread violent bigotry really isn’t a responsibility that either the album itself or Girl Talk as a musician is or should be required to shoulder. I firmly believe in making art for art’s sake (even in these dark days when such a choice may seem, at worst, thoughtlessly self-centred or cowardly), and as an artist who uses samples as his medium, Girl Talk is at least somewhat constrained in his choices. Of course, he certainly could have made better choices (though he also could have made worse choices). But in any case, I seriously doubt our various social calamities would improve if we start requiring artists politicize their art (more likely, I think, we’d merely end up resurrecting some even more stridently hysterical and hypocritical version of the Hays Code). Gregg Gillis’ social responsibilities begin and end with the consequences of his own actions as a member of his community, which is exactly the same for each of the rest of us; so long as he treats the people around him with the dignity and respect they deserve according to their innate humanity and their actions, I believe he passes the generally accepted minimum requirement of social responsibility (which is basically Hippocratic: first, do no harm).
If you think we’re letting ourselves off the hook with an inadequate level of social responsibility, well: I agree. I think at the very least we as adult individuals should feel responsible not merely for not harming our community by our actions, but for improving it by our actions. To paraphrase the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., what we need is positive action, not negative peace. And while I don’t think it should be contentious to believe that while producing art definitely counts as improving the human community, I think we can all agree that as beautiful and spiritually uplifting (in a non-denominational and perhaps even non-religious sense) as art can be, it’s never going to be as concretely practical as, say, fighting to make sure children grow up with proper nutrition and plenty of both physical, mental, and emotional exercise, instead of a steadily demoralizing and passifying diet of hyper-corporatist and white supremacist Christian nationalist propaganda and/or semi-regular classroom activities that include running for your hardly-started life from hundreds and thousands of bullets each going roughly 3,000 ‘freedom units’ per second faster than your chubby little legs. But it’s not the responsibility of us as creative adults to create a wholesome society in which our children can grow up hale and hearty: it’s the responsibility of us as adults: parents, educators, farmers, and all the various workers who toil miserably in the military-industrial complex and every industry that daily produces this violent and oppressive society. I firmly believe, along with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Y. Davis, and countless others from time immemorial, that if our social responsibilities to each other conflict with the law, it is always morally better to break the law than shirk our social responsibilities. To paraphrase Socrates: if you’re not in this shit for the pursuit of moral goodness, what the fuck are you even doing here?
However, this is clearly not the perspective of All Day, which can perhaps be stated as the pursuit of peaceful happiness is a morally legitimate use of one’s time. And, to be clear, I do not disagree with this perspective. I think All Day is an exceptionally well-crafted album, and it remains one of my all-time favourites, and one of the first options I choose from when putting on music for a crowd who can’t agree on anything. Where I disagree, if that’s even what I’m doing, is when the pursuit of peaceful happiness is used to replace direct social action. The pursuit of peaceful happiness is perfectly acceptable in a peaceful world. But in our world, which is, to paraphrase Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction, pretty fucking far from peaceful, it is an abdication of our moral responsibilities.
Politically, All Day is more or less just the Portlandia sketch “One Party At A Time,” where unemployed millennials are trying to change the world but keep getting interrupted and distracted by partying, but mostly stripped of ironic self-awareness. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that irony has been killed, and All Day is an album which genuinely believes in the effective political power of partying.
Argument Two: The Party Always Ends With A Hangover
This perspective is reinforced by how the album ends, on a rather idealistically melancholic note, pairing John Lennon’s “Imagine” with Bun B’s (censored) verse on “One Day” a UGK song discussing the fatalism and futility of the drug game:
This world we livin' in, man, it ain't nothing but drama:
everyone wanna harm ya.
In New York niggas (brothers) gettin' shot for bombers,
now they got your life in the palm of they hand like California;
niggas (playas) with dubs of hydroponic marijuana (from Pomona)
gang-bangin' got the ghetto hotter than a sauna.
Down in Orange, my nigga (boy) Pots died on the corner
behind a funky-ass (five dolla) dice game;
I saw him once before he died, wish it was twice, man.
I remember being eight deep off in Chucky crib,
lettin' us act bad, not givin’ a fuck (even carin’) what we did.
When we lost him, I knew the world was comin' to the end,
and I had to quit lettin' that devil push me to a sin.
My brother been in the pen for damn near (about) ten,
but now it look like when he gettin’ out I'm goin' in.
So, shit (now), I walk around with my mind blown in my own fuckin’ (lil') zone
'Cause one day, you're here, the next day, you're gone.
Imagine all the people
sharing all the world.
You may say I’m a dreamer,
But I’m not the only one.
I hope someday you’ll join us
and the world will live as one.
Lennon’s is essentially the same plea for abstract and superficial bipartisanship that do-nothing centrists constantly bleat. And the ahistorical and apolitical vibe of such centrists is also aptly described as nostalgia for a time that never existed, a feeling our culture has only more deeply marinated in since All Day was released, a feeling independent of whichever particular nostalgic time period you’re soaking in (your main options as a mass consumer are, in chronological order: the rock ‘n’ roll era, the Disco/New Wave era, the alt rock/grunge era, or the pop/rap era.). Our incessant navel-gazing must be deeply entwined, alternating between cause and effect, with this never-ending doom spiral of sequels and reboots being pumped out by the slop mills streaming services and the conglomerated Frankenstein monsters still lurching around old Hollywood lots (at least for now, during what may be tv-and-film-as-a-creative-human-expression’s last tortured gaspings, before the hyper-malignant cancer of capitalism puts on a constant fucking loop of AI diarrhea and (metaphorical) laxative advertising on every screen). You can even compare our current examples of ‘Artifical Intelligence’ with mash-up music in the sense that both are incapable of producing something genuinely new; their creative energy lies in rearranging, repackaging, and reassembling.
Of course, creativity has been described as exactly the novel combination of pre-existing elements, but I still don’t believe that qualifies what we call Generative AI as actually creative (or intelligent) at all. For one thing the AIs generate their outputs based on statistical popularity, and popularity is the precise opposite of novelty (and often intelligence too—hey oh!). And novelty seems to me crucial to creativity, since even an artist who’s decided on creating a work based on something artistically well-worn (an odd-couple romance, a friendship-deepening treasure hunt, lovable misfits achieving redemption, you-sonofabitch-I’m-in-type heists, etc.) is expected, at a minimum, to bring a new perspective, or technique, or twist, or something, anything, to their work. In other words, we still expect that even something derivative should have a reason for it existing apart from what it’s derived from. Girl Talk, and mash-up music in general, has many reasons for existing beyond the music it samples: not least being the almost spooky way two seemingly unrelated songs can somehow fit perfectly together; and the pure and simple joy of watching each person in the room at some point stop what they’re doing, glance up and exclaim, “Hey! I know that tune!” with a big happy dog grin on their face. Such moments are, I believe, moments of true human community—which is to say they are genuinely political, in that they bring us harmoniously together despite our differences. Such moments are the arts of humanity at their most refined and complementary.
Generative AI does not, beyond spurious claims of ‘greater efficiency’ (which is not even remotely necessary in creating art, is generally unpleasant when applied to social life, and is frankly dehumanizing in relationships) and untested and probably equally spurious claims of ‘increased productivity’ (a goal of only specific and limited value), bring anything new to human culture. Even the real reason for AI development—removing yet more economic (and thus socio-political) agency from people like you and me, thereby making all of us that much more desperately and helplessly servile to power-mad pedophiles and other assorted unrepentant reprobates and wrongdoers—is merely the latest insanely energy intensive elaboration on a scam that’s been the entire point of the ruling class’s existence since at least the Agricultural Revolution. The initial creation of Generative AI can be called a creative act, one of almost certainly deep and long lasting consequences, but Generative AI itself is neither creative nor intelligent. (In fact, I’ve sometimes thought of Generative AI as a sort of funhouse mirror of Narcissus, a sloppy and stolen anime reflection and garbled echoing sycophancy of our (white male) self-image and our (white male) voice we can’t resist, and as such could very well result in our own self-destructive all-consuming self-obsession, an outcome that would be inarguably and ironically stupid as fuck, and therefore entirely appropriate.)
(An aside I have no where else to put, but still want to mention: Missy Elliott flew so Nicki Minaj could faceplant.)
Argument Three: Sharing Is Caring; We Are All One
Now, you may argue that since ‘stolen content rearranged’ is an accurate definition of AI, how could it not also be an accurate definition of All Day, which (as I’ve already made clear) was assembled using hundreds of samples that neither Gregg Gillis nor anyone at the Illegal Art record label legally obtained permission to use? Certainly, from a contractual and/or propertarian (that is to say, an economic) perspective there is practically no difference whatsoever.
But there is one hugely significant difference from the perspective of how the ‘commodity’ is made available (we should probably call it the Aaron Swartz difference): Girl Talk’s albums were originally released as free downloads—technically they were released under the ‘pay-what-you-want’ model with the initial price set at $0—; and they are still mostly available for free (though some of his older albums now cost at least $5 USD if you want better than mp3 quality). Many AI companies have released their (least capable) models for free, as something like an introductory offer, but everyone should know by now that this is merely the first stage in Silicon Valley’s enshittification process. As with streaming (and everything else), the costs of AI will undoubtedly go in only one direction: up. The way AI is being marketed and sold is, essentially, a scam designed to further strand us on segregated platforms (ie, ‘walled gardens’) and bury us under mostly non-consensual sunk costs (like monstrous data centres) so that we won’t be able to escape even if we wanted to.
The reason Girl Talk released his albums for free with the option to pay was so that as many people as possible could enjoy them and those who wanted to support him and his label were able to, and for no other reason. His albums were not made to be ‘loss leaders’ designed to entrap consumers, they were not designed around scumfuck psychological methods of manipulation to subconsciously keep your attention focused on consuming for some sadistic asshole’s profit instead of thinking for yourself, and the lyrics of the songs Girl Talk sampled were not finessed or censored in order to fluff up shareholder feelings or deceive legal authorities and anyone else who might put a stop to the profiteering. To simplify: Girl Talk has not release his albums for free because he planned or is planning on selling our lives to the highest lowest bidder, which is exactly what Silicon Valley (and therefore Wall Street, and therefore Washington, and therefore everyone) does.
In fact, I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe that Girl Talk released his albums for free precisely to push against such immoral and inhuman profiteering: the last words on the album are, after all, John Lennon’s urging us to share the world. More metaphorically, it seems to me that a desire to freely share is also inherent not just in mash-up music itself—which is a genre that requires input from a wide range of people—but in music as a whole, which, as The Cat Empire have stated, is “the language of us all.”
This is likely literally true: from the anthropological evidence, we seem to have learned music at least 35,000 years before we learned ourselves how to write, which suggests to me that music is our first universally understandable communication system (plain language is, of course, much older, but language is, infamously, a cacophony of incomprehensible babble); and, neurologically, hearing is our ‘fastest’ sense (meaning our brains can process the sounds around us faster than they can process the sights, smells, textures, and tastes). Taking the anthropological and neurological evidence together, it seems to me that music is both our original and most effective (or at least efficent) form of universal emotional communication3. And, perhaps most importantly, music was not invented in order to be commodified and marketed for profit: it was invented to communicate; and communication is, as we should all know from paywalls, fucking infuriatingly difficult when it’s locked behind a price (which is of course on purpose: if you’re inexplicably incoherent and unhappy, you’re much easier to manipulate). Language—any and all language—is a tool most ethically useful when it’s used without restriction to create mutual (ie, shared) understanding.
Conclusion: Inclusion is Great for Parties, but Solidarity is Necessary for Life
Obviously, this wouldn’t be a well-written piece about Millennial culture without a comment from the often insufferably self-congratulatory music site Pitchfork. So, without further ado, from the review of All Day: “But if I need a five-minute fix, ‘Get It Get It’ is the best illustration of how the roomier confines of these songs allow the samples to breathe, evolve, and take on a life of their own without wearing out their welcome. Scoff at the supposed ‘wackiness’ of matching ‘Pretty Boy Swag’ with ‘Windowlicker’ and you'll miss what is arguably Gillis' most inspired musical arrangement. It's not great because of novelty, it's great because it totally makes sense-- it's almost eerie how perfectly Soulja Boy's halting cadences match Aphex Twin's fidgety programming, amplifying the implicit weirdness of the former and the skewed pop instincts of the latter. If M.I.A. realized that agit-pop is greatly enhanced with kickass guitar riffs, she might realize how perfectly tailored Rage Against the Machine's ‘Killing in the Name’ is for her protégé Rye Rye. Later in the track, Gillis pairs up the hyper machismo of Pitbull's ‘Hotel Room Service’ with Depeche Mode's ‘Just Can't Get Enough’ as a musical illustration of Girl Talk's general outlook, a unity borne of the search for hedonistic pleasure.
[...] What All Day and Girl Talk himself are nostalgic for is not a specific sound or even a specific period of time, even though Gillis' sweet spot is alt-rock and pop-rap from the 90s. It's not ‘hey, remember “Thunder Kiss '65”’ or, ‘whoa, what happened to Skee-Lo,’ but rather nostalgia for a time when MTV and radio were the primary methods of conveyance. They weren't perfect, but there was a certain thrill to being something of a captive audience, of letting yourself go and being impressionable for just once, finding out that ‘Possum Kingdom’ was pretty rad while waiting for a new Beck single, that both ‘Flava in Ya Ear’ and ‘Liquid Swords’ were great in their own way and that your parents liked some cool shit after all once you discovered the classic rock station. It's fitting that Gillis went old-school and ‘released’ All Day so that everyone could have it at the same time: He wants nothing more than to recapture the thrill of a true communal pop experience.”
What the reviewer doesn’t mention, perhaps because Pitchfork seems to enjoy its role as snooty gate-keeper far too much (the Sleaford Mod’s lyric, “All ya chinny wine tasters die in boxes like the rest of us wasters” seems extremely apt), is that they are describing a culture of open sharing: Radio and MTV “weren’t perfect, but there was a certain thrill to [...] letting yourself go and being impressionable for just once [...] It’s fitting that Gillis went old-school and ‘released’ All Day so that everyone could have it [...] He wants nothing more than to recapture [...] a true communal pop experience.”
The relevant fact is not Gregg Gillis’ exceptional curatorial skills, but that radio was free and MTV was cheap enough4 to be culturally ubiquitous (which is not to say the point of them wasn’t to make money), and it was their widespread availability that enabled the “true communal [...] experience” All Day tries to bottle. Such musical diversity (the reviewer mentions the average MTV viewer being exposed to Rob Zombie, Skee-Lo, The Toadies, Beck, Flava Flav, GZA, and classic rock) broadcast as widely as possible is the complete opposite of streaming’s relentless siloing and exploitation of each individual (everything is exclusively “for you,” and not “for everyone”), so that although practically everyone is listening to the exact same small handful of ‘musicians,’ everyone wants to believe their own musical taste is uniquely sophisticated—just like people who whore themselves out for brand names want to believe they’re ‘style icons’. (This is entirely anecdotal, but the number of people who’ve told me they listen to “everything” when they actually mean “everything on the Top 40” is too damn high!)
This kind of widespread yet hyper-individualized monotony (I’m reminded of the Leftöver Crack lyrics to their song “Clear Channel (Fuck Off!)” (accurately detailing how economic concentration always results in the destruction of genuine culture) from their album Fuck World Trade (2004), “We figured out a long time ago that it's much easier to control people when we're all watching the same TV shows, listening to the same radio stations, going to the same movies, looking at the same billboards, eating the same food, and speaking the same language.”) has turned out to be an excellent social solvent, turning what had been genuine community into what Margaret Thatcher accurately described as a mere collection of disconnected individuals. She was of course sadistically bigoted, viciously intolerant, and ignorantly derogatory toward other (poor and non-white) people, so she was actually celebrating the dissolving of community and sociability in the lethally corrosive selfishness of capitalism, but her unrepentant sociopathy unfortunately does not automatically make her description incorrect. Especially as enough of our political ‘leaders’ (on ‘both’ sides) have spent the intervening decades whole-heartedly agreeing with her, and apparently continue to hold her in high esteem and as an example to follow unquestioningly, so that even if her beliefs were not always and shouldn’t ever be true, they have undoubtedly become our globally lived reality.
It is exactly this unconnected individualism that All Day invites us to overcome, although with a caveat asking us to ‘leave politics at the door.’ And certainly Gregg Gillis is correct if by ‘politics’ he means the kind of egotistic domineering and insultingly pejorative manipulation the self-titled ‘elite’ perform on our screens with our ‘participation,’ exactly as if politics were a more boring and less confetti-filled episode of American Idol. But that is, of course, not really politics, for the same reason Taylor Swift isn’t a ‘real’ musician (but Gregg Gillis is): because what they do is done exclusively and dishonestly for their own material enrichment rather than any social or communitarian instinct to improve (or at least celebrate) our shared humanity5.
As a millennial, I vaguely remember a time when being ‘anti-establishment’ seemed like the only cool thing to be. I don’t remember any fellow kid wanting to be a ‘sell-out,’ even if they wished to become rich. Perhaps I’m still just high on the lingering fumes of Gen X slacker culture from before it was gentrified into the never ending hustle, but I think we have committed a mistake of historical and perhaps world-breaking magnitude by ‘growing up’ and going mainstream. (The Minneapolis-based and inexcusably underappreciated rapper P.O.S. said it perfectly: “you didn’t get mature, you got tamed; ain’t the same.”)
But, with all respect due to P.O.S., I think the lyrics I’m going to close this essay off with is by pop-punk boy-band Rise Against, and their once-famous song, “Swing Life Away”, from their still-extremely relevant and excellent album Siren Song of the Counter Culture:
“Am I loud and clear, or am I breaking up?
Am I still your charm, or am I just bad luck?
Are we getting closer, or are we just getting more lost?
I'll show you mine if you show me yours first;
let's compare scars, I'll tell you whose is worse.
Let's unwrite these pages and replace them with our own words.
We live on front porches and swing life away,
we get by just fine here on minimum wage.
If love is a labor I'll slave till the end;
I won't cross these streets until you hold my hand.”
1 I do want to add that we seem to have collectively given up giving the newer generations cool or even slightly clever titles (like are we really gonna start calling the next bunch of babies Generation Beta? Generation Beta Cuck Soybois?). To help fix this, I propose we rename Gen Z (with their permission, so far as it can be got) Generation Pandemographic. Furthermore I suggest we don’t vote on this, since we’d probably just end up electing Generationy McGenerationyFace. (And as for Gen A, I’m far too out of touch to have any suggestions.)
2 Discriminating against people based on their skin colour is exactly as idiotic and meaninglessly arbitrary as discriminating against people for their height, or eye colour, or the knobbliness of their skull, or the texture of their hair, or the circumference of their shit-smeared balloon knot.
3 Math (or “maths” if you have a cultural predilection for dick-riding ‘majestic’ inbred welfare nepo-babies who either practice depraved sex crimes as if they’re a ‘sport’ (like fox-hunting), or protect their relatives who do) may be another universal method of communication (and math and music are very nearly the same thing), but I think for most of us the emotions we associate with it are often deeply negative; and understanding mathematics is not nearly as ‘natural’ or ‘effortless’ as understanding music is, at least for the vast majority of us (including me). Perhaps if we were less emotional and more rational, math could replace or supersede music as a truly universal language.
4 I haven’t actually been able to find any data on how much MTV cost consumers directly (to be honest I haven’t looked like super-duper hard). However—given that it made its money the same way pretty much all channels did (and still do), by selling air-time to advertisers, and that it doesn’t seem to have been a ‘premium’ channel like HBO—I’m going to assume that it was often included with the more or less average and affordable bundle of channels. If someone can better inform me, it’d be appreciated!
5 All you fucking Swifties can come after me all you want: you’re wrong and I’m right. Taylor Swift is, like all billionaires, an exceptionally pathetic mediocrity. Why do you think they’re all so fucking thin-skinned and neurotically litigious?
