How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Accept Hipster Nation

"I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last; a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald


In a recent article for Popmatters entitled "Hipster Hatred Knows No Bounds," Michael Brett laments the current state of music as opposed to his heyday in the '90's:

Last weekend, I made my journey to Hipster Nation’s annual convention, the Pitchfork Music Festival. I arrived with a fifth of gin, my bag chair, and an immediate distaste for many of my fellow attendees. I knew they would need to share the space with me. But I wanted to let them know without any misunderstanding that their presence was nothing but a distraction.

How had things come to this point? Aren’t rock festivals built on a foundation of one nation under a groove? Why didn’t I arrive with anticipation for that singular moment, that show moment when you look out all around at that giant sea of bliss in which you swim?

The first reason has to do with me. I’m aging. And I don’t like it.

The second reason has to do with them. They’re not angry enough. In fact, they’re a bunch of wimps.

American ‘alternative’ music prided itself on being the angriest music around. Bands like Husker Du, Jesus Lizard, Mudhoney, and Nirvana cut their teeth on ‘70s arena rock. Their guitarists knew Thin Lizzy licks. They just played ‘em faster and louder, chewed up with feedback. When I began to go to shows in the early ‘90s, I was scared shitless. There were a mess of big dudes with tattoos (when they were still cool) and Melvins shirts who lived for the moment when a scrub like me would try to sneak around their mosh pit.

In regards to Brett's first reason, I can relate - I'm aging too, but I don't mind. I'm the cranky, old guy off to the side who doesn't really fit in at these shows and I'm thankful for that. But age is important in this debate. You first encounter "alternative" music when you are in your teens or early 20's and it is a fresh, new world that you embrace uncorrupted. Musicians seem larger than life and they are expressing things that seem to speak directly to you. As you get older, however, myths fade, and while you can still enjoy music no matter how old you are, the way in which it is viewed between generations is vastly different. If this "hipster" decade was Brett's initiation into the world of music instead of the 90's, he would probably embrace it in ways he can't possibly fathom now.

In regards to reason number two, I would say that Brett is right - this generation is not angry enough, but I think that all stems from what influenced this decade to begin with...

...rap metal, fires, rapes, and the general hooliganism that was Woodstock '99.

But this trend is nothing new. The punks were angry and railed against the hippies. When the crowds at punk shows became too angry and overcrowded with jocks, many punks left it behind to form a more cerebral-type music, i.e., Johnny Rotten forming Public Image Limited out of the Sex Pistols; Fugazi emerging from Minor Threat; etc., etc.

Every scene eventually becomes stale and the next decade will find kids distancing themselves from the current decade while borrowing from it as well to form something new. And someday, someone will be at a concert in the year 2015 feeling out of place as they deplore the state of music around them wondering why it all couldn't be like that Yeah Yeah Yeahs concert in '03 that blew their mind.

Why I Don't Care

Last Thursday, a woman called police to report a break-in at a house saying that she saw "two black males with backpacks on the porch," with one "wedging his shoulder into the door as if he was trying to force entry. One of the "black males" was Yale professor and distinguished historian, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who happened to own the house. The police allege that Gates was being belligerent as well as initially refusing to present proper identification, while Gates contends that it's a simple case of racial profiling.

Does racism still exist? Of course. Does racial profiling exist? Yes. But We ALL engage in profiling. Anyone who says otherwise is either a liar or lives in a bubble. And, while I wasn't there witnessing the Gates situation, I'm going to speculate anyway. When cops are alerted to a potential break-in, it is their job to respond and they should ask for I.D. as they have no idea who this guy is. And, yes, Gates has every right to be upset after just arriving back from a long trip to China to be accused of breaking into his own home BUT, however much of an inconvenience this is to Gates, if an officer asks you for I.D., show it to him. Anything less is asking for trouble.

Secondly, injustices happen to white people everyday. Is it any less of an injustice simply because the person handing out the injustice happens to be white as well? Had the parents of Jon Benet Ramsey been black, you can be assured that the injustices that they endured for years would have been viewed through a racial lens. Injustice is injustice is injustice. Several years ago, a black guy jumped in my truck and told me to drive. The destination was a dead-end in the ghetto where he proceeded to rob me and, luckily, not kill me which I had already convinced myself was on his to-do list. As I frantically drove away, I came across a white police officer only two blocks away. When I told him what had happened, he told me, "well, you shouldn't have been buying crack, you little motherfucker." White guy in the ghetto? Must be up to no good. I was profiled. That cop had fire in his eyes and I assure you, had I protested, he would have beat me silly and/or arrested me. As a white student at a black college, I was often profiled as smart and wealthy. Ironically, the reason I ended up at a black college in the first place was because I lacked both.

Just because injustices statistically happen more to one group than the other, doesn't mean that one should be ignored over the other. And every incident between whites and blacks should not be automatically labeled a racist incident. It's overkill and it makes it incredibly difficult to separate real racism from racial paranoia. The Gates story is not worthy of front-page headlines and I say this as someone who truly admires the guy.

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Rise Above

"The public is usually slow to catch on to new things, and it's important that musicians stick to their guns and not look for that instant gratification."
-Greg Ginn

In 2007, Dirty Projectors, a band out of Brooklyn, New York, released Rise Above, a cover of Black Flag's Damaged, except that the songs were reimagined exclusively from the memory of head Projector, Dave Longstreth. While I appreciated the respect that Longstreth had for Black Flag, I was never able to wrap my brain around Longstreth's interpretation of a punk classic.

On Wednesday night, Dirty Projectors played Red 7 and brought Black Flag leader, Greg Ginn, on stage to jam with them on a couple of songs. I wondered to myself, as I scanned over the crowd, how many kids in the audience actually understood the importance of the older gentleman on stage who was the most influential architect of the 80's underground music scene.

Ginn formed Black Flag in 1977 in southern California, as well as the record label, SST Records, in order to release Black Flag albums. SST, however, would go on to be so much more - releasing some of the most influential albums of the 80's by bands such as: Husker Du, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Meat Puppets, Minutemen, The Descendants, Bad Brains, etc. And, yet, the crown jewel in the SST discography is Black Flag's first full-length LP, Damaged, which was dripping with angst, rage, alienation, and humor.

Black Flag, driven by its thrashing guitarist and primary songwriter - Ginn, would become the hardest working band in the business, touring relentlessly from city to city to even the most remote areas while establishing an extremely dedicated fanbase along the way, as well as the ire of the Los Angeles police department which constantly kept tabs on the band and harassed them because of their raucous live shows that sometimes ended in riots. It was quite the contrast to see Ginn playing his slow jams on the guitar while Dirty Projectors played loudly along side of him to a serene crowd. The dichotomy, however, was thrilling all the same.

The Strange Case Against Judicial Activism

In New Haven, Connecticut, eighteen firefighters(17 of whom were white and one hispanic) alleged that the city discriminated against them by failing to promote them, despite the fact that they had all passed written tests for promotions. The city invalidated the tests because none of the black firefighters who took the same tests were able to pass them, which resulted in the eighteen firefighters bringing a lawsuit upon the city of New Haven. Sonia Sotomayor, as a member of the 2008 Second Circuit panel, ruled that the city of New Haven had a right to throw out the tests as it had a "disparate impact" on minority firefighters. Sotomayor is now President Obama's Supreme Court nominee and this particular ruling has become a rallying cry by conservative opponents who have accused her of "judicial activisim."

Judicial activism occurs when a judge or justice decides a case based on their personal or political ideology as opposed to a strict adherence to the Constitution. Minority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, said Sotomayor's federal appeals court ruling last year against white firefighters alleging reverse discrimination leaves the impression that she allows her agenda to affect her judgment and that she favors certain groups. "It's a troubling philosophy for any judge - let alone one nominated to our highest court - to convert empathy into favortism for particular groups," McConnell said.

If judicial activism is such a concern when nominating Supreme Court judges, then why do Republican Presidents nominate conservative judges while Democratic Presidents nominate liberal judges? In the case of the white firefighter discrimination case, Ricci v. DeStefano, the Supreme Court held 5-4 that New Haven's decision to ignore the test results were in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The five members delivering the opinion were all conservative(Alito, Thomas, Scalia, and Roberts) with the exception of Justice Kennedy who is considered a moderate or "swing" voter. The dissenting opinions were all liberal(Ginsburg, Breyer, Stevens, and Souter). In Bush v. Gore, in which voter fraud was alleged in the 2000 presidential elections, the Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 vote to uphold Bush's victory over Gore. Need I say how those votes were split? Whether you agree with any of the Supreme Court's decisions or not, the fact remains that many votes are split along ideological lines and everyone on the Supreme Court, past and present, seems to be guilty of judicial activism.

McNamara

When I first saw Stanley Kubrick's dark, comedy classic, Dr. Strangelove, about a mentally unstable general who orders a nuclear strike on Russia, I never really gave a second thought to military generals having world-destroying powers at their fingertips because comedy often relies on the absurd. It took some time after seeing Dr. Strangelove to realize that this "absurd" scenario was completely plausible before JFK's Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, who died today at the age of 93, closed that loophole.

Yet, what history will most remember about McNamara is that he was the anti-communist hawk who helped escalate the Vietnam War during his tenure as Secretary of Defense which made him an enemy of the anti-war movement, to say the least. Toward the end of his term, however, the doubts about the war began to set in, but it wouldn't be until later in life that he began to publicly address the situation and admit that the escalation of the war in Vietnam was wrong, which, justifiably, didn't win him much praise from Vietnam veterans and their families. A New York Times editorial would declare, "His regret cannot be huge enough to balance the books of our dead soldiers."

Initially, McNamara declined the post of Secretary of Defense, telling President Kennedy that he was not qualified, which led Kennedy to reply, "I don't believe there's any school for Presidents, either." And it's true - there are no schools for Presidents or Secretaries of Defense. But there is history and cultural understanding. And the lessons of Robert McNamara, which was brilliantly documented by Errol Morris in The Fog of War, should be a prerequisite for anyone involved in planning or inheriting a war.

"Nobody gets to do over his mistakes, least of all Robert McNamara. But perhaps the memory of this brilliant and tragic man will keep us from being too certain of our own judgment -- and encourage us to consider, even when we feel most confident, the possibility that we could be wrong."
- David Ignatius(Washington Post)

Grace Around The World

Last Sunday, I attended the cd/dvd release party of Jeff Buckley's Grace Around The World under the sweltering half moon on the outside deck of Mother Egan's Pub. Buckley's mother, Mary Guibert, was in attendance and I wondered, as she watched her son's live performances on the screen, if it brought her sadness, pride, or a mixture of both. Buckley drowned in May of 1997 in Memphis after having released only one album, but oh what an album it is. Grace was released on August 23, 1994, but wasn't well received commercially, peaking at #149 on the Billboard charts in the U.S. But, while sales of Buckley's debut album were sluggish, worldwide critical acclaim for Grace was off the charts.

Grace continues to be one of my top ten favorite albums of all-time, but for awhile I suspected that Jeff Buckley's amazing voice that I heard on Grace could only be possible through slick studio production...until I saw the dvd, Live in Chicago. His voice is something rare and it pulls you in whether you're a fan of his or not. Led Zeppelin guitarist, Jimmy Page, said of Buckley's voice - "Technically, he was the best singer that had appeared probably in - I'm not being too liberal about this - if I say, in two decades."

The problem with Grace Around The World is that Buckley has been dead for quite a while now and there is nothing in this live cd/dvd release that hasn't already been covered. If you want to see Jeff Buckley's performance live, get your hands on the dvd, Live in Chicago. If you want to hear Buckley's live recordings, you need to pick up the cd, Live at Sin-e. Whatever you decide to do, do yourself a favor and immerse yourself in the sounds of the late, great Jeff Buckley whenever you get the chance. You won't be disappointed.

Madness: An Interview with Marya Hornbacher

While in college, I was diagnosed as bipolar II, also known as manic depression, where moods cycle between highs and lows over time. The "manic" episodes in bipolar II, however, are less intense than those with bipolar I. Being diagnosed as mentally ill with all the stigmas attached would have seemingly been a low point in my life but, instead, I was finally able to put a name to the "oddness" in my brain. It was very liberating to find that many others shared the same condition and some of them were even well-known: Kurt Cobain, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tim Burton, William Faulkner, Sylvia Plath, Charlie Pride, etc., etc. The list goes on and on.

But it wasn't enough for me to know that I had bipolar disorder and that others were in the same boat. I wanted to devour as many books as possible to better understand my condition and one of the best accounts that I've come across is Marya Hornbacher's Madness: A Bipolar Life. Impossible to put down, Madness is a hellacious roller coaster ride that documents Hornbacher's battle with bipolar I disorder in such a manner that it seems improbable that someone could survive such an ordeal for so many years and, yet, she is here to tell the tale. Thankfully. Still, the most haunting part of the book may just be the facts that she compiles at the end regarding bipolar disorder:

*Life expectancy of an adult with serious mental illness: 25 years shorter than that of a person without

*Bipolar patients who have attempted suicide: 25%

*Bipolar patients whose suicide attempts have been lethal: 15-20% (This is the highest suicide rate of any psychiatric disorder, and more than 20 times higher than the rate of suicide in the general population. About half of all suicides in the U.S. can be attributed to bipolar.)

*Odds that a person with bipolar I will also struggle with substance abuse: 60:40

*Odds that a person with bipolar II will: 50:50

*First-marriage divorce rates for people with bipolar disorder: three and a half times higher than the rate of divorce in the general population

To say that I was enormously impressed by her book is an understatement, and she was gracious enough to grant me an interview which I can't thank her enough for.


PopCultureJihad: To me, the moral of your story is one of acceptance. Accepting that you will never defeat this illness and that it will always place limits on your life, but there are so many people out there who refuse to accept the fact that they are mentally ill either because of the stigma surrounding mental illness and/or the pressure to "fit in." You've struggled with this yourself and it's not exactly an overnight transition. What could have possibly helped you to reach the point of "acceptance" at an earlier point in your life?

MARYA: I think if I'd known how much pain I would cause myself and others by refusing to accept the reality of my mental illness, I might have thought twice about resisting it so hard. The simple fact is that a failure to accept is a failure to live fully; in refusing to accept my situation, I made a de facto decision to live in fear, antipathy, and outright battle on a continuous basis. Those are states of mind and emotion that are incredibly corrosive and ultimately destructive of the human spirit. By the time I came to realize that acceptance was the only way I would ever learn to manage my mental illness, I was absolutely beaten down, and beaten down by my own choices. I think if there had been people in my life who also experienced mental illness, but chose to accept and manage it, I might have learned from their example that theirs was the way to a peaceful co-existence with the mind that I have. There's no question that the stigma surrounding mental illness makes it exceptionally difficult to accept, and I believe that continuing to work toward education and understanding about mental illness will lessen the stigma, and therefore lessen the stigma that we internalize ourselves. The less we fear the illness, the less we fight, and the better we manage.

PopCultureJihad: There's a recent article in Newsweek magazine entitled "Listening to Madness" - http://www.newsweek.com/id/195694 - that talks about the Icarus Project in Manhattan - a "mad pride" collective - in which its members are forgoing medication and "embracing mental illness as creative force." I count myself as part of the nonmedicated population, but for very different reasons. What are your thoughts on the "mad pride" movement and others who forgo their medication?

MARYA: While it's worth noting that the Icarus Project calls itself "pro-choice" about meds, and suggests that its members can take them or not, at their discretion, I think the general tenor of the movement is fairly firmly anti-med. This is not entirely unfounded, by any means; God knows I've been put on meds that have nearly killed me, that have indeed poisoned me, and that have caused intolerable side effects. But at the end of the day, I need meds, because without them, I'm simply not as highly functional as I want to be. Similarly, I share the Project's antipathy/skepticism toward/about psychiatric hospitalization, diagnoses, et al; but I've also had my ass and life saved time and again by exceptional doctors at hospitals who have had the insight to see what kind of treatment was going to pull me out of a severe episode. I, too, struggle with what Icarus calls forced treatment, and others call mandatory hospitalization; anyone who struggles with these disorders recognizes the deeply discomfiting notion that our minds may cause us to lose control of our choices. The trouble is, our minds occasionally make dangerous and problematic "choices" for us when we're sick, and some of us, some of the time, become a danger to ourselves or others; it's difficult not to see, then, the appeal of mandatory hospitalization on those occasions. I myself would very much like to know that I will be put in a safe place if I am not in my stable state of mind, and am therefore not making safe decisions. I think, in some ways, that the whole struggle with the psychiatric establishment and its treatment modalities comes less from a proactive place, and more from a reaction to the exceptionally, spectacularly bad treatment many of us have received over the years--misdiagnosis, dangerous and poorly chosen medications, disrespectful professionals, ignorant professionals, misguided treatment decisions that gave us little room to move as individuals, and a general sense that we are not actually seen as individuals but as "cases." The psychiatric industry is, forgive me, a total fucking disaster, and the casualties are the people who are treated so poorly. The excellent professionals are definitely out there, but they're hard to find. So, after a certain number of years of poor treatment, it makes sense that people would finally opt out of the entire business and make an attempt to deal with their illness on their own. That said, it's not how I do it, because I can't. I've tried doing this without medication, and it just doesn't work. That's not because I'm being spoon-fed a bunch of garbage about how I'm "sick" when really I'm a "genius"--it's because I have a disease that requires treatment, and medication is part of the treatment I need. I do see mental illness as an illness--it is, in fact, a brain disease, no matter how many "gifts" it may bring. Which leads me to the part of the Mad Pride movement I have the biggest problem with, viz. the idea that madness and giftedness are one in the same. They certainly tend to cluster, genetically, in the same people and the same families; there's no denying there's a connection between mental illness and creativity. But I get tired of the line that my madness is the source of my creative work. Frankly, my madness does nothing but interfere with my creative work, on a practical level. When I'm having an episode, I flat out can't work. I speak for a number of the artists with mental illness that I know when I say that sustained, quality creative work--a lifelong creative career--requires a level of mental clarity that my illness denies me when it's at its worst. People with bipolar often don't want to take their meds because they're afraid they'll lose their highs, and with them their manic artistic productivity. What I've found is that, with my highs gone, I no longer generate reams and reams of manic garbage. I produce more slowly, but I produce better work, and I produce consistently, and over time I build a body of work that is of a higher level of quality than the very mixed bag my manic/depressed work was. Also, simply put, a whole lot of artists with mental illness killed themselves. I'm not interested in doing the same. ALL THAT SAID: I agree with the man quoted in the Newsweek article who speaks to the point that the Icarus Project has created something badly needed within the mental health world: a community of people who connect with one another on more levels than simply "we're sick." The Mad Pride movement may be an important move toward lessening stigma, by virtue of the fact that it sees us as individuals who have a shared challenge, rather than as a massive, unknown, feared, teeming Illness.

PopCultureJihad: I have reservations regarding genetic engineering in which they may be able to someday tinker with the genes that cause mental illness and possibly eradicate it, creating what I've imagined to be a world of "robotic" humans who all think and act the same. A bipolar perspective is far different than someone who is not mentally ill. A person growing up poor is going to have a far different perspective than someone who grew up wealthy, etc., etc.
On the other hand, I personally do not want to bring a child into this world knowing that I may possibly pass this condition on to my offspring. I'm very conflicted on this issue. With all that you've been through with bipolar disorder, how would you personally feel about bringing children into this world if you could? And, If you knew the child was going to be bipolar and you could eliminate the bipolar gene, would you?

MARYA: In short, yes. If I was having a child, and had the opportunity to prevent that child from having bipolar, I would do it. I would think hard, but I would do it. It's a matter of wanting to prevent what is sometimes an excruciating amount of mental and emotional pain. I wouldn't wish bipolar on anyone. There are people who've asked me if I could go back and live my life over, would I want to NOT be bipolar? Indeed, I would want to not be bipolar. I appreciate some of the experiences I've had; I appreciate that my mind has the advantages it has; but I don't believe those advantages are the sole purview of someone with bipolar, and I'd love to be one of the people who has the advantages and not the bipolar (because I, like anyone else, want life to be easier). But, I'm with you in the uneasiness about the idea of genetic engineering. With our knowledge of genetics in its infant stage (and it is), we still don't know how the genes for mental illness relate to other genes, such as (most obviously) those that are related to creativity. The perception that they are the same genes (madness = genius) is inaccurate, but it is true that the genes are related in some way; until we know what way that is, we need to be careful before we go removing genes willy-nilly, or we're not going to like what we get.

PopCultureJihad: I personally think that any sort of mental health care program should incorporate a neurologist as well as a brain scan to provide a sort of physical landscape of the brain. Though it has come a long way, we are still somewhat in the dark ages of mental health care. If Marya Hornbacher was in charge of overhauling the mental health care system, what would it entail?

MARYA: Research. The amount of money devoted to researching the mental illnesses is positively pathetic. You're right, we're still in the dark ages. We still have the New York Times referring to "mental illnesses" as opposed to "physical illnesses," when for God's sake mental illnesses are physical illnesses. If the Times can't get it right, do we expect the average person to know that mental illnesses are physical diseases of the brain? And if people don't know that, how can they be asked to support research in to these diseases of the brain at the same rate as they're supporting research into other brain diseases, like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's? The three major mental illnesses combined get a fraction of the research money that goes to Alzheimer's alone. (The disease that gets the smallest fraction is bipolar.) Until more research is done, we won't know what we're looking for when we look at the physical brain; there's early research, but very little, because it's wildly underfunded. All of this is a ripple effect of stigma. The perception that mental illnesses are not "real" illnesses leads to the perception that there's no need to fund research for their treatment, prevention, early identification, and (maybe?) eventual cure. So, research is one step. The more immediate step is to pass parity laws in every state that treat mental health care at the same rate that other care is treated. There needs to be treatment available at far-reduced cost to people without treatment through their employers. And there need to be social service centers that are trained in accessing mental health care for un- or underinsured populations, where the need for mental health care is very high. Finally, and I don't know how this is going to happen, but the medical, nursing, and other professional schools for people going into the care professions need to get a whole lot better. There needs to be far less misdiagnosis, improper medication, and poorly-planned care for people who need these services.

PopCultureJihad: There are testimonies in favor of Electroshock Therapy(ECT) as well as testimonies against it. You've personally experienced this treatment a number of times. You've said it's erased alot of your past memories. Do you feel as though it has helped you and would you recommend it to others?

MARYA: ECT has pulled me out of several severe episodes of mania and depression, and I'd do it again. It is a measure of last resort, and I wouldn't recommend it without knowing that all other efforts to break the episode had failed. But it can really be a life-saver. I do think that I've become more forgetful, and there are parts of my history that are very foggy, but on the balance, I'm glad I'm alive, and I think ECT has kept me that way more than once.