Pop Songs

~ Laura

In our morning check-in phone call, Steve noted that David Brooks did not steal his column from this blog today. We’ve been joking that Brooks is hijacking ideas on this blog for his column.

Today, Brooks has his social conservative hat on and is analyzing pop song lyrics from Pink and Avril Lavigne. He says that these songs are entirely new.

If you put the songs together, you see they’re about the same sort of
character: a character who would have been socially unacceptable in a
megahit pop song 10, let alone 30 years ago…

Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit
puberty around 13 and many don’t get married until they’re past 30.
That’s two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships
and shopping around. This period isn’t a transition anymore. It’s a
sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules.

Once, young
people came a-calling as part of courtship. Then they had dating and
going steady. But the rules of courtship have dissolved. They’ve been
replaced by ambiguity and uncertainty. Cellphones, Facebook and text
messages give people access to hundreds of “friends.” That only
increases the fluidity, drama and anxiety.

The heroines of these
songs handle this wide-open social frontier just as confidently and
cynically as Bogart handled the urban frontier. These iPhone Lone
Rangers are completely inner-directed; they don’t care what you think.
They know exactly what they want; they don’t need anybody else.

Of course it’s all a fantasy, as much as “The Big Sleep” or “High
Plains Drifter.” Young people still need intimacy and belonging more
than anything else. But the pose is the product of something real — a
response to this new stage of formless premarital life, and the
anxieties it produces.

In America we have a little problem with
self and society. We imagine we can overcome the anxieties of society
by posing romantic lone wolves. The angry young women on the radio
these days are not the first pop stars to romanticize independence for
audiences desperate for companionship.

Maybe. Or maybe this songs are for strong girls. Ones that are rebelling against the pink explosion of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and the Olson twins. Pink is a big boned girl who snarls at the camera. She’s more Billy Idol than Barbie. Avril Lavigne wears neckties and sweatbands rather than push-up bras and babydoll dresses. And both of them are married.

Published by Laura

9 thoughts on “Pop Songs”

  1. Good stuff, Laura! I loved your last paragraph. By the way, I think you don’t really get the full picture of how the young people are doing without a good look at all the different pharmaceuticals that are keeping them going (for now).

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  4. As the mother of two girls, 14 and 9, I am thankful there are strong women in the music industry, the ones listed above and others such as Missy Elliot, and even though she does wear a push-up bra, Christina Aguilera. I would much rather my girls listen to real music, not marry until they’re 30, and be as independent as possible. When did that become a bad thing? When did marrying out of high school and becoming dependent on a man come back into style?

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  5. Oh, come now. We don’t trust people who put up their mailboxes with duct tape? I don’t trust Brooks, but I find his mailbox kind of endearing. Really, you know, this proves that he really is Jewish (check out the comparison of the “Jewish” tool chest and the “Wasp” tool chest in Jewtopia. :-).
    bj

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  6. We don’t trust their judgement on what it means to keep one’s house in order, that’s for sure.
    Also, he’s firmly passed the age which today’s kids’ music is designed to piss off. If he’s pissed, that’s clearly a feature, not a bug.
    Once upon a time, the old farts complained that kids these days came a-courtin’ in that Mr Ford’s loud and dangerous rattletrap machine. They longed for the days of their own youth when all was right with the world. Mr B here is plowing well-tilled fields, spreading some very old fertilizer.

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  7. Well, I guess I am likely one of Doug’s old farts: my wife and I married very late and I will advise my kids that earlier is better. We missed a lot of time together, and for what? Some romances which now blur into the past, a lot of lonely uncertainty.
    That said, we had our reasons: we both looked at our parents’ marriages and wanted no part of something like that. We were trying to establish ourselves. Still, having somehow miraculously come through to a marriage we are happy in, we wish we had started sooner. And we had to spend thousands of dollars on infertility services, because of age, before we got our kids, and I’m definitely the least spry of the baseball dads.
    Matthew Yglesias was on this too: http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/why_i_read_david_brooks.php

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  8. I got married at the end of my first year of graduate school just shy of 23 and think early marriage is peachy, and that it streamlines living arrangements and emotional life and takes a lot of the pain out of the graduate school experience. Early parenthood and parenting during graduate school are a different matter, but I haven’t done it, so I’ll let other people comment on that.
    By the way, I hope this mailbox-blogging thing isn’t a trend. Who among us (except apartment-dwellers) is without lawn-care peccadilloes?

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