While I’m as addicted to my phone as the rest of you, I’ve never really been much of an early adopter when it comes to technology. I tend to get pulled along by the force of pure inevitability, joining the movement at the point where any further resistance stops being cool and starts looking simply obtuse.

And so it is that I’ve been playing around a bit with AI chatbots, mostly using Claude as a water-intensive search engine to research such cutting-edge questions as “what cars are good in winter” and “how can I tell when a pineapple is ready to eat.” But I’ve also used it a few times to help me do some writing. Nothing public that I’ve put my name on, but I’ve had it draft some documents and reports of the sort that no one will read. And for curiosity’s sake, I’ve also had it write some stuff for me deliberately imitating my writing voice.

Who are we kidding. It’s incredible.

All technology is in one way or another a means of either replacing human labour or amplifying human capabilities. Sometimes it feels miraculous, other times it is perfectly transparent, and occasionally it just makes you feel icky. But using AI is the first time I’ve felt like I am betraying humanity.

I might not be the only one. In the university graduation season that recently ended, at least three commencement speakers in the United States had their pearls of wisdom greeted by a chorus of boos and catcalls from the assembled graduates.

At the University of Central Florida, the audience erupted in booing at a ceremony in early May after real estate development executive Gloria Caulfield called AI “the next industrial revolution.” After she implored the audience “can I finish?”, someone yelled out, “AI sucks!”

At Middle Tennessee State University, the boos came when music executive Scott Borchetta told the grads that AI was a tool they needed to learn how to use.

And at the University of Arizona, the jeering went on for minutes after Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the students to get on board with AI. “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat,” Schmidt said. “You just get on.” The loud response from one member of the crowd? “Fuck this guy.”

It is possible this was all lingering resentment at the knowledge that somewhere around two-thirds of their classmates had coasted or even cheated their way through the last couple of years of their degree. Or perhaps it was more forward-looking: A bleak job market becoming more unappealing by the minute, thanks in part to the very technology being pushed on them by the speakers who had been invited to send them on their way.

But is it possible the hostility might have been coming from a place even more profound? Could the students have been, if only subconsciously, mourning the loss of their humanity, or at least, the imminent demise of their pre-AI selves?

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For all of human existence, until about a year or so ago anyway, the most significant feature of intellectual labour was how hard it is. Thanks to the success of the behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow, we have a good grasp of why that is the case. His distinction between “System 1” and “System 2” to describe two distinct ways the human brain processes information and makes decisions has become part of our received wisdom. It has been overused in places, and many of Kahneman’s claims have proven hard to replicate, but the basic scheme is still a useful way of understanding how our minds work.

System 1 is what is often referred to as our gut instinct or intuition. Think of driving a car on a flat open highway on a clear day, knowing that two plus two equals four, or catching a ball thrown at you from a few feet away. It is fast, almost effortless, and in a lot of ways completely automatic and involuntary; we often don’t even really know how we do these things.

On the other hand, whenever you try to memorize a new phone number or email address, do long division or multiply two three-digit numbers, play a musical instrument or learn a dance routine for the first time, you are using System 2. It is slow, voluntary, and explicit, forcing you to hold a number of thoughts and ideas in working memory as you work through the steps. It also requires an enormous amount of effort.

These are not actual modules or parts of the brain — they are modes of thinking, or ways of making judgments, and each involves a key tradeoff. What you gain in speed with System 1 you lose in accuracy, as the cognitive shortcuts it relies on often lead to errors in judgment. For System 2 tasks, the high cost of mental effort is justified by the need to get things right and to make things explicit. When someone insists you “show your work,” they are asking for the evidence of System 2 labour.

The act of writing is pure System 2 work. It is sequential, explicit, and transparent. You have to work through an argument, or a narrative, line by line, clause by clause. Writing a simple newspaper column can take an entire day, a proper book can take years of research, planning, and execution.

Unless you use AI. Take a few seconds to prompt a chatbot and the sentences come pouring out, sophisticated arguments, inferences and evidence, leads and kickers and turns of phrase. Some of it is great, some of it isn’t. But any writer who has spent any time with a decent LLM has experienced that moment where it says something better, edits it smarter, makes it more creative, effortlessly and in seconds.

There are AI apologists out there arguing that AI is to writing what the washing machine was to laundry, or what store-bought butter was to the butter churn: it takes away the hard drudgery of the task and leaves the fun, creative part to the humans. Treated as a new tool in the cognitive arsenal, the argument foes, AI is just another step on the way to freeing humans from menial labour, both physical and mental.

But the analogy doesn’t hold. The washing machine and the butter churn allowed humans to trade stupid work for something smarter, more ennobling. But the hard work of thinking is literally what makes us human. System 1 is your primate brain, the legacy of our evolutionary heritage from the ancient savannah. The hard, focused attention that characterizes System 2 thinking is a currency, and what you choose to spend it on defines what you care about, and ultimately, who you are.

Which is why whatever else AI does, whatever benefits it brings the world, there is a sense in which it literally steals your soul. A new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon and MIT found that when people used AI for even 10 to 15 minutes, they performed significantly worse when the AI was removed, even on tasks they should have been able to answer easily. They argue that repeated AI use appears to prevent you from building the mental model you need to solve a problem yourself. And when instant answers from AI chatbots become routine, using your bare brain for System 2 tasks starts to feel disproportionately hard, “a kind of recalibration that turns normal effort into something that feels like a defect.”

The rise of AI isn’t just a further stage in the liberation of humans from physical drudgery. It is a direct existential challenge to your identity. The students who booed and catcalled the speakers lecturing them on the exciting new digital tools that were transforming the world under their feet might have been merely irritated by the cheats in their midst, or anxious about the job market out into which they were being sent.

But more than likely, the jeers reflected a deeper unhappiness, stemming from the certain knowledge that they were being sent out into a world that was going to demand not just that they work in different ways, but that they become fundamentally different people. The last days of their university lives were the last moments they would ever spend with their pre-AI selves. And they were going to miss them.

An earlier version if this piece appeared recently in The Line

From the X-Files

• Nearly half of American adults under 30 say they would prefer to live in the past if they were given the option.

• Alan Cross’s list of the top 50 all-time alt-rock one-hit wonders is fine but it is missing Sheriff’s When I’m With You, which is the greatest one-hit-wonder of all time.

• The Smashing Pumpkins are recreating the tour they did in support of the original Mellon Collie album. The “rats in a cage” tour will feature two sets, one acoustic, one electric, starting this fall.

• Musique Plus, the Quebec version of Much Music, has been reborn for the Tik Tok era

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Everyone knows that our political discourse is wretched. What passes for political debate, in Canada and the United States as well as most of what used to be called the civilized world, has been pretty much reduced to partisan grunts, AI-generated meme-trolling, and fake news. Why that is the case is a matter of some debate, though there is a widespread suspicion that the internet, and in particular social media, have something to do with it.

That’s almost certainly true. But if Elon Musk’s X platform is the last nail in the coffin that holds the corpse of the old 20th century ideal of deliberative democracy, a good candidate for the first is a creation of an earlier media billionaire: Ted Turner's CNN.

When Ted Turner died a couple of weeks ago, he got the lengthy bio-pic worthy obituaries that he deserved. But what was missing was a broader conversation about his impact, and how so much of what we are dealing with today in our media environment is a downstream effect of the cable news network that Turner launched on June 1, 1980.

In an age where user-generated content is king, it is hard to get our heads around just how innovative CNN was. It had a segment called World Report that was basically the Huffington Post of its day, consisting of plenty of unedited material and contributions from unpaid freelancers who had been provided with beepers they could use to alert producers in Atlanta about breaking news around the world.

It was long before anyone had access to large-bandwidth digital transmission, so CNN used air courier services to ship tapes to their studios in Atlanta, London, or Tokyo. There are crazy stories of the workarounds they would use to get access to footage. For example, a producer in Nigeria had no budget to pay for delivery so he would give stuff to a guy at the airport, who would hand it to pilots to smuggle to New York, where CNN reps would meet the pilot and then get the tapes to Atlanta. There’s a similar story about a Lithuanian television station, after the Soviets invaded in 1991 shipping stuff through a diplomatic pouch to the Moscow bureau of CNN. It’s not for nothing that CNN and its cultural twin that also launched in that fateful summer of 1980, MTV, are often credited with helping the U.S. win the Cold War.

But more than any other media outlet, CNN can be credited (or, perhaps more plausibly, blamed) with the invention of the 24-hour news cycle.

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The idea of the 24-hour news cycle does not just mean that the station provides round-the-clock coverage. It is exactly what it describes: a cycle, which has a distinctive pattern of coverage that begins with the initial “breaking” news of an event (such as a mass shooting or a natural disaster), followed as soon as possible public reaction to the event, commentary from pundits, academics, and other experts, and punctuated by updates on the actual event as new information comes available.

This had a profound influence on how politics functions, thanks to three major developments. The first was speed. Cable news stations, especially networks such as CNN that have stringers, affiliates and other contacts around the planet, are able to cover breaking news in something close to real time. The advent of cheap mobile communications technologies have made it even easier.

But as the news cycle speeds up, the message inevitably becomes compressed. This gave rise to what was soon called “the CNN effect,” where saturation coverage of an event creates almost instant mass public awareness of an issue, forcing politicians and other authorities to react often before they are ready, and to formulate policy and public relations responses on the fly.

Finally, the unintended consequence of this was a massive increase in the power of repetition in forming public political opinion, as the same clips, the same quotes, and the same news copy read repeatedly throughout the day.

Together, these had a transformative effect on our political culture. It meant that if you could get something into the news cycle, you could count on it being repeated many, many times, burning it into people’s minds. And for politicians, this combination of speed, compression, and repetition means that no attack or criticism can go unanswered for any significant length of time. The longer an attack is left to itself without being disrupted by a response, the more it gets repeated and the sooner it becomes lodged in the public’s brain as a fact.

The consequences of all of this are now very well known. In the age of 24-hour news, it is not enough for a political leader to have a sage council of advisors who can think over how to take a measured response to a crisis. It has become necessary to have a permanent “war room,” ready to go into a state of high alert at the slightest sign of trouble. Furthermore, the objective can no longer be to establish the truth, what matters is simply “getting the message out there.” When there is barely time to react, there is, needless to say, no time to think, much less time to develop a complex response. It is all about talking points and message discipline, paired with whatever wedge issue you can use to turn the whole thing back on the opposition.

It is easy to see how many of the great political afflictions of the internet age — the instant and global propagation of news, the extreme amplification of talking points, wedge issues, half truth and lies, as well as the flooding of the information space with misinformation from hostile actors — are themselves just the logical extensions of processes and techniques that were well developed by the time the World Wide Web launched in 1993.

Curiously, CNN played a key role in one of the first great crises of credibility regarding internet-era news, surrounding the explosion and crash in 1996 of TWA Flight 800 out of New York. Despite strenuous official denials, former White House Press Secretary and ABC News correspondent Pierre Salinger held a press conference where he claimed he had proof that the plane had been accidentally shot down by the U.S. Navy. Editors at CNN traced Salinger’s “proof” to a hoax email from a retired airline pilot that had been circulating on the Web for a couple of months.

CNN quickly exposed the hoax, but the whole episode seriously rattled the journalist community about the growing power of online news. As one CNN reporter put it: “People are used to looking at a TV screen and accepting it as fact… the fear [in the internet age] is that people could be making life-changing decisions based on information that could be horribly wrong.”

Ted Turner didn’t want to just be a media mogul, he wanted to change the world. He sincerely believed in the power of the media to bring people together by telling positive stories, or by telling the stories that no one else would tell. Making money and doing good could go hand in hand.

He certainly changed the world, but not in the way he intended. The age of deliberative democracy didn’t end with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, or with the rise of Facebook, or with the first algorithmically optimized outrage cycle. It ended, or at least began ending, on June 1, 1980, in Atlanta, with the vision of a man who genuinely believed he was making the world a better place.

From the X-Files

• The new Tragically Hip musical It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken is now running at Hamilton’s Theatre Aquarius. The story follows Waleed, an exiled journalist who arrives in Canada and falls for Kate, the owner of a local music store, with the Hip’s big hits as the backdrop.

• You might have seen the viral social media posts starting with the tag “hey what were you like in the '90s?” featuring montages set to Goo Goo Dolls' hit song Iris. A writer at Brock University used it as the hook for an essay arguing that the 90s nostalgia trend reflects structural economic failure and is unwittingly mocking the students of 2026 by showing them what they can't have.

• And probably not unrelated: There’s a growing trend of students booing commencement speakers who try to sell them on the AI-powered future.

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My first real slow dance was in grade 7, with a pretty brown-haired girl named Cia who apparently “liked” me, which was the lingo of the time for having a crush on someone.

I’m certainly mis-remembering parts of it, but the story I’ve settled on is that it was at a house party in Heather Harkness’ parents’ basement. One of Heather’s older brothers, lurking upstairs and having had enough of the agonizing awkwardness of what was going on, came down to teach us all how to slow dance: Put on a song; girls hands go here, boys hands go there, turn clockwise in a slow circle till it’s over.

And so it was that I found myself standing in front of Cia Christensen, reaching out with my arms locked like some middle school Frankenstein. She adjusted my hands, pulled me a little closer, put a hand on my left shoulder and leaned her chin on my right. I couldn’t tell you what song was playing; whatever it was was drowned out by a roaring waterfall in my ears. All I remember is how unexpectedly warm it all felt, her breath hot on my neck, her cheek burning against mine.

Slow dancing became a staple of our collective adolescent awakening, in that shoulder season between the indifference of childhood and the anxious, alcohol-fueled dramas of our later teenage years. It is hard to overstate the way it has burrowed itself into my memories of that period, in a way that managed to be both shockingly intimate and surprisingly innocent. Slow dancing almost never led to anything more; boys and girls would come together, twist in a circle for four or five minutes, then move apart as if it had never happened. It was a prelude to other things, of course, but those wouldn’t come for a few years yet.

If the trendspotters are to be believed, slow dancing among Gen Alphas has pretty much died out. Writing for Billboard, Kyle Denis chronicled the “evolution” (i.e. gradual disappearance) of the practice a few years ago, largely through interviews with DJs who had been observing how the risky intimacy of slow dancing had given way to a more ironically sexualized set of dance floor moves, mostly twerking. In a widely-circulated essay in the Globe and Mail last December, the Kelowna writer Kelly Young picked up on a report from her Grade 8 niece, who told her they never played slow songs at school dances, and she hadn’t once slow danced with someone she likes.

This is not necessarily a problem, or anything to remark upon for reasons other than misplaced nostalgia. I’ve never been to a sock hop, danced the jitterbug, or taken a girl to the soda shop for a milkshake, and I don’t feel like I missed out on anything crucial. Youth culture changes quickly, and the norms around boy-girl interaction and how intimacy is negotiated and navigated are so specific to a time and place they can be completely opaque to the olds. In a lot of ways, that opacity is precisely the point.

What is concerning though are the reasons why slow dancing seems to have gone the way of acid wash jeans and leg warmers. As the Billboard story reports, part of it has to do with changing tastes in music — lovey-dovey power ballads or romantic R&B stuff giving way to more raw and blatantly sexualized themes. At the same time, there is some evidence that the changing politics of gender is an issue, as Gen Alpha recoils from the way the “traditionally binary-gendered exercise of slow dancing leaves out many people.”

But more than anything, the culprit seems to be that ever-present companion of our analog lives, the smartphone, and the new dimension it brings to the proceedings. Kids today live in a constant fear of being what they call “cringe” — to be the object of second hand embarrassment on the part of their peers. Almost any type of behaviour can be cringe, it just has to violate any one of the mess of unwritten norms around social media behaviours, such as a lack of self-awareness or social awkwardness, showing excessive emotion, or just being a pick-me or a try-hard.

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That’s not a new thing, by any stretch. Every youth culture has its tacit rules around appropriate public behaviour, which almost always sets limits on what is an acceptable amount of earnestness and enthusiasm one is allowed to demonstrate. But what is different today is that cringe-inducing behaviour, however incidental or limited, can be filmed and edited and shared for all the world to see. It is one thing to have your friends in laugh as they watch you trying to slow dance with a girl six inches taller than you; it is another thing entirely to have the episode shared and edited and stitched into a hundred different reaction videos on TikTok.

In short: kids don’t slow dance, because they are afraid of being filmed slow dancing.

This is a small aspect of a more general social shift. We are only in the earliest stages of the 360 degree 24/7 surveillance panopticon we’re building for ourselves, and its full implications for all of society will play out for years to come. But for kids, the problems are immediate and acute. As Kyle Denis puts it, slow dancing was such a culturally important experience because of how it funnelled “heightened levels of intimacy and vulnerability into core memories — a phenomenon that is harder for Gen Z to cultivate because of the unprecedented omnipresence of technology in their lives.”

It is precisely that combination of intimacy and vulnerability that was enabled by those basement house parties that were the major signposts of middle school. Periodically through the year, someone would announce they were having a party, which meant that about twenty of us, more or less equally divided between boys and girls, would show up on a Saturday night, mumble hello to the parents, then troop down to the basement for a few hours.

Nothing much happened at these parties. The boys would talk about sports, the girls would take turns crying. There would be chips and pop. We would maybe watch a movie or some videos, but mostly we would listen to music, lip syncing or trying out moves from music videos or deciphering the hidden meanings in the album’s liner notes.

Those basements were bubbles of safety where were were hidden from the prying eyes of parents, teachers, and other classmates, and where the terror of risk and experimentation was buffered by the security of knowing that nothing really bad could happen. We didn’t do much, partly because we didn’t know what to do. Whatever hormonal and psychological stirrings were happening in our early adolescent brains and bodies, they had no clear target or outlet.

That is, until we were taught to slow dance. But even then, the best that could happen was that you’d spend a few minutes in awkward and experimental intimacy with someone you maybe sorta kinda liked. The worst was… the same thing. For those few moments in those few years, to slow dance was to be balanced on a knife edge between play acting grownup behaviour we barely understood, and stepping through a portal to something that would eventually prove to be far more fraught, for better and, more often, for worse.

The memory I have of my first slow dance is so strong precisely because it is so incomplete. No recording exists, no one can modify or correct it. All that’s left are a few images and a burning cheek, reshaped by forty odd years of remembering it into something that is entirely mine. And that is ultimately what Gen Alpha is being robbed of: that private and personal challenge of stepping uncertainly toward another person, into an experience that belongs only to them, unverifiable, unchallenged, and unshared.

From the X-Files

• From the WSJ, Generation X goes to the Moon begins with the observation that all four of the Artemis II astronauts were Gen Xers, and explores what that means for a generation traumatized by the Challenger disaster.

• In a sign of shifting political winds, the new premier of Quebec is a Gen Xer, as are all of her rivals. Speaking of Quebec, Melissa Auf der Mar’s book Even the Good Girls Will Cry is part rock memoir, part love letter to the Montreal of the 1990s.

• CFNY: The Spirit of Radio is a TVO documentary about the Toronto radio station that defined alternative and indie culture in the eighties and nineties.

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ONE OF THE ODDEST MUSICAL SCANDALS of the late 1980s was the case of Milli Vanilli, an R&B duet from Munich that sold over 30 million records internationally with hits such as “Blame it on the Rain” and “Girl You Know It’s True.”

They won a Grammy award in February 1990 for Best New Artist, but it all came crashing down that November when their producer, Frank Farian, admitted that neither member of the group – the Frenchman Fab Morvan and the German Rob Pilatus – had actually done any singing on their records, and their live performances were all lip-sync’d to backing tracks. Their Grammy was promptly revoked, and there was even a class action lawsuit on behalf of record buyers who had been “defrauded.”

In a sad coda to it all, they attempted a comeback of sorts in 1997, but it was cut short after Pilatus spent time in jail for assault and robbery, and then died in a drug overdose in early 1998.

What is weird about the whole affair is that no one could have seriously believed that Rob and Fab were anything more than the Zoolanderesque karaoke frontmen for an entirely manufactured act. To begin with, their producer, Frank Farian, was the brains behind Boney M, another famously cooked-up group of lip-sync’ers. Second of all, all you had to do was watch any interview of Rob and Fab speaking to know that there was little to no chance these two disco club rats were the voices of Milli Vanilli. And as early as summer 1989, there was an incident where the duo were singing live on MTV when the recording jammed and started skipping, at which point Pilatus ran off stage in a panic.

Indeed, as a 2023 documentary confirmed, pretty much anyone remotely associated with the industry knew what was going on. And even the audience didn’t seem to care much one way or another. What really catalysed it as a scandal was when one of the guys who actually did the singing on the record complained publicly about his lack of credit, and exposed Morvan and Pilatus as “imposters”. At this point, everyone had to pretend to be shocked and/or apologetic, while Rob and Fab were hung out to dry.

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This past spring, a scandal with a similar narrative arc played out in a much more niche community, that of electric guitar YouTubers. Like virtually every other hobby community or cottage industry on Earth, there is a large online community of guitar players offering a mix of tips and tricks, serious instruction, gear reviews, and show-offy technical set pieces.

One of the more popular of these influencers is (or, was) a 20-something Italian funk musician named Giacomo Turra, who has three quarters of a million Instagram followers, a substantial following on other platforms, and a signature guitar with D’Angelico. I followed Turra, and though I wasn’t really a fan of his music his videos were entertaining and highly produced jams with other musicians. But one thing was pretty obvious: he wasn’t playing live on his videos – he was clearly miming the guitar parts to pre-recorded tracks.

Lots of YouTubers do this. And even though there is a subplot in the guitar YouTube world where people step through videos frame by frame trying to “out” those who might be faking it, many people defend the practice on the grounds that as long as you actually wrote, and can actually play, what you are miming, then it’s not a big deal to air guitar it for the perfect internet take.

But a couple of months ago, a British bass player and YouTuber with half a million subscribers named Danny Sapko put out a video taking down Turra for a number of other more serious crimes. As Sapko discovered, not only was Turra miming his guitar playing, in some cases he was actually fake playing the piece at a slower tempo and then speeding up the video, to make himself look like a better player than he was. Worse, there was strong evidence that the songs he was playing over weren’t even actual guitar parts, but computer-generated tracks from a notation software. Finally, another musician jumped into the comment boards under Sapko’s original video to point out that a lot of Turra’s most popular pieces were stolen from other musicians, and Turra wasn’t flagging them as cover versions, he was claiming them as his own. He was even stealing the entire arrangements and solos.

The whole thing blew up hugely. Almost every major guitar YouTuber put out a video giving their take on the scandal, though probably the most devastating came from Rick Beato, who is the closest thing the community has to a wise elder. As Beato told his five million subscribers, he had actually filmed a session with Giacamo Turra, but had quickly realised that “he wasn’t good enough to be on my channel.” Turra’s half-assed apology only made things worse; the outrage turned into a pile-on, complete with slightly cruel parodies.

As with Milli Vanilli, one of the problems with analysing the scandal here is figuring out precisely just what Turra did wrong. The musical theft and plagiarism is obviously serious, and lots of people pointed out, with considerable indignation, that Turra had helped himself to songs from musicians with far greater ability, but far fewer followers.

If musical theft is the crime, Turra is guilty as charged. But to a large extent, the plagiarism was understood as a relatively small part of a bigger problem, which is that Turra was faking all of it: the playing, the skills, the pretend live performances. What seems to have happened here is that, like Rob and Fab, the Turra scandal exposed something that the guitar community knew was widespread, but which everyone had agreed to pretend wasn’t happening, or at least not make a big deal out of. Once Sapko’s video hit, it became impossible to ignore, and Giacomo Turra became the lightning rod for a great deal of pent up anger and hostility in the online guitar community.

Yet behind all the contempt directed at Giacomo Turra there is something else at work: fear. The thing about electric guitar is that it is one of the last redoubts of the old analog culture. An electric guitar running through a tube amp cranked until it breaks up and distorts remains the craft’s defining aesthetic, and has been the organising principle of the vast majority of all popular music released since the early sixties. But that has been compromised in any number of ways over the years, from digital effects processors to GarageBand for recording to modelling amps to digital pickups that allow you to change the very essence of your guitar at the push of a button.

In his own take on the Giacomo Turra affair, a guitarist named Troy Grady put the situation in stark terms. He starts by conceding that musicians miming is nothing new; from Soul Train to American Bandstand to Top of the Pops, big acts have air-banded their way through the studio versions of their hits.

But what distinguishes those bands from YouTube fakers like Turra are the audience expectations. Everyone knew the acts on these shows were faking it – sometimes the bands even made fun of it on stage (like in this video of Michelle Philips eating a banana while “singing”, or Nirvana taking the piss on Top of the Pops). With Giacomo Turra, it was just layer after layer of deception by a guitarist with a fictional skill set, whose entire performance is a lie. It’s like if Rob and Fab weren’t even real people, and Milli Vanilli’s songs weren’t real songs, and the session singers weren’t even real singers, but instead it was all a digital concoction.

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Two years ago, Rick Beato interviewed Billy Corgan for his channel. Their conversation is 90 minutes long, and it is a fabulously thoughtful and engaging discussion about the creative process, the mechanics of recording music in the nineties, and the birth of the grunge scene. But toward the end, Beato tries to draw Corgan into some criticisms about the present state of the music biz. He begins with a softball, asking Corgan what he thinks about the way TikTok drives the music business today.

But Corgan doesn’t bite. Instead, he says that “kids are going to gravitate to excitement. You can’t look askance at kids gravitating to excitement in a dopamine rich society. The artists just need to figure it out.”

Beato tries another tack: “But are you glad you [Smashing Pumpkins] came around in the pre internet, pre social media, pre cell phone era?”

Again, Corgan declines the easy dunk. Instead, he suggests that Smashing Pumpkins would be an even bigger band if they came out today: “We were a perfect band for social media,” he tells Beato. “We were visually rich, with strong personalities, we would have done well.“ Then he adds the kicker: “I don’t blame kids for leaning into the modern world.”

But then Corgan himself raises the ante, and suggests that the real problem for artists is looming with the rise of artificial intelligence: “We are on the verge of AI systems that will make learning to play an instrument redundant. I’ll bet you in 20 years there will be artists who will just program music” through AI systems. After Beato proposes that it is actually more like three years out, Corgan replies sure, whatever. The point is that AI systems will completely dominate music. An intuitive artist beating an AI system will be very difficult, since a musician will be able to play three notes outlining an idea and the AI will do the rest. They will get rich, and “no one will care if they can’t play, or don’t know a 7th or a 9th chord.”

Corgan ends up arguing that in the grand scheme of things this is just the way of the world, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. At the very least, there is no point in yelling at the tides. But he concedes that something will be lost along the way. Making music, Corgan says, is a deeply emotional intuitive process that takes time; more than anything it is an exploration of self. And, he concludes, “No AI system will ever trump that journey.”

Note that he’s not claiming that no AI will ever make music that could sound as authentic and resonant as, say, Nevermind or Siamese Dream. It’s a more profound claim: that making music is part of the human process of self-discovery, which is worthwhile and valuable for its own sake. And no machine can do it, precisely because they are not human.

Or as Troy Grady concludes his own video about Giacamo Turra:

This is more important than ever, people. We are fighting for our creative lives against the rise of the machines. Clarity about what you are presenting, whose work it really is, is the line between art and artifice.

At any rate, it turns out that Rick Beato was optimistic by about a year. This past week saw the appearance of a band called “Velvet Sundown”, an obviously AI-generated group whose computer generated songs included such titles as “Dust on the Wind” and “The Wind Still Knows Our Name.” After a week of speculation, a “spokesperson” for the band acknowledged that it was all AI, and called it an “art hoax”.

It is actually more like a probing operation in what is shaping up as a multi-front battle not just for creativity, but for humanity itself.

From the X-Files:

• I recently came across “Why the nineties rocked: Back then we still had a future to yearn for” — a 2022 piece by Douglas Coupland from Unherd.

• “The death of the summer job” (I want to write something about summer jobs soon).

• “Gen X? More like Gen Sex” — Mireille Silcoff continues to build her brand

• I’m dying to read Cold Glitter: The Untold Story of Canadian Glam by Robert Dayton. I read about it in Michael Barclay’s substack which is the closest thing to an alt-weekly you are going to find. Subscribe!

• The alt title for this post was rAIge agAInst the mAchInes

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POP CULTURE IS ONE OF THE PRIMARY MECHANISMS through which a society works out its fears and anxieties. One of Gen X’s earliest and most enduring worries is about the end of the world. In the 1980s, that anxiety manifested itself predominantly through the threat of nuclear annihilation, fuelled by American president Ronald Reagan’s decision to end the Carter-era detente and take a more forceful line on the USSR. The first half the decade was an endless parade of movies and songs and novels and video games and television shows, all devoted to narrating the inevitable global holocaust that our politicians seemed determined to engineer.

Read: Growing Up In The Nuclear Shadow

By the 1990s, the end of history had put nuclear Armageddon on the back burner. End-of-the-world anxieties shifted into a more distinctly countercultural mood, driven substantially by a growing obsession with the negative effects of consumerism and its impact on the environment. “Shopping is destroying the planet” became the rallying cry of the growing anti-globalisation movement, captured by such definitive texts as Naomi Klein’s 1999 book No Logo and the quarterly dispatches from Adbusters magazine.

Then came 9/11, after which any critique of capitalist consumerism was harnessed to a more global condemnation of Western imperialism and our consumer-capitalist civilization. This was made manifest in a slew of post-9/11 offerings including the 2004 anti-shopping parable Dawn of the Dead and, that same year, the global warming disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow.

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But between the nuclear threat of the 80s and the enviro-declinist fantasies of the post-9/11 era there was a brief period in the mid-1990s when Gen X didn’t have all that much to worry about, at the level of sheer existence anyway. The culture of calamity saw a brief reversion to dumb ‘70s style offerings animated by nascent CGI tools — vacant fare like Twister (1996) and, famously, Titanic (1997). There was even a funny moment when 1997 saw a pair of competing volcano disaster movies (Volcano and Dante’s Peak), while 1998 welcomed the threatening asteroids of both Deep Impact and Armageddon.

Into this brainless mix slipped a quiet little Canadian movie called Last Night, shot lovingly in Toronto and directed by Don McKellar. The plot follows a loosely overlapping group of people as they prepare for their last night on Earth; for unexplained reasons the world will end at midnight, and everyone has some loose ends they want to tie up before it comes.

Sandra (played by Sandra Oh) is stranded after her car is vandalized, and she spends the rest of the movie trying to get home to be with her new husband. Patrick (Don McKellar) meets his family for a final mock Christmas dinner, but he leaves early, intent on spending the end of the world alone in his apartment. His younger sister Jenny (Sarah Polley) is off with her boyfriend to a street party. Sandra’s husband Duncan (David Cronenberg) is working late, calling customers and reassuring them that their heating gas will be kept on right up to the end, while Patrick’s friend Craig (Callum Keith Rennie) is checking off a bucket list of people he wants to have sex with, including a black woman, a virgin, and their high school french teacher.

When the movie was released, a lot of the reviews expressed surprise at how low-key the whole thing was. There was no fear, no action, no looting, no final orgy of violence; instead, everyone seems to have largely made their peace with the end. The film was described as a very Canadian take on the end of the world, and “the perfect antidote” to the American genre of apocalyptic films that were dominating the cinemas that summer.

Except that’s not quite right. There is plenty of evidence that there had been a fair amount of looting and rioting – the movie opens with a long shot of Sandra poking through the empty shelves of a supermarket looking for anything worth salvaging. Then her car is stolen and vandalised, and later, her husband is shot dead by a kid walking past who happens to see him on his front step and kills him for the heck of it.

But it is true, the predominant mood of the film is not panic or fear, and there are no superheroes running around trying to save their families. Instead, the film is soaking in regret, and any residual fear is not over death itself, but of things left undone or unsaid. Everyone is quietly but desperately trying to leave on their own terms. Sandra is in a panic to get back to her husband because she barely knows him; right to the end Craig is trying to come to grips with his sexuality, and makes a failed pass at Patrick; Patrick is looking for relief from the pain of losing his wife, who we learn was a school teacher who has recently died of cancer. Only Jenny and her boyfriend Alex seem pretty cool with the whole thing — they are young enough to have not yet accumulated the pool of regret that fills the well of a long life.

If there’s one big lesson from the movie, it’s that the real reason to fear death is not extinction, but FOMO – the fear of missing out. What makes the prospect of dying so distressing is the knowledge that things will go on without us. It’s not the end of the party that is so sad, it’s the thought of leaving the party early. But if it is ending for everyone, what is there to be sad about?

Last Night ends on a beautiful note. Patrick and Sandra have retreated to his rooftop, where they are playing music and sharing a glass of wine. The sun is high in the sky (“I liked it when it used to get dark”, says one character). They sit on chairs facing one another, each holding a pistol to the others’ temple, preparing to fire just before the world ends. The crowd gathered in the street counts down the last seconds, like some terrible New Year’s Eve. And as the sun flares and expands, filling the sky, they lower their pistols and lean in to kiss one another, and the world, goodbye.

From the X-Files:

• The long-awaited zombie flick sequel 28 Years Later is coming out next month. Here’s the trailer.

• I just finished Annie Jacobsen’s new book Nuclear War: A Scenario, which walks the reader through how the first minutes and hours of World War Three might play out, beginning with a sneak attack by North Korea. Apparently Denis Villeneuve has optioned the movie rights.

• I’m quoted in this recent piece by Robson Fletcher of the CBC, which looked at whether Gen X was suffering particularly from Trump tariffs. I didn’t really play along, but it’s a good article.

• That said, I just came across this piece in the economist, “Why Gen X is the real loser generation.” Everyone give it a read and we’ll discuss it in a further dispatch.

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IN THE FALL OF 1989 I had just started my first year of a BA in political science at McGill, and some of my professors were absolutely losing their minds. Entire course outlines were being re-written on the fly, whole chunks of the syllabus jettisoned, as academics tried to figure out what was going on in Eastern Europe. By early November the Berlin Wall had fallen, and everyone was trying desperately to shoehorn the emerging new world order into long-standing research programmes and professional commitments.

Given everything (gestures vaguely at the world), this is probably as good a time as any to think about what went wrong with the end of history. More specifically, about what is wrong with “The End of History?”, the bombshell of an essay by Francis Fukuyama that detonated in the pages of the National Interest in the summer of 1989.

Published at the height of Gorbachev-era glasnost, Fukuyama argued that what we were seeing were not just some long-overdue reforms to the workings of the Soviet Union, but in fact the ultimate victory of the combination of Western forms of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism. For Fukuyama, this victory marked "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." As the title of his essay put it, this meant the end of history as such, where history is understood as the working out of grand ideological narratives: the second coming of Christ, the establishment of the Islamic Caliphate, the revolt of the proletariat and the withering of the state, and so on.

Fukuyama was roasted by many at the time for what was seen as blind arrogance, largely because of a line in the essay where he describes what was going on as nothing less than “the triumph of the West, of the Western idea.” Not only did this sort of triumphalism go over poorly with those whom we would now call tankies, it also seemed quite clearly premature.

Yet just four months after the essay was published, the Berlin Wall came down. A year later, Germany was reunified; a year after that, the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a sovereign state.

It is hard, today, to describe or even recapture in memory what an incredible time that was. If our profs were struggling, for us students it was just wild. The division of the world into two opposing ideologies, and the entire cultural, social, economic and military apparatus that went along with that, was the water in which we had swum for our entire lives. Living with the constant threat of nuclear annihilation was just the price of admission to the human race. And then in a blink, it was gone. The Iron Curtain was raised, and within a few years, Gorbachev was appearing in an ad for Pizza Hut.

Needless to say, triumph of the West has proven to be more elusive than some of us expected at the time. And while Fukuyama himself has conceded that he might have been a little over-optimistic, he has remained committed to the idea that we have reached the end of history, in the specific sense he intended: to say that we have reached the end of history is not to say that there will be no more wars, no more jockeying for status or domination between individuals, or groups, or states. What it does mean is that once a society has reached the "universal and homogeneous state" — liberal democracy in the political sphere, and free market consumer culture in the private sphere — there is nowhere left for that society to go, ideologically, and that all of its apparent "ideological" ambitions will, henceforth, be framed within the tight ambit of political individualism and consumer culture.

To make the argument, Fukuyama drew on a specific reading of Hegel, which saw the struggle for recognition as the locomotive of history. Being recognized by others is how our identity or sense of self develops; but this can lead to conflict as individuals strive to be recognized as valuable and independent agents, often at the expense of others. That is, people seek status based on unequal relations with others.

This is the central problem with all “isms”, all grand ideologies: They privilege one group, colour, gender, class, race, language, what have you, at the expense of others. And so in each ideology, there are contradictions at the level of unequal recognition, which makes these ideologies intrinsically unstable. The only stable outcome is a society based on mutual recognition, where individuals acknowledge each other's self-consciousness and intrinsic equality and independence, leading to a more just and free society. This society is both liberal and democratic: liberal, because it recognizes and protects individual rights and equality; and democratic because it is legitimized through the consent of the governed.

On this view, the end of history is the resolution of all contradictions in the “universal homogeneous state”; liberalism in the democratic sphere, and consumer capitalism in the economic. There is no struggle, no conflict, just liberal democracy combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos.

This is why Fukuyama was convinced that we had reached the end of history. Not because there would not still be wars, and not because we had seen the end of conflict or crackpot messiahs, but because there were no remaining ideologies that had not been discredited as fundamentally unstable. As Fukuyama insisted, even dictators would seek to justify their actions using the language of rights and democratic legitimacy, however fraudulent it was in practice.

The first inkling of what is wrong with this argument was actually at play way back in the early 1990s. During that period, even as the liberal democracy/consumer capitalism end of history argument was playing itself out at the level of geopolitics and of grand ideological narratives, a strong countercurrent was emerging inside the West itself, in the form of identity politics. The Cold War might have ended, but a vicious culture war had broken out between conservatives and progressives. Largely driven by differences over values, the war that raged on campuses and in society more broadly had wide-ranging battlefronts: abortion, gender, sexual orientation, identity politics, the school curriculum, the Western canon, Christmas, the family, popular culture… If it all sounds familiar, it’s because it is. What is going on right now, notably in the United States, but across the entire Western world to varying degrees, is a hypertrophied elaboration on that earlier culture war, juiced by social media and the enormously transformed tech and economic landscape.

The question is, why is liberal democratic consumer capitalism so prone to culture wars? The answer is actually buried in the middle of Fukuyama’s original essay. In a passage where he raises the possibility of alternatives to liberalism, he notes the rise of religious fundamentalism only to dismiss it as a serious competitor: As he puts it: “Yet while the emptiness at the core of liberalism is certainly a defect in the ideology… it is not at all clear that it is remediable through politics” – then he goes on to claim that the impulses that drive religiosity are most successfully satisfied within the personal space that liberalism carves out.

It is increasingly clear that not all demands for recognition can be resolved at the level of individuals and safely tucked away in the private sphere. There are forms of community, types of identity, that put public demands on others in the way of group rights and collective recognition. But demands for group rights are themselves intrinsically invidious, insofar as they are always disguised forms of status seeking and privilege. At the very least, they are bound to be interpreted that way by those upon whom the claims for recognition are being made.

The upshot is that liberalism itself might be fundamentally unstable, to the extent that it can neither fully accommodate nor entirely eliminate the demands for unequal recognition. Instead of a steady state of stable liberal democracy and consumer capitalism, what could be on offer is a constant pendulum swing between liberalism and forms of perfectionism, with relentless identity politics and culture war as the only steady state.

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From the X-Files:

• Goodbye, Lenin remains the definitive take on the nostalgia many felt, and still feel, for the old communist order.

• Did the CIA write “Winds of Change,” the Scorpions power ballad that ended the Cold War? This podcast is incredible.

• For my money, the best end of history song was this one:

In late June of 1981, I went on a weekend car-camping trip ahead of the Canada Day holiday with my friend Rick, his brother and his parents, and another kid, a pal of Rick’s who I didn’t much like. We spent the trip goofing around the campground, swimming and playing catch and generally just enjoying being Canadian kids on the cusp of adolescence with a whole summer vacation stretching ahead of us.

On the drive home, Rick’s parents were up front listening to the radio while us four boys sat in the back, sunburnt and bickering. At one point, his dad shushed us all as he turned up the volume during a news break. We caught the end of the announcement: Terry Fox had died.

The car went quiet; after a few moments I realised that Rick’s mom was crying. I remember sitting there, knowing that something terrible and important had happened, but not really knowing what to say, what it meant, or even really how to process it.

We all knew who Terry Fox was, of course. He had been all over the news the year before as his Marathon of Hope increasingly gathered national, and then international, attention. After overcoming initial indifference in the Atlantic provinces, and then faced with open hostility from drivers in Quebec, it was a big deal when he came through Ottawa. The Citizen ran an iconic photo of Terry taking the ceremonial kickoff at a Rough Riders game at Lansdowne Park, which was a short walk from our house. A week later, he did an interview with the American network show Real People, where host Sarah Purcell interviewed Terry while running along with him. In Toronto, he met Darryl Sittler, who gave him his 1980 NHL All-Star Team sweater. The Marathon of Hope was turning into a big deal, and Terry’s dream of running across Canada and raising a dollar for cancer research from every Canadian seemed well on its way to coming true.

Until September 1, when Terry had to suspend the Marathon of Hope outside Thunder Bay after he learned that the cancer that had taken his right leg had returned, this time to his lungs. The following June, after months of chemotherapy, he fell into a coma and died, a month shy of his 23rd birthday. The news footage of Terry being interviewed on the last day of the Marathon of Hope, as he chokes up at the end, is almost unbearable.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Terry lately, for a variety of reasons. Partly it is because my daughter has an oversized shirt that she got for being the captain of our family’s Terry Fox Run team last year, the first one Ryan Reynolds helped design, which she has a habit of wearing to bed as pyjamas. But there was also the announcement by the Bank of Canada in December that the federal government had decided Terry Fox would be replacing Laurier on the $5 bank note. This decision is obviously damage control by the Liberals; in 2023 an image of Terry Fox was removed from the new Canadian passport, replaced by generic images of random animals and children jumping in a lake, a decision that upset a large number of Canadians.

But apparently it didn’t upset everyone. After the announcement by the Bank of Canada, the Ottawa Citizen ran a thoroughly bizarre oped by a local amateur historian named Desmond Mills which argued that Terry Fox had no business being on our money (and, one presumes, being in our passport for that matter). Mills’ argument is that pride of place on our money “should be reserved for those who built up our nation and contributed to the development of its identity and culture,” which he says means “stately political figures and, only in exceptional cases, non-political figures of renown who helped define the Canadian national consciousness or contributed or helped raise awareness for Canada on the international stage.” According to Mills, Terry Fox doesn’t make the cut, being, in the “grand scheme of history” a “relatively minor figure.”

I’ve written and edited more than my share of clickbait contrarian op eds, with varying degrees of success, and I understand the appeal from a journalistic perspective. Sometimes it’s fun getting people riled up just for the sake of it, especially when the stakes seem low. And you can imagine running a version of this argument that ends up as a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the very idea of public idol worship. But going after Terry Fox? It is like asking what Anne Frank ever did to deserve her fame.

Mills makes a crucial mistake when he decides to hang Fox’s achievements and legacy on what he did for cancer research, which he praises, but with the qualification that “it was not instrumental in developing the Canadian national character or its institutions.”

This is hilariously, preposterously wrong-headed. In fact, I would make the opposite argument: Despite the fact that the Terry Fox Foundation has, to date, raised something like $900 million for cancer research, this accomplishment is relatively minor when compared with what Terry Fox did for Canada.

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Consider this: Terry Fox was born in Manitoba, and his family moved to British Columbia when he was 8. There is little evidence to suggest he ever spent much, if any time, in central or eastern Canada. Yet the Marathon of Hope began on April 12 1980 with Fox dipping his right leg into the Atlantic Ocean near St. John’s, and filling two bottles with seawater that he planned to pour into the Pacific at the end of his run.

Why start there? Why run across Canada at all? Why not just run around B.C., or to Alberta and back, or up to the Yukon or down the Pacific coast to California? The answer is that Terry Fox saw himself as a Canadian, addressing himself and his mission to a Canadian audience.

In choosing to run from coast to coast, he was essentially using the geography of the country as a narrative instrument. The greatness of the land matched the greatness of his ambition, and it enabled him to speak to an imagined community that was tied together in part through that geographical expression. I’m going to run through your town, your city, your province, hop step by hop step, mile after agonizing mile, because in some sense you are mine and I am yours, and I have an idea for something I want us to do together.

It’s weird to have to point this out, but there was a reason Terry Fox was made the youngest ever Companion of the Order of Canada in a special investiture ceremony. And there is a reason why there are Terry Fox statues, roads, memorials, parks, and schools and even a mountain, from one end of this country to the other. And it has little to do with the fact that before he died, he had raised $24 million for cancer research, and a lot to do with how he made Canadians think about themselves and their country, and what they could accomplish when they weren’t bickering.

Statesmanship can take many forms, and sure, occasionally it looks and sounds like a politician with big ideas and grandiose schemes. Sometimes, though, it’s just an intensely competitive kid with a prosthetic leg and a bone to pick with the world, asking his country to join him.

This year marks the 45th anniversary of the Marathon of Hope. You can donate to the Terry Fox Foundation online here.

From the X-Files:

• The novelist Andrew Pyper died shortly after New Year’s Day. I didn’t know him, but he was part of a scene in Toronto that I circled around the periphery of for a while in the late nineties. I’ll write about it at some point, but for now this piece by Craig Davidson in the Globe is lovely.

• After 120 years, the Cherry Blossom candy is headed for the chocolate graveyard in the sky. I never liked the treat, but as a kid I adored the insane, very seventies, psychedelic commercial that was basically an ad for drugs, or sex, or sex on drugs:

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SO YOU HAVE totally spent the holiday season vegging out. You didn’t manage to get Oasis tickets for your main squeeze; your home skillet has all the raggedy flannel he needs to get through the year. It’s five sleeps till Christmas and you are panicking. Don’t wig out chiefs! We’ve got your back here at Nevermind, with our second annual last minute Gen X Christmas gift guide. (Here’s last year’s list— there are still lots of great ideas there!)

As always, the first thing to keep in mind is that while nostalgia is fine, even advisable, it is important to avoid at all costs anything that is Gen X branded, like everything on this Etsy list. You don’t wear the shirt of the band to their concert, and you don’t wear a “I’m Gen X” t-shirt.

Second, for some of these things you’re going to need an Amazon Prime sub and/or a Facebook account — FB Marketplace is the el dorado of Gen X gift buying. Anyway, here’s a quick list of things the Xer in your life will love, that you can get before Christmas if you act fast (and maybe live close to an Amazon fulfillment centre).

Books

Hardcopy is a must here, no e-books allowed. All these can be delivered by Christmas through Amazon Prime. Or you could, you know, try a bookstore.

The Book of Elsewhere: A Novel, by Keanu Reeves and China Mieville. I bought this one more or less based on the cover and the names. It looks great. I got it at Paragraphe in Montreal, where the clerk said it was “weird.” YMMV!

Video Games: From Pong to the PS5, by Nicolo Mulas Marcello and Alberto Bertolazzi. This seems self-recommending.

We Oughta Know: How Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah Ruled the ’90s and Changed Music, by Andrea Warner. This is a must-read, I think. It’s such an obviously great idea for a book I am surprised it hasn’t been written yet. (UPDATE: The excellent Michael Barclay informs me that this is actually a reprint of a book that came out on a very small press almost a decade ago. I oughta known that! But that reminds me that you really oughta subscribe to his substack, which is basically a one-man alt-weekly newsletter.)

The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius, by Patchen Barss. Penrose is no Gen Xer but Patchen is; some of you may remember him from his early days in journalism on the ground floor of the National Post when it launched. He’s a great writer.

Finally, if you can stomach pre-ordering, the hot new Rick Astley autobiography is coming out in early January. Also, coming in March (too late!) is the uncensored history of Lollapalooza. (These will probably go on next year’s guide).

Concerts

So yeah, Oasis huh. I was lucky enough to get tickets for Toronto in August, but for those who didn’t, there’s always StubHub.

For a band I don’t really like, I’ve seen Metallica twice (and would have seen them a fourth time if Axl hadn’t started a riot at the Big O in 1992). Anyway, they are touring North America this summer with Pantera and Limp Bizkit.

Green Day’s Saviors (sic) tour, celebrating 30 years of Dookie and 20 years of American Idiot, began last year and they are keeping the party going.

Also touring around various parts of this planet: Alison Moyet, Kylie Minogue, and the Pixies. (Not together, mind you).

But honestly, if nostalgia what you want, just go to the home page of killer 80s/90s/00s cover band Dwayne Gretzky. They tour relentlessly, and their shows are fantastic.

Gifts

The 2024 bucket hat revival isn’t over! Amazon has a great selection they can deliver pronto. But if you are willing to do a bit of driving, here’s where Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji are your best friends. Punch in a few keyword searches and let the algorithm do the rest. Some ideas to get you going — most of these are from my Montreal listings, so localize as needed.

How about an old fashioned Polaroid instant camera? There are a bunch on FB Marketplace, and you can get the film packs delivered from Amazon.

A vintage Nirvana toque for $10, or a Guns n Roses shirt? You know what is a great nostalgia gift? A Hudson Bay point blanket.

Use your imagination here, and get creative. If you can think of it as a nostalgia item, odds are someone near you is selling it. And if all else fails, you know what to do: Get yourself a boom box or CD player and some cassette tapes or CDs, and make your loved one a Merry Christmas mixtape. You can start by burning them a copy of the new Dean and Britta Christmas album entitled A Peace of Us, which is all kinds of great and has a lovely version of the old Bowie/Crosby duet on The Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth.

Happy Holidays everyone. Much love to all.

-ap

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And so but 1996 was the Year of David Foster Wallace. More specifically, it was that summer we all read Infinite Jest, grad students avoiding real work by tag-teaming and overlapping in a communal reading of a couple of increasingly ragged copies of Wallace’s thousand page metafictional masterpiece. We would read all day and then talk about it over drinks at night, trying to parse the actual plot while trading off favourite lines or references or anecdotes.

The baroquely constructed dystopian-comedy plot aside, what was exhilarating about Infinite Jest was just the style of the writing: the run on sentences and the interior monologues and the footnotes and the footnotes to the footnotes and fourth-wall breaking and just the relentlessly and frequently exhausting pyrotechnic approach to spelling, grammar, structure, and voice. At least two of my friends soon contracted the habit of answering the phone with a drawn out “mmyellow?”, mimicking the style of one of the main characters, while I tried to jump start my then-nonexistent journalism career by trying to write just like DFW in an ill-advised column for the student newspaper.

It all seemed fantastically new and fun and breathtakingly original. Only later, when I got around to reading Wallace’s acknowledged influences (DeLillo, Pynchon, and Gaddis especially) did it become obvious just how much he had borrowed, adapted, or outright stolen. (One character from Infinite Jest, who wanted to be a sports reporter and would narrate matches from the sideline into his fist like he was holding a microphone, is straight up ripped off from an early and relatively obscure DeLillo novel called End Zone).

It wasn’t that Wallace no longer seemed like an incredible writer and intellect – he absolutely was – but rather, just that he seemed more plainly derivative. Not in a bad way, just more obviously human. And when it came to all of that writerly gymnastics, it was clear that he was doing more than just having fun with the reader; he was desperately trying to outrun (or at least out-write) his influences when at all possible, and acknowledge them when not.

All of this is detailed in probably the best critical essay written about David Foster Wallace, A.O. Scott’s “The Panic of Influence,” published in the February 2000 issue of the New York Review of Books. As Scott writes in his omnibus review of DFW’s work up till then, “It’s hard to think of another writer of any generation who has written more prolifically about the obstacles to writing, or who has lampooned the self-dramatizing frustrations of the creative process with such inexhaustible, maniacal conviction.”

Wallace’s central problem, Scott notes, is that he suffered from an extremely acute case of what the literary critic Harold Bloom, in a 1973 book about poetry, called “the anxiety of influence”. As Bloom argued, every poet takes his or her inspiration from another poet’s work, and as a result, runs the risk of writing derivative or “weak” poetry. But because every poet wants their work to be seen as original or visionary, the mere existence of influences generates a deep sense of anxiety in the writer. For the relatively few accomplished “strong” poets, this anxiety results in truly original work that stands for posterity, while the rest are doomed to obscurity.

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Wallace was consumed by the desire to avoid obscurity and establish his bona fides as a strong poet. But he was also obsessively aware of how much he drew upon his predecessors; he wore his influences thickly, openly celebrated them, and went to a great deal of trouble to let the reader know that he knew that you knew that he had stolen a riff or a line or a schtick, while still trying to shrug off the influences and say something clear and novel, though clearly footnoting anything that might strike the careful reader as ever so slightly borrowed. More often than was healthy, this resulted in writing that was a complete mess, a funhouse-mirrored ouroboros of self- and self-self- and self-self-self-reference.

You don’t have to be a poet or novelist to suffer from the anxiety of influence. Creators of every sort, from film to painting to music or just anyone who deals in the manipulation of cultural symbols more generally, is always in a complicated and often tense negotiation with the past. Indeed, that negotiation forms the very core of the idea of the self, and in this identity-obsessed age, the struggle between identity (your authenticity or uniqueness) and influence (your heritage) gives rise to a deep paradox.

It goes like this: On the one hand, we prize originality, we celebrate those who are able to go their own way, do their own thing, resist the conformism of the masses. But on the other hand, the very concept of an identity involves a commitment to predictability. Think of your favourite singer or band: if you hear a new song, you can usually tell it is them within a bar or two. Artists have a distinct style, as do filmmakers. But forget the creative arts, and just think about your relationships: someone who understands you the best is the person who already knows what you are thinking, or what you are about to say, or how you will respond to a given situation.

We try to resolve the paradox by convincing ourselves that we are all unique, true originals, authentic selves, and that any predictability simply comes from people becoming attuned to our quirks and character. But what if the predictability goes deeper?

A recent paper in computer science reported on the result of an experiment in using generative AI to simulate the “attitudes and behaviours” of over a thousand real people. The researchers did extensive interviews with the subjects about their lives, and then fed the results into LLMs (the large language models that are the foundation of generative AI) to create “generative agents”, i.e. simulations of the real individuals. The results were pretty impressive: The agents were able to replicate participants' responses on the survey at least 85% as accurately “as participants replicate their own answers two weeks later, and perform comparably in predicting personality traits and outcomes in experimental replications.” Put simply, if you train a LLM with someone’s attitudes and behaviours, you can create an agent that will credibly mimic their identity. And keep in mind, when it comes to AI research, we are in the paleolithic era.

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Yet AI has already made deep inroads into the creative industry. For all the worries (or maybe it’s hope) about the coming AI sludge and predictions of the inevitable collapse of AI models that end up just consuming their own garbage, people are already using it to create original, interesting, and in some cases beautiful works of art – from painting to poetry to literature to film. We are not far from being in a position where the question of whether something was “created by AI” is no longer an interesting or useful question to ask.

Does that mean the end of human creativity? Not in the least. If anything, it will open a new space in the culture for more considered and meaningful forms of pure human-powered engagement and creativity. As the artist and writer Austin Kleon boasts at the end of his excellent substack, “This is a hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm newsletter.”

It does raise hard questions, though, for the very idea of the self. If, as is looking likely, we are all going to be effectively replicated by autonomous agents programmed on our own behaviours, what does it mean for identity, agency, free will? Are we reducible to mere patterns, predictable and formulaic? Are we all, deep down, just glorified auto-complete, algorithms trained on the Big Datasets of our DNA and our childhood?

I increasingly think that is more true than not. The good news is that maybe my kids will be able to hang out with digital me, long after I’m gone to dust. Want to know what pops would have thought? Let’s just ask ChatGPDad.

Maybe that sounds dystopic, like a bargain-bin episode of Black Mirror, but honestly I kind of like the idea. And how different is it, ultimately, than the endless hours we already spend with Aristotle or Shakespeare or Dickens or Austen or Rothko or Kahlo or Prince… or David Foster Wallace, who killed himself in 2008 at 46, but whose mind I can visit anytime I like, with a short stroll over to my bookshelf. We interrogate, argue with, and learn from the past all the time; our digital future is in many ways just a more democratized and interactive form of what we already experience.

At some point, given sufficient time and perspective all of these influences just sort of blend into one big cultural inheritance, the great human mystery experiment, and the anxieties over any one contribution seem small and insignificant.

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From the X-Files:

• ‘Zine scene chronicler Broken Pencil magazine is over and done with (also, Hal has a Substack)

• Vice founder Shane Smith has a new show investigating “disinformation”

• The inevitable backlash against the backlash to “Do They Know It’s Christmas”

• It seems that every microgeneration has to discover Mark Leyner for themselves

• The photo of David Foster Wallace at the top of this newsletter was generated by Dalle 3

A MONTH OR SO AGO, my third-grader daughter came up to me after school and asked for a pad of paper and a pen. “What for?” I asked. I want to show you something cool, she replied. 

So I fetched the supplies and handed them to her. She took the pen, bent over the pad, and started sketching, starting with three short parallel vertical lines, then three more right below them. Within a few seconds she had drawn this:

She looked up and gave me a sly smile, like she was letting me in on a big secret. “Cool, huh?” 

I could only nod, because I was on the verge of tears, triggered by some weird emotional concoction of pride, nostalgia, and regret. She had drawn what a friend of mine used to call “the Metal S”, but which goes by a bunch of other names including the Cool S, the Super S, and the Surfer S. There was a stretch back when I was in grade six or seven where half the kids would spend the better part of a class ignoring the teacher and just sketching endless variations of the Cool S on their workbooks, their backpacks, their sneakers, and their jeans. 

The Cool S is just one element of what has turned into a constant stream of memes my daughter has been bringing home from school this fall. There was a short-lived cat’s cradle craze in September; a few weeks ago she and I were walking our dog through the schoolyard on a weekend and she proudly showed off the hanging backflip off the monkey bars she had learned from a new kid in her class; a trip to the park the other day took twice as long as normal because my daughter and her friend were laser focused on avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk.

Neither her mother nor I taught her any of this, no adult did. These are all part of what is known as childlore, the furious mix of games, songs, rhymes, tricks, pranks, riddles, superstitions, rituals, and everything else that makes up the common and exclusive language of children. What is characteristic about childlore, unlike regular folklore, is that it is neither taught to kids by adults nor is it mediated by them. Instead, it is passed on between children, from older to younger siblings, from the upper grades to the lower, from kids in one school to friends and relatives in another. But this whole organic process is so self-contained that adults are often completely clueless as to what is going on under their very noses. 

Which is weird, because any grownup can recognize childlore when they see it – after all, they were once children too. Childlore is everywhere if you know how to look for it: it is the schoolyard house rules governing hopscotch or jump rope;  the accepted mechanisms for selecting who is “it” in tag – eenie meenie miney mo, or put in your patats and chant my mother and your mother were hanging out the clothes.  Boys throw a baseball bat in the air and take turns gripping it higher toward the end to see who bats first; they show one another how to spell naughty words on calculators turned upside down; they spend hours drawing cool S’s on their jeans. And so on and on and on. 

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For the individual child, their immersion in childlore tends to end quickly and rather abruptly. By the time they reach middle school and enter puberty, they abandon the secret language of children and move into the more publicly semaphored world of adolescence. But still, somehow, this whole culture manages to exist and perpetuate itself, down through the generations, with virtually no input or oversight from grownups. 

Yet the fact of childlore, the existence of this hermetic culture of children, is hardly a secret. Exploring its recesses is a staple of children’s literature, from Narnia to Roald Dahl to Charlie Brown. But it turns out that one of the most incredible characteristics of childlore is how conservative it is.  In their groundbreaking 1959 book The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, one of Iona and Peter Opie’s big ambitions was to explore the claim that the growth of mass media would have a corrosive effect on these childhood traditions. The worry was that mass media would undermine the self-contained nature of childhood and interfere with the child-to-child transmission of its folkways. 

As the Opies’ research revealed, there was not much to worry about. Eenie meenie is from the early 1800s and hopscotch is at least a hundred years older than that. Kids have been taunting one another with “I know you are but what am I?” since the fifties. The Cool S that my daughter drew has been around since the 1970s. Some parts of childore, schoolyard songs and rhymes in particular, go back to the middle ages (the widely held idea that ring around the rosie was a plague chant might be false, though it does seem to have pagan origins).  As the Opies showed, childlore is highly stable and resilient, even in the face of increasingly ubiquitous technologies of mass communication. 

There are other looming threats, though. One is the increasing reluctance of young adults to leave their pre-pubescent culture behind. Whether it’s colouring books for adults, someone making the case for sleeping with stuffed animals into your twenties, the arch way thirtysomethings talk about “adulting”, or the creepola phenomenon of “Disney adults”... as the writer James Greig lamented about his peers recently, “we’re a generation of adult babies”.

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This goes beyond run of the mill nostalgia. Sure, large and growing swathes of the culture are now explicit nostalgia plays, where middle aged post-hipsters are spoon fed the music and memes of their teens and twenties. I’m as guilty of indulging that as anyone (hence this newsletter). But at least built into the ideal of nostalgia is the presumption of aging, the acceptance of adulthood, the acknowledgment that life has stages, a beginning and middle and an end. The growing refusal by young adults to even leave childhood behind is a whole different gambit.

Them, when you combine this culture of perpetual infantilism with the rise of the absolutely vile kidfluencer phenomenon, you get something incredibly pernicious: the algorithmic marketing, branding, and commodification of childhood itself. 

Whether childlore as a culture that persists and reproduces itself outside the purview and mediation of adults can survive this is an open question. I suspect it will, in some form anyway, though I’m not sure how much I would bet much on it. Like any fragile ecosystem, we might need to treat childlore as endangered or at risk, and a lot depends on adults knowing how to leave well enough alone.

One of the most difficult things to do, when my daughter is showing me the latest trick she’s picked up, is to keep myself from bursting the bubble and let on that I already know all about it.

I’m not always successful. Just the other day we were walking along and I noticed she was doing something complicated with her hands. I asked her what she was up to, and she showed me the old here’s the church, here’s the steeple thing. I decided to indulge myself a bit, and showed her a variation where at the end you don’t “see all the people” and waggle your fingers; instead you “kill” them – you open your hands and let your fingers lie flat like the end of a hand-puppet Tarantino movie. She loved it, and I suspect she has since shown it to her friends.

I wish I had resisted the urge to show off. There was no reason for it other than misplaced pride. I’m trying to take comfort in the quote from the folklorist Douglas Newton, which has become the unofficial motto of childlore researchers: “The world-wide fraternity of children is the greatest of savage tribes, and the the only one which shows no signs of dying out”. 

I hope so.

I am extremely sorry for the extended break I took with this newsletter. It was not intended by any means; I took on a new job in September that took up more of my attention than I expected, and the weeks stretched into months and it got harder to get my writer’s brain back online. That job is finishing up and I expect to be back to regular programming now. There’s so much to talk about. ap

From the X-Files

• Gen X is being blamed (or credited!) for getting Donald Trump elected. This won’t come as a surprise to readers of this newsletter.

• Keanu Reeves turned sixty a few months back. He has a weird new novel with China Mieville that is getting… reviews.

• This made me laugh.

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IT IS OVERWHELMINGLY LIKELY that Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States. It is similarly likely that Pierre Poilievre, leader of Canada’s conservatives, is going to be the country’s next prime minister. If this does indeed come to pass, will Generation X finally get the reactionary government it has always wanted?

As North American politics continues its rightward lurch, it is becoming increasingly commonplace to note the outsized role of Gen Xers in pushing this trend. In 2022, a Politico essay tried to explain “How Gen X became the Trumpiest generation”. That same year, an essay in Salon lamented how “of course Gen X was always going to sell out and vote Republican”. Writing in The Line last year, Rahim Mohamed wondered “how Generation MTV became Generation GOP?” These aren’t outliers – there is a whole sub genre of cultural commentary devoted to trying to explain just why Gen Xers are so right wing, compared to both their Boomer predecessors and the Millennials and Zs who followed. 

This raises a couple of questions, the first of which is: is it even true? And if so, why?

On the facts of the matter, it appears that members of Generation X are, on the whole, more conservative than other generations, and this is especially true in the United States.  For the past three or four years, polls have consistently shown that Gen Xers are more likely to see the country as going in the wrong direction, more likely to disapprove of Joe Biden, and more likely to support Donald Trump and vote Republican, than any other generational cohort. And while every generation tends to become more conservative as it ages, it is a tendency that accelerated under Gen X. 

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Pollsters have found similar support for these trends in Canada. An Abacus survey conducted last August found Gen Xers had the highest level of support for the Conservatives, with 41 per cent of those surveyed intending to vote CPC. And just this past June, the pollster Frank Graves released a series of charts tracking sentiment in Canada on a number of issues, including national attachment, social cohesion, and voter intention. He found significant intergenerational discord, with members of Gen X showing the highest level of support for smaller government, and Gen X males having the highest level of support for the CPC. 

 So why is this the case? How did the generation that fought (and won) the first culture war against conservatives, that launched the antiglobalization movement, that made heroes out of left wing icons like Kurt Cobain and Naomi Klein, become the most right wing cohort of all? Did we follow our Boomer parents’ hippies-to-yuppies trajectory in selling out? Or is there something else at work, beyond crass financial self-interest? 

There’s probably at least something to be said for the “crass self-interest” angle. Despite the long-standing claim to being the first generation to do worse than their parents, the truth is, Gen X is raking it in. Starting right around the pandemic, Canadian Gen Xers quietly overtook Boomers as the generation with the highest average household net worth. It may also explain why alone amongst the generations, members of Gen X list “cost of living” as their most salient political issue, in contrast with both the older and younger cohorts who identify things like climate change, health care, and the environment as the most important issues facing Canada. 

But there’s another, more common, theory, which argues that Gen X never sold out, because there was nothing to sell out in the first place. The argument goes something like this: The defining trait of Gen X was that it was always apolitical. The everything-sucks anti-establishment pose was mere contrarianism – a gut reaction against whoever might happen to have political or cultural power at any given moment. As Rahim Mohamed put it in The Line, “The only difference between today’s Gen-X counterculture and the one of yesteryear is that, whereas ‘The Man’ was once a suit-clad Yuppie holding a brick phone, today, he’s more likely to be a progressive urban software developer who rides his bike to work.” On this view, it makes perfect sense for Gen Xers to tilt Republican. The “anti-woke” agenda, for example, is “in actuality, a quintessentially Gen X full-court press against a progressive ‘establishment’ that comprises Hollywood, academia and activist corporations.”  

Again, this is an exceedingly common view, and frankly there is a lot to be said for the argument that the alt-right is the new counterculture. But it doesn’t really explain why the Boomers, the members of the original counterculture, haven’t themselves tacked as far to the right as many Gen Xers seem to have. 

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One thing worth bearing in mind in these sorts of discussions is that political preferences are a lot less malleable and subject to change over time than we like to think. A recent paper on political preferences, entitled “The Great Society, Reagan’s Revolution, and Generations of Presidential Voting” argues that what overwhelmingly matters to shaping one’s views are the major features of the political landscape during your years of peak socialization, basically the ages of 14-24. In a sense, your political preferences are not much different than your preferences in music or fashion or movies or television or food: We overwhelmingly see these as having peaked in quality in our late teens and early twenties (check out this graph, it is wild).

The authors of the “Great Society” paper linked above have a model that divides post-War Americans into five generations – New Deal Democrats, Eisenhower Republicans, 1960s Liberals, Reagan Conservatives, and Millennials. Their key finding is that the events forming partisan preferences (and which they claim accounts for over 90% of the macro-level variance in voting trends) occur largely between the ages of 14-24, and a generation’s preferred party is basically fully locked-in by 40. 

On their view, the defining period of the socialization of Gen X (whom they describe as “Reagan Conservatives”) starts with the Carter presidency – marked by stagflation, the energy crisis, and the Iran hostage crisis – followed by the extended “Morning in America” Reagan presidency and the foreign policy successes of George H. W. Bush. As they argue, the “it’s the economy stupid” focus of the Clinton years might have blunted the baseline conservatism of Gen X only somewhat, given that most Xers were by then well past their period of peak socialization. 

As is often the case, the Canadian experience parallels the American trajectory but in a more bleached out way: The defining political movements of Canada’s 1968 cohort would have been the last Liberal majority under Pierre Trudeau from 1980-1984, and the two conservative parliaments led by Brian Mulroney. This period was marked by relentless and bipartisan constitutional wrangling at the domestic level. To the extent to which there would have been a conservative socialization, it might have been first in Canada’s role as a side player in the end of the Cold War, and then, later, as a response to the effective bankruptcy of the country thanks to decades of (largely Liberal) deficit spending, which was fixed only by extraordinary fiscal austerity throughout the 1990s. This latter period is what might at least partly explain the dominant concern Canadian Gen Xers have for relatively straightforward economic issues. 

The tl;dr then: Why is Gen X so conservative? Because we were raised in conservative times.

If there is a lesson in this, it is about the overwhelming power of nostalgia. Nostalgia shapes pretty much everything in our culture, and there is no real reason politics should be any different. Whether anything can and should be done about that is a question for another time. — ap

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From the X-Files

• RIP Shannen Doherty. Here’s my earlier article about the death of her 90210 classmate Luke Perry.

• Happy 60th birthday Courtney Love.

• RIP Evan Wright, dead by suicide at 59. Wright was a remarkable journalist, and author of a masterpiece of war reporting, Generation Kill. The miniseries based on that book is hugely underrated and might be David Simon’s best work.

IN HER 2017 NETFLIX SPECIAL, “Christina P: Mother Inferior”, the comedian Christina Pazsitsky (b. 1976) jokes about all the wild stuff Gen X had to deal with — “crazy stuff like crack cocaine, and AIDS, and Friends.” She also makes light of having been a latchkey kid, laughing about how,  if you were lucky, you might just be still alive by the time your mom came home. 

This is a by-now standard Gen X coping mechanism: treating childhood neglect – in this case, taking care of ourselves after school – as a matter of significant pride, part of our generational identity. It is something that was endured, or survived, even possibly to our benefit: if you believe the marketing hype, the latchkey generation is tougher, more resilient, adventurous, and open to risk-taking than the snowflake Millennials who came up behind us. 

But whatever pride there may be is often leavened by a great deal of bitterness, usually over absentee parents who (it is thought) put their own needs and priorities ahead of those of their kids. For example, the 45 year-old American writer/podcaster/comedian Bridget Phetasy set a certain precinct of the Twitterverse aflame last month with a piece about that most Gen X of topics, namely,  her parents’ divorce when she was twelve. The essay, published in the Spectator, is entitled “How divorce never ends”, and it is a long, angry, bitter rant about the price Phetasy and her siblings paid for the divorce, and how they are still shelling out for it well into their own middle age. 

For a lot of Gen Xers, it’s a familiar story. After Phetasy’s parents split, they each quickly found new partners. Her mom moved to a different city with her new husband (who, we are told, was insane). What followed was an teenage wasteland marked by logistical nightmares, financial struggles, psychological manipulation, and, more than anything, outright abandonment. One of the most amazing anecdotes, in an essay that is largely just a string of amazing anecdotes, involves an aunt coming over and finding the kids scarfing down handfuls of raw pasta. “Feed your kids, they are starving!” her aunt lectures her father. “ About which Phetasy dryly says, “although we weren’t literally starving, it would have been nice to have had a sandwich once in a while.”  

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What is interesting about Phetasy’s piece, in many ways, is just how unremarkable it is — the I-was-abandoned-by-my-divorced-parents has been its own genre of Gen X lit for a while now. For example, in 2011, the journalist Susan Gregory Thomas wrote an essay for the WSJ called “The divorce generation”, where she describes the effects of her own parents’ split, with much of the same fence-sitting between exhilaration and reproach:

Our suburb was littered with sad-eyed, bruised nomads, who wandered back and forth between used-record shops to the sheds behind the train station where they got high and then trudged off, back and forth from their mothers’ houses during the week to their fathers’ apartments every other weekend.

Both Phetasy and Thomas make a direct link between two trends that marked the identities of their generation: skyrocketing divorce rates, and the rise of what became known as “latchkey kids” — children who return home after school and are left unsupervised until a parent comes home from work.  There was widespread concern about the situation at the time, and the received wisdom was that it was on the whole a bad thing. But as one might suspect, the truth is a bit more complicated. 

To begin with, the two phenomena were very real. By the early 1990s, there were something like 3.5 million latchkey kids in the U.S., or seven per cent of those between the ages of 5 and 13. And this was accompanied by skyrocketing divorce rates: married couples with children made up 40 per cent of households in 1970, but only a quarter in 1990. 

But interestingly, there is no clear link to be found between being a latchkey kid and social or emotional damage. It is true, one study found that latchkey children showed more hyperactivity and certain types of misbehaviour than kids who came home to a parent or other adult caregiver. But these effects disappeared when the researchers controlled for emotional support and for income. 

In fact, two major studies done in the 1990s found that latchkey children did about as well, socially and emotionally, as their peers who received adult supervision following the end of the school day. What seemed to matter was not the type of care per se, the presence or absence of a grownup, but rather the overall quality of kids’ family life. That is, it isn’t whether kids are alone or not, it’s what they are up to when alone, and whether there is any monitoring, support, and discipline. Which is just to point out the obvious, which is that the distinction between being supervised and unsupervised is not so clear cut. Does a parent check in? Is there a neighbour nearby to call on? An older sibling? What sort of household rules are in place? Are they enforced?

This makes intuitive sense. There is a world of difference between a kid coming home after school to find a note from a parent on the counter that says “dinner is on the stove, I’ll be home at 5:30” versus a kid who comes home to an empty fridge and no sense of when anyone will be home, and is left to fend for themself. Indeed, according to one study, many kids found the alone time after school to be empowering. They liked the solitude and the responsibility, and didn’t always like it when a parent repeatedly called to check in on them. No, going home to be alone wasn’t necessarily the problem – often, the real trouble was found elsewhere. 

According to one Canadian study by two researchers at the University of Victoria, one area of concern was girls who spent unstructured and unsupervised time not at home, but instead just  “hanging out” with friends. This group reported more problem behaviours (smoking, drinking, shoplifting) compared to their supervised female peers, and more problems than all the boys in the study. (See our previous post on peer pressure, for more on this).

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The other area where problems arose was with children who returned home to single mothers after school. Members of this group experienced more anxiety, misbehaviour and conflicts with other children than did kids who received supervision from other adults after school. The study’s authors don’t have a full explanation for why this might be the case, but they speculated that some single mothers “endure considerable stress and may have few psychological resources to offer a child after school.”

Which brings us full circle, and back to what seems, for many Gen Xers, to be the source of the real trauma – their parents’ divorce. One of the more disturbing aspects of Phetasy’s article is not the details of her and her siblings’ neglect, or even how damaged she was as a child by the divorce, but how much of it she is still carrying with her. As she goes on to say in the essay, both she and her husband still bear the marks of their respective parents’ splitups, most notably, the rage she feels over having to juggle the neediness of four sets of grandparents who want access to her own kids: “I get furious at the idea that I’m still taking care of these boomers emotionally, over thirty years later.” If the replies on her Twitter feed are any indication, a lot of people feel the same way. 

Ultimately, the long term consequences of all this will be borne out by how Gen Xers have ended up parenting their own kids. If our parents sinned through neglect, are we simply making the opposite error, by overcorrecting? A while ago, the writer and college administrator Julie Lythcott-Haims wrote a piece for Time that described the precise moment the scales fell from her eyes: After a long day spent trying to convince helicopter parents to back off and leave their kids to experience college on their own, she sat down at the dinner table and instinctively reached over to start cutting her kids’ meat: “If you want your kid to be independent at 18, at some point you have to stop cutting their meat. I sat bolt upright. When do you stop cutting their meat?”

This is probably the great parenting conundrum for Gen Xers. Having suffered the loneliness of abandonment, many of are now determined not to let our own kids out of our sight. It will be interesting to track the implications. 

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I AM PRETTY SURE that the first time I came across Spy magazine was in September, 1991. Most probably I was introduced to it by the editorial team of The Red Herring, a satirical magazine published by SSMU, the Students Society of McGill University. The Herring (motto: “McGill’s only intentionally humorous publication") had been launched a few years before, and I had signed up during frosh week to see if I could be some sort of contributor. 

At that first meeting, I recall one of the editors mentioning how Spy was the greatest magazine on Earth, and how in both tone and content, it was exactly the sort of thing they would be looking for in contributions to the Herring. I don’t think I had heard of Spy, or if I had, I hadn’t given it much thought. But I wanted to write for the Red Herring, so I went out and hunted down a copy. It was easy enough to find on the newsstand – the cover of that month’s issue of Spy had Bruce Willis on the cover, photoshopped naked and pregnant in a parody of a sensational picture by Annie Leibovitz of Willis’s then-wife Demi Moore that had just appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair. 

Of course, by late 1991 Spy was already legendary, in the right circles anyway. The New York based magazine was the mongrel descendent of the National Lampoon, Mad Magazine, and Tom Wolfe, though that was all Boomer crap as far as I was concerned. Spy, on the other hand, was a revelation. When I started reading through that first copy, I was by turns puzzled and amused, with most of the in-jokes and boldface name references going totally over my head. But I fell straight up in love with the writing.  I remember thinking, You can do that?

What Spy brought to the table wasn’t just satire, it was satire of a specific sort: Self-conscious, ironic, and more than a bit smarmy, with a steady flow of juxtapositions of the high-brow and the utterly juvenile. But more than anything, what Spy did was break down the detached and “objective” fourth wall of journalism, inviting the audience into the back rooms of the sausage factory, pointing at everything and everyone, and going – “hey, isn’t all of this kind of shit?”

For ironic, overly-educated but still overly-juvenile undergrads, it was a drug like no other. Over the next few years working on the Herring, we freely stole Spy’s entire schtick – the tone, the jokes, the pranks, everything, unfortunately, except the actual cleverness.

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Spy was founded in 1986 by Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter, two outsiders (Andersen was from Nebraska, Carter from Canada) to the New York media scene. Their key insight was to realise that there was an audience for journalism that spoke to the audience in the voice that journalists used when talking to one another after work,  in the bar, at parties, or just hanging around the newsroom after hours. What this meant, practically, was a license treat the entire culture – politics, business, media, society – as a fodder for what amounted to celebrity commentary. Gossip, if you will. 

Their targets ran the gamut of the era’s listers from A to D: Martha Stewart, George H. W. Bush, Steven Segal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Kennedys, the Clintons, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, Princess Diana, the Wall Street swells and Hollywood power brokers, and everyone in between. If you were any combination of rich, or powerful, or pretentious, or just an asshole, you were in Spy’s sights.

But the one target they nailed, probably more often, more incisively, and more presciently, than any other was Donald Trump. The Donald, and in one case, his then-wife Ivana, was the subject of at least eight features in the magazine over the years, along with countless other casual mentions, digs, pot-shots, and sneering asides. The editors peered through the very thin crust of respectability that Trump had cultivated for himself, as a man of great wealth, refined taste, and laser-business acumen, and saw underneath a lying, fraudulent, and extremely vulgar, buffoon. In this, he was the avatar of New York City itself, in all its late ‘80s greed-is-good excess. 

Spy’s conceit was to always refer to him as “short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump”, a childish insult that also gave the writers a way of making fun of his penis size without ever coming right out and saying it. Along the way they dug into his finances, mocked his business failures, trolled him with 13 cent cheques (which he cashed), and generally made it clear that while he might have fooled some people, he hadn’t fooled the editors of Spy magazine. 

Trump swallowed that hook, over and over again; to this day, Andersen and Carter both delight in recalling how often Trump would write to complain about the treatment, sending them pictures of himself with his hands circled in black sharpie, with a note saying “see? Not so small!”

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Life is long and the half-life of gossip is short. Graydon Carter left Spy in 1991 for the more lucrative, and squarely establishment, job as editor of Vanity Fair.  Kurt Andersen left in summer of ‘93, handing things over to Tony Hendra, a veteran British satirist who was best known (to us, anyway) as the guy who played Spinal Tap’s manager, Ian Faith. The magazine was never the same. It got sold, changed editors a few more times, and hung on until 1998, its energies and influence long spent. 

Spy magazine is a quarter century gone (its entire archive is online here) but its impact on today’s media is almost unquantifiable, and its lasting legacy is in the type of journalism it fostered. The magazine’s direct offspring include The Onion as well as the Dave Eggers empire, but the one true journalistic descendant was Gawker, the online New York-focused content vertical that dominated mid-noughties digital media. Gawker’s “everyone’s a fraud” tone was pure Spy, an influence its founding editor Elizabeth Spiers has openly boasted about.  Gawker is itself now gone too, brought down by Peter Thiel in a revenge lawsuit for the ages – but that’s another story. (As for the Red Herring, it published in fits and starts, went online, and eventually seems to have ceased publication in 2013 or so).

But beyond specific outlets, the infamous Spy style is ubiquitous now, to the point where it is pretty much the default conversational tone of online culture: snarky, gossipy, mercilessly mocking, what Gawker’s Tom Scocca, in a hugely influential essay, called “smarm”.

In 2015, Donald Trump decided to make a run for president of the United States of America.  In a piece for Vanity Fair that summer, with Trump’s candidacy just underway, former Spy contributing editor Bruce Feirstein reminisced about their fun days mocking Trump. He ended by confidently predicting that there was no way he would win: “Short-fingered or not, on so many, many levels, the presidency is beyond his grasp.”  As the campaign came to a close in 2016, Hearst Media even launched an ersatz online version of Spy to lampoon a candidate they were sure would, as they thought he always had done, fall flat on his face.

But time has a way of making fools of us all, including (maybe even especially) those who thought they had taken the measure of their enemies, and found them coming up short. Not only did Trump win in 2016, he will most likely win again in 2024. I haven’t seen any self-congratulatory chortling from the old Spymeisters this time around.

See you in the comments! — ap

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If pop culture is the mechanism through which a society works out its generalized socio-political anxieties, the public service announcement, or PSA, is the vehicle through which grownups work out their anxieties over parenting on their children. 

I have two children in elementary school, and it is the rare week that they don’t come home and tell us about some guest speaker or assembly or video they were shown, designed to raise their awareness about one social issue or another – such as bullying, homo- and transphobia, or socioeconomic privilege. Combine that with the steady procession of coloured shirt days and other special recognition events and holidays, sometimes it seems like the curriculum is just one big PSA.

For the most part, I don’t have much of a problem with this. The campaign against bullying in particular, which started to gather steam in the mid-2000s, strikes me as an entirely welcome and long, long overdue recognition by the school system that their job is to create a safe and secure environment for learning, not to enable a Lord-of-the-Flies style culture of torment disguised as character building. 

But it is interesting to compare the current smorgasbord of causes and concerns with the single-minded focus of my own elementary school experience, which went hard against the scourge of peer pressure. From my earliest memories, it was made clear that peer pressure was to be avoided and resisted at all costs; there was no crime worse than doing something just because one of your friends suggested it might be a good idea. Smoking, drinking, drugs, minor theft or vandalism – these were all things you might be inclined to do because of peer pressure, and it was up to each and everyone one of us to push back against it. 

When I was growing up in Ottawa in the late seventies and eighties, there was a local francophone theatre troupe called the Théàtre des Lutins.  Thanks to an ingenious approach to minimalist staging that let them perform in small school gyms, they had cornered the market on in-school presentations. Their pain et beurre was a rotating repertoire of morality plays, almost all of which were designed, in one way or another, to warn us of the dangers of peer pressure and of the desire to be seen as “cool”. A typical example was a play where a gang of slightly older youth, led by a proto street tough named Joe, would target younger kids for membership in the gang. 

“Veux-tu être membre du gang de Joe?” Joe and his friends would ask the kids. “Oui bien sûr!” they would reply. “Ok si tu veux être cool et membre du gang de Joe, alors tu dois fumer cette cigarette!”.  Then the targeted kid would smoke a cigarette, get violently ill, and then go home and tell their disappointed parents what had happened. Or in another episode, prospective membres du gang de Joe would be invited to drink a beer, or steal a chocolate bar, with similar negative results.  The message, obviously, was that you shouldn’t want to be cool, and you certainly shouldn’t do stupid things in order to be so perceived. 

We loved these plays, of course. Daring one another to do mildly stupid things, in order to join the mythical “gang de Joe,” became a staple of the schoolyard for a few years. 

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As we moved into high school, the messaging around peer pressure became more insistent, and more narrowly focused on the dangers of drugs. To a large extent, it was a consequence of the Reagan-era war on drugs in the United States bleeding into Canada, with the anti-peer pressure aspect being pushed through the Nancy Reagan-fronted “Just Say No” campaign. This was a massively well-funded PSA program that even served as a plot device for episodes of Diff'rent Strokes and Punky Brewster (though some older members of Gen X will better remember the “gimme drugs” episode of Welcome Back, Kotter, when Arnold Horshack got hooked by some drug dealers, and was mocked for it by Barbarino).

The interesting thing about this hypertrophied emphasis on the dangers of peer pressure was that it was clearly an expression of profound adult anxiety over what kids would get up to when there were no grownups around. This makes sense in the context of the seventies and eighties, when you had the combination of a number of factors that included spiking divorce rates as well as greatly increased participation by women in the workforce. This gave rise to the well-memed phenomenon of Gen X as the “latchkey” generation, which saw large numbers of kids left on their own outside of school hours for extended periods of time. Add in the growing concern over drug use, and the PSAs pretty much write themselves. These included the much-loved “This is your brain on drugs” series of ads, the anti-drug spot shot by the cast of Saved By The Bell, and the surreal anti-crack PSA featuring Pee Wee Herman. 

By the mid-1990s things had started to calm down on this front (though Rachael Lee Cook’s very popular “this is your brain on drugs” ad came out in 1998). Partly this had to do with a decline in a lot of the factors that had given rise to the original moral panic around peer pressure. Divorce rates were dropping steadily from their early 1980s high points, as were a whole lot of other indicators of social breakdown, including arrests for robbery, assault, forcible rape, and motor vehicle theft. 

But there was also a new threat to kids looming, also from a place where the reach and oversight of adults was severely limited – namely, cyberspace. It took a while for the awareness of the various threats to catch on, largely because of the limitations of connectivity in the Web 1.0 world (though it is interesting that the Théàtre des Lutins was doing a computer safety morality play in the early 1990s). By the mid- to late 2000s though, online safety had almost completely supplanted IRL peer pressure as the dominant anxiety for parents. Sexual predation and grooming has been the overwhelming concern, though cyberbullying and its various offshoots was a huge issue as well. 

But in recent years, the greatest amount of alarm has been raised over the old nemesis, peer pressure, but transposed into a virtual key. Three or four times a year, my kids’ school board sends out a message to parents warning of the latest viral video or Tik Tok trend that is supposedly sweeping through the schools, almost all of which are essentially dares: the blackout challenge, the nutmeg challenge, the milk crate challenge, and on it goes. This freaks us out of course, but more often than not my kids say they haven’t really heard of it, or if they have, it’s all second or third hand, and they don’t really know of anyone actually doing this sort of stuff. But for parents, it is the stuff of nightmares, and it is compounded by the essentially global character of these things. All it takes is one or two stories of kids getting hurt or even dying, whether it’s in Canada, the US, Europe or elsewhere, to convince you that there is no such thing as a safe space online. 

This is the context, I think, in which it is important to understand the growing backlash against phones in schools. Sure, a lot of it has to do with the kind of things Jonathan Haidt is talking about in his new book The Anxious Generation – primarily mental health and anxiety. But there is also a profound sense by parents that what kids get up to online is not in their ability to control or even oversee. The paradox is that even as some parents insist their kids have phones in the name of safety, it is increasingly clear that the kids aren’t being handed a lifeline, they are being given a hand grenade. 

There is a lot more to it, of course, and the discussion around phones in schools has a lot more room to run. But what is fascinating to me here is how quaint the old 1980s-style fears about peer pressure seem in comparison to what is going on now. At least back then parents had a pretty good sense of who your kids’ peers actually were – they were largely kids like them, from broadly the same socioeconomic background, and they lived more or less in your community. The online world in which our kids are now spending much of their time and attention is a much different beast; it is global, purely viral, and largely anonymous, and it is backed by none of the basic community norms and expectations that would have at least tempered much of what we got up to in the 1980s. 

One good thing you could say about the peer pressure to join the gang de Joe, is that at least they were peers.

When Morgan Spurlock died last week, I was inclined to write a quick piece about him and the influence of Super Size Me. But then I realised that I hadn’t actually seen the movie since it came out and remembered very little about it. There’s a longer piece I want to write about the activist era of Gen X, starting with the anti-globalization movement and tying together people like Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, and the gang at Adbusters. In the meantime, see you in the comments. ap

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Not since Kendall Jenner slipped away from a modeling shoot to defuse the tensions around a Black Lives Matter protest by handing a can of Pepsi to a riot cop has a mainstream ad campaign generated as much hostility as the just-released spot from Apple pitching the arrival of the thinnest iPad ever. 

The ad was shared on Twitter by Apple CEO Tim Cook, who implored potential customers to “Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create." The clip shows a huge hydraulic press slowly crushing a bunch of old analog-era creative tools and treats, including a trumpet, an acoustic guitar and a piano, a record player, a camera, an old stand up arcade game, some rubber squeeze toys, and a bunch of paint cans. Then it pulls up to reveal the new, ultra thin iPad Pro, which has assimilated all of these things like some flatland Borg.  

You can see what Apple was going for here – all these old, bulky, single purpose tools and playthings are now available at your fingertips, in a package no bigger than a magazine. It’s an upgraded version of that old meme that used to go around about everything that used to be literally on your desktop – phone, typewriter, file folders, fax machine, and so on  – is now digitally sitting there on your computer desktop. 

People got it all right. The response to the spot was immediate, visceral, and vicious. They hate it. 

How did Apple go so wrong?

The most salient feature of the western mind’s relationship with technology is the ambivalence we have felt ever since Prometheus stole fire from the gods. On the one hand, we can now cook our food and keep ourselves warm. On the other hand, who knows where this will lead? Have we unleashed forces that will lead us to our destruction, or at least, lead us away from our true, authentic, selves? We love technology but we fear it, and the pendulum tends to swing from one extreme to the other depending on a host of factors, the most important of which is probably the rate of change and innovation. The faster things move, the less time we have to adapt, and we fear what is being lost more than we appreciate what is being gained. 

We are living through a period of what is for most of us unprecedented technological change, where the threats – to both humanity, and to our humanity – seem more urgent than they have in decades, certainly since the advent of the nuclear bomb. Whether it is the sudden fears over AI or the rising moral panic over smartphones or the leery way we look at self-driving cars, there is a firm sense that things are just happening too fast, that the old is being replaced by the new in ways we are barely able to process, let alone control. 

This is something that Apple used to understand implicitly, going back to the famous “Big Brother” Super Bowl spot from 1984, filmed by Ridley Scott. In that ad, legions of drone-like workers are arranged in orderly rows, watching a giant screen where Big Brother appears to give an address celebrating the anniversary of the “Information Purification Directives” that have created a society of pure ideological conformity. Everything is black and white, until a blonde woman wearing bright red suddenly appears, running toward the screen being chased by riot police. She screams, then throws a huge sledgehammer at the screen, which explodes in a flash of light. Thanks to the new Macintosh from the Apple Computer Corporation, we are informed, 1984 will not be like 1984.

At one level, this ad is the purest rebel sell – the ideology of rebellion and non-conformity being used to pitch a high-priced consumer product. And sure, it is a bit silly to suggest that an effective way of  asserting your individuality is to use a non-standard operating system. But what Apple was able to do with the Macintosh was deliver on one of the most difficult tricks of mass production, by making its users feel that their individuality was being enhanced by the product, not smothered by it. And so it has been ever since. For decades now, but especially since the introduction of the iPod, Apple has managed to convince its customers that its products are an example of the liberating power of technology – not liberating us from our flesh, but liberating our flesh from centralized control. Apple’s great success was making us feel more human, not less so. 

Which is what makes Apple’s decision to introduce a new product by showing beloved tools of the analog world literally getting crushed so baffling. First, it completely undermines what has been one of the most successful unique selling propositions of any brand in history. But more to the point, it utterly fails to notice where the current debate over technology is trending. School boards everywhere are taking steps to ban phones not just in class, but anywhere on school grounds. Even the people who are making AI are pleading with governments to regulate AI. Culturally, there is a rising fascination with the tools and techniques and products of the old analog world, not only amongst jaded Gen Xers, but also amongst their Gen Z offspring who are starting to wonder what the world was like in the Before Times. Gen X nostalgia is everywhere.  

It wouldn’t have taken much to save the spot. As one person noted in a comment under Tim Cook’s Twitter (X) post, the whole thing would have worked perfectly if the ad were simply played in reverse: Instead of the tools of the increasingly-lost analog world being crushed into the iPad, they expand out of it. 

Any successful technology has to be seen as amplifying or expanding our basic humanity, not subsuming it or replacing it. For the company that gave us the “Big Brother” ad to go full 1984 is a remarkable failure of self-understanding, and an even more amazing failure to simply read the room.

Steve Albini died this week, at 61. I don’t have much to add that hasn’t been written – the man was a genius, and did as much to shape the music of the 90s as just about anyone. But if you are looking for something fun, read his four page proposal to Nirvana to produce In Utero. Or just listen to In Utero. Meanwhile, Welcome new readers! Thanks for joining us; please share this with anyone you think might enjoy it. See you in the comments. ap

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ONE OF THE GREAT PLEASURES of having my kids get older is being able to introduce them to the pop culture of my youth – mostly movies and music – and seeing what resonates, and what doesn’t. My son loves ‘80s action movies, but Star Wars (alas) bores him. My daughter likes Taylor Swift, but while I haven’t managed to get her into the OG drama queen Alanis Morissette, she really digs Queen. 

One thing both of them agree on is that Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a most triumphant movie. We’ve watched it as a family maybe half a dozen times, and I adore how my kids have adopted as their own some of the best catchphrases of the film (e.g. “we’re totally weak… we couldn’t possibly fight you”). Of all the decade’s endless run of goofball teen stoner comedies, it’s probably the sweetest and most innocently fun, and it totally stands up today. 

Except for one scene. It’s when Bill and Ted are back in Merry Olde England, and they are being chased through the castle by some medieval dickweeds. Ted falls down some stairs, and rushing down, Bill thinks he sees him killed by a sword thrust through his suit of armour. As it turns out, Ted wasn’t in the suit at the time, and he re-enters the scene a few moments later to find Bill leaning over the empty suit, mourning his friend. Relieved, the two friends hug, only to step back, look at one another with a scowl, and together go: “Fag”. 

The scene makes me really uncomfortable, and it almost ruins what is one of the best lines in the whole film, when Ted explains how he survived: “I fell out of my suit when I hit the floor!” Yet by the standards of ‘80s pop culture, this is pretty mild stuff. Looking back, it is wild just how drenched in homophobia it all is. 

The ur-text for a lot of us was Delirious, the Eddie Murphy standup comedy special from 1983 that launched his career into the stratosphere. A friend’s older brother had a copy on VHS, and we probably watched it a dozen times in their basement. It all seemed side-splittingly funny at the time, and not despite,  but in some ways because of, the homophobic content. This includes Murphy’s fey imitation of Michael Jackson and an extremely unfunny riff about AIDS. Murphy’s attempt at an apologetic line, “I kid the homosexuals, because… they’re homosexuals,” struck our adolescent brains as hilarious, and we would recite it to one another over and over. 

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That cued up a decade worth of casual homophobia that we consumed almost without question or comment. It was so relentless, it’s hard to find a “beloved” teen movie from the era that isn’t shot through with gay slurs. In particular, the f-word and its variants is constantly employed as a generic insult. It is exceptionally predominant in John Hughes’ movies, including Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, and The Breakfast Club, but it also appears in Weird Science, Teen Wolf, Adventures in Babysitting, and on and on it goes. 

The f-word also makes an appearance in at least two of the biggest hits of the decade, “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits and “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues. The artistic defence of the its use in both songs is that it is “spoken” by characters in the song itself, and is supposed to reflect badly upon them. But that didn’t stop both acts from endorsing the subsequent bowdlerization of the radio edits of the tunes.

What’s incredible, in retrospect, is how this went on even as the AIDS epidemic was devastating the LGBTQ community, with the entertainment industries being some of the hardest hit. The free use of “fag” or, if the writer was getting creative, “homo”, as a go-to put-down seems to have operated in some sort of parallel universe where its “humorous” intent was somehow completely divorced from the transparent meaning of the words and the actual people to whom they applied. 

It’s hard to identify a single turning point in the culture where offhand homophobia stopped being acceptable, for comedic effect or otherwise. I can think of three episodes that have always stuck in mind as important, though.

The first was the release in 1988 of the Guns N’ Roses Lies EP. GN’R was probably the biggest rock band on the planet at the time thanks to their Appetite for Destruction album, and I loved them. But the EP had a song called “One in a Million,” which was purportedly about an experience Axl Rose had getting off the bus at the Greyhound terminal when he first came to LA. The lyrics include rants against police and immigrants, blacks and gay people, and employ hugely offensive slurs against both both of these latter targets.

The band came in for a fair amount of criticism for the song. While Axl tried to defend it at the time, he was never really able to explain or justify the song’s obvious sentiments and it was not included in any later compilations or box sets of their music. But as far as I was concerned, the most devastating takedown came from the comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, who had a bit in his routine where he mocked the song for its lyrics about how “immigrants and f******” come to his country “and spread some fuckin’ disease”. As Goldthwait wondered, had he missed some great exodus from the land of “Homoslavia?”

Now that struck me as funny.

A second, related moment was the eclipse of hair metal and the rise of grunge music, in particular the fantastic popularity of Nirvana, in the early nineties. Hair metal was notoriously misogynistic and, at least tacitly homophobic, notwithstanding all of the makeup and the hairspray and the tights and the high-pitched singing. But Kurt Cobain was the first musician I liked who I can recall being outspokenly feminist and pro-gay rights, not because it was part of his own image or identity, but because he simply hated the misogynists and the homophobes. A straight guy defending gay people? That was new.

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Around the same time, Magic Johnson announced that he had contracted AIDS, which forced a long-overdue conversation about the disease into the mainstream. Two years later, Tom Hanks starred in Philadelphia, a based-on-a-true-story movie about a lawyer who sues for wrongful dismissal who was fired after his employer found out he was gay and had contracted AIDS. Hanks was already a star, known mostly for slapstick or romantic comedies, but Philadelphia is the film that turned him into a Serious Actor. That Bruce Springsteen agreed to write the Grammy-award winning song “Streets of Philadelphia” for the soundtrack only amplified the mainstreaming of the issue. 

Nothing changes overnight of course. And even if things , in retrospect, seem to have turned the corner in the early nineties, it wasn’t until 1997 that  Ellen DeGeneres was able to come out as gay, albeit in character as “Ellen Morgan” on her hit sitcom, Ellen. And as late as 2009, the hit comedy The Hangover frequently went to the mined-out coalface of frat bro homophobia in search of yucks. But the key point here is that by the 2010s this sort of thing was a noticeably uncomfortable aberration in the culture, where a quarter century earlier it was the unnoticed norm. 

The good news is that social and moral progress is a real thing. Thanks in part to the natural tensions built into intergenerational dynamics, each cohort of teens tends to be more progressive than their parents, and there is very little in the way of retrenchment or backsliding. Which is why as much as Gen Xers tend to roll their eyes at some of the pieties of kids these days, especially around pronouns and bathrooms and that sort of thing, it’s important to acknowledge that there’s no going back.

And even if we could, why would we want to? The past is a mirror of our former selves, and through the looking-glass culture of the 1980s, it’s hard not to see a lot that should make us all cringe. 

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THIS PAST WEDNESDAY, I walked into my 8:30am class at McGill and asked the students if any of them had watched the solar eclipse that had tracked across from SW to NE across North America on Monday, and of so, what they thought of it. Almost all of them had tuned in to the celestial broadcast, many had taken part in the viewing party the university had hosted on the front campus, most thought it was pretty cool. One skeptic thought it was neat enough, but there was one thing he didn’t quite understand: Why, he wanted to know, when the eclipse reached totality, did everybody cheer?

I stammered for a bit, hemming and hawing. It seemed dead obvious to me why everyone cheered the disappearance of the sun, but I had trouble putting it into words. Stalling for time, I lamely offered “well, people used to cheer on planes when they landed.” The student sort of scoffed and said “sure, but at least that’s a technical accomplishment. The eclipse was just… something that happened.”

I gave up trying to give a cogent answer and just got on with the lecture. But the question kept bugging me during class, and I was still thinking about it back at my desk when a Slack notification popped up, informing me that O.J. Simpson had died. 

A lot has been written over the past few days about the life and death of O.J. Simpson, most of it focusing not on his outstanding career as a football player, nor on his oddball second act as an actor/pitchman, but rather on the fact that he murdered his ex-wife and her friend. Or more correctly, the coverage has focused on everything that happened after the murders. 

Simpson’s trial is typically described as “the trial of the century”, which it probably was. Stretching for almost a year, from November 9 1994 to the following October, it was a preposterously over the top and irreducibly American mix of pop culture, sports, celebrity, crime, television, and racial politics – the whole moronic inferno. It was also perhaps the last great psycho-social-cultural spectacle of the pre-internet age. 

The political and cultural fallout from the trial was enormous, starting with Simpson’s shocking (to white audiences) acquittal by a jury made up of eight African-Americans, two Hispanics, one half-white half-Native American, and a single white female. While it is impossible to understand the acquittal outside the context of what was widely understood as deep racism within the LAPD, as well as the aftermath of the Rodney King riots of 1992, it  is fair to say that the failure to secure a conviction ruined the legal careers of the prosecutors — Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden both resigned after losing the case. The presiding judge, Lance Ito, was himself the target of a great deal of mockery and criticism over his obvious enjoyment of the trial’s profile and his indulgence of the media’s coverage of the trial.  

As for Simpson, he had managed to assemble a “dream team” of lawyers that included  F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, Robert Kardashian, and Johnnie Cochran. All went on to some sort of fame or infamy (if they didn’t already have it): Cochran’s courtroom manner was satirized relentlessly on Seinfeld; Kardashian’s offspring gave us (Keeping Up with) The Kardashians and the whole influencer culture that followed; Dershowitz was already known as the lawyer to the stars, but has been dogged in recent years by his seedy connections to Jeffrey Epstein. And so on and on.  If Spy Magazine were still around, they would be publishing a continually-updated 8-page pull-out map showing the network of connections between the O.J. Simpson trial and the extended popular culture of the last thirty years. 

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All of this has been written and talked about at great length; there is a reason why 2016 saw the release of both a mini-series and an extended documentary about the trial, such was its cultural impact. Given all this, it’s difficult to keep in mind that behind the pop culture circus of it all was the brutal killing of two innocent people, by a serial abuser who got away with it. This was a point that Norm Macdonald went to great lengths to keep reminding people about, to his own detriment and the great discomfort of his targets. 

There is one aspect of the whole Simpson affair that always amused me though, and that’s the role it played in derailing David Hasselhoff’s music career. Hasselhoff is, of course, best known to children of the eighties as the co-star (alongside the car) of the cheesy action show Knight Rider. He then became one of the biggest TV stars of the 1990s thanks to Baywatch, which ran for over a decade and which had a viewership estimated at close to a billion people. 

But Hasselhoff was also a singer, and alongside his fame as an actor was somewhat of a big deal as a pop star in Europe, especially Germany. He craved singing success in America though, which is why in the middle of June 1994 he booked himself into a pay-per-view show in Atlantic City to promote his recent album You Are Everything. It was supposed to be his big music break stateside. 

But as luck would have it, 100 million Americans ignored Hasselhoff’s concert, and instead spent a few hours that day watching television as a white Ford Bronco, with Simpson in the back seat and driven by his buddy and teammate Al Cowlings, led the LAPD and a phalanx of police and media helicopters on a long slow-speed chase down a California Interstate. Hasselhoff took it pretty well, joking later that the only people who watched him perform that night were three people, including his mom and dad. As well he should; the chase also derailed the kickoff of the USA-hosted soccer World Cup, the NBA playoffs, and the ticker tape parade for the new Stanley Cup champions, the NY Rangers.  

Amusement factor aside, there’s another interesting aspect to the Hasselhoff piece of this, which is the very idea of the star (and producer) of a show with a global reach of a billion people having to book a pay per view concert at a casino resort to juice his singing career. It is hard to conceive of a world where someone’s talents and audiences could be so siloed and isolated. Today, the multi-platform profile of the singing/acting/entrepreneur/influencer star is the standard package.

From the murders to the car chase to the trial and its aftermath, the O.J. Simpson affair was one of the last great episodes of what we’ve started to call the “monoculture.” This refers to a somewhat mythologized time during the last decades of the 20th century, when the culture was still created, programmed, and distributed by the top-down gatekeepers of mass society. This was the push-culture of broadcast media, including radio, film, cable and network television, that by its very nature gave people a limited set of cultural choices that frequently had to be consumed “linearly”, i.e. at the same time. This is the culture of Letterman, Leno, and Howard Stern, of Friends and Seinfeld, of the Oscars and the Grammys and the Olympics and the Super Bowl. 

Like all aspects of the lost age of analog, the simple recourse to nostalgia has to be tempered by a recognition that there was a lot to dislike about the era, not least of which was that it didn’t really admit of a great deal of diversity in either content or intended audience.  As a good Vox piece from a few years ago put it, the late 20th century monoculture was basically middlebrow entertainment made by and for white Americans: 

Monoculture is a Pleasantville image of a lost togetherness that was maybe just an illusion in the first place, or a byproduct of socioeconomic hegemony. It wasn’t that everyone wanted to watch primetime Seinfeld, but that’s what was on, and it became universal by default.

What do we have now? Everyone agrees that the old monoculture is gone, killed by the internet, though it disappeared more recently than we might think. Even in the early years of social media, when Facebook and Twitter were young and innocent and no one had been cancelled yet, the social internet frequently served as a fun “second screen” where there would be a collective conversation going on where everyone was talking in real time about some other shared or focal part of the culture — the Oscars, or an Obama speech, or Hurricane Sandy.

That online culture is gone now, and with it, the whole idea of a monoculture. What has replaced it? Some argue that the culture we have now is completely asynchronous, fragmented, individualized, and niche, as we retreat to our rooms and our phones to binge our way through an offbeat miniseries or listen to some obscure band or, increasingly, swipe our way through an endless succession of viral TikToks or reels or stories or shorts. 

There is that for sure; I am increasingly surprised by just how much culture I consume alone, in the dark, with headphones on staring at a small glowing rectangle. But parallel to this is a monoculture of a different sort, one driven by the relentless selection pressures of the algorithms on mass streaming. This is the world of Netflix and Spotify and Amazon, but also the world of the Avengers and the MCU and Taylor Swift and Beyonce’s new “country” album. For all the choice on offer, there’s a shallow sameness to everything, a digital-algorithmic sense that whatever it is, it’s contrived and cynical, created entirely for its ability to snare your attention or clicks. We are only in the earliest days of seeing just how much AI will exacerbate and accelerate this process. 

It’s probably trite, but my sense is that people don’t miss the monoculture so much as they miss things like togetherness, and the sense of depth and meaning that comes from experiencing the universe on its own terms, not as something engineered for their attention. Something like a solar eclipse, which, as my student put it, is just something that happened. 

Why wouldn’t you cheer?

I apologise for the long delay between newsletter dispatches. I got into a busy time at work and it took me longer than I had anticipated getting back to this. I expect to be back on a regular schedule now, posting every week or so. Meanwhile, welcome to all the new readers! Thanks for joining us; please share this with anyone you think might enjoy it. See you in the comments. ap

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This piece isn’t on the most uplifting of themes, and I’ve been putting off writing it for a while. But I think it follows pretty naturally from the last dispatch, and it is important to talk about, so it’s probably time to get to it. We’ll get back to more fun stuff later this week — ap

A FEW YEARS AGO, I was driving once again down the 401 from Montreal to Toronto. It is a tremendously boring drive, and on this occasion it was saved only by my car radio’s ability to pick up The Edge 102.1 just as the station launched into a countdown of the Top Twenty Grunge Hits. As I whiled away the kilometers humming along to the sounds of the 1990s, I was struck by just how nihilistic and gloomy so much of the music was. I was also struck by how many of the musicians I had been listening to were dead. Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon, Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, Kristen Pfaff of Hole, Doug Hopkins of the Gin Blossoms, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, Scott Weiland of STP, Chester Bennington of Linkin Park… on it went, all of them gone, the direct result of either suicide or drug overdose.

As the Huffington Post put it when Chris Cornell died, suicide and death by drug overdose is sadly familiar to Gen Xers. The list includes a plenty of musicians, but also actors such as River Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Corey Haim, Heath Ledger, Brittany Murphy, Anna Nicole Smith and plenty of others. And then there is David Foster Wallace, probably the single most influential Gen X writer, who hanged himself in 2008 after fighting depression for decades.

It’s hard to know exactly how to parse this — it’s always dangerous to draw any broad conclusions based on the self-destructive lifestyles of celebrities, especially rock stars. But what is definitely true is that when Kurt Cobain killed himself in April 1994, it was quickly interpreted by many as the quintessential Gen X act of rebellion. As one writer put it, “Self-destruction is to Generation X what playing chicken was to '50s rockers, what taking hard-core drugs was to flower children. It's the ultimate rebellion in a world of youth culture where the forms of rebellion have been exhausted.” On this analysis, suicide is just what happens when you take the Gen X worldview to its logical conclusion.

We have explored the elements of that worldview already in this newsletter, notably here and here, but I’ve been avoiding the argument about suicide being the logical consequence. But unfortunately, it does seem that suicide rates are higher amongst members of Gen X, in a manner that suggests it is an actual generational characteristic, and not just a cohort effect.

In 1897, the sociologist Emile Durkheim published his book Suicide, which documented a robust fact that held steady from the beginning of the 19th century. Across almost all societies, suicide rates were much larger for adults aged 25-64 than for youth (15-24), while suicide rates for the elderly (age 65 and up) were much higher than for adults. The explanation for this also seemed straightforward: the young have the most life to look forward to, and also the least knowledge about how their lives will turn out.

That monotonic relationship started to fail around 1950. In the United States between 1950 and 1990, suicide rates for youth tripled, while the comparable rate for adults dropped by seven percent and for the elderly it fell by 30 percent. By the mid-Nineties, suicide was the second or third leading cause of death for youth across the countries of the Anglosphere and Western Europe, and in 2004, an Australian newspaper described Gen X as “the suicide generation.” But what is interesting — and somewhat disturbing — is that in many jurisdictions that trend continued even as Gen X moved into middle age. Far from mellowing out, from 1999 to 2017, members of Gen X consistently showed higher rates of suicide compared to other cohorts, while a 2019 American study lamented rising rates of despair amongst adults entering middle age.

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Just why Gen X is so morose, and why it so often manifests itself in self-harm, is hard to know, though in many cases the spike in suicide overlaps with the rise in the use of opioids. That is, those born in the 1960s and 1970s continue to be the age group with the highest number of deaths attributable to suicide or drug overdose. But that just invites the question of what is eating Gen Xers in the first place.

When it comes to suicide, it is important to distinguish between “successful” suicide versus suicide attempts, because they are different phenomena. Many attempts, in particular amongst youth, can be best understood not as a desire to end one’s life so much as a strategic action designed to exercise some sort of control over peers, their parents or other adults. There are also crucial demographic and gender-based differences: to give just one example, the suicide rate in Nunavut is ten times that of the general Canadian rate. And while women attempt suicide 50 per cent more often than men, they “succeed” only one sixth as often. But in sheer numbers, something around 70 per cent of those who take their own lives are white males.

There have been a lot of attempts at explaining just what triggered the rise in suicide rates across the developed world in the 80s and 90s, and frequently cited factors include Robert Putnam-style “bowling alone” elements such as the rise of individualism and the decline in community and other forms of social capital. It has also been blamed on structural changes in the economy, the rise of consumerism, and the decline of meaningful work in the age of globalization. But an important paper published in 2001 by the Harvard economists David Cutler and Edward Glaeser, along with the psychiatrist and Boston University professor Karen Norberg, zeroed in on a narrower possible cause: divorce rates.

When it comes to suicide attempts, they found clear evidence for a “strategic” model arising out of a desire to punish or control others, especially parents, which is exacerbated by social contagion type effects. For completed (that is, “successful”) suicides, they found mixed evidence for both social contagion as well as economic factors. But by far “the most important of these variables is the female divorce rate. In areas where more women are divorced, youth suicides are greater. This effect is large; if one takes the increase in divorce rates over time in consideration, one can explain as much as two-thirds of the increase in youth suicide.”

How the causal path might work here will be left to the reader to ponder. But if this explanation does hold, there is a bit of good news to be found. In Canada, the divorce rate started to rise in the mid 1970s, spiking to an all-time high after some legal reforms in 1986, before levelling off and beginning to drop sharply in 2005, to the point where it is now back to 1975 rates. Divorce rates in the U.S. show a similar pattern, peaking slightly earlier in 1980, but falling to a 50-year low in 2019.

This is probably not the whole story. But it does suggest that one of the big bragging points of Generation X, namely that we were “latchkey kids” who grew up resilient and self-reliant, free of adult supervision, is actually a bit of a fraud. It might very well have done an enormous amount of psychological damage, much of which is still with us.

Help is available

If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, please call 9-1-1.

Help is available 24/7 for suicide prevention and mental health. Here are some resources:

• Talk Suicide Canada: 1-833-456-4566 (or text 45645 from 4pm to midnight ET)

• For Quebec residents: 1-866-APPELLE (277-3553)

• Kids Help Phone: 1-800-668-6868 or text CONNECT to 686868

• Hope for Wellness Helpline for Indigenous peoples: 1-855-242-3310

• Trans Lifeline: 1-877-330-6366

• Wellness Together Canada

• Preventing suicide: Warning signs and how to help

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THERE WERE LOTS OF THINGS WE COULD GET AWAY WITH SAYING in our house; my parents weren’t too hung up on casual swearing, for example. But one phrase that was absolutely forbidden was “I’m bored”, and uttering it was liable to get you sent to clean your room, or worse. 

But frequently bored, I was. When I try to conjure up the dominant mood of my high school years, what I remember almost the most is just how incessantly bored we were. There was lots to do of course, between schoolwork and family life and extracurriculars; there were movies and music and parties, sports and other hobbies, lots of us got part-time jobs, some had boyfriends or girlfriends. But time seemed infinite; there were endless gobs of it lying about, stretching into the evenings and weekends and summers, like a great psychological desert. And more often than was healthy, we dealt with it by Getting Up To No Good. 

At the centre of it all, as enabler, partner, lubricant, participant, or distraction, was alcohol. We started drinking at a shockingly young age – some of my classmates were drinking by the end of grade nine, I started along with most of my friends in grade ten. But by grade eleven, pretty much everyone I knew drank, and drank heavily. A good weekend was one where you got loaded one night, a great weekend was when you did so both nights. We were too young to get into bars, but it was easy enough to get booze – either from older siblings, stealing from parents, or from a trip across the Ottawa River to Hull, where the depanneur owners weren’t too hung up on checking for ID. So on weekends by night, we would gather in parks or by the river or in houses where someone’s parents had made the terrible mistake of going away, and we would drink. 

Along with the booze came the loss of inhibition and impairing of judgment that gave rise to all sorts of risk-taking: from physical stunts, reckless driving, and other forms of self-destructive behaviour through to acts of minor vandalism or public mischief (a lot of which still seems too recent to safely talk about.) There was some experimentation with sex, though I think a lot less than many of us would have liked. But all of this got poured into the crucible of what seemed like endless time, where boredom acted as foil and forge of our adolescent identities. 

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We were not alone in this, not by any stretch. The second half of the 20th century could without much exaggeration be interpreted as the Age of Boredom, a period generously coloured by a general sense of tedium, ennui, apathy – whatever you want to call it. An large and influential sociological theory, known as the “critique of mass society”, was largely motivated by a belief in the essential dullness of modern life, in particular in its suburban aspects.  

But what is boredom, anyway? It’s not just the fact of having nothing in particular to do. It is the negatively charged experience of that state, and it contrasts with the more positive sense of mere idleness, what the founder of The Idler magazine, Tom Hodgkinson, echoing Walt Whitman, calls “the pleasurable, harmless and completely cost-free pleasures of simply doing nothing in particular.”

But the late twentieth century had trouble with idleness, because there was always an alternative to having nothing to do, namely, television. As William Deresiewicz writes in a fabulous 2009 essay “The End Of Solitude”,  it is no coincidence that the Age of Television and the Age of Boredom went hand in hand: “Television, by obviating the need to learn to make use of one’s lack of occupation, precludes one from ever discovering how to enjoy it… You are terrified of being bored – so you turn on the television.”

The problem with television, though, in the age before streaming, or even widespread easy recording, was that TV was a pure commodity, designed for wasting time. There was no real expectation that people would really care deeply about what they were watching, it existed solely to distract or, at best, mildly entertain the viewer. Waching television was what you did when there was nothing else to do. To that extent, it was just boredom made manifest – less a solution to the problem than a symptom of it. Hence, amongst my friends, the standard response to the teenage wasteland was risk taking and rebellion.

As far as we were concerned, this was nothing more than the natural order of things, baked into the very structure of our civilization. It was certainly completely normal behaviour by the standards of our peers, and as reflected back to us through pop culture. Yet some of the most interesting (and in some ways perplexing) social phenomena of the last three decades have been the significant declines in risk-taking behaviours amongst adolescents in high income countries. Whether it is binge-drinking, smoking, cannabis use, delinquent behaviours, or precocious sexual activity, the whole package of risk-taking activity amongst youth has been dropping steadily in Canada and the U.S. since the mid-1990s. One major study looked at the trends across the Anglosphere and the EU since 1990, and found similar results. The kids aren’t really behaving badly these days, at least by the usual measures, and while it is difficult to tease out the various causal factors, the hypothesis everyone keeps returning to is that it is a consequence of the enormous decrease in unstructured face to face time with friends. For example, during the 1990s four fifths of American 10th graders reported going to parties at least once a month, by 2017 this had dropped to about 57%.

This large drop in casual hanging out falls in lockstep with the rise of internet use, and seems to accelerate with the introduction of smartphones. This has led to a lot of armchair theorizing about a straightforward substitution effect, where (the argument goes) kids are now too busy texting one another or spending time online to have time for things like drinking and drug use, unprotected sex, vandalism, and so on. It’s not so simple, though, and there are probably a lot of other factors at work, including changing norms around parenting. It would certainly be a wild coincidence if the well-documented rise of helicopter parenting had no impact at all on the drop in adolescent rebelliousness. Indeed, if there is one thing that enabled a lot of our behaviour back in the eighties, aside from the booze and boredom and the time, it was the almost complete absence of widespread parental oversight, which gave plenty of room for peer pressure and status competition to wreak their havoc.  

But however the question gets resolved, one thing is true, which is that no one really gets bored anymore – the portable, networked, smartphone-enable social internet has seen to that. If boredom was the great social malaise of the second half of the twentieth century, loneliness is the despair of the first half of the twenty first. As Deresiewicz puts it, just as boredom is the negative experience of idleness, loneliness is the negative experience of solitude. And just as spending countless hours watching television trained an earlier generation to be bored, “a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself.” Where Generation X never learned how to be idle, today’s adolescents are incapable of solitude. 

This has led to a great deal of hand-wringing about the effects of smartphone use on mental health, and it is given some credence by studies showing that, compared to Gen X and even Millennials, members of Gen Z are much more likely to report feeling stressed, anxious, and lonely. But cause and effect remains hard to establish, especially given the extent to which we are all just much more comfortable talking about mental health than we used to be. 

Besides, for all of our collective bravado, the boasting about being the latchkey generation, it’s not obvious that Gen Xers are doing all that great. What’s eating Generation X? We’ll pick that up in the next dispatch. 

As always, thanks for reading. I’d appreciate you sharing this with anyone who might find it enjoyable as well. — ap

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IF WE HAD A COLLECTIVE RELIGION, growing up in Ottawa in the 1980s, it was rock music. If we had a cathedral, it was the Civic Centre, a dingy, ten thousand seat hockey arena nestled under the north stands of the Lansdowne Park football stadium. And while it was a pretty ecumenical church, the high priests came in the form of AC/DC, the Australian rock band led by the brothers Angus and Malcolm Young. 

Our high school was huge, with over 1700 students spread out over five cohorts (Ontario had Grade 13 back then), and it had the entire eighties menagerie of social cliques and types.There were jocks and preps and stoners and nerds and punks and artsy types, most of whom didn’t agree on much. But just about everyone agreed that AC/DC was awesome. 

And so it was that on May 11 1988, what seemed at the time like my entire high school gathered at the Civic Centre for the closest thing we had to mass, as AC/DC was in town for their Blow Up Your Video tour. It was a Wednesday, the end of the school year was hull-up on the horizon, and a sizeable chunk of my classmates had cut class to gather outside the doors to the Civic Centre, drink beer, and get ready to rock. 

I went with a bunch of friends, sitting up high in the stands and looking down on the right side of the stage. I don’t remember much about the show, but I remember the atmosphere in the rink snapping like a mouthful of pop rocks after the opening act, L.A. Guns, skulked off after their short set. I remember AC/DC opening with a big missile coming up out of the stage and disgorging Angus Young playing the headbanging opening riff to Heatseeker on his devil-horned Gibson SG. I remember the singer, Brian Johnson, ringing an enormous bell during Hells Bells. I remember catching sight of some friends from school losing their minds down in general admission, and I remember the cannons that roared at the end of For Those About To Rock. But mostly it was like almost every good arena concert I had seen: an ecstatic mental wash of guitars and drums and lights and explosions and screams.

My first real rock concert had come almost four years before, also at the Civic Centre, in late 1984. My friend Ken, always cooler than I, had bought us tickets to see Iron Maiden, who he was really into, though I was more excited to see the opening band, Twister Sister. We lived just over the canal from Lansdowne Park, so Ken and I got ready at our house and then walked across the bridge, joining a metalhead procession of leather and booze and pot. I was a bit freaked out by the scene outside the arena (watch the classic documentary “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” for the flavour of it) though it was even crazier inside. I couldn’t believe how much smoke there was hanging over the crowd. 

I didn’t even really understand how concerts worked – Ken had to explain to me the whole concept of an “opening band” – but Twisted Sister was amazing. They only really had a couple of great songs (“We’re not gonna take it” and “I wanna rock”) but they milked them for everything they could. At one point, clearly running out of material, the singer Dee Snider brought up the house lights and refused to play any more songs until everyone in the rink was standing up, which included getting the whole crowd to bully two laggards who were nailed to their chairs up in the rafters. Then he told everyone look, you guys are a pretty great crowd, but your city has a bad name. “I’m gonna give you a new name”, he said. Then Dee Snider made everyone chant “Otta-fuckin-wa” for about ten minutes straight. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. 

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Iron Maiden put on a great show but they were exfoliatingly loud. By the halfway mark I was leaning over with my fingers in my ears against the pain, and I was relieved when I looked over and saw Ken doing the same. I think we left before the encores, ears ringing and eyes watering, but happy as could be. And as we walked out, I noticed how the windows on the doors in the entrance way had fogged up completely as the steam bath inside the arena came up against the winter cold, and on those windows someone had written, in enormous letters, “Otta-fuckin-wa”. 

It was like being admitted into something magical and grown-up. Not quite a cult, but definitely a fellowship, with its own rules and symbols and rituals and grammar: the logic of an opening act, the structure of a setlist, the breaks for guitar and drum solos and sing-alongs and the part where they introduce the band, the obligatory ballads illuminated by a sea of Bic-lighters. All of which was crazy exciting and, it felt like, more than a bit dangerous. 

I have no idea how many shows I saw at the Civic Centre over the following decade.After Iron Maiden there was Bryan Adams, Sting, and Peter Gabriel (at least twice), INXS, David Bowie, Midnight Oil, John Cougar Mellencamp, Billy Idol with the Cult and, of course, AC/DC. There was basically a default rule, which was that if a band came through town, we would go, though I skipped U2 because I was a snob and thought they sucked. 

Arena rock as a genre is in a weird place right now, thanks to a shifting media ecosystem, the changing economics of touring, and the simple turnover of generations. There are still bands touring and playing indoor arenas, but what is weird is how many of them are holdovers from the 80s and even 70s. (Among the upcoming concerts at the Bell Centre in Montreal, I see Aerosmith, Heart, Cheap Trick, Bruce Springsteen, and Iron Maiden). In general, the scene seems to have taken on a sort of distorted barbell shape, with a small number of mammoth acts like the Rolling Stones or U2 selling out 80 000 seat stadiums, while everyone else plays smaller venues topping out at a few thousand seats. The old days of a steady parade of popular acts playing a ten to fifteen thousand seat arena have disappeared. 

As for the Ottawa Civic Centre, it is still around, for now. It’s scheduled for demolition at some point as part of a more general planned renovation of Lansdowne Park. But it doesn’t matter, because bands haven’t played there in over a decade. (The last rock concert there, appropriately enough, was Deep Purple). 

Every generation finds its own gods, and while Taylor Swift isn’t entirely my bag, I kind of get the mania. Who wouldn’t want to be part of something so huge? Back in 1988, the day after the AC/DC concert, it was pretty much all anyone wanted to talk about – the songs and the explosions, where they sat, what they saw. One buddy of ours who was down in general admission said he had actually managed to reach up and strum Angus Young’s guitar; there was a rumour about another kid who had snared a guitar pick off the floor. 

But what mattered weren’t the particulars of your story. What mattered was that you were there. 

I’m working on a series of posts about the culture wars of the late 80s and 90s, but in the meantime we’ll be sort of bouncing around a bit, thematically. As always, thanks for reading, and I’d appreciate you sharing it with anyone who might find it enjoyable as well. — ap

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