I recently heard a song from Halsey, a new artist in the growing group of indie pop singers who are making it onto the charts with clever hooks and thoughtful lyrics. It's called "New Americana," and its lyrics give me a feeling I can only describe as visceral dislike. Here's why.
Halsey paints a portrait of current American youth (like me) in an admittedly catchy celebratory anthem capped by the chorus: "We are the new Americana / High on legal marijuana / Raised on Biggie and Nirvana." Her lyrics are intended to point out the difference between the values of today's youth and the generations before us.
According to Halsey, our generation is social media savvy, hip to the latest viral videos and Twitter trends. Our women are more career-driven. We generally dislike anyone richer than us, and we view money as power. We're more accepting than anyone else of things that our parents would have called wrong, like gay marriage and - as the chorus mentions - drug use.
If Halsey's right, then what a misguided and lonely lot we must be.
The New Americana Halsey speaks of is a culture of idol worship: one nation under Me, Me, Me. Every characteristic of the current youth culture Halsey mentions has a distinct flavor of separation. Observation tells us that she is right. Today, largely speaking, we are individualists to the hilt.
Social media distances us from others by placing the barrier of a screen and contrivances like News Feeds, #hashtags, and sepia filters between our interactions with them. Every interaction with someone else online, more often than not, becomes either a matter of self-centered exhibition or anonymous opinion-flinging.
Being career-driven is not bad in and of itself, but when was the last time you heard anyone in popular media praising men and women who make starting and caring for a family their priority? Moreover, a singular and unyielding focus on career over community is, in fact, a bad thing.
A general suspicion of those with riches ignores the paths those individuals took to attain their riches. As the wealthy in money and influence are condemned, those who want to make an impact in business look at such public condemnation and become more reluctant to aim at success. Those young people that actually grasp at financial success often do so because they want to dominate others.
Our generation couples these tendencies with a sweeping rejection of many norms and values that have defined our people for centuries. We reject these things because they bind us, and to be our own gods, we must be free of them. Distinctions are labeled discriminatory simply because they divide, rather than because they are unreasonable or unjust. We will allow no one and nothing to tell us what is right, wrong, good, or bad. We aspire to become so free of moral boundaries that we can justifiably do whatever we please.
This is not courage. This is recklessness.
We replace these guiding cultural distinctions either with nothing at all, or, perversely, with their exact opposites. Agitating for this kind of change leads to a growing separation from our past, with no common guide but our own conflicted and contradictory sense of what we think is momentarily best.
The worst thing that our New Americana is doing, however, is flattening out uniqueness - and it begins at the level of education.
Colleges and universities, once great places of driven study and creative energy, have become repressive, holding their students to "speech codes," oddly trying to create a place of "free speech" by stifling any speech that they feel divides or "triggers" their sensitive students. Education indoctrinates students into a way of viewing the world that characterizes much of it as oppressive and threatening. Our generation is only too happy to "rebel."
I place "rebel" in quotes because, at this point, rebellion by the youth against the "establishment" has become so commonplace that it IS the establishment. It's a very strange, contradictory phenomenon. The media champions activism by "social justice warriors" and those who reject traditional values and customs routinely. Change at all costs, consequences be hanged, is the order of the day in the minds of many young men and women.
If you choose not to rebel, if you choose to hang onto the past, you will be shouted down, ignored, or laughed off. True conservatives, those who seek to preserve traditional values and institutions, are the new counterculture.
If Halsey's picture of my generation's culture is accurate, then I want no part in it. I'll take tradition, and the tried, true values of faith, hard work, and moral courage that make our culture and our country so great. I would love it if you would come along with me.
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