I belted out the song like any other grunge wannabe in the early 1900s, but I had no idea what I was saying. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain likely did not know what he was saying either. Content wasn’t the point. Explosive expression was.
The Nevermind album both shook the music world and shaped the culture for years to come. Grunge gave way to nouveau punk, and that genre, as all genres do, eventually became so mainstream that suburban girls from well-to-do families began to dye their hair and resist the Man, whoever that was, they could not be sure.
As I listen to music with my daughters in my truck – going here, going there – always a rush, I am struck by one particular song by Billie Eilish entitled “Why Am I Here?” It is one of many current songs that, in sundry ways, attempt to probe the deeper questions of life, but I mention it here because its title is so on the head of what ails so many younger people. What is that, exactly?
We might begin with the Modernists who over a century ago decried all things traditional, ushering protocol, morality, form, and all things institutional to the curb. It was all so inhibiting – so smothering. What is more, it is what birthed the first world war and all of the inexplicable carnage it produced. Out with the old, they cried. In with the modern, the new, the fresh, the original.
Only that did not seem to work out either. World War Two came along, and the carnage was even more terrible, the destruction even more horrific. A genocide. Atomic bombs. Millions of lost lives
Everything that led to that must go as well. These were the Postmodernists. Not one tradition was too suspect. Not one bit of morality was too dangerous. There needed to be a massive overhaul. Morality would be rebuilt from the ground up.
This was in the late 1940s – a project of the Baby Boomers.
But how did it all unfold?
The sexual revolution of the sixties. The drug experimentation of the 70s. The materialism of the 80s. Abortion. HIV. The breakdown of the nuclear family. And then came the school shootings. Despair. Hopelessness. Anxiety. Mostly among our youth. And then a song begging the question, Why Am I Here?
These are my students. The ones who rarely read. The ones who, thanks to AI, rarely write.
Over a century ago, leading artists and intellectuals threw everything out, determined to start anew. But what has become of us as a result?
I actually got a chance to meet Jacques Derrida at a conference at Penn State. For those of you who do not know, Derrida was a leading figure in the postmodern movement. He wrote essays that argued for the necessary deconstruction of everything that could be deconstructed. To him, it was about unveiling systems of power, and his way of thinking even targeted the definition and use of words. Have you ever wondered why there is so much confusion today about the words we use? Man? Woman? And all the rest?
When asked what he thought about the movement he spurred, Derrida offered a whimsical answer: Do not take me so seriously, he said.
If only we had listened.
