"We'll never get to hear how the band might have developed; the analogy would be if John Lennon had died not in 1980 but in 1965."

Wrote my son John, yesterday, April 8th:

Nirvana released only three proper studio albums. In an interview near the end of his life, Cobain was critical of the band's soft/loud formula and talked about wanting to branch out stylistically. He was disappointed that the band up to that point had emphasized the heavy side of that formula instead of a poppier, Beatley side.... They should have done so much more. But they changed the direction of rock music in the few years they were around. I realize that other bands have a better claim to inventing grunge. Nirvana was to grunge rock as the Beatles were to '60s rock, or as Mozart was to the Classical style, or as Bach was to Baroque. They didn't invent their style. They perfected it. Cobain was the first to admit that he mostly ripped off a lot of other bands to make Nirvana's music. I'm so glad he did.

I appreciated that John was commemorating the date we learned that Kurt Cobain had killed himself, his body having lain dead, undiscovered, for 3 days. As I wrote over there, the date we heard the news matters deeply:

To me, it's the effect on people like you that is so significant. For the music that you and other young people loved to have suddenly taken on the meaning of the rejection of life -- that was terrible thing (in addition to the loss that you describe, to know that you would never hear more, never have the experience of hearing what would have evolved from what you already had made part of your mind and your life through love and attention).

John was 13 at this point, and he recounts hearing the news that day on MTV, in a report that used the phrase "a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head." He turned to me for an explanation, and I said "That means he killed himself."

What emotion does your youth culture valorize and what social form does it envision?

William Deresiewicz takes inventory.

For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement.

The beatniks aimed at ecstasy, embodied as a social form in individual transcendence. Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; of marijuana, arresting time and flooding the soul with pleasure (this was before the substance became the background drug of every youth culture); of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

The punks were all about rage, their social program nihilistic anarchy. “Get pissed,” Johnny Rotten sang. “Destroy.” Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony.

And what of these kids today? Are we going to call them the "hipsters?" Deresiewicz prefers "millennials." He diagnoses the emotion as niceness, which doesn't seem hip at all. (Not that hippies were hip.) Is niceness an emotion? Deresiewicz toys with "post-emotional," then comes up with "the affect of the salesman." And that's not very nice at all. What "social form" do these little jerks get? Deresiewicz assigns them: small business. 

Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.

See how that goes with "the affect of the salesman"?

Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.

This is not meant as a compliment. Deresiewicz is not a fan of "the bland, inoffensive, smile-and-a-shoeshine personality — the stay-positive, other-directed, I’ll-be-whoever-you-want-me-to-be personality — that everybody has today."

ADDED: I like Deresiewicz's writing style and he has a lot of nice observations, but something's obviously missing — something expressed by the "these kids today" tag I just added. In every generation, there's a mix of conventional and rebellious type individuals. The millennials he describes sound very similar to the people beatniks, hippies, and slackers rebelled against. There are rebels among the millennial generation too. Look at all the protests these days! Look at all the young people who are looking to the government to deal with the joblessness. How cheerfully entrepreneurial are they?

"[C]urio cases, taxidermy and other stylish clutter of the Victorian era have been taken up by young hipsters..."

Jeez, I never know what to believe when I'm reading about "hipsters" in the New York Times.

... he saw a young man dressed in a bowler, cape, breeches and knee socks on the Lower East Side.

“We’ve already seen the comeback of the butcher and the baker,” he said. “Next thing is going to be a hipster candlestick maker.”...

Country and city men alike have rediscovered old-school American brands like Filson, Orvis, L. L. Bean and Duluth Pack. Obsolete hobbies like wet-plate photography are finding new enthusiasts; long-outmoded farming practices are being revived. Even deer hunting with old-fashioned muzzleloaded rifles, which have to be loaded with gunpowder, a musket ball and a ramrod, has come back in force in some states.

When I read style pieces like this, the first thing I always think about is The Great Grunge Hoax of 1992. But then, I'm not a hipster. I'm a member of the tom-tom club.

Remember...

... Grunge?