Scene

I feel like I'm coming down with an illness.  That isn't very surprising considering that most of the typesetting department has been out with the flu.  It's even less of a shocker when you consider that my dinner consisted of shitty, vending machine breakfast sandwiches and a bag of Bugles.  Hell, I've had that infamous tickle in my throat all weekend and decided to treat it with half a pack of cigarettes and a $40 bar tab.  You can't feel the symptoms of a cold when they're buried in the miseries of a stalwart hangover.

That was a fun ride home, by the way.  On Saturday my band headed up to St. Louis to play the last night of the local punk rock fest there; Dude's Weekend.  It should be noted that Dude's Weekend was actually called Stay Retardeder the year prior, and the year before that it was the aptly named Stay Retarded.  I'm just as baffled as you probably are by the questionable misogyny and the poking of fun at those with special needs that these fest names exhibit, but that's territory I'm not going to go into right now.  There's a whole other generational/existential angle I'd like to explore instead.

I rode up to St. Louis in Jake's car with TJ.  The conversation revolved heavily around TJ's recent breaking of a 2 1/2 year long dry spell (prime entertainment fodder) until we officially found our way out of the greater Kansas City area.  It was at that time that we almost died when Jake veered off the road so that he could make a stop at one of Missouri's millions of fireworks stands.  Those places look like massive warehouses full of explosive ordinance, but when you enter you find that only the front room is stocked and it's selection is shittier than most tents that pop up in Kansas around the 4th of July.  Such is life, I suppose. 

Once we got back on the road, Jake craned his head toward the back seat where I was sitting.  He asked me if I'd ever heard of orgcore.  "Morgue Core?" I asked.  "No," he said.  "O-R-G, no space, CORE."  No.  I definitely hadn't.  He alluded to something like he and I belonging to that particular subgenre of some scene or another and urged me to look it up.

What I got was the picture from yourscenesucks.com of an "orgcore punker".  An orgcore punker- apparently- is someone pushing thirty or already there with an affinity for beards, flannel shirts and late 90's/early 2000's mopey, drunken punk bands.  The similarities between description and reality got even more eerie; orgcore punkers sport band themed and sailor tattoos and are all more or less alcoholics.  Shit, I thought.  And here I was beginning to believe that I'd left all notions of belonging to any scene behind a while ago.

Something pierced my pseudo-panicked confusion before it could really settle in.  These "core" and "scene" labels are often times applied from the outside.  I don't know anyone who'd walk around and seriously say that they're orgcore.  At the show that night I did take stock of all the orgcore punkers I saw, however.  That's a phenomenon called labeling.  Once you've ascribed a label to someone, it is damned near impossible to undo the damage.  This labeling phenomenon is a central part to the dehumanizing effects of racism and homophobia by the way, but that's not the point I'm even remotely trying to make here.

The crux of the matter is that these genre labels are absurd, teenaged bullshit.  We all remember how it was to listen to Taking Back Sunday when everyone else in our highschool class was listening to shitty hip-hop and Nickleback songs.  It made us feel separate, superior some how.  These indie and underground bands and the scenes that grew around them were havens for misfits like myself and most of you.  When we heard those songs and went to those shows we felt like we belonged and that we were a whole hell of a lot smarter and erudite than our jock and cheerleader peers.  The problem, though, is that we were pigeon-holing ourselves and only filling some vague sort of a uniform.  There wasn't anything wrong with the music or the shows, but allowing your style of dress to define your social grouping and status is just ridiculous.  It's tribal, really, which doesn't seem so bad until you realize the majority of your fellow "tribe" members are just as petty and awful as the people you were trying to deviate from when you got into this mess in the first place. 

It all boils down to this "Generation Me", or "Generation Y" thing.  Wouldn't it be more accurate if the monikers were "Generation Meh" and "Generation Why?"?  I think so.  Thanks to the internet, we're free to shut out the rest of the world and dive headlong into whatever social setting we want to.  Do you want to be a swinger?  There's a social networking sight for that.  Have you always believed that you were an immortal bloodsucking monster of the night?  There's a sight for that too (insert clever Facebook joke here).  The point is that we don't have to interact with anyone we don't want to and it's ripping American society apart.  Instead of being individuals loosely affiliated and able to level with just about anybody, we're becoming a reluctant confluence of thousands upon thousands of tiny, little tribal groups lacking the basic social skill set to relate to anyone outside our immediate clave.  Good bye, greatest society on Earth.  That's why we should be Generation Meh and Generation Why?.  Because we're addicted to techno-crack and we couldn't care any less.  Those names are also cute and clever (sort of) and mark the pinnacle of my creative output for the day.

So what's the solution?  Well, there isn't one.  As far as the whole genre argument goes, you're basically going to be committing the intellectual equivalent of smashing your face into a brick wall if you even attempt to fight it.  There's an unstoppable ocean of human ignorance there that forms the very premise of the discussion, so don't even try.  My approach has been to overtly ignore the whole thing while secretly remaining convinced of my own superiority to anyone engaged in the "scene" conversation.  Clearly that doesn't work because here I am fucking writing about it.  And as far as the social disintegration of America goes, I'd simply invite you to pull up a seat, grab a drink, kick of your shoes, and watch the ship sink.