On January 11th, 2016, I started a daily practice of writing a joke meditation of the day called Cracked Pot Meditations. I was still recovering from the treatment of cancer, and I was having very challenging cognitive issues, so I chose just to put something simple and easy to write every day. Posting it to the blog allowed me to have some accountability. Some of those meditations were poorly written and unedited. I have gone back and begun editing these and adding an illustration, starting with the April 27th meditation. I hope you enjoy.
Meditation for August 16th
Kids Don’t Know How To Subculture Anymore
From the Harlem Renaissance to the Beats, Rock and Rollers, Hippies, Punks, and New Wavers and Metal Heads, subcultures have sat at the fringe of mainstream culture with criticism and cynicism. The youth have turned their back on their parents’ ideas and culture to form their own identities and have finally rewritten the way we write, create art, and make music.
The kids have no idea how to do that anymore. Most kids are listening to music that is in no way different than their parents. Kids are being driven to punk rock shows and even attending rock and roll camps where they learn how to rock like mom and dad used to. The kids have nowhere to turn when the world starts to seem unbearable. They are going to the same shows as their parents. The old forms, like punk and metal, are being performed in bars by middle-agers trying to hold onto a thread of youth, and by other middle-agers trying to hold onto a thread of their youth. It’s gross, and maybe it’s time to let the kids rock and roll?
Parents aren’t scared of what their kids are up to anymore.
Kids are okay with what the fashion industry and music cabal are pushing. There is no refusal to participate in the sickening capitalism of the Kardashians, Kanye West, Taylor Swift, or Jack White of the band U2. It is accepted. It isn’t even done, ironically, like how the whole disease started. I remember punks all of a sudden liking pop music, but they’d play it off like it was ironic, but then the ironic joke just stayed around, and pretty soon there wasn’t any punk anymore, just disco beats and bad lyrics.
The kids seem slightly uncomfortable with the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency (again, this was written in 2016). Still, they seem to have no way to combat the reality except with memes and regurgitating what has already been shared. There is no violence, no destruction of the status quo, and no dangerous music or fashion that seems likely to scare the squares.
Writers, musicians, and artists used to do jail time for censorship.
The few who seem to crave a unique subculture either relocate to Portland, Oregon, or seek solace in the nineteen-eighties genres.Boring bands that are widely accepted, like Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, The Clash, and God Hates Computers, grace young people’s t-shirts everywhere. The punks are the same and are more concerned with doing punk perfectly than being punk at all.
Now it’s okay to be into metal and punk! Why, when I was a kid, the metal heads were all racist nazis if they weren’t fat D&D nerds! Now, long-haired bullet belt-wearing metalheads are doing hair for a living and eating vegan food, and are hot. How can metal be metal if the fans of metal are hot?
It’s as if we’re stuck in a spiral. It’s almost as if the man has mastered the art of keeping kids sedated through Facebook and 80s TV show-inspired movies. Dads are listening to hip hop with racy lyrics. Moms are blasting Minor Threat as they drop their kids off at school. Your parents might be more extreme than you are!
It’s not dangerous. Maybe the shock has worn off, so nothing could scare the mundane squares that want things to be calm. Maybe after Marilyn Manson, GWAR, and the Insane Clown Posse, nothing will make a right-wing Reagan lover shake in his boots.
Now we’re raising the biggest bunch of traditionalist, conservative, moral jerkwads ever. They didn’t see any option but to be the establishment. Just watch, when the millennials become old enough, we will see the return of a unified Grand Ole Party and moral soundness along with family values.
There will be no subculture to fight against it.
We have become too cynical and lethargic to stand up to anything anymore. We pick at the details while the big picture becomes darker and darker. The reaction to the ones who have to live in the fringes is to push them farther and farther away with “freedom of speech” bullshit and a “love it or leave it” mentality, while the ones who would have ordinarily grabbed the flag of a subculture to stand up for their rights is busy saying what makes Beyonce’s video radical enough, or what makes Bernie Sanders radical enough, or how Kim Kardashian’s fashion empire is the new feminism, and how RuPaul drag race is proof that gays are accepted and free now. Our politics are being orchestrated by advertising.
I don’t care about you kids changing anything, but what I would like to see is something new, dangerous, and creative to come out and scare me. I want to be afraid of kids. I want the kids to look like the world is going to shit rather than looking like my grandparents’ generation by getting ready to destroy a global ecosystem for a dollar.
Don’t follow the punk and metal trends, and stop placating mainstream artists who toy with commercial activism for your subculture. Do your own thing, because what has happened before has all been beautiful.
Perhaps we are the Roman Empire, fading away into the dark ages, where knowledge is not only lost but also no longer sought, despite having the entire worldwide web at our fingertips. We’re too lazy and uninformed to look.
Prayer
Prometheus,
While the story tells of you stealing fire from the Gods
And giving it to us,
They forget that you also gave us the culture of the Gods.
It wasn’t so much eating cooked meat that angered the Gods,
That we started eating our sacrifices,
It was the art, the written word, and philosophy that made us just like Gods.
Then the Gods punished us with painful mortality,
And you are on the rock, having your liver eaten by an eagle for eternity.
Some say that Lucifer is Prometheus,
And that our punishment has been the punishment of mortality,
And that’s what we create,
Is our immortality,
Our afterlife,
For the Gods would never dare give us an afterlife.
Amen
Craft
One reason there isn’t a strong subculture is that artists often don’t learn the whole history and practice classic forms before destroying them. All of the greats that fucked up traditional forms were also great at making the creative forms. Now, people often look back ten years for inspiration and only learn the last few years of the art form before contributing their voice to it.
We also need to know that voice. We don’t know what we want to say, but we know how we want to say it. Without the voice, there is an emptiness in our creations. Some of the most prominent contemporary artists create these pieces that appear to be empty. They share more with advertising than with art. None of it scares us.
Goal
Let’s create art that fucks up society again, but don’t do what we already did again; let’s do something new.