We’re Desperate, Get Used to It
The stimulus, if it ever comes, will not help. The rent will be defaulted on. The storefronts will shutter. The people will go hungry. It is unignorable. It is inescapable. It is already happening.
I turn on the TV and I don’t see my world reflected within it and that’s why I rarely turn on the TV. I don’t want to escape. I want to exist. I want to survive. I want to see others do the same. I don’t want to watch another show about a rich family who loathes one other or a 24-year-old white woman who hasn’t yet figured out this crazy thing called life. I want to watch a show about my next door neighbor who works the night shift at UPS and sits in his truck during the day blasting hip hop in order to get away from the wife and two kids he lives with in a one bedroom apartment. The shows I see when I turn on the TV are, instead, aspirational. But aspirational is, by and large, unachievable.
My city, like all American cities, is bleak, getting bleaker all the time. Buildings are boarded, empty lots left fallow. Filth collects in the streets; soiled fast food wrappers and broken IKEA furniture and waterlogged Amazon boxes clog storm drains. Abandoned Lime Scooters, strewn across sidewalks, are scrap metal venture capitalists would prosecute junk dealers for selling. Ponytailed women in pastels jog past endless rows of tents at Echo Park Lake, each one containing a story as harrowing as the last. The darkness is outside our door.
History, I know, is cyclical. Soon, then, will it be the ‘70s once more? I can’t help but think about the Los Angeles punk scene — the inclusively miserable collection of “black[s], white[s], straight[s] and queer[s]” the Screamers screamed about. They were poor and they were pissed and their material reflected that. I can still listen to them today on Spotify, if I care to. It’s a good thing the vast majority of them are dead, because were they alive Spotify would not provide them a living. Seven years ago David Byrne declared that, “for a band of four people that makes a 15% royalty from Spotify streams, it would take 236,549,020 streams for each person to earn a minimum wage of $15,080 a year.” Things have only gotten worse since then. Touring income kept musicians afloat for a while, but with the world on lockdown they can’t even sell t-shirts to inebriated Europeans anymore. Quelle merde.
I once found myself in the backyard of one of the last people to have successfully monetized being a misanthrope, back when you could make an honest living honestly critiquing a decaying culture. I was there as the friend of a friend who had also cashed in when there was money in contempt.
(Side Note: The continued existence of Larry David’s career does not mean there is still money in misanthropy, as what he does is not art, nor is it criticism — it’s classic slapstick heel shit. The joke is that he has $400m yet he is still upset.)
Smoking on a decorative rock near the fenced edge of the lawn so his preteen son couldn’t see my shame, I stared at the scene before me: a beautiful, substantial California Craftsman home polished to the height of its former glory. My eyes traveled down to the deck, then rested upon a hot tub, which instantly became suffused with meaning. Someone who had created some of the most pointed, hate-filled art I had ever witnessed was somehow able to parlay it into hot tub money, while I’d never be able to afford a one bedroom bungalow. This stung, yet came as no surprise. I stubbed my cigarette out and walked back into the house.
Eating artisanal vittles in front of his restored fireplace, I contemplated my lot in life. Perhaps my payment as an artist in the 21st century lied in my friendships with those who were able to make actual coinage before the bottom dropped out. This was better than no payment at all, but sneaking slices from a $8 sliver of cheese didn’t pay my rent.
Less than a decade ago, I split $760 a month on a studio apartment with my boyfriend and could hardly afford it. There is no logical reason why my rent is now $1300 and I am lucky to pay it, even though 90% of my income (well, when I had an income) goes to it. This is my experience and it is not unique. It is just like the experiences of virtually everyone else I know, yet this is not reflected in the world of art we are given. Because capitalism ruined culture in much the same way it ruined, y’know, everything else. Corporations used to be willing to lose lucre in order to gain prestige, to soften the sellout cash grab their true existence entailed. No more.
We now find ourselves in a world in which pockmarked perennial losers, drunk on bottom shelf booze, are no longer our poet laureates. They have been replaced by a new class of artists who possess the luxury of being able to create in perpetuity, as they are not draining their life energy Postmating cold pressed juice to non-tipping yuppies. This new breed of capitalism-approved dilettantes have been shoved down our throats because they went to school with other children of inherited wealth who became PR agents.
They have Peletons. They have Priuses. They are soft and the content they create reflects this. It is toothless, self referential. It says and contributes nothing. They are publicly upset about the same things we are — inequality, xenophobia, unaffordable housing, et al — but only because it has become politically convenient to do so. The nouveau riche can no longer shamelessly embrace their wealth. They must now be woke for appearances sake, to appear humble and empathetic and thus avoid cancellation, imploring us to donate to just causes in between Instagram posts about their latest $200 haircut.
When you are born on top of the world, however, all punching is downward. They choose the easiest targets, people for whom we can all collectively agree are in the wrong, incels and influencers and the like. It’s lazy, but so is the lifestyle of someone who never has to worry about the rent. I am aware of the fact that I resent them because I do not have what they have. I, quite literally, hate them cause I ain’t them. Yet I am also aware of the impotence with which I express this hatred to my nominal audience. And really, I don’t actually hate them, I hate the system which has allowed them to thrive.
Because these people would have gotten opportunities regardless, as that’s how privilege works. It’s pointless to hemorrhage mental energy begrudging them. Instead, I mourn the loss of the voices of starving artists plucked from obscurity, heard by the right A&R person or read by the right lit agent or seen by the right talent booker. I mourn the loss of a time in which agents could place company money on high risk bets.
I mourn the loss of a time in which corporations harvested cool, they harvested actual, undistilled, feral, cool; now they harvest a guilt-ridden, insincere facsimile of it placed atop the cypher of a culture vulture whose dad was name-checked in the Panama Papers, as it has become the safest bet. Now, they always take the safest bet. But is it, really? Who’s to say a book or an album or a TV show penned by someone who is genuinely impoverished can’t light the world afire? After all, don’t they actually represent reality?
I want the ‘70s to return. I have become nostalgic for bad skin and home done haircuts. I have become nostalgic for the lie that commoners could shift the culture. I suppose it wasn’t a lie at the time I was first told it, I was just too young to cash in. Now, it seems, I never will.