From the Jun 8 – Jun 14, 2000 issue

Music

Weird Like Everyone Else

Hipster Fascist Ann Powers Reveals Everything You Already Know

by Mark Gavreau Judge

IN THE SIXTH SENSE, one of the most popular and acclaimed recent American films, Bruce Willis plays a man who isn't at all what he thinks he is. In fact, as most people know by now, Willis is dead and doesn't know it. He putters around the house, talks to a wife who ignores him, and keeps appearing in the same clothes. It isn't until the last few minutes that he, and the audience, uncovers the awful truth.

I thought of Willis' ghost when I recently came across a copy of Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America, an autobiography-cum-manifesto by New York Times rock critic Ann Powers. Weird Like Us is an exasperating and remarkable book. In its advocacy of punk rock, drugs, nontraditional living arrangements, adolescent behavior, and general narcissism, Weird is nothing you couldn't see on prime-time television or in most newspapers. What is so stunning is that Powers, an employee of The New York Times and author of a book published by those fringe troublemakers Simon & Schuster, can with a straight face contend that her "rebellion" is anything outside the mainstream.

Thanks to Powers, it's possible to understand a neat trick by America's cultural elite, passing themselves off as a minority fighting the System, when in fact they are the System. Like Willis, Powers has no idea that the world she inhabits is not at all what she thinks. The bohemian poses she assumes have become comfortably fixed in the mainstream: the narcissistic, therapeutic, tyrannically liberal, and relentlessly hip culture that America has become. Everyone's a bohemian these days.

I should know: My life was almost identical to Powers, but when I was mugged by reality and became a conservative, the avenues that seem to magically happen to Powers, a fellow journalist, were closed off to me. In reading Weird, I was surprised at how closely my life has paralleled that of the author. I then found myself profoundly grateful that events had forced me to grow out of it.

Powers and I are roughly the same age, mid-30s. Like her, I grew up in a nice middle-class home, and as a youth I rebelled against my parents and everything else. I too loved punk rock, the scabrous youth music whose sole purpose is to act out temper tantrums. I too spent time in erstwhile punk mecca Seattle, where Powers lived and had her first acid trip on July 4, 1980, in a scene that opens the book. Like her, I worked in a record store, and experimented with drugs (although I was always too scared to try LSD). My politics, like hers, were on the left, full of rancor for the kind of right-wing bogeymen that I know were fabricated from the disappointment at missing the battles of the 1960s. Like much of my generation, I created monsters to bravely set myself against. The monsters, of course, were Chimeras--the phony liberal Cerberus of race, class, and gender. I was a fool.

I was also self-aggrandizing in a way that only over-indulged, modern American children who've known no real hardship can be. (Where did all those WTO protesters park the shiny SUVs their parents bought them for graduation?) It wasn't enough that the right-wing, the religious, and bourgeois middle-class America were losers; my friends and I, with our inside knowledge of bands, our funny haircuts, and our forward-thinking politics, were sanctified, special, holy. We felt a connection to the saints of the left: the Beat poets of the '50s, street fighters of the '60s, punk rockers of the '70s, and now us. We were taking it to the Man by wearing leather jackets, staying out late drinking, and, well, playing our punk rock real loud. It was lifestyle politics masquerading as something more, because there were so few taboos left to break.

The attitudes, politics, and philosophies of prior rebel movements conquered American culture with absolute completeness. Premarital sex was rampant, as was divorce. In the Washington, D.C. record store where I worked, I was the odd man out because I'm not gay. You could wear whatever you wanted in public, publish anything, and say anything. But admitting this would have left me and other "rebels" in the 1980s with no enemies to take on, and taking on America was what it was all about. It was romantic, and impressed girls. Moreover, it got me noticed by The Washington Post, which called me in for a face-to-face in 1989 after they saw something I had written. I would eventually write a few articles for the political and cultural page "Outlook."

I was working in a record store at the time, living my life parallel to Powers, who also worked in a record store. Like her, I was a part of a generation for whom, as Allan Bloom has pointed out, rock music has surpassed religion and art as the ultimate aesthetic experience. Powers describes the heady feeling of working in a record store and meeting like-minded rock fanatics:

"We flocked to each other because we all shared this holy devotion to music, though we tended to diverge on matters of genre and style... Mona preferred 1960s soul, Ted dug New Wave, Paul liked funk, and Tracy mooned endlessly over scruffy indie rockers like Alex Chilton. I did my own mooning over Billy Bragg and Brian Eno, but stayed interested in other people's passions.... Loving music had pushed all of us off the track--away from the normal pursuit of career, mate, and family, on an endless quest for that vibrating high, the plunge beyond time that comes only when you submerge yourself beneath the waterline of amplified sound. We were addicts, in a way, but we were also adepts, enlightened by a noise most people considered no more than a pleasant distraction. What was left for us but to practice our art of listening?"

What indeed? What is so bizarre and disquieting about this passage is that Powers seems to have no clue at how utterly conventional it all is. She's a young American who loves rock and roll and gives it power beyond itself. Folks like that are more common than golden retrievers. Powers doesn't seem to realize that to the educated eye, or even to the intellectually curious, she seems trapped in what one reviewer called "bohemia's mental gated community." What she perceives as an eclectic taste in music runs the gamut from A to B: Let's see, there's soul, funk, rock, and, uh, indie rock. She's like those guys in the record store in the movie High Fidelity, trapped in a ghetto of cool that they pass off as pure expansiveness. But at least John Cusack had changed by the end of the film.

It's hard to get past a page of Weird Like Us without coming across vapid, self-important grandiosity. Here Powers describes the cultural atmosphere of the mid-1980s, when she was living in a group house in San Francisco:

"It was the mid-1980s, Reagan's American morning. We felt like we were living in an alien nation, where robotic yuppies ate twelve-dollar plates of mashed potatoes at ersatz-retro diners and neck-scrubbing Christians fought artists in the streets. The air buzzed with words, speeding toward us like bullets: virtue, morality, values. According to everyone around us, we could lay no claim to these terms; we were expected to follow in the deep footsteps of the countercultural baby boomers or to stay in our corners, despairing at the failure of their revolution. We felt like we had to start at the beginning. And so, like children, we shut the door behind us, pulled out our gameboard, and played the Game of Life."

Dear Heaven, the bravery! Robots and $12 plates of mashed potatoes! Who can blame Powers and her fellow rebels for rejecting Reagan and retreating to their rooms to reinvent the world--oh yeah, and to take a job with The New York Times and get a fat advance to write a book for a major publisher. Her cutting-edge program offers nothing that's not already quotidian Hollywood fare and boilerplate leftism.

At the end of Weird Like Us, Powers advocates her bohemian America moving into the mainstream, where it "can inflict permanent damage." She doesn't realize that in the last 30 years, this is exactly what has happened. When in 1992 The New York Times called and offered her a job, Powers at first rejected it, thinking it a capitulation to the mainstream she'd been fighting her whole life. In fact, her drug-taking, punk rock, pagan wedding ceremony, and antipathy to conservatives gently placed her on the sure path to the Times and the liberal elite. Still, the Left's desire to appear marginal is so overpowering it erodes common sense. Psychologically, the rebel needs an enemy. Despite caterwauling about the "corporate" media, in the last 10 years the mainstream media has become indistinguishable from the "alternative" press--and just as ossified--in its forward-looking lockstep liberalism.

Toward the end of her book, Powers offers a windy salute to indie rock and its hero Kurt Cobain. When Cobain blew his head off, "a bomb... hit bohemia." Powers says she's not interested in "laying blame" for Cobain's death; then she does just that. He died because of "the pressure of having to perform as both salesperson and commodity." Also, there was "repulsion at the moneymaking mavinery of the pop industry." Yeah, those millions in the bank can be hard to take. Almost as an afterthought, Powers mentions Cobain's drug habit and manic-depression.

Around the time Powers got the call from the Times, I was leaving my old life. Too many all-nighters and too many angry bands playing at top volume had finally taken their toll. I discovered new things: Thomas Aquinas knows a lot more than any 20-year-old with spiked hair and a guitar; America is the best place in the world to live; melodic music is good; abortion is murder; human beings are fallen creatures. In short, I grew up.

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