Contemporary Adulthood

Note: This is an essay about music. I have not, in my recollection, written about music before, and I am not an expert on it. My observations are highly personal and subjective and probably will not hold up very well to logical scrutiny. Nevertheless…

The National are music for adults. I mean that in the best possible way. Making music – especially rock music – for adults is difficult. Think about it: who buys Paul McCartney’s albums anymore? Why did middle-aged U2 decide to begin a song with the nonsenical phrase “one, two, three, fourteen,” sung in Spanish? When you were a kid, why was your mom listening to Kenny G and Michael Bolton in the car? The very phrase ‘adult-contemporary’ is so cringe-inducing that now we’ve got alterna-dads, guys with kiddie backpacks who refuse to buy in to the commercialized ethos of The Eagles (or their Gen-X equivalent) because, well, that shit’s lame.

Nope, it’s much, much easier to make rock music for lonely, disaffected, alienated youth. Even Radiohead, my favorite band, wrote things like “kicking squealing gucci little piggy” and “we hope that you choke.” Most grown-ups don’t really want anyone to choke, at least not that directly. This is not to take anything away from Radiohead, but it’s undeniable that they resonated far more with me at 16 than at 26.

The usual response to this, as you get older, is to a) stop thinking about music, or b) listen to music because mostly for its creative aspects. I’d guess I’ve been doing a bit of both for the past several years, since my late-teens musical prime. Sure, a song here and there would resonate, but it seemed difficult to conceive that something could do it in the same way as when I was a teenager.

The National, however, have proven to be an exception to that. Now, The National are a solid rock band, but nobody will ever mistake them for great musical innovators. But the lyrics…they actually fucking matter. They feel relevant, to me, now.

I think a big part of the reason why it is so difficult to capture adulthood in four-minute rock songs is because adulthood is fucking complicated. Your anxieties and fears and hopes and challenges generally do not boil down to thinking that nobody understands you. But that doesn’t mean they go away – they just change. You’re not mad at the world, but you do get a vague sense of dread when you step on to the subway in the morning.

The National writes unassuming anthems for that vague sense of dread. The New York Times called their latest album, High Violet “the world according to a man who isn’t getting any younger, mostly wants to be a good father and husband and employee and friend – and might be happy, but for all the resistance he thinks he keeps tamped in his own head.” Outside of the fatherhood bit, this could apply to most of the band’s music.

It’s the music of the self behind the brave face, where the self isn’t a self-destroying narcissist or a secret sociopath, but something more mundane and yet more difficult to explain: a man who simply wonders if he’s not where he could be, not doing what he should, if everyone else is in on something that he is, somehow, missing. Or, is it all in his head? Does everyone else think the same thing? They probably do, he’s practically certain they do, but…that doesn’t really make it any better.

I always think that the sense of anxiety in The National’s music also stems, in part, from anxiety about society. It’s hard not to walk around with a weight on your mind when you’re pretty sure the world you grew up in is slowly disintegrating (and it is). One of my favorite lines from the band is quite simple: “Can we show a little discipline?” The line is delivered in the band’s usual monotone, amid a cacophony of strings and horns. Speaking for discipline in the chaos. It’s an open question, never answered, and I can’t help but think it’s evocative of the hedonistic culture in which we’ve all been raised, of the rebelling and counter-rebelling and partying and hooking up, of the national debt and the cult of the individual. Can we show a little discipline? Can we even do that anymore? There’s a desperate nostalgia in the line, wondering aloud if America’s come apart and if you, personally, are a part of the problem or the solution. Maybe I’m ascribing too much meaning to this.

If you are thinking there is something conservative, something traditional, about this message: there is. The National are a twenty-first century Brooklyn band. They are, for lack of a better word, a hipster band (though their appeal is broader than that). I live in Brooklyn in the twenty-first century, and, broadly, subscribe to its political norms. But I’m also very sympathetic to this argument, which I recently encountered in a Washington Monthly profile of an ill-fated conservative magazine: “Gosh, my super-transgressive life is sort of unrewarding, maybe I’ve exhausted this mine of self-indulgence and personal freedom and saying ‘fuck the man,’ and the right is completely disinterested in engaging those people, I think they’re missing out.”

I have no plans to become a political conservative anytime soon (indeed, I don’t find the relationship between finding an entirely hedonistic life unrewarding and political conservatism to be compelling), but I have always thought the hard-partying hipster-artist lifestyle that parts of our culture glorifies appears fundamentally unsatisfying. That uneasy relationship with an ever-present (or seemingly ever-present – once again, you always wonder if it’s really just in your head) hedonism comes through in The National’s lyrics. You don’t want to be one of those possibly-mythical dudes that gets drunk every night and doesn’t have a job and has lost all track of his sexual partners. You know you don’t want to be that guy. But…are you missing out on something? Maybe you are, you don’t know for sure. And, of course, maybe those people barely even exist outside TV shows and blogs and silly stereotypes. And you think about all this while you are standing on the L train, surrounded by beautiful people, staring at the poster for that godawful new MTV show about teenagers who seem to hang out in their underwear all day.

I’d guess not every adult is like this, but it’s certainly a very adult condition. We don’t reject contemporary culture, but we do want to take what we want from it and we’re not quite sure what we want to take, we’re not quite sure what we should take, and it’s hard to decide because the guidance always seems to point to all or nothing. We want love and meaning, and are apprehensive about both. We’re afraid the America our parents raised us to believe in is vanishing, and even more afraid that we can’t do anything about it. Wide awake in a fake empire, indeed.