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This originally appeared in The Declaration on 2 February 2006.

Some animals are more equal than others: At first blush, one might think George Saunders’ new novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, is just a political allegory for early twenty-first century America. There’s the vaguely fascistic despot, Phil, who (a) speaks best when his brain is removed from his head, (b) responds to violence with greater violence, (c) takes the presidency of his country by undemocratic means, (d) enforces loyalty oaths on his constituents and (e) steals every last resource of a bordering nation. There’s the populace who follow his every decree enthusiastically, eating up the drivel he spouts about their great nation. And there’s the “media”—three guys with bullhorns—who try desperately to report on all these actions, but instead have a case of ADHD and like to talk out their anuses. Sound like any country you know?

Like that other political allegory against totalitarianism that you might have read back in high school, Saunders uses simple language and distinctly inhuman characters to get his point across. Where Orwell used animals to obvious effect (the animals most in favor of the socialization of the farm are, ahem, the sheep), Saunders characters don’t even seem alive. One Inner Hornerite consists of a tuna can, a belt buckle, a blue dot and some connecting parts; another resembles a bald letter C with antlers and side vents to breathe. The Outer Hornerites are as odd, with a presidential advisor who is just a mirror with shady eyes.

The plot is just as insistently abstract. Inner Horner is completely surrounded by the nation of Outer Horner, and it’s only big enough to hold one of it’s citizens at a time. The other citizens wait outside, in an area termed the “Short Term Residency Zone.” When Inner Horner shrinks, stranding the occupying citizen in Outer Horner, all hell breaks loose. The Outer Hornerites tax the Inner Hornerites within an inch of their lives, there’s a coup, and everything the Inner Hornerites do is suddenly interpreted as an attack.

Considering how weird all of this is, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is probably Saunders’ most immediately accessible work. The language is simple and the characters seem to have a fairly one-to-one relationship to reality. There are no ghosts, no children with memory implants that speak in a denatured English—just what appears to be a simplistic allegory about the state of democracy in America today. There’s nothing as seriously challenging as the stories in Pastoralia or CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. The entire book can be read in about forty-five minutes, and re-read faster if you’re on deadline.

But as the story continues, it starts to resist these easy comparisons. Saunders writes conclusions to his stories that do more than simply resolve the plot, happy ending or not. He often includes a twist at the end—not a “Finally I can sit and read all of these books oh no my glasses broke!” type of twist, but a more subtle one that forces the reader to reconsider his or her assumptions about what has come before. Slowly, the one-to-one correspondence between Phil and that guy about ninety miles from here falls apart. Another nation, Greater Keller, is introduced: Greater Keller launches an attack to force regime change in Outer Horner; they measure their national wealth through a statistic called the National Life Enjoyment Index Score. Sound like any country you know?

Unfortunately, if you’re reading for the politics, this will probably be a case of too little, too late. By this point, we’re already two-thirds of the way through the book. Saunders’ blurring of the lines doesn’t really add anything to a reader?s understanding of the characters, who remain mostly interchangeable. It doesn’t affect the plot at all, since an even bigger deus ex machina is soon in coming. What it does do is change the point of the allegory considerably: The book’s not against totalitarianism (well, yeah, okay, it is), it’s not against communism or capitalism or anything so crass. It’s an argument against partisan violence that?s as true in this country as any other. Every satirist is an idealist at heart, after all.

There’s a problem with all of this, however. It’s that reading The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil as allegory is so reductive that it erases everything someone should be reading fiction for. The allegory’s just there to enhance the humor, really: when one realizes that the media folk have a mouth by their ass, it’s so over-the-top that one can’t help but laugh. When Phil wins over the Outer Hornerites by a “stentorian” speech after his brain falls out, the chuckle that follows is just as involuntary. The novella contains a comic universe that’s only funnier because of its odd intersections with reality. (Which is really the definition of satire, after all.)

It helps that Saunders is able to free his prose from the constraints of reality, too; there’s nothing to keep the words on the page, and it flows from laughter to anger to just pretty in a matter of a few sentences. On an uninhabited part of Outer Horner, he writes that it was “a lush verdant zone where cows’ heads grew out of the earth shouting sarcastic things at anyone who passed, which, though lush and verdant, was unpopulated because the cows’ sarcasm was so withering.” There are illustrations, too—always a little odd in an “adult” work of fiction—by Benjamin Gibson, but they suit the story quite well. They help the reader imagine the very odd characters that Saunders envisions, and at the same time have an odd beauty all to themselves.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is a sharp little book—a quick read that won’t change your mind on any of those pressing political issues that divide the nation, but it will keep you chuckling as you go along. It’s not Animal Farm (and thank God for that). It’s a satire that keeps stretching at the boundaries of what satire can do, far more than a condemnation of Bush or Hitler or totalitarianism. Because even if all allegories were equal, some would still be more equal than others.

Some ideas just make sense in retrospect. No matter how odd it might have seemed at the time that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, or that the Red Sox would win the World Series on the night of a lunar eclipse, or that a late-night block of cartoons aimed at college students would be a runaway success, looking back makes it clear that these events were necessary–nay, ordained. And some things are immediately recognizable as bad ideas, like going to war in Iraq or making a hip-hop album about a block of cartoons aimed at college students. These ideas aren’t just bad–they’re the sort of things that bring countries and careers to ruin.

Unless, of course, you bring together a brilliant producer who doesn’t get the respect he deserves and a rapper who tends to get respect from the “wrong” quarters–the English majors, the jazz fiends, the backpackers. The Mask and The Mouse, in which Danger Mouse and MF Doom collaborate in just the first of the huge collaborations of the fall, could have turned into a horrible, syncophantic whorish enterprise, destroying careers and sullying–nay, negating–the name of Adult Swim in our hearts.

Sure, Danger Mouse has caught flak for being gimmicky. But The Grey Album was another one of those totally-obvious-in-retrospect ideas, and was the perfect vehicle to showcase his twisted pop genius. This is a man who can find the pop in everything from reggae beats to opera arias. Here, his beats are much more tense and compressed than most of his earlier work. Danger doesn’t know when to stop at points. Drumlines, violins, guitars, flutes and (the has-to-be-a-reference-) accordion get layered over one another until the whole thing threatens to break, and that he keeps it from the brink of cacophony is a testament to the man’s skill. There’s, like, four different drumline mixed together on “The Mask,” with horn stabs and soft synths trading off on top of it. “Perfect Hair” uses a flute solo to sound light even with all the complexity going on beneath it, while “Mince Meat”–one of the simpler songs on the album–still keeps morphing underneath Doom’s steady flow.

Because what Doom does here is dominate–nay, destroy: presented with a beat that morphs instead of the sudden jazzy shifts that marked Madvilliany, the man goes all English major on us. People expecting the same inventive wordplay and absurd rhyme schemes that have marked his career so far won’t be disappointed, though the similes have been turned down a notch. Doom doesn’t so much ride the beat as use his flow as its counterpoint. Watch Doom dodge and dart around the beat: on “Bada Bing” he starts by perfectly matching the rat-a-tat pace of the early song before coming unhinged and just loosely staying with the beat like a jazz soloist: “And Doom, [breath], maybe it’s him. / Called up my lady and said baby, it’s Slim. Make me up a margarita; I need to take a swim.” Chiasmus, effictio, blazon: this is the vocabulary one reaches for to describe Doom’s lines.

The specific Adult Swim content is hit or miss, though. Songs revolving around Harvey Birdman and Sealab 2021–for all of Doom’s previous success sampling cartoons–fall flat. It’s at it’s best when the characters have contributed something new to the album. Shake’s phone calls begging onto the album actually stay funny, and Meatwad performing “Beef Rap” off Mm..Food–that’s another one of those obviously-brilliant-in-retrospect ideas. The Mooninites make an appearance on the surprisingly not-childish “Vats of Urine.” Space Ghost shows up, not with Ghostface on “The Mask,” but to proclaim that, “America’s craving some Doom.” Lord knows it should be.

Who are the biters? Prefuse 73’s Scott Herren certainly has had enough of them. He takes criticism of his music personally, flipped out over the leaking and subsequent downloading of his new album, Surrounded by Silence, and is probably seeking out the Dec offices at this moment for the first two clauses of this sentence. The LP’s first track, titled “I’ve said all I have to say about them,” opens with a sample declaring, “fuck the biters.”

Fortunately, he has said all he has to say about them, quickly establishing that he’d rather let his creative abilities speak for themselves. And his abilities are ample; Herren’s technique for crafting beats differs greatly from most other producers. Unlike an RJD2 or a DJ Shadow, Prefuse 73 doesn’t allow cohesive samples. There’s no sped up soul samples on a Prefuse 73 track, no beat grabbed from a funk hit–or not, at least, anything you’d recognize. Instead, Herren chops everything up into tiny little pieces, letting the rhythm and melody and harmonies arise from the interplay of short, one or two beat samples. Sounds distort, become something apart from even themselves when he throws them together into this fashion. Even on the larger scale, he keeps the same plan, and blips of staccato notes suddenly bite into fuzzed out cacophony. Vocalists and guest instrumentalists typically find themselves just one more element for Herren to play with, and might find their contributions chopped up or, at the very least, worked low in the mix. The result–odd, considering how layered and complex the rhythms are on most tracks on the album–is that these incredibly dense songs wind up evoking wide-open landscapes. Surrounded by Silence does, in fact, drown the listener in a soundscape rather than propelling him forward.

The collaborating artists get more airtime on Surrounded by Silence than on past albums: almost every track has a guest vocalist of some sort. Ghostface, El-P, Aesop Rock, Masta Killa and GZA all contribute raps. Ghostface and El-P’s “Hideyaface” winds up being one of the best songs of the year so far, all Ghostface free association (Why does he mention the Newark Star-Ledger?) and El-P free aggression taking on–who else?–the biters. The Masta Killa- and GZA-driven “Just The Thought” runs around one of the more straightforward beats Prefuse 73 has put together, a bouncy concoction that doesn’t last nearly as long as it should. Unlike in the past, their vocals are mostly untouched; it seems that Herren who “didn’t want to record rappers rapping over a beat” on his first album, Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives, has come to terms with just how damn good it sounds.

But the other tracks–based around work with Blonde Redhead, the twins Claudia and Alejandra Deheza, and Tyondae Braxto, amongst others–find him chopping samples again like a sushi chef,* doing what he does best. Listen to the swelling horn on “Minutes away from you,” the way he keeps holding off the high point from the listener until just the right point. Listen to the looping strains of “love” on “Pastel Assassins,” the way he holds the song in stasis, refusing any sort of release for so long. Scott Herren knows what he wants, and he’s willing to work for it.

So why worry about the biters? They only push him to the next level, only make him focus on the vocals and his ability to produce a beat as much as his ability to create abstract landscapes, only force him to put himself on the line. The truth of the matter is that Scott Herren needs the biters, as much as he doesn’t want to admit it. He’ll never really be done talking about it, and that’s probably a good thing.

Aesop Rock is the Ben Marcus of rap. Like the author of Notable American Women and several extremely strange essays for McSweeney’s and The Believer, Aesop Rock (nee Ian Bavitz) tosses words in strange contexts and weird rhythms, twisting their meanings and granting ordinary words power that they lost long ago. Sure, a lot of times you won’t catch his exact point on the first listen–or the twentieth, for that matter. But for Aesop, the environment and feeling that his lyrics impart has always been more important than individual lines. Not that he doesn’t craft stuff you can’t help thinking to yourself at strange points during the days, but it will be more to puzzle out what he means.

His 2003 effort, Bazooka Tooth, was sprawling, messy and unfocused at places; supposedly the exploration of an alter ego (named Bazooka Tooth, natch), the production fuzzed over his lyrics and overlaid them on top of each other. Running at the upper end of the CD’s capacity–over 70 minutes–Aesop’s explorations of the character were mixed with Definitive Jux boasting and the sudden expansion of the city at one minute in time. Though good, as a hip-hop concept album, it couldn’t hold a candle to Mr. Lif’s I, Phantom.

So Fast Cars, clocking in at just over thirty minutes, represents a focus that Aesop Rock hasn’t had in years–it feels like an album squashed into EP length. It’s chock full of goodness, and there’s a lot to like here. The fuzzy lyrics are gone, as well as some of the more avant-garde staccato rhythms that he experimented with on Bazooka Tooth. What’s left is the smooth flow from Labor Days, and a surpringly focused set of songs on militarism, religion and other bugaboos of life in America these days. On “Fast Cars,” the title track, he comments that he’s “live from the ultra-fly sham city bunker where cults multiply alarmingly / Hush little baby, timeout / The black market mockingbirds can sing not a lick but lean to peck your eyes out.” For Aes Rock, terror lies behind every corner of the city; it’s unavoidable. On “Zodiaccupuncture,” he reminds the listener that “the hand cannons won’t ask about your zodiac, boy.”

The production is hit or miss. Aesop Rock splits the production duty with Blockhead, while “Winner Takes All” is produced by Rob Sonic. Half the songs are standard Definitive Jux beats, with heavy bass and Vangelis-style synths in the background evoking a future dystopia here today, and these tracks kind of all run together (though Aesop does vary his flow enough to keep them distinct). But both “Holy Smokes” and “Rickety Rackety” stand out. Blockhead builds “Holy Smokes” around a glockenspiel sample and adding drum beats that vary in intensity as Aesop vents about the Catholic Church sex scandal and the commercialization of religion. “Rickety Rackety” runs on a bouncy bass beat that propels even El-P to throw out a good verse or two. Considering this is Definitive Jux, the fact that you can actually dance to it is mindblowing. “Rickety” is hands down the best song on the album, grabbing that beat and using it to contrast the style of Aesop Rock, El-P and Camu Tao. El-P’s slightly off-rhythm lyrics and Camu Tao’s fast delivery complement the more measured style that Aesop Rock has cultivated throughout the entire album.

The album may be short, but that’s not a bad thing. Aesop Rock takes time to sink into, thanks to the density of his images and weird playing with language. But as an added bonus, the album comes with a booklet of all his lyrics from the past five releases–including Float and theDaylight EP–so that you can finally sit down, and figure out what he says and apply some English major techniques to this stuff. Don’t let his absurdity throw you off–there’s a lot in Aesop Rock’s lyrics, and it’s worth it to sit down with him for some relaxation and some cathartic city terror.

Hey, remember electroclash? That wonderful combination of electronic dance music with punk guitars and sensibility, that powerful weapon of mass distraction? Those international superstars with lasting power, like Fischerspooner and Peaches? Do you remember rocking out on the dance floor, with a Long Island in your hand, to “Emerge” and doing everything you could to forget that (a) 9/11 happened less than a year ago and (b) this particular aesthetic had been done before, back in the 80s, that decade that you were faking nostalgia for?

I don’t, particularly, as I was pretty drunk that entire summer. But for a while there, electroclash (or, y’know, dance-punk, which is what it was) was set up to be the next big thing from NYC. It eventually fizzled out, but not before leaving a bunch of great party albums like Fischerspooner’s #1 (and only), and two out of eight of the 2manyDJs mixes by the guys formerly known as Soulwax. And a couple of singles by James Murphy, aka LCD Soundsystem, aka half of the production group the DFA. Soundsystem caught people’s attention–especially the attention of the

A radical proposition: let’s stop making fun of the French. “Cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” however clever it might have been at first, is old and played out; that whole “Freedom fries” thing was way overrated as humor and as an insult. Besides, any culture that can throw out anything as good an album as M83’s new Before the Dawn Heals Us clearly has something going for it.

M83 throws everything they’ve got at you: spiraling guitars, percussive drums and weird synthesizers. They switch moods as fast as they switch riffs; going from post-apocalyptic pastoral landscapes to full power–Oh hell, I’m just going to say it: It’s a concept album about nuclear war.

“Fields, Shorelines and Hunters” starts out as a just a simple bass drum beat underneath a few synthesizers, eventually devolving into a burst of static. The weird, NES boss-battle riff that starts out track six (alternatively named by the Atari logo, an asterisk and, on my iTunes, “6.”) disappears almost immediately in a mess of guitars and drums that themselves disappear to a fast paced beat seconds later, then come back underneath some synthesizers that can only be described as “soaring.” And then the next track, “I Guess I’m Floating,” takes all of that away for the sounds of children playing on a school playground and a series of short three-note sequences that provide some constancy over bass that ebbs and flows. And then it’s back into Nintendo level music again.

But it’s later in the album–as it flows into “Teen Angst” and “Safe” and “Let Men Burn Stars”–that the nuclear war thing–okay, maybe I’m reading too much into this–really pops up. “Falling stars exploding on the sea / God it’s beautiful! / The land and the roses slowly disappeared,” sings Anthony Gonzales on “Safe,” and then “A wounded angel is smiling at me,” as the synthesizers swell back up. It makes more sense listening to it than reading a descriptions of it. On “Teen Angst,” he sings “The planet is dying.”

So yeah, there’s an element of cheese-eating: the synthesizers get ridiculous at a couple of points, and the lyrics–especially the female vocals in “Moonchild” and “Car Chase Terror!”–take a little time to grow on you. That “Car Chase Terror!” is supposed to be a dialogue between a mother and daughter fleeing Satan, but are both voiced by the same vocalist, doesn’t make it any easier to understand.

But M83 never lets you get comfortable with just a simple riff unless it’s buried under lots of other stuff. For that reason, it doesn’t have the warmth of Air’s Talkie Walkie, or even the Virgin Suicides soundtrack. That’s not a particular problem, considering that it’s as powerful in its own right, creating a sense of distance in a way that still encourages engaging with the album. It’s the sort of thing that demands to be listened to on huge, good speakers with the lights turned low. It’s an album that should wash over you like an flowing tide or a nuclear blast. M83 understands that there is beauty in destruction, and throws at it you with force.

This article originally appeared in The Declaration on 22 April 2004.

Recently the Cavalier Daily bounced its business page (this was reasonable: no one read it, fewer wanted to edit it) in favor of a health and sexuality section. This probably seemed like a good idea at the time, and for the most part it is. There are articles about STDs, condoms, drugs–stuff that the average college kid should be paying attention to, but isn’t. And then there are the sex columns. They are titled with bad puns that would make even the Dec blush: “The G-Spot,” “How Come?” And they are filled with supposedly cutting edge information that just about everyone already knew.

There was an old Poodah joke about “Lee Camp’s Original Comedic Thought of the Week,” which slimmed the former CD humorist’s column down to four words of unoriginality: Men don’t like shopping! Amusement parks are crowded! Similarly, the new sex columns are just as banal: Men who ejaculate too early are bad in bed! Women may or may not enjoy the taste of semen! Relationships are hard! As the urinal said to the sink, “No shit.” For fuck’s sake–this is supposed to be edgy?

I remember being in high school and voraciously reading every one of Susie Bright’s columns over at Salon.com. This was a heady time, in the late days of the Clinton administration, when just about everything seemed to be focused on sex, money, and how people, from whom you didn’t expect it, were getting sex and money. So on the poster child of the new journalism, you could read about dot-com start-ups and sex columns and a serial novel by a former call-girl.

The novel was okay, and it was certainly better than either “Silicon Follies” or that new Dave Eggers one that I haven’t read past the first couple of paragraphs. And Bright’s column was, to this high schooler, fucking awesome. The logic worked along this line of reasoning: “Hey! Girls! Having sex! And I can read it in the computer lab of my all-guy Catholic school! ALL RIGHT!” Her column wasn’t that bad; often times it touched upon things other than sex. I enjoyed it. I also liked to consider myself fairly sexually liberated, despite the fact that I was a virgin.

Bright writes about sex intelligently, with the aim of enlightening her readers and maybe, maybe getting them slightly aroused at 4 pm on the fifth floor of a Manhattan school, although there’s a few things she missed in retrospect. Here’s Bright, writing about her plans for a new book in a Salon essay:

I want to examine the dark side of sex, and ask just how much deliverance we can expect from the sexual revolution. I’m going to look at the connection between beauty and eroticism (they’re not the same thing, you know). I’m going to tease out the role of envy in sexual repression. (link)

Bright understands that the whole issue of human sexuality is anything but simplistic; that it’s not a one- or two-sided issue, or even a spectrum, but a whole multi-dimensional mess that would make M-theory physicists get lost (and most do). Even sexual orientation is completely up in the air. There are so many facets to the human personality, so many different ways we get turned on and off, that it’s not a simple issue of “here is a hot [object of desire], go nuts.” These are good questions that need to be asked, and answered intelligently. In her columns, Bright would dissect the etiquette of a porn shop, or maybe how to sleep with a hotel concierge. She always understood, though, that this wasn’t for everyone, but that some people would benefit from her writing about it.

I fail to see, though, how anyone benefits from the over-simplified situations written about in the CD’s sex columns. The first one I read–Katja Schubl’s article about “one-minute men”–isn’t written to enlighten, but rather to scare the poor boy into doing a good job. She talks about longing for sex while in Germany, only to come back to a boy who doesn’t satisfy her; she dumps him without a second thought. Way to strike a blow for deep, lasting relationships, Katja. Even if one accepts that her goal was just to get her rocks off, Schubl’s article is the opposite of erotic or instructive. Instead, it gives the fear to the poor boy taking a girl to bed for the first time: it doesn’t matter how witty or compatible you are, it only matters how you are in the sack (and for God’s sake, you better be a demon). Moreover, it assumes that there is only one type of relationship on the planet, that sex is simple. (Her column this past Monday only further reinforces that she can’t comprehend, or at least write about, more than one style of dating.) Cut-and-dried “advice” like this, or the article about how men can improve the taste of their sperm, take away the joy and discovery of sex: they leave you robotically pumping and sucking away, wondering why you aren’t having sex like everyone else.

In his essay “Books in Bed,” Jonathan Franzen reveals his own anxiety about sex writing (or, to be more specific, writing about sex). He takes on Bright (unfairly, I believe), Dr. Susan Block and a host of other sex writers with the same ferocious intensity that Penn and Teller reserve for feng shui experts. “Their work creates the bumbling amateur,” he writes. “Their discovery of sexual technique’ creates a population bereft of technique.” Taking something private and making it part of public discourse doesn’t mean that everyone will suddenly have amazing sex lives; it means that everyone has higher expectations than they can handle. It means that sex becomes another measuring stick, laying right besides your car, your clothes or your stack of cds, for what you are as a human being. The one thing that should have remained outside the American desire for normality has, paradoxically, become the center of it.

Although Bright understands that sexuality is complicated, she is also of the school that our SEXUAL REPRESSION needs to be broken through to a glorious world of hot nights and hotter days; here’s Bright again, this time from her personal webpage:

Sexual expression is THE most repressed form of American speech. You can rail against capitalism in this country, you can tele-evangelize from a pulpit that only exists in your mind, you can be gross, gratuitously violent, and just plain insane, but in this country, you cannot say certain words in public because they are SEXUAL, you cannot look at certain pictures in public because they’re SEXUAL and you cannot articulate many ideas to the mainstream because their SEXUAL nature deems them inadmissible. (link)

This is true (if a little bombastic), especially in these heady years of the waning Bush administration. But, at the same time, it ignores that we are swimming in so much sexual obsession that it’s impossible to get away from. It’s hard to say that there are pictures you can’t look at, due to their SEXUAL nature, when billboards of slim models in skimpy underthings cover Times Square; when Victoria’s Secret ads (Is that you, Bob?) and specials are all over TV; when a show like The Swan gets airtime on Fox; or when the flimsy dress of a singer falls apart on national TV and the entire nation convulses.

But because of this notion that all sexual expression is “repressed,” many people mistakenly think that sexual expression is “edgy.” Any time sex is talked or written about, it’s shocking, or it’s immoral, or it’s transgressive. Howard Stern is a “shock jock” with a lot of job insecurity at the moment. And MTV and Virgin Records were prepared to ride the wave of edginess following the Super Bowl halftime show to record sales and profit. None of these things are edgy, whatever “edgy” means. They’re pedestrian. I couldn’t care less about a middle-aged woman’s pierced right nipple. Or the adventures of a woman getting evaluated on Stern’s show (that’s less edgy, more sad). Franzen’s against all sex writing, for reasons I can understand if don’t agree with. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with an honest examination of sex–or rather, the stuff that happens around sex (i.e. dating)–but when it becomes tinged with the touch of edgy or transgression, it’s got something to prove. The writing has an air of desperation–please find this arousing and interesting and exciting! Christ. Instead , it has the same tiring quality of writing that liberal use of shitty cussing has. (Are you tired of the cursing in this article yet? Good. I’ll stop.)

Granted, it’s this edginess that sex writing is supposed to erase. Writers of sex columns will tell you that their intent is to get rid of this feeling, to make talking about sex normal and acceptable dinner-time conversation. So why does Gretchen Zimmerman discuss her sexual history and self-identify herself as a slut? Did she really think she was reclaiming the word for millions of “sexually liberated” women around the country? No. She could have said “sexually liberated.” Instead she used a word with a negative connotation to catch the eyes of her readers, not to mention reinforce the whole Madonna/whore thing that everyone in this country seems to have trouble with. It appeals the prurient interest more than the rational parts of the brain, which makes sense, because there’s no rationality to sex. The brain may be an erogenous zone, but sex is just the pleasurable banging of parts against each other like mammals have been doing for millions of years. To talk about sex, and only sex, is to limit oneself drastically in one’s subject matter, one in which it’s impossible to say anything new.

More importantly, it’s almost impossible to make it interesting or essential. Reading about someone else’s sex life is like listening to your roommate talk about that dream he had last night: it’s long, it’s rambling, it makes little sense and has no point. It can be somewhat amusing, if done well, but you’re not going to walk away with a better understanding of your roommate or humanity in general. Who cares that he found himself chased by little three-foot tall H2s while running on the surface of the sun? Who cares about someone else’s sexual history? I’m not better off knowing these things about a complete stranger (who, with my luck, I’ll have a discussion with next semester). I am, in fact, worse off, because the private details of his or her life are now a part of the public sphere. I have to put up with them, regardless of whether or not I want to.

I’m going to make a bold statement here: we shouldn’t really talk about sex. I don’t just mean in columns, I mean on cell phones, in coffee shops–anywhere. We can talk about dating all we like, because dating is about relationships between people and therefore infinitely fascinating and infinitely complex. But sex is the most private of acts, one that people should keep to themselves. There’s no need to open the blinds and show our naked selves to the worlds, because it’s hard enough to show our naked selves to the one we’re sleeping with. We gain nothing but a quick smirk in the back of Wilson 402. We lose nothing but a respect for intimacy and a sense of discovery that is our birthright as college students. If you don’t mind losing that, go nuts. Just don’t tell me about what you find.

“I don’t intend to challenge President Bush to a contest of who’s a more regular guy,” Mr. Kerry writes in his new campaign autobiography, “A Call to Service,” even as he does so. In the same book, he boasts that he’s “the son of a public employee” (in the diplomatic service) and “a charter member of one of the most selective but fastest-growing sports clubs in the world: the Nascar fans of Massachusetts.”—Frank Rich, The New York Times, 23 November 2003

Listen: I know John Kerry doesn’t really watch NASCAR. You know John Kerry doesn’t really watch NASCAR. The American people know that John Kerry doesn’t watch NASCAR. John Kerry is a blueblooded, Massachusetts liberal. He does not watch NASCAR anymore than I watch NASCAR, and while I appreciate the sight of Democrats trying to reach out to our Southern brethren, this is not the way to go about it. People don’t like to be talked down to, and the first time Kerry’s in South Carolina and someone asks him about an obscure car—like, say #47—or driver that he hasn’t been briefed on from the one guy on his staff who went to Emory, this whole thing is going to blow up in his face.

Or is it? I mean, sure, I don’t watch NASCAR, and no one I drink with watches NASCAR, but surely lots of people around the nation are in love with it. Right? I mean, it’s got rising ratings, and an almost complete lack of black people, so people in the South have to love it. It’s in the state constitutions!

But I don’t buy into this. I think people watch NASCAR for the same reason I watch football: I have no idea what the hell is going on beyond the vaguest of parameters, but it’s still a lot of fun to kick back with your friends and watch two differently dressed groups of players run lots of complex plays that clearly mean something if you pay attention to it long enough and drink beer and smoke cigarettes. Substitute “cars in circles” for “football players” and I think you’ll see where I’m going with this. You’re watching the game/race, and you’re paying attention, but more than anything else it’s hanging out with friends that’s the important thing. It’s only when women got involved that they had to make up excuses for it.

This, I think, is key to how NASCAR started:

Wife: Hey, what are you boys up to?

Husband: We’re watching Joe and Danny drive around in circles in the backyard.

Wife: Oh. Is it a race?

Husband: Um. A race? Yeah. They’re racing.

Wife: Well, that’s nice. Y’all want any sweet tea?

And from that point they had to keep making up more and more stuff, and paint numbers on the cars, and start analyzing statistics and finally come up with the Winston Cup circuit in order to add the necessary legitimacy. Guys hanging out and talking and watching people drive around in circles? Weird. Guys hanging out and talking and watching sports? Fantastic.

They’re all in on it, y’know: everyone who really watches NASCAR is saying the same thing: “Feck off. Feck off to my wife. Feck off to the people in the North. Feck off to college students who write highly sarcastic articles about NASCAR. We all gonna watch some cars drive around. Really fast.” Every time someone buys into the hype and takes it seriously, they laugh. Every time some Northern politician uses it to prove he’s “just like them,” they’re going to laugh their asses off. Because they know better.

Which brings us back to Kerry and the problem of Southern Democrats. Angry White Males, or NASCAR dads, or whatever it is we’re calling them now, aren’t going to be fooled by a sudden switch in Kerry’s demeanor. It took Bush fifteen years to erase the stigma of his roots, and he had to become a born-again Christian. Clinton was a Southerner. Kerry and Dean are from New England, and it’s going to take a lot more than shallow declarations and Harley-Davidsons to overcome forty years of Republican propaganda. Hammer home on Enron and corporate scandals. Beat the free-trade drum and the loss of American jobs (and to the North, play it as “the exploitation of poorer countries”). Play the services card—if not universal health care, think of something else. Play the economy card. But for Christ’s sake: leave NASCAR alone. It’s only when you don’t really see the appeal of it that you understand that appeal for the first time.

I’m sick of hearing about generation Y. There’s a hand-me-down attitude in the name, an implied dismissal of everything that our generation has worked for in the past twenty-three years. We’re not a generation defined by our love for technology, for video games, for cable television and fourth-graders that curse like sailors (and almost as much as we did in fourth grade). We’re not defined as the generation that sends everyone to college, or the generation that has skyrocketing rates of depression. We’re the generation that, simply, came after Generation X. It’s as if our older slacker brother finally got a job and handed down all his old T-shirts. And that’s some fucking bullshit.

Let’s face it: if you were born after 1980, and if you’re reading this you’re probably my friend and therefore born after 1980, you’re getting shit on. You’re besieged by the siren calls of MTV and TRL. You’re constantly swimming in a sea of advertising, mostly dedicated to your demographic, mostly selling sex with hotter women than we will ever meet and the joys of getting drunk on new, classier malt liquor. You’re being forced to watch prodigies like LeBron James and Alicia Keyes and Conor Oberst found at an ever younger age, making you feel old at twenty. And on top of all this, you don’t even have a proper name for your generation.

In the mid 1990s, right as Gen-Y started to pick up speed, there were a couple of other terms that were flying around. There was the Nintendo generation, raised on Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog. There was the Internet Generation, which was a pretty good fit. We grew up with the internet; it hit maturity right around the time we were discovering we now had hair in our nether-regions and our voices were cracking. It even went through a crazy high-school love affair with the kindly gentleman from New York, Wall Street. But then snowball.com decided to appropriate it for it’s advertising–THE DESTINATION FOR THE INTERNET GENERATION–and it slowly went out of favor. Not to mention that it abbreviates to the iGeneration, which makes it seem like all of us were invented by Steve Jobs.

Still, how’d we end up with such a derivative, boring name like Gen-Y? Laziness, I guess. Without a Dennis Coupland to come up with a catchy title, and the other titles focusing on just a tiny aspect of our personalities, magazine writers and editors fell into a rut and did the easy thing. After all, Generation X used to be called the post-boomers, which was even an even more boring and condescending title–they were the “after” generation. But there seems to be a greater acceptance of Generation Y on the part of the kids, at least until they start to think about it and realize what’s going on. And there’s also the problem of how we behave, and whether there’s a big difference between us and those who have come before.

Do we have ideas? Is there a philosophy forming in college dorms and student ghettos that’s noticably different from ten years ago? I’d have to say yes. For one thing, there’s much less of Coupland’s knee-jerk irony, and a huge rise in tasteless jokes. (Why’d the baby stop crying? Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.) But that’s not really a sign of difference, more an evolution. But what is different is the way upward mobility has become the new religion of America, followed by most people exactly the same way Catholics treat their beliefs. Instead of getting baptized, going to confession, receiving Communion and being confirmed, all without any real sense of what the religion is about, the new sacraments are: doing well in high school, taking a Kaplan course to beat the SATs, going to a good college and coming out with a high-paying job. Why are we doing this? Because it’s what we have to do in order to survive, just like Catholicism is what I’m supposed to do in order to get eternal life in heaven.

This same, godless, assembly-line approach to life gives yield to the other thing we do, which is find something, anything to believe in. The number of niches that have been created just so that we can be part of something bigger than ourselves is absurd. There are: frat boys, sorority girls, indie kids, fundies, neo-hippies (pot and adderall!), goths, politicos, and any number of smaller subcultures that don’t have easily assigned names. If something’s got potential, people will latch on to it. Look at the Dean movement online, or the Draft Clark thing, and you realize that people are putting their faith in someone, devoting huge amounts of time to him, purely because other people have already put their faith in him. Anything that makes life a little more enjoyable, that could make things improve even the tiniest bit, is worth the effort.

But the defining aspect of our generation is the growing sense that we’re screwed, and the other two behaviors are intimately tied into to this. There’s our ever-increasing dependence on technology, to the point where an internet virus causes huge financial losses and a power outage shuts down an entire quadrant of the country. (People: the New York blackout might have been the biggest blackout ever, but a hundred years ago there were no blackouts. (Because there was no power. Shut up.)) There’s the extremely short-sighted policies of the Current Administration, and even those who think Bush is God are a little worried about their future. There’s the ever-greedier behaviors of corporations; people who unironically wear advertising on their T-Shirts because they just don’t know any better. There’s the dawning realization that corporations do not have our best interests at heart, and the frightening on that there’s not much we can do about it. You see it in the eyes of everyone–no matter who you talk to, they’re spooked about what comes next. Another huge attack? Not being able to find a job after graduation? Robots taking over our economy within twenty years? (That one’s a stretch.) Even fundamentalism is a way of coping with the modern world–having an omniscient, omnipotent Other in control of everything slows the world down, gives everything some meaning. It’s a fight against science, and science is a fight against mysticism, and the battle lines have been drawn.

We’re fucked. The whole damn generation is the Fucked Generation. No one’s really been willing to come out and say it, and so we’re generation Y: the bastard sons of that bitch Generation X. Striding purposefully forward with no real destination, fake family units smiling brightly into a future clouded by fog and microprocessors and RFIDs, grinning in the face of total destruction. This is who we are. Say it loud. Say it proud. Give yourselves a new identity–not one that’s derived as a matter of after whom we were born, but one that’s a function of what we are. Force it into the national discourse; make the Times and the New Yorker bleep out our name. Make the people understand we don’t like what’s going on, and we’re just about ready to start making some changes. Because if we don’t, it doesn’t mean we’re any less fucked. It just means we’ll be sitting around asking, “Y us?”

So here’s the thing about Chuck Klosterman’s new book: he’s stolen almost every idea I had for when I published my first in two, three, or ten years. Romantic love as a Hollywood concept? Yeah, I’d thought of that. The importance of Saved by the Bell to a certain generation of young people? Yeah, I’d gotten that too. The NBA as the only sport that matters? Check. Presenting the table of contents as a CD track listing? That was my ace in the hole.

What I’m getting at is that I should be pissed off, or offended, or something, since I’ve now been beaten to the punch on just about everything I had to contribute to popular culture. Surprisingly, though, I’m not. Because Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs is not only better written than I could manage at this point, it’s also probably more insightful than I ever get. And, oh yeah, he’s an editor at Spin and I run a tiny-ass mezine.

So here’s a quick briefing on what “cultural criticism” is: it’s a way for guys who are too obsessed with Pop Culture (capitals are necessary) and know it to turn things around, rationalize their behavior. It’s okay that Klosterman has watched nearly every episode of The Real World three times, identifying with the protagonists like close friends, because he’s smart enough to realize that this is dumb. He’s also smart enough to argue that everyone’s been affected by the quintessential reality program to some degree (at least, those of us of a certain age), resulting in a lot of people who are, for all purposes, one-dimensional. You’ve got your guys who are party animals, the folks who are quiet intellectuals, the folks who are screamingly ignorant, and your Pucks. He points out that as the producers realized that boiling down the roommates to their defining characteristic equaled drama, the MTV-watching populace did essentially the same thing.

And so it goes for a wide range of topics: why soccer is a loser sport (it’s for those kids who aren’t good at anything else, because you can’t be bad at soccer); how the “downer ending” of Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back: Non-Special Edition led to slacker culture and a stoned Winona Ryder singing “My Sharona” in a gas station; how children’s cereal ads lay the groundwork for hipsters and other elite groups in college and beyond; the strange, Rapture-oriented world of Evangelical Christians.

There is a problem with this approach, though, and that’s that it tends to solipsism, a definition of which is handily included among the epigrams at the start of the book. Almost all of these essays are directly from Chuck’s mind; there are not a lot of external sources that he quotes other than his friends and associates (though there are many hilarious footnotes regardless). The best essay in the book is, hands down, “Appetite for Replication,” in which he goes on a road trip with a Guns & Roses cover band called Paradise City; he gets a lot out of the descriptions of the band members, how they react to others on their tour. It’s not surprising that this is one of the two essays that appeared in magazines first. Everything else is new to this book, and it suffers somewhat because of this.

Even then, he stumbles on some cultural news that’s pretty revealing. In an essay about The Sims, that game where we try to remake our lives as much as possible on a computer, he writes this about his seven-year-old cousin, Katie, as she tells him to ignore the backstory of his Sim:

“It was uncharacteristic for Kate to be so unwilling to tell harmless lies. If she had been playing with her Barbie Dream House and I asked her why Barbie had four pairs of shoes but only two decent outfits, Katie would have undoubtedly spent the next half hour explaining that Barbie purchased the extra shoes while shopping in Hong Kong with Britney Spears and planned to wear them to a cocktail party in Grandma’s basement. . . . [But] in the world of The Sims, Katie won’t color outside the lines of perception.”

It’s a pretty damning account of the effect computers have on kids imaginations, and it’s no less powerful because Klosterman stuck with someone he knew pretty intimately to write about.

But I guess the beef I’m getting at is that the book never really comes together as an argument. It’s great that he details all these things about how we are and how we behave in such a highly connected, corporate driven world (though he does, strangely, omit chat rooms and instant messaging and the web except for a brief chapter on porn–at last, something original to contribute!). He says at the beginning that everything is connected, even if nothing matters on it’s own. But the problem is that he doesn’t really write about these connections. He doesn’t talk about how The Sims is connected to internet voyeurism, or how the characters can emerge as one-dimensional as the characters on The Real World (and how can you miss that, when half the Sims Family Album pages are wanna-be Kristof’s directing The Real World LCXI: Bobby’s Computer?). He doesn’t draw parallels between Saved by the Bell and the cereal commercials, even though they were presumably shown in between one another. If you’re going to have an essay titled “George Will vs. Nick Hornby,” and have it be about baseball and soccer, don’t you at least owe it to yourself to reference how Nick Hornby added to the previously mentioned John Cusack Experience mentioned in the first essay, “This Is Emo”? Klosterman has all the pieces there, but he never really puts them together. Maybe that’s what he intended, though. I’m sure that he’d say this is exactly what our lives are like today.