Millennial US

Decades from now, when we look back at the economic collapse of the late 00's, I think we're going to realize that it was a turning point in our history. It's going to come to be looked at, not as a recession to bounce back from, but an essential restructuring that will change a lot about the way America is supposed to work.

In the back of my mind, I had been thinking since the early 90s that capitalism shouldn't work. Back when Borders was in its heyday of IPOs and stock splitting, when everything was blue skies and candy rainbows, I realized that the key to success in terms of American corporations was to grow continually, never slowing (and even increasing if you can manage it), doing more and more to keep the stockholders happy so they'll keep investing. It was apparent to me even then that this was an unsustainable pattern, but many people smarter than me about these sorts of things seemed fine with it. (Seth Meyers once had a joke that rang especially true with me: "When everyone's making money, no one examines the system because they're too busy saying 'WHEEE!'")

So what did Borders do to keep said investors happy? Expand internationally, opened more and more stores, spreading themselves thinner and thinner until an inevitable downturn in the market caused them not to be able to scale back fast enough, and the whole thing came crashing down. I think it really was a larger example of how most people live their lives: exist on credit under the assumption of never-ending income.

In any event, this was one case out of many. The crash has put America in a position of there suddenly being more able-bodied people than there are jobs. That doesn't seem like it's going to change anytime soon. Companies that downsize just learn to make do with less people -- even if Borders had completely bounced back, do you think they would have ballooned their staff back to its former levels? Of course not.

At the same time, there are more and more complaints about the "millennial generation", who are (to hear it told) are lazy, shiftless and spoiled -- which, you may remember, is how EVERY GENERATION SINCE THE BABY BOOMERS has been described, particularly by the generation that came before.

But here's the thing -- and let me talk about this by way of my own experience -- I recently went through a period of almost two years of unemployment. Now, during that time, I suppose I could have taken a minimum-wage job somewhere, but I put in the time and effort and looked for something in my field of expertise. And that wasn't just a matter of pride or vanity, but that to do so would have been a step down from the unemployment benefits that I was getting. Early on I did the math and realized that if I took a job that paid less than $13.50 with healthcare deductions (almost twice the current minimum wage), I would be actually bringing home less money and food for my family to live on.

This is why you'll never hear me complaining about benefits programs -- these "entitlements" you often hear Republicans complaining that the rest of us think we deserve. Thanks to these programs, my family was "entitled" to survive with comparatively minimal change -- we kept our home, ate three meals a day, and maintained our Internet connection so I could keep looking for jobs.

It's really a testament how great our country is that I could afford to take the time to look for the right job, rather than have to take the first thing I could get. And it's exactly this fact that is being brought against the millennials. They're not lazy and shiftless -- at least not any more so than the generations before them -- they're trying to find the best way to navigate in a business system that is actively working against them being able to get a decently-paying job. And they're being ridiculed for it.

The truth is, more members of today's society than ever before are starting at a baseline that was the end goal for most of human history... having a sanitary place to live, enough food to eat, and something to wear. Each generation seems to start off a little better off than the one before. And yet, we expect them to work just as hard, if not harder, to make more money to get more stuff.

Up until now, America has run on the continued accumulation of wealth. But as the cost of living decreases -- and rest assured that it is, a person with a full-time job can afford technology that would seem like a king's black magic to a person with a full-time job twenty years ago -- we should start asking ourselves what wealth gets us, exactly. And whether a person's value to society is equal to the amount of money they can pump back into it.

So can we really blame young folks if they can get by without dedicating themselves to a career that they really don't want -- and less and less really need? It seems as though we're moving toward a civilization where more people, instead of what they *have* to do, can do what they believe they *should* do, That's something I can definitely get behind.

The biggest problem America has had up until now is the power structure that has been in place. We can't change to alternative energy, too many jobs depend on the auto and gasoline industries! It's cheaper for the military to continue to produce tanks and planes than to close the plants! Well, we're closer now than ever before to the perfect time and place to make these kinds of fundamental changes.

Here's my proposal: privatize our infrastructure (and from here on out, bear in mind that I'm no student of finance or business, so it's entirely possible that I have no idea what I'm talking about.) As I understand it, private companies like Halliburton made billions of dollars providing ancillary supplies for the military during the wars of the last decade. I don't see a reason why similar companies can't take over supplying what we might need to build a smart power grid, or maintain our highways and replace aging bridges, or construct wind farms/solar panel fields/flood levees/nuclear plants so that we can reduce our carbon emissions and set an example for the rest of the world. Hell, with a healthy, competitive infrastructure-renovation industry, we could even branch out internationally and work toward getting the whole world up to code.

But it takes a change of mindset to put something this big into production. It needs people who aren't beholden to the way America has been run up until now. It takes someone with a new mindset, someone who hasn't already bought into the go-to-school-then-go-to-work-until-you-retire paradigm. Someone who, I don't know, might be seen as lazy and shiftless, but is really being afforded the opportunity to find new ways to work within and outside the current system.

See what I'm getting at here?

The Longhair Chronicles

It started in my senior year of high school. Actually, if you take a look at my yearbook picture, you can start to tell by the way my hair seems to have a little extra anchorman-esque volume... that's because it's being swept back and tucked in, out of view of the camera lens. Earlier that year, I had made a decision to let my hair grow.

At the time, I didn't really think about why I had decided to do this... although I do remember that way back in my sophomore year -- before I found my home with the theater crowd -- I used to hang out with a small, strange group of guys at lunch. They would talk about the kung fu movie that had been on the previous Saturday night, the various exploratory expeditions they took into their neighborhood's storm drains, and seemed obsessed with accurately emulating the drawing style of six-year olds. I didn't really fit in with this crowd, but I didn't seem to fit in anywhere else anyway. The reason I hung out with them is merely that they seemed to accept me as one of their own. I did watch the Saturday night kung fu movie and had a working knowledge of Monty Python, but that was the only touchpoint I had with them. They contributed one lasting thing to my psyche, however, which was the nickname "The Man With the Flowing Hair". They must have dubbed me this because I was getting a little shaggy; then, as now, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about how long it had been since my last haircut.

Later, at the end of my high school career, I made the conscious decision to stop cutting my hair. Perhaps I wanted to live up to the only nickname I ever had in high school, or (more likely) I knew that I was about to start moving into the next stage of my life, and was looking make some kind of radical change to mark the occasion.

It's not like I was the only guy around with long hair, of course. This was the tail end of the 80s, and long hair had been the hallmark of rock bands for quite a while. A change was starting, though. I seemed to notice it more as Metallica slowly moved from garage band into the mainstream... hair was changing from a moussed-up symbol of glam excess into a legitimate, serious statement, that rare form of rebellion that can actually be achieved with literally no effort.

I let my hair grow throughout that summer, and by the time I started attending U of M in the fall, it had officially reached the "awkward" stage. It wasn't quite long in the traditional sense of the word, but at least long enough to flip up at the ends, especially when it was humid. I had my student ID picture taken on a rainy day, and it looked like I had done the old 60s trick of using orange juice cans as rollers all around the bottom.

I might have stopped then, but if I was having any second thoughts about my hairstyle, it was dispelled by a fellow student in my freshman English class. His hair was uniformly long and awesome-looking, and it looked like it just grew that way, which I mistakenly thought would happen to mine if I just could get it long enough.

My choice of era to start growing my hair turned out to be fortuitous. In 1991 grunge swept in, making long hair stylish again, and I had a substantial headstart on guys who wanted to look more like Chris Cornell or Eddie Vedder. On a blustery winter day almost two years after I had started consciously growing it, I was walking through a passage between two university buildings, and a gust of wind blew my hair so that it got stuck in the corner of my mouth for the first time.

After that, I realized I wanted to give it some sort of shape instead of just letting it grow wild, so I decided to keep the front trimmed just enough to make it look like it was long and swept back. Here I made my second possibly mistaken assumption: that it wouldn't look like a mullet. That hairstyle had already been moved into mainstream consciousness by Mr. Billy Ray Cyrus, but hadn't yet become synonymous with "redneck". I don't think my choice of style went that far, but I was probably walking a dangerously fine line.

Nobody at home seemed to object to my choice, which in retrospect seems strange. I never heard a negative word from my parents, grandparents, or girlfriend. In fact, my younger brother took a stab at growing his out similarly, for a while. Maybe they knew better than I did that I was looking for a kind of handle for my identity. The beginning of college is a bewildering time for everyone, trying to find your bearings in a situation that is so alien (and alienating) than anything you've known before...

But through those college years, and even after, my long hair was my calling card. There were only one or two other guys in the Men's Glee Club (my only social circle) that had similarly long hair. I suppose it gave me a little boost of confidence when, standing along with up to sixty other identically-dressed men, I had something that made me somewhat unique.

I kept the hairstyle for over ten years, all the way up until the summer of 1999. I had been silently thinking about it for a week or two, when I turned to that girlfriend who had been so supportive and in the interim had become my wife, and said, "I think I'm ready to get rid of this." She made an appointment for me with her hairdresser, and I had it done. I didn't get it as short as I currently have it, but back to my high school length. It was another five years (and a little bit more thinning) before I switched to the length I have now.

Looking back at it now, I'm noticing how my hairstyle choice then actually fits into my current personal philosophy, which must have been forming back then even though I wasn't aware of it. In my search for a way to visually define myself, I was stating that I didn't think there was anything else particular noticeable about myself.

This philosophy has two seemingly contradictory sides: first, that every person is utterly, entirely unique; and second, that no one is particularly special. It's this second part that seems to go against the grain of everything we're taught in Western society, so let me see if I can explain my thoughts on it a little more fully... It's a given that each of us is an almost infinitely complex tapestry of genetics and experience. We're dropped into a particular time, a particular place, and particular circumstances that we have no choice about. And all things being equal, none of us holds a particularly privileged place in any of it.

Think of all the people in your life, spread out around you in a sort of bulls-eye pattern. Everyone's is different, but for example, say that closest to you is your family: kids, spouse, siblings, parents. Moving farther out are your closest friends, then an ever-widening circle of less familiar friends, acquaintances, ranging all the way out to people you might have spoken to once. Now consider that you are also represented somewhere in the patterns of everyone else in your pattern. It's this change from ego-centric to omni-centric thinking that should make you realize how peripheral you are in almost everyone's life but your own.

I'm not saying that as individuals we're unimportant. In fact, I'm saying that we're all equally important. When you stop thinking that other people are inherently better or worse than you, a whole raft of possibilities become open to you. 90% of what you think you can't do is actually within your reach. It's really just a matter of application, what you're willing to put yourself through to get there. The trick is finding your natural talents and following them.

I think this pursuit of something to physically distinguish themselves is really people looking to find their "thing", the hook that makes them easily recognizable. For some it's a particular profession, for others it's a pop cultural obsession, or in my case, a hairstyle. There's a comfort in knowing something definite in a mass of humanity that are all headed in different directions.

I really wasn't aware of an ulterior motive for letting my hair grow at the time, but clearly I had one. I thought I needed something to make me memorable, when really it was my thoughts and actions that I should have been focusing my attention on. It took ten years for me to have the confidence let go of that particular piece of vanity.

So, did it ultimately work for me? Did I really gain anything by growing out my hair? Well, the answer is yes and no. While I think I did garner a certain amount of confidence from it, I don't think there's one positive experience or personal connection that I made with anyone that was at all influenced by it. As we all should eventually learn, you're not defined by your defining characteristic.

Aaron's Top 10 Influential Albums

Lately I've seen folks on Facebook posting lists of their "ten most influential" albums. The idea is that you're supposed to not think about it too much, just scrape off what floats to the top of your mind when you think of your formative musical years. The stuff you loved, the stuff you know backwards and forwards, the stuff that turned you down a different musical path. But when I read my friends' posts, all it did was make me wonder how they came up with their lists... what made that album so special? And how did it affect what they listened to next? I figured I could do what I wanted my friends to do. I tried to figure out exactly *why* and *how* those albums informed my tastes in the years to come. So here we go -- and I put them in chronological order, because that's how it should be:

1. ABBA - Greatest Hits (1977). Current music was kind of lacking in the house I grew up in. My parents had a stack of pop 45s they had accumulated through the 50s and 60s, of course, but they hadn't really jumped onto the rock-LP bandwagon. Most of the full albums on the shelf had to justify their presence by being designed as longer-form works -- namely, classical music and Broadway musicals. Three notable exceptions to this were Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow, and ABBA. And while I make no apologies for my Fanilowism, what's really remained most fresh in my mind is the Swedish quartet that was once offered one *billion* dollars to mount a reunion tour (they declined, for some reason). I think the reason it does, is that it was a logical pop continuation of the full-orchestration trend that classical and musicals had already set me up for. An ABBA single is full of harmonies, wide washes of sound, and seemingly every instrument they happened to have lying around the studio. Few of their songs sound much alike, and it instilled in me a tendency to pay close attention to other style-hopping kitchen-sink-including artists (see: ELO, late-era Beatles, Jellyfish, Arcade Fire, Janelle Monae, and almost every other artist further down this list).

2. The Police - Synchronicity (1982). This was the first cassette that was bought when my brother got a boom box for his tenth birthday, and we conspired to take full control of our listening habits. "Every Breath You Take" was ubiquitous at the time, but I think I was more interested in the thrashier "Synchronicity II" and its accompanying apocalypse-of-garbage video. What we discovered, though, was a varied record of surreal randomness, bouncing from the obvious radio hits to the Middle-Eastern freakout of "Mother" and the the jazz-leaning "O My God". It was a gateway album for all manner of unapologetic weirdness that I loved during the 80s, and still try to seek out today.

3. Asia - Alpha (1983). For the first ten years of my pop musical education, MTV was the beginning and end. Even now, I'm stumbling across unknown (to me, anyway) aspects of what else was going on in music at the time. With this kind of televised tunnel vision, I was frequently exposed to musicians who had already enjoyed long, storied careers, but with no context I accepted them as just as new as everything else I was hearing. I had no idea who prog-rock titans such as Yes, King Crimson, and ELP were yet, much less that it had taken various members of those groups to form "supergroup" Asia. All I knew was that I loved their expansive sound, the way Geoff Downe's stacks of keyboards and Steve Howe's thrashy guitar sensibilities balanced and spun off of Carl Palmer's thundering drums. It all came together to sound gloriously *huge*. By the time I heard the orchestra come in at the end of their massive ballad "The Smile Has Left Your Eyes", I was sold. Talk to folks who knew me in high school, and you'll learn that this one rarely left the little cassette-holding pocket in the door of my Honda Civic. One of the best closing tracks ever, "Daylight", still gives me goosebumps.

4. Judas Priest - Defenders of the Faith (1984). If you're twelve and starting to learn about heavy metal, JP ain't a bad place to start. Following my predetermined M.O., their influence is due to the way they could fill an arena with sound (Two lead guitarists! *Two*!), but for the first time I also was fascinated with the edginess of the lyrics (single entendre "Eat Me Alive" and the chilly vampire-as-metaphor ode "Love Bites" come immediately to mind). This was the first album where I sat down, put the headphones on and actually tried to figure out how they were doing what they were doing, through repetitious study. Seriously, give me a tennis racket, and I can still air-hammer every one of those Downing/Tipton crossfire guitar solos.

5. Level 42 - World Machine (1985). I've already talked in a different blog entry about how I first came to hear Level 42, but looking back, I can now see that it also changed the way I listen to music, and by that I mean how I *physically* listen to music. Now, if you don't mind my setting the Wayback Machine a little, you'll recall that cassettes had two sides, and had to be flipped and rewound/fast-forwarded appropriately if you wanted to listen to something on the other side. The lead single, "Something About You" was the first track on side 1, but the tipping point of deciding to shell out the cash to buy the album came when I heard the first song on side 2, "Hot Water". So for a while after buying it, my brother or I would play "something About You", flip it over, rewind to the beginning of side 2, and listen to "Hot Water". Repeat ad nauseum. After a while, we'd get tired or distracted and let the tape roll farther and farther into the respective sides before turning it over, and that was when I found that the second songs on both sides were good, too. And then the thirds. And the fourths. To this day, I still feel that I've listened to the first track on this album about twice as many times as the last. But this process made me more inclined to look beyond what singles were being hyped, beyond the videos and into what I think are still referred to as "deep cuts". There's much more risk and reward, I found, in discovering things for yourself. It was the first little break in the headlock MTV had me in.

6. They Might Be Giants - Lincoln (1988). Ironically, it was MTV that made me fully realize that there was music out there that it wasn't telling me about. Late on Sunday nights, the show 120 Minutes would play "college radio" videos that wouldn't get played at any other time. It's where I saw XTC's "Dear God" for the first time (as outlined in another blog entry) and also where I discovered "Ana Ng", the opening track from TMBG's second album. The next day, I bought the cassette (I think I made a quick detour into a record store while Christmas caroling downtown with my high school choir) and listened. This album broke so many rules... there should be ten songs at most, not eighteen! Songs need to be around four minutes, not two (there's only one song that tops out at well over three)! Songs shouldn't take left turns and play bridges that seemed totally unrelated! In the span of 40 minutes, TMBG handed me sushi-proportioned bites of rock, jazz, samba, military marches, and even a Christmas song, thereby upending everything that seven years of televised pop indoctrination had drilled into me. I still love them for that.

7. XTC - Oranges and Lemons (1989). Everyone has that one album that defines their high school years, and this is mine. Even if it hadn't been the shared soundtrack of my and Amy's early relationship, I would still have been entranced by it. I listened to it so much that I haven't actually played it in years. I know it so thoroughly that I think I'd just end up listening to it on autopilot. Maybe if I put enough time between me and it, I can experience it somewhat anew when I finally return to wander across Andy Partridge's chrome-plated Technicolor soundscape. Until then, I can at least acknowledge how good it felt to find an album so finely tuned to my spirit. It's somewhat contradictory in its style, utterly cohesive in its variance, a surprisingly upbeat collection considering that it contains songs like "Here Comes President Kill Again" and "Cynical Days". Maybe that's because it's bookended by the psychedelic explosion of "The Garden of Earthly Delights" and the introspective, soaring "Chalkhills and Children". Both are songs that marvel at the breadth and depth of the world, but in totally different ways. Splattered everywhere in between is wordplay, immaculate production, and hooky songcraft. It's like all the music I heard in the 80s was leading up to this.

8. Fishbone - The Reality of My Surroundings (1991). It's hard to come up with a better album opening... a multiplied, distorted voice intones what I think is "We will save you now!", followed with a spinning guitar hook that keeps repeating over and over, picking up speed until it smashes into the opening riff of "Fight The Youth". You know you're listening to a great album when there just about every other track would also be an equally epic opener. Honestly, every song here (except the live, silly, and kind of icky "Babyhead") can do no wrong. It's political, it's celebratory, it's punk and gospel and thrash and funk and jazz all rolled into one sparkling package, albeit with sharp edges. Fishbone taught me something that I didn't realize through much of the formal, studio-pristine eighties... music that's fueled by exuberance and enthusiasm is *so* much better.

9. Prince - The Gold Experience (1995). Prince is magic. This we know. But when I take a look back over the advanced-to-expert level of completion I have of his music, this album stands out the tallest. Not bad, considering it was a contractually obligated release (and thus marked not under his given name, but his rebellious 0)+> symbol). With songs strung together by a loose concept of "The Dawn", which is apparently some kind of virtual reality jukebox, he dives headlong into his id-vs.-ego shenanigans with a shot of adrenaline he hadn't had since Diamonds and Pearls. He starts with the 1-2 punch of "P Control" and "Endorphinmachine", and doesn't let up much until the closing number "Gold", in which he takes the spirit of his excellent earlier song "The Cross" and cranks it up to 10. I could just write a list of why every song on this album is awesome, but I'll spare you. I'll just say that it could just as easily be called "The Human Experience", because it ranges from the profane to the sacred, from isolation to connectedness, and the whole time glows under its own power. This is what artists do when they buck the system and become beholden to no one but themselves.

10. Bjork - Homogenic (1999). There's something to be said for an artist who finally cracks the code of what their true voice should be, and you can actually hear that happening to Bjork here. It's appropriate that she opens the album with "Hunter", where the refrain "I'm going hunting" means more than just looking for someone to love... it's looking for inspiration, a new way of existing. Up until this point, Bjork had sort of been comfortably defined by her Iceland-pixie image, with songs that were menacing and silly in equal measure. But on this album, she dives so much deeper... Here's my theory about it. I could be totally wrong, but I think all these love songs are her singing to *herself*. When she says, "You lift me up to a state of emergency" or "This is an alarm call, so wake up, wake up now," when she sings of love unravelling in one song and being woven back together in another, she's being self-reflective, issuing a personal challenge to accept and love herself right before our ears. Don't believe me? Then consider the video that Chris Cunningham made of the final track, the ethereal "All Is Full of Love". It features two china-and-chrome robots kissing each other in slow motion, and both have Bjork's face. Knowing this, these songs ring even more deeply, and show me how the right music can reveal a person's soul.

After the turn of the century, things get fuzzy. Of course, it's hard to pick an album that you've lived with for less than ten years and analyze how it's influenced you. If it's done its job, if it's burrowed its way into your soul and taken up permanent residence, guiding you along the path of your personal future, it takes more time than that. But while there are always new paths to explore, your past will always inform your present as much as you let it. Choose wisely and forge ahead.