Friday, July 3, 2009

The Aliens Landed Hard

You see, the problem isn’t that a generation has chosen sadness as an icon. It’s that other generations don’t know why.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

This one makes you think.

Jenny said...

I cannot decide if this is meant to be depressing or not.

Anonymous said...

my dream the other night

a SPACESHIP landed hard

SGRMSE. said...

I like this. It's so haunting ♥

Ally said...

Wow.
This certainly sparked a time of serious thinking.
Sometimes I think that sadness can be a powerful muse - but never as you have suggested, an icon.
I love your perspective.

Anonymous said...

I find it funny that the person that is an icon of utmost happiness in our hearts can also be the person that best represents every ounce of pure sadness in our souls.

Jesse said...

We know something is going terribly wrong.

They've been here too long to understand what it is.

Jude said...

I adore this. So provocative.

Chop Logik said...

The unifying irony behind this being that every generation has done this.

So let's stop pretending the gap is so large.

Anonymous said...

I'm eighteen. And my generation, Western society, already makes me feel sick. Sad. People, tv. Am I the only one that feels this way? I feel like in some ways I'm a product of my environment, but sometimes, I hate the environment.

I want a break from the Western world. I want a breath of unclogged air.

icenine said...

I love the way you express my (and many others') feelings and sound so eloquent.

Me said...

@Chop

Rebelling against the previous generation is a, relatively speaking, new phenomena that only really reached the scale it's seen in today in the 1950's.

You also can't say that the 'free love' movement of the 60's is anything like the zeitgeist of today's popular culture (and popular culture is around 17 years old, or the people who were around 8 years old on September 11th 2001) or even like the frustration expressed during the grunge/neo-punk movement of the 90's, after hair metal lost its place. Even goth culture while it had an element or nuance of "sadness" in the 80's, can't really be compared to an entire genre devoted to the subject.

So while I agree that for the last few decades children have always rebelled against the previous generation, I can't agree that there's ever been one that's embraced "sadness" as a cause so specifically as this one.

There's also never been a generation gap as much as there is today in terms of technology and sociology, how many parents are on tumblr, facebook, livejournal, twitter and so on?

I'm not talking about the music or the culture itself or making some kind of moral or aesthetic judgment on it, those are subjective opinions. I'm just trying to state my observation.

You are <3 as always my friend.

Chop Logik said...

@Me

Word up. Thanks for expanding, very good points. I had images of past generations having tragedies unknowable to us (such as a World War) to center its axis on- but for the most part, it would seem that they took a more positive outlook, used adversity to bring people together. This day & age, alienation seems to take up most of the menu. So yeah, gaps widening all over the place. I just wanted to rally against it and have people not despair!
What I really meant was that the gap between any of us isn't as large as you can make it in your head. So let's keep trying to close it.

Good to see you have some weight behind your words!

Anonymous said...

emoism?.. =]