Michael vs. Ironic Appreciation
Dear Internet,
I remember the first album I bought with my own money. It was the summer of 1998, I had just turned 11, and Will Smith's Big Willie Style was dominating the airwaves. It was a simpler time: Savage Garden was teaching us all to love again, and Next had made a dance hit about surprise erections. I took my birthday cash to the local Blockbuster Video to buy the Will Smith CD, and took it home to play it immediately on my portable boom box. (NOTE TO OLD PEOPLE: at least three things in the preceding sentence do not exist anymore.) I listened to the album nonstop; I memorized all of the lyrics, I even learned the steps to the alien dance scene in the "Men In Black" music video. I only stopped listening to Will Smith to enjoy some of my Mom's music, namely ABBA and Phil Collins. By the time I went back to school in September, I was excited to share how musically literate I had become. I finally had taste.
It took about five minutes at school for me to realize that Will Smith wasn't considered cool by anyone, ever. His music barely counted as rap, he didn't even swear, and wasn't even good at it. Let's not go into what I was told about ABBA and Phil Collins.
This marked a pretty significant part of my personal development: when the opinions of others began to directly influence my tastes. I had encountered it before, but this was different. I couldn't control if kids teased me about my clothes or my lunch items (it's a well-established fact that the kids who got Lunchables every day were the corrupt fat cats of every school yard), but I chose to like Will Smith and ABBA. I was exposed to them by the radio and the easy-listening sensibilities of my Mother, but they spoke to me, and I pursued them. Having your first pieces of pop cultural identity judged and found lacking by your peers happens to everyone, and I think my generation has found an interesting coping mechanism: ironic detachment.
Stage 4: Reconciliation of Criticism and Future Choices
This is the stage that brings us to the present day, and it's different for all of us. There are several people who choose to disregard outside criticism of their likes and dislikes, and go on to lead happy, well-balanced lives. But once you've decided you're too good to take anyone else's views into account, things can get very dark, very quickly. The ability to process and grow from criticism is part of Abraham Maslow's view of self-actualization in his Hierarchy of Needs. If you don't want to click through and learn something, going through life ignoring all criticism would be the equivalent of you being homeschooled for all of your formative years, at a school that you run, with a curriculum you created, and textbooks you wrote. At a certain point, you could very well become your own Yes Man, constantly thinking every idea you have is completely awesome. And who would say otherwise? Who would you even recognize as a valid second opinion? You'd be the Forever Mayor of Crazy Town.
In short: learning to process criticism is good, and the majority of us will do just that. But there will be a lot of variance, as you learn to balance your rapidly-forming (and changing) opinions with the equally tumultuous views and criticisms of everyone around you. It's called being a goddamn teenager, and it's uniformly horrifying. No age range tries harder to seem mature (while being anything but) like teenagers, so everyone is on edge, ready to sell out the first person who slips back into baby territory, lest they be accused of it themselves. At the end of this gantlet of emotional stress lies adulthood, and by that point, you probably have a good idea of what is acceptable for you to like, and what will result in you being criticized by your peers.
Will Smith Example: My family never forgot about my Big Willie Stylings, which is why my little brother bought me Born to Reign, Will Smith's third studio album, for my 15th birthday. I promptly hid the album from sight, and made sure to keep my Eminem album out in the open in case anyone doubted my suburban urban listening credibility. But when I brought my Discman on bus rides, I would be listening to that album. And I still liked it. But I made damn sure to carry it around in the Marshall Mathers LP case.
So, let's assume everyone currently in adulthood went through this four-stage process, and they're now living with whatever balance between bowing to criticism and developing personal taste they managed to cobble together. That brings us to a trend that I believe is, if not unique to my generation, absolutely definitive of it. The idea of guilty pleasures, of liking something ironically, of essentially apologizing for caring.
It's commonly called "ironic appreciation" but it's the same idea as a "guilty pleasure." Let's parse both of those phrases to see what's actually being said here.
So, here is a video of a cartoon robot singing the dictionary definition of irony. You will now never forget the proper usage (unless we're talking about Dramatic Irony, in which case, fuck you), and can graduate from being The Annoying Wrong One to The Annoying Correcting One. For the video-challenged, I'll type out Bender's definition, so we can see how ironic appreciation is 1) Correctly ironic and 2) Not fooling anyone.
As someone who recently tried (and failed) to grow and maintain a moustache, I can tell you right now that it's not effortless. At the very least, that shit needs to be trimmed, and I'm assuming that the gentleman in the above picture is also doing some waxing and styling as well. If you were to bring up his facial hair, I'd bet my last Stanley Nickels that he would call it ironic. I literally found this picture by Googling "Ironic Moustache." Which, going by our definition, means that he's wearing a moustache for something other than its literal intention. What other definition of personal grooming is there outside of you doing what you want with your own body, presumably for your own enjoyment? The only other option is that he intentionally styled his 'stache in a way he found ugly, so he could laugh at people who took his facial hair seriously. I refuse to believe anyone would go to such lengths to prove absolutely nothing. At best, you're making your friends feel like assholes for taking their friend at face value (AKA "Doing what good friends are known to do").
Moral of the story:
I remember the first album I bought with my own money. It was the summer of 1998, I had just turned 11, and Will Smith's Big Willie Style was dominating the airwaves. It was a simpler time: Savage Garden was teaching us all to love again, and Next had made a dance hit about surprise erections. I took my birthday cash to the local Blockbuster Video to buy the Will Smith CD, and took it home to play it immediately on my portable boom box. (NOTE TO OLD PEOPLE: at least three things in the preceding sentence do not exist anymore.) I listened to the album nonstop; I memorized all of the lyrics, I even learned the steps to the alien dance scene in the "Men In Black" music video. I only stopped listening to Will Smith to enjoy some of my Mom's music, namely ABBA and Phil Collins. By the time I went back to school in September, I was excited to share how musically literate I had become. I finally had taste.
It took about five minutes at school for me to realize that Will Smith wasn't considered cool by anyone, ever. His music barely counted as rap, he didn't even swear, and wasn't even good at it. Let's not go into what I was told about ABBA and Phil Collins.
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| How were kids not into this? |
This marked a pretty significant part of my personal development: when the opinions of others began to directly influence my tastes. I had encountered it before, but this was different. I couldn't control if kids teased me about my clothes or my lunch items (it's a well-established fact that the kids who got Lunchables every day were the corrupt fat cats of every school yard), but I chose to like Will Smith and ABBA. I was exposed to them by the radio and the easy-listening sensibilities of my Mother, but they spoke to me, and I pursued them. Having your first pieces of pop cultural identity judged and found lacking by your peers happens to everyone, and I think my generation has found an interesting coping mechanism: ironic detachment.
Before I can explain exactly how we're collectively using the idea of irony as a security blanket, I'm going to quickly outline my theory of pop cultural development/independence/rejection. Also: Urban Outfitters used to sell officially-licensed Linus blankets. So, would that make it hipsters who use irony as a security blanket ironically buying security blankets? OR DID I JUST BLOW YOUR GODDAMN MIND.
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| One day, Michael vs. Memes. One. Fucking. Day. |
The Ironic Defense Process
Stage 1: Zero Personal Choice
This stage makes up the majority of your childhood. You like what you are coached to like, with little deviation. Your parents, your siblings, and the media can pretty much program you to like whatever they want. Obviously you will develop your own tastes to a degree, but you have yet to develop a strong attachment to your choices. Because, at this stage, they are not yours in the truest sense. Not yet.
Will Smith Example: I liked Will Smith because The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was always on TV, my Mom said he was a nice man and a good role model, and I saw Men in Black in theatres for my 10th birthday. I was lead to his work, and strongly encouraged to like it.
Stage 2: First Strong Personal Choice
This could stem from anything you were introduced to in the previous stage. The biggest difference here is the intensity of your interest. This could be the first thing you ever really gave a damn about, from trading cards to pop bands. You begin to take ownership of your interest, and seek out more information/exposure than you have been previously given. It's an age of discovery, and it's great.
Will Smith Example: After buying Big Willie Style, I was on the hunt for more info. I found cassette tapes of his music as The Fresh Prince, I learned that he wore Ray-Ban brand sunglasses in Men in Black (and then settled for Wal-Mart knockoffs when I saw how much a pair went for), and I would buy the children's equivalent of gossip magazines if Will Smith was on the cover. It was weird.
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| Extremely weird. |
Stage 3: First Criticism of Personal Choice
This one can happen immediately, or it can sneak up on you. For instance, Boy Bands. They take over the world on the strength of their popularity, but it's almost always a fad type of situation. Then, you wake up and your favourite band isn't cool anymore. It's for babies. It takes a rare type of child to stick up for their still-forming sense of personal agency and opinion at this stage, so more often than not, Boy Bands and other once-loved affectations are put back in the box in favour of more age-appropriate pursuits (NSFW). This stage isn't entirely tragic: learning to process external criticism against your personal desires is an important skill for everyone, and this is where it starts. Like most things in life, The Simpsons described this exact stage in about 20 seconds, so do go ahead and treat yo'self to the following clip:
Will Smith Example: As I said in my opening paragraph, I never really recovered from the triple assault on my newly-developed musical taste. I gave my Will Smith CD to my Mom, and started watching the MuchMusic Countdown every week in a vain attempt to learn cool music. But this was the late '90s, and I didn't like Puff Daddy or Ace of Base. I didn't want to be a baby, but I didn't like grown-up music yet.
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| And I had not yet learned to exist as a Baby Senator. |
Stage 4: Reconciliation of Criticism and Future Choices
This is the stage that brings us to the present day, and it's different for all of us. There are several people who choose to disregard outside criticism of their likes and dislikes, and go on to lead happy, well-balanced lives. But once you've decided you're too good to take anyone else's views into account, things can get very dark, very quickly. The ability to process and grow from criticism is part of Abraham Maslow's view of self-actualization in his Hierarchy of Needs. If you don't want to click through and learn something, going through life ignoring all criticism would be the equivalent of you being homeschooled for all of your formative years, at a school that you run, with a curriculum you created, and textbooks you wrote. At a certain point, you could very well become your own Yes Man, constantly thinking every idea you have is completely awesome. And who would say otherwise? Who would you even recognize as a valid second opinion? You'd be the Forever Mayor of Crazy Town.
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| You're my butterfly; sugar baby. |
In short: learning to process criticism is good, and the majority of us will do just that. But there will be a lot of variance, as you learn to balance your rapidly-forming (and changing) opinions with the equally tumultuous views and criticisms of everyone around you. It's called being a goddamn teenager, and it's uniformly horrifying. No age range tries harder to seem mature (while being anything but) like teenagers, so everyone is on edge, ready to sell out the first person who slips back into baby territory, lest they be accused of it themselves. At the end of this gantlet of emotional stress lies adulthood, and by that point, you probably have a good idea of what is acceptable for you to like, and what will result in you being criticized by your peers.
Will Smith Example: My family never forgot about my Big Willie Stylings, which is why my little brother bought me Born to Reign, Will Smith's third studio album, for my 15th birthday. I promptly hid the album from sight, and made sure to keep my Eminem album out in the open in case anyone doubted my suburban urban listening credibility. But when I brought my Discman on bus rides, I would be listening to that album. And I still liked it. But I made damn sure to carry it around in the Marshall Mathers LP case.
So, let's assume everyone currently in adulthood went through this four-stage process, and they're now living with whatever balance between bowing to criticism and developing personal taste they managed to cobble together. That brings us to a trend that I believe is, if not unique to my generation, absolutely definitive of it. The idea of guilty pleasures, of liking something ironically, of essentially apologizing for caring.
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| Yes, I will squander an emotional moment from an award-winning graphic novel for a cheap joke. |
The Ironic Defense (AKA "I don't really care about ______")
With notable exceptions, few times in your life will be as socially repressive and judgemental as your teenage years. Once we all Grow Out Of That Shit, people mellow out, and become increasingly accepting of the lives of others. Do unto others, and all that. Personally speaking, everyone I know is far more interesting now than they were in high school. Give someone the space to explore what interests them without fear of immediate and unfounded reprisal, and they'll often end up doing some pretty cool stuff.
But it's still there, for most of us. That fear that, if we reveal too much, we'll be branded immature: a man-child, or a princess, or any other creative way of essentially telling someone that they are stunted. At the same time, we've been forming and pursuing new interests for years now. We have all (hopefully) developed rich inner lives and are each probably well-versed in a handful of topics, but this stuff will remain unknown unless it happens to be on the List of Socially Acceptable Interests (the list does not actually exist). So what do you do if you want to like something, but want to shield yourself from public ridicule? You say that you like it, but only as a joke.
Final Will Smith Example: Every time I make a playlist for a friend, or bring my music to a party, I play a Will Smith song. Everyone laughs and gets nostalgic, and I get to play it off as a goofy '90s throwback. But you know what? I played "Gettin' Jiggy With It" at all those parties because it's an excellent song. I would have played the whole album, but that's harder to play off ironically. So I did what I actually wanted to do under the guise of not really wanting to do it. And I'm not alone.
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| "But Michael," you say stupidly, "This picture has nothing to do with anything!" When did you forget how to love, you monster? It's a tough fighting baby with knuckle tattoos. The end. |
It's commonly called "ironic appreciation" but it's the same idea as a "guilty pleasure." Let's parse both of those phrases to see what's actually being said here.
Ironic appreciation
First off, almost everyone uses the word "irony" incorrectly, or accuses someone of using it incorrectly when they're actually doing it properly, or thinks that enough time has passed for an Alanis Morrissette reference to rise from the ashes and become funny again, just like Dark Phoenix.
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| Comedy gold! |
So, here is a video of a cartoon robot singing the dictionary definition of irony. You will now never forget the proper usage (unless we're talking about Dramatic Irony, in which case, fuck you), and can graduate from being The Annoying Wrong One to The Annoying Correcting One. For the video-challenged, I'll type out Bender's definition, so we can see how ironic appreciation is 1) Correctly ironic and 2) Not fooling anyone.
"The use of words expressing something other than their literal intention!"
So if we adjust this for context, when you say you're liking something ironically, you're "liking it for something other than its literal intention." The most common claim here is that someone is into something embarrassing/not aimed at them because they derive amusement from it. And that's fine: deriving amusement from something is exactly how comedy works. It's why Louis C.K. won so many Emmys that he qualified for a free sandwich, and why people still gather to watch screenings of a 14-year-old movie with a 35% Rotten Tomatoes rating. The latter example is a good one: The Room is, by all accounts, a terrible movie. People watch it to laugh at it, but it's not the only existing reason they watch it. There is an emotional core there, a sense of empathy for a severely misguided filmmaker, that I believe speaks to people. What pisses me off about the idea of ironic appreciation is that it means you are one of two people: you would either spend the time, money, and effort to do something only to laugh cruelly at its inadequacies and failures, or you would straight-up lie to everyone you know about enjoying it on any merits other than ridicule.
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| Pictured: A man who un-ironically put himself into his craft, and the results of that choice. |
So, which one are you: A liar, or an asshole? Are you so determined to never be criticized or possibly ridiculed for your likes and dislikes that you'll essentially go on the offensive as a bully, taking down your interests before anyone else has a chance to? After all, if you're the first one to admit how dumb something is, no one else can catch you off guard. It's a time-honoured strategy, having been used everywhere from Presidential debates to the famous case of B-Rabbit v. Papa Doc.
On the other hand, you could just deny that you're drawing any enjoyment from something outside of the amusement you take from its failings. But does that make sense? Has anyone ever said: "This speaks to me, and I like it because I find every part of it unlikable"? We like things because we like them, not because we're truly excited to hate someone else's hard work. I think we'll all be worse off until we can admit this. Because right now, we have essentially preempted ourselves against any criticism by distancing our feelings from our choices. It's not just about pop culture; this can extend to faith, to friends, to fashion. Yeah, let's talk about fashion.
On the other hand, you could just deny that you're drawing any enjoyment from something outside of the amusement you take from its failings. But does that make sense? Has anyone ever said: "This speaks to me, and I like it because I find every part of it unlikable"? We like things because we like them, not because we're truly excited to hate someone else's hard work. I think we'll all be worse off until we can admit this. Because right now, we have essentially preempted ourselves against any criticism by distancing our feelings from our choices. It's not just about pop culture; this can extend to faith, to friends, to fashion. Yeah, let's talk about fashion.
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| Oh, Hipsters. We have so much to discuss. One day. |
As someone who recently tried (and failed) to grow and maintain a moustache, I can tell you right now that it's not effortless. At the very least, that shit needs to be trimmed, and I'm assuming that the gentleman in the above picture is also doing some waxing and styling as well. If you were to bring up his facial hair, I'd bet my last Stanley Nickels that he would call it ironic. I literally found this picture by Googling "Ironic Moustache." Which, going by our definition, means that he's wearing a moustache for something other than its literal intention. What other definition of personal grooming is there outside of you doing what you want with your own body, presumably for your own enjoyment? The only other option is that he intentionally styled his 'stache in a way he found ugly, so he could laugh at people who took his facial hair seriously. I refuse to believe anyone would go to such lengths to prove absolutely nothing. At best, you're making your friends feel like assholes for taking their friend at face value (AKA "Doing what good friends are known to do").
Everyone takes a risk when they step out the door, because we could all be a victim of drive-by cruelty. For a lot of people, that cruelty is a knee-jerk reaction to encountering something they're not used to, so they try to beat it down instead of growing to understand it. Few things make you stand out in a crowd like experimental fashion, so we now have an entire generation that covers their risks in a layer of preemptive derision. If you compliment my outfit, I'm stoked. But if you even start to criticize it, I laugh it off as a silly fashion lark. Because who would dare put time, thought, and effort into something that could be attacked? Who would put themselves out there, knowing a stranger could make them question their image or actions? Who would be sincere when you can be invulnerable?
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| Not us! |
Guilty Pleasures
The exact same mindset applies here, too. Guilt suggests a misdeed or a transgression: If I watch Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, what am I guilty of? And to whom? These very phrases suggest that we're answering to some unseen voice outside our periphery, ready to strike us down the moment we slip up or show our hands. We strike back, either at our own interests (pointing out their flaws before anyone else can), or at those around us (before they inevitably do the same to us). Who are we worried about? Do they even exist? Or are we living in a state of uneasy insecurity because of a fictitious, composite version of the people (children and teenagers) who first made us deeply aware of criticism and our own shortcomings?
On top of the numerous insecurities heaped on all of us as part of modern marketing, my question is simple: Do we really need to feel bad for liking what we like? Do you?
The New Sincerity (is The Old Sincerity)
What I'm suggesting has been championed in the last two decades in criticism circles as New Sincerity. I understand that a lot of this irony defense mechanism stuff is rooted in post-modernism and cynicism, but this isn't a revolutionary idea, and it certainly does not need to be framed, championed, and chronicled in the ongoing saga of Rampant Mass Mythologizing that we have all been engaging in. I mean, look at how long this post has been. Look at how much thought goes into the balancing act of enjoying something while hiding your enjoyment from those around you. It just doesn't seem worth it. The internet is an electric city that covers the entire world, where new things are created every second, and porn is created twice as fast. There is so much to do, to learn, to care about.
Surely, we can find a better way to spend our time. We're worth it.
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| The My Little Pony fanfiction I'm writing is of significant psychological and sociological import. Also, don't call me "Shirley." |
Moral of the story:
It always hurts when the things we love
Are misunderstood by others.
But acting aloof and above it all
Makes you look like dumb motherfuckers.
xoxo,
Mike!
