The reaction to Rage Against The Machine’s announcement last week that it would reunite next year to headline Coachella landed with the same ripples in the algorithms as any news and nothing more. Some rejoicing. Some detached ironic shrugging. Then onto the next thing. Indifference, among my almost totally millennial timeline, was an unsurprising reaction despite there being so much to be angry about right now. At the moment of Bernie crowds and climate marches, a righteously angry left-wing Gen X rap-rock band from the 1990s barely generates anything but an eye roll from that generation. One millennial had a different take that stood out, though. Matt Healy, the 30-year-old frontman and vocalist for the band the 1975, wrote on Twitter: “Rock music and the world en mass has never needed Rage more.” Rage Against the Machine’s last original studio album, an album for which I lined up outside the now-closed Tower Records on Newbury Street in Boston with friends to buy along with the Fragile by Nine Inch Nails until my mom came to get me, was released almost exactly 20 years ago to the day.
That 20-year period corresponds exactly with the ebbing of the cultural supremacy of Gen X and the rising of millennials’ place as foremost cultural producers. In that time, not only have cultural products that suggest rebellion against political or economic systems almost disappeared but so have our expectations that any such cultural products are even possible. It felt like Healy was alone in his reaction. Yes, he got 10,000 likes on his tweet. But there’s barely a mention of “where’s our rage against the machine” on Twitter and only four examples of the phrase ever being written on Google. No one has ever typed the words "why is there no rage against the machine for the trump era" according to Google. The 1975 are actually an exception to the rule that millennial music does not rage against the machine, with lyrics that protest and provoke. But like the Dirty Projectors and Lana Del Rey, two other artists who occasionally write lyrics that are a wake up call against cultural, political, economic and climate malaise, the 1975’s music is delivered as deliberately digestible indie-pop. Because when millennial music is angry, it’s usually not socially angry but individually angry.
Think Taylor Swift, Adele, Beyonce and Drake’s defiant breakup (or almost breakup, in the case of Beyonce) songs. At a moment of widespread anger in media and politics, millennial culture like music is not angry at what’s making us angry. It ignores those forces. As a generation we’re not engaged against those forces, they simply happen to us and manifest their effects in moments of every day life, like isolation resulting from a breakup, to which we react angrily. If millennials aren’t engaged in political or economic revolution, then surely Gen Z is, right? Rage Against The Machine’s reunion comes at a perfect time, on the heels of mass climate action and Greta Thunberg. But taking a quick survey of the music of Gen Z, it’s hard to tell. 100 gecs, a band whose critical narrative is that they are quintessentially Gen Z, seem to rebel sonically but not lyrically. Their sound has been called a revolt against algorithmic smoothness and sameness. But their hooks are as unashamedly capitalist as anything that’s come before, ironically or not. The content of Billie Eilish’s music is almost traditional even if the sound is indebted to 2010s hip hop. Maybe Healy is right.
Maybe the next generation really does need Rage right now, then. While this is not a thorough enough survey of Gen Z culture, nothing sticks out to me as being as revolutionary as Thunberg’s speech. I would love to hear some examples if any readers have them. But at some point the rage exhibited in Hong Kong, in Chile, in Paris, in the climate marches, could find a voice artistically and culturally. That role is up to Gen Z. Angry music is for the youth and millennials have aged out. I wish the late Mark Fisher, whose work inspired some of the thinking here, were around to write about this moment. Surely, someone more equipped than me will write about it and I look forward to reading it.
The shorter stuff
Graydon Carter on his late friend Robert Evans shows just how much of Evans' clout was fake, from the fake Jack Nicholson call Carter once witnessed to the fake Life magazine cover Evans made for himself. But the best detail is Carter's gingerly laying down on a fur throw that was supposedly famous for having witnessed decades of intercourse. (AirMail)
Maybe the above is a sign of Carter's "preoccupation with the past" that current Vanity Fair editor Radhika Jones "gently needled" him about in this piece on Condé Nast. Click for the Lil Nas X anecdote but stay for the realization that September's issue of the New Yorker only had three full-page ads. (New York)
Alex Williams questions whether we've come that far since the heyday of men's magazines as several of them, like GQ, rebrand away from passé masculinity. He describes the latest issue of GQ as "so gender fluid it’s soggy." (NYT)
I've spent hours digesting Deadspin-related content for no real reason. My favorite detail I've learned: "Shaken by the editor’s departure, Deadspin staff members retreated to a nearby Planet Hollywood in Times Square for a drink." (NYT)
I feel extremely old but this is the coolest Halloween trick or treat gift or candy or whatever. That's just me, though. (Twitter)
Harry Styles announced his follow-up to his debut album, which had way more in common with Sea Change-era Beck and Pink Floyd than you might have imagined. (AV Club)
Isn't watching Netflix at 1.5x speed the logical conclusion for content meant to keep you company? The behavior has been widely adopted already in a similar medium, podcasts. (NYT)
It seems like everyone is coming around to the idea that the cable bundle is dying only to survive and rearrange itself as a bundle of streaming services like the organism in John Carpenter's The Thing. (CNN)
Obviously the first-ever R-rated movie to top $1 billion at the box office will get a sequel. (Vice)
Are we about to witness the rise of the "arc-thology?" An anthology TV series based on characters from Billy Joel's music is being PR'ed using this term that seems to be a cross between American Horror Story-esque anthology TV series and Rocketman-esque biopics. (THR)
The Beastie Boys' "Eggman" is currently at #51 on the Shazam charts presumably due to its inclusion in the show Watchmen. (Shazam)
One of the last music blogs, Aquarium Drunkard, put out its Decade list and it is characteristically chill. (Aquarium Drunkard)
Prepare for a moral panic around TikTok, the perfect foil for a Washington and Silicon Valley team-up. (NYT)
Can someone cool buy Clickhole please? G/O Media might sell it. (WSJ)
Nick Denton is supposedly developing a platform to publish group chats. (VF)
Count me in for the Bee Gees bio-pic from Spielberg. (THR)
If your eyes glaze over at the mention of Disney+ or Apple TV+ or HBO Max or the word streaming, at least read this one thing about why these services are going to be free or subsidized for some people. (Wired)
Should that Future song exist in a post-squid monster attack Watchmen universe? (The Outline)