Generation Y might as well get it tattooed across its world-weary forehead: The Age of Irony is out, and The Age of Sincerity is in.
While so many aspects of the art world took that self-conscious, irony-laden turn in the late 1960s/early 1970s, featuring metafiction writers such as Thomas Pynchon and the shiny musical kitsch of disco, irony—as David Foster Wallace eloquently warned in his scary-smart, gut-felt plea, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”—came to tyrannize us by the 2000s. While hipster culture abounds within metropolitan areas of the country with such a heavily ironic style via thick, old-man glasses, always-slightly-funny (unavoidably so) mustaches, figure-hiding women’s clothing and figure-hugging men’s clothing, such irony can only travel so far when it comes to music.
Artists such as Das Racist, for example, are making waves for their highly self-conscious and culturally critical rap. While their output is catchy and well-produced, the lack of earnest lyrics and heartfelt sentiment leaves a substance-starved generation wanting. When too scared to admit true feeling, it seems, the thing to do is point and mock. Safer that way.
This is why “Montezuma,” the opening track to Fleet Foxes’ second album, Helplessness Blues, is such an important song. The trademark ethereal, full and bell-like harmonies of the band are of course intact, but the song’s cultural significance lies within frontman Robin Pecknold’s lyrics. Opening with his own self-analysis, Pecknold meditates, “So now I am older/Than my mother and father/When they had their daughter/Now what does that say about me?” Admitting his place in a more than slightly self-involved generation, he asks, “Oh, how could I dream of/Such a selfless and true love?/Could I wash my hands of/Just looking out for me?”
It seems fair to assume that most Fleet Foxes fans will identify with this realization. Not only is it incredibly admirable that Pecknold is showing such “childish gall” (a brilliant term of Wallace’s) in the face of a culture that is so quick to mock anything even remotely resembling a cliché, however sincere the underlying emotion may truly be, but the generational rift imbedded in the lines strikes a particularly lonely chord.
While it’s amazing that our generation has been given so much more than our parents’ was, generally speaking, it is an uncomfortable reminder of our willingness to take that much more on a regular basis and to believe we are destined for greater things.
The entire album is rich with this honesty, and Pecknold seems determined to quell our selfishness a bit and remind us of the brevity of time, the grandiosity of the natural world, and how little of an impression our existence—the entire human race’s, let alone your individual being’s—makes in such a big picture. He asks us to rid ourselves of any desire for material gain, especially any we happen to have been born with: “Gold teeth and gold jewelry/Every piece of your dowry/Throw them into the tomb with me/Bury them with my name.”
In “Montezuma,” Pecknold is essentially asking us to enter adulthood with awareness of genuine feelings, and cautions us against continuing to cultivate our own selfishness (“Oh man, what I used to be”), and he does it over a simple, gorgeous melding of guitar, hymnlike choral harmonies, and perfectly minimal percussion. It is a lovely gateway into an album that urges us to transfer our critical eye from the other to ourselves, to direct our questions inward, and perhaps relax slightly—to remember that time passes without us, and so the most we can do in the face of such brutal reality is to work on being just a little bit more human while we still have the baffling opportunity.
