I recently read a Facebook exchange between two young gentlemen—members of a Sacramento-area band on the rise—regarding a satiric song by one of one of my favorite poet-jesters of the Americana/Texas Outlaw music genre, Hayes Carll.
Hayes Carll photo courtesy of Hayes Carll.com.
The song is delivered in the first-person voice of a redneck whose worldview is obviously being mocked. The song is at once silly and brave given that the ditty is entitled “She Left Me for Jesus,” and that the singer-songwriter lives and works in Texas.
The thing is, these young guys insist on taking this singer-songwriter’s lyrics literally. Through their lens, the following line about Jesus is viewed as the product of racism: “I’ll bet he’s a commie, or even worse yet a Jew…”
Well of course that’s racist—but not the singer-songwriter’s racism. The joke is on all of the characters in the song, including the central character voiced by the singer. You kids get that, right?
I’m from the era of postmodern irony, and our use of ironic humor is straightforward: Absurd things are to be cynically mocked with all of the subtlety of a pneumatic nail gun. The humor is meant to draw blood. Think Jon Stewart and David Letterman. Following Letterman’s typically snarky monologue and Top 10 bit, his guests take a few darts from Dave’s bottomless quiver — delivered as both biting comments and acidic attitude — and many of those guests (from my generation, especially) eagerly and ably reciprocate.
But this is Jimmy Fallon’s time. His humor is sweet natured—he’s just poking fun. His musical parodies are reverential. Nobody gets hurt. (Jim Belushi and Dan Aykroyd were worshipful of the music they celebrated with The Blues Brothers, but there were enemies aplenty in their world, and those foes were often put to the sword.)
Fallon’s interviews are supportive and congratulatory to the point of being ass-kissy. Fallon will never in the coming decade follow up an actor’s movie trailer with, “Man! That looks great! Great work!” while cackling and wearing a Letterman-like dung-eating grin on his face that make clear what he’s really saying: “Jesus God, those were the highlights? Ten bucks for that?”
I’d read several times that the current young generation is the “post-irony generation,” and I’ve only chanced at the vaguest guess at what that’s supposed to mean (a guess that turned out to be wrong). Motivated by what appeared to be the immune-from-irony comments of the young guys mentioned above, I looked into it. Post-irony, it turns out, is actually an emerging alternative to what has for some time now been labeled “new sincerity.”
I’m a fan of Americana music, but this new-sincerity school has spawned the types of Americana bands that I just can’t abide: Earnest, humorless acts with predominantly optimistic dispositions (Connor Oberst, Mumford & Sons, The Lumineers). In a similar vein is a genre of sweet-natured, aww-isn’t-that-cute movies that I find watchable, but that don’t really move me (everything by Wes Anderson).
These new-sincerity works are about as ironic as a yellow lab chasing a tennis ball. The attitude is: Look! A yellow lab chasing a tennis ball! Isn’t that cool? That’s so cool!
Punk rock mocked mainstream rock and everything else. The attitude was: The Stones should have quit after “Satisfaction'” because they’ve sucked out loud ever since.
New-sincerity thinking, on the other hand, starts off from this type of vantage point: We can all agree that Springsteen was the awesome godfather of new sincerity—but Journey was great, too. My ironic mustache, vintage sweaters, and Space Ghost lunchbox in which I actually carry my lunch are no longer ironic, because I love them and they totally kick ass, and they’re me.
Within the framework of my generation’s postmodern irony, the world is absurd and deserves to be cynically mocked, and it’s hard to take much of anything seriously. In the subsequent era of new sincerity, that same world is for the most part meant to be taken seriously, or “unironically,” and we should all strive for some sort of downsized self-actualization, and try our best to be happy about it.
So what is post-irony? Post-irony, as a sort of dialectical synthesis, combines sincerity and irony by either: (1) taking seriously something that is generally viewed as absurd, or (2) being unclear as to whether something is meant to be ironic.
What?
I’ve been listening to Father John Misty for the past year, off and on, trying to decide whether I like him or not. Unlike the new-sincerity Americana bands that I tossed overboard up above, I take his music to represent both sincere appreciation of the Topanga Canyon/Malibu sound of the 1970s (The Byrds, Neil Young, Buckingham/Nicks-era Fleetwood Mac), but also a sense of ironic humor about it—with a refusal to acknowledge the irony in an overt way, not even with a sly wink. Thus, post-irony.
So maybe the youngsters listening to “She Left Me for Jesus” are aware that the song is meant to be ironic, yet they’re consciously choosing to take the lyrics at face-value—but not really. They’re being “ironic” (where the quotation marks suggest that their irony is smarter and far more subtle than the simple construct: Hayes Carll is being ironic). They’re addressing Carll’s irony with their own irony/not irony.
Get it?
If you’re able to tease post-irony apart, congratulations—the neural plasticity of your brain hasn’t hardened to the kiln-fired consistency of mine. I find it nearly impossible to distinguish new sincerity from post-irony. But I surely recognize the comforting, sour smell of good old-fashioned postmodern irony when I sniff it—I imprinted on that aroma in my youth. And while I envy the younger generation’s dialing-back of my generation’s cynicism, I’ll continue to take Letterman over Fallon, and Hayes Carll over Father John Misty, if only because at this point I’ve got no choice.
