The New Sincerity
Irony is dead. Long live irony.
By Matthew Hurwitz
“Irony died not in a fiery explosion, but slowly, quietly, of old age. And it wasn’t replaced by a return of the old guard.”
- Jesse Thorn
There comes a time in all generations when the burden of hipness begins to impair their cultural development. Clinging to old paradigms of what’s cool, we become as lame as our forebears when we first cast off the shackles of their fads and follies. Someday, too, we will risk embarrassing our children, and other people’s attractive children. Let it be known then that the pattern has been recognized, as has our place within it. We will not fall prey to the obsoletion of our hippie parents or our yuppie parents. With a radical new aesthetic on the rise, our generation’s potential for greatness stands to surpass their ineffectual protesting and even that of the so-called World War II-winning “Greatest Generation” before them. Screw those guys.
The epochal term “New Sincerity” was coined by San Francisco radio host Jesse Thorn on his program “The Sound Of Young America”. It is an abandonment of the snide cynicism of the 1990s to adapt irony into something positive and constructive instead of merely sarcastic, a freedom to accept the ridiculous on its own terms without guilt. Thorn’s model for this still-developing concept is Evel Knievel, the 1970s performance stuntman who, among other attributes, wears a red-white-and-blue caped jumpsuit and jumps long distances in a rocket-powered motorcycle. Thorn: “Number one, he is ridiculous. Impossible to take seriously. But it’s not just that he’s ridiculous. He’s awesome.” Divorcing irony from condescension, there’s no need to proclaim superiority to a man whose pursuits were so patently crazy.
Another perfect test case: the musical career of William Shatner. In 1968 he released an album, The Transformed Man, featuring songs like “Mister Tambourine Man” and “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” in which he passionately gave spoken-word renditions of those songs’ lyrics accompanied by the music itself. Deadly serious and sincere, it became a punchline upon arrival.
Captain Kirk’s avant-garde music album is a bit hard to take at face value, sure. It couldn’t even gain retroactive jokey relevance in the great wave of ’90s irony that swept up dreck like The Brady Bunch to the pedestal of glib silliness that must’ve really meant something underneath it all. 2004: Popular and respected musician Ben Folds produces Shatner’s second album, Has Been, in exactly the same style as Transformed Man and it features tracks with artists like Aimee Mann and Henry Rollins. Every single review expresses the same sentiment in one way or another: “There’s no way to take this thing seriously –– just look at the title –– and yet it rocks…it’s fun to listen to.” Not novelty fun, but fun! And oddly enough, every bit as sincere as The Transformed Man, which was clearly ahead of its time. Ben Folds and Shatner created one of the first great works of The New Sincerity aesthetic.
This is partly a recapturing of innocence, of perceiving the world without the constriction of cynicism, but with the larger perspective of irony - neither completely ironic nor completely sincere. Hence, New Sincerity. This is our generation’s destiny. Our forefathers have lamented irony as the death knell of Western Civilization, but what they were ultimately pained by was the nihilism of it. “Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He’s cool.” “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” “Eh, I don’t even know anymore.” Indeed. We know we’re already beyond this. The battle is nearly won. “So bad it’s good” has never felt so right.
Our vernacular, for example. To describe something as totally awesome is to proclaim it totally awesome, in joy of using those two words and the joy that something is totally awesome. Or radical or wicked or sweet. That these words are silly does not diminish them. In their exuberance they become what they define, and through the new sincerity, without guilt. “Groovy” is as groovy as groovy sounds coming out your lips. We may emancipate that word’s 1960s origins from contempt of age. This is a wonderful surprise of the New Sincerity vernacular: the lingo of our fathers is given new life and validity.
A word of caution: corporate media has already caught on to the New Sincerity, and in their quest to sell us anything, they’ve been packaging everything they can from the last 40 years of pop culture with a shiny new bow. We got more ’80s retro than we know what to do with, and when VH-1 runs two seasons of I Love The ’70s, ’80s and ’90s” each, we can be pretty sure that not everything in those fine documentaries is really worth a second opinion.
Beyond New Sincerity appreciation for the past, though, there’s also an assault of new stuff that’s got irony up the wazoo, but zero sincerity, like Desperate Housewives or Napoleon Dynamite. Spoof movies have gone this route pretty badly. Airplane! or The Naked Gun played the material straight and got laughs from exaggerating genre conventions, whereas both Not Another Teen Movie and the Scary Movie series are content to copy exact scenes from recent films as setups for dick and shit jokes.
Feeling superior to your entertainment is not the New Sincerity, and by the same coin, taking yourself seriously isn’t either. One part ironic, one part sincere. This is all very new, but this is the way. Go forward, move ahead. We’re through being cool.