The New Lone Rangers By David Brooks
If you’ve been driving around listening to pop radio stations this spring and summer, you’ll have noticed three songs that are pretty much unavoidable, and each of them is a long way from puppy love.
First, there’s “Before He Cheats,” by Carrie Underwood. This is a song about a woman who catches her boyfriend in a bar fooling around with someone else. But she’s not wounded or insecure. She’s got nothing but contempt for the slobbering, cologne-wearing jerk. She’s disgusted by the bleached blond girly-girl who’s leading him on and who doesn’t even know how to drink whiskey.
As she rages, she’s out there in the parking lot rendering a little frontier justice — slashing his tires, taking a baseball bat to his headlights, carving her name into his leather seats.
The second song is “U + Ur Hand,” by Pink. This is about a woman out for a night on the town, very decidedly without men. She’s at the bar doing shots with her girlfriends and she’s not in a Cole Porter frame of mind. She snarls at the pathetic guys who come up offering to buy her a drink, telling them: “Keep your drink, just give me the money. It’s just you and your hand tonight.”
The third song is “Girlfriend” by Avril Lavigne, which is done in the manner of an angry cheerleader chant, a sort of drill sergeant version of the ’80s Toni Basil hit, “Mickey.” It’s about a woman who tells a guy to make his loser girlfriend disappear so she can show him what good sex is really like. Or as she sneers: “In a second, you’ll be wrapped around my finger, cause I can ... do it better! She so stupid! What the hell were you thinking?”
If you put the songs together, you see they’re about the same sort of character: a character who would have been socially unacceptable in a megahit pop song 10, let alone 30 years ago.
This character is hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fedup, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving. She’s like one of those battle-hardened combat vets, who’s had the sentimentality beaten out of her and who no longer has time for romance or etiquette. She’s disgusted by male idiots and contemptuous of the feminine flirts who cater to them. She’s also, at least in some of the songs, about 16.
This character is obviously a product of the cold-eyed age of divorce and hookups. It’s also a product of the free-floating anger that’s part of the climate this decade. But as a fantasy ideal, it’s also descended from the hard-boiled Clint Eastwood characters who tamed the Wild West and the hard-boiled Humphrey Bogart and Charles Bronson characters who tamed the naked city.
When Americans face something that’s psychologically traumatic, they invent an autonomous Lone Ranger fantasy hero who can deal with it. The closing of the frontier brought us the hard-drinking cowboy loner. Urbanization brought us the hard-drinking detective loner.
Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don’t get married until they’re past 30. That’s two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn’t a transition anymore. It’s a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules.
Once, young people came a-calling as part of courtship. Then they had dating and going steady. But the rules of courtship have dissolved. They’ve been replaced by ambiguity and uncertainty. Cellphones, Facebook and text messages give people access to hundreds of “friends.” That only increases the fluidity, drama and anxiety.
The heroines of these songs handle this wide-open social frontier just as confidently and cynically as Bogart handled the urban frontier. These iPhone Lone Rangers are completely inner-directed; they don’t care what you think. They know exactly what they want; they don’t need anybody else.
Of course it’s all a fantasy, as much as “The Big Sleep” or “High Plains Drifter.” Young people still need intimacy and belonging more than anything else. But the pose is the product of something real — a response to this new stage of formless premarital life, and the anxieties it produces.
In America we have a little problem with self and society. We imagine we can overcome the anxieties of society by posing romantic lone wolves. The angry young women on the radio these days are not the first pop stars to romanticize independence for audiences desperate for companionship.
― Martin Van Burne, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 15:05 (eighteen years ago)
I know I shouldn't care, but jeeeez....
Yay!
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 15:07 (eighteen years ago)
"Keep your drink just gimme the money"
Is there any better response to this than..
"Right you are, here, £3. Now, ......(etc)"
― Mark G, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 15:09 (eighteen years ago)
Wait till Brooks gets his mitts on the Miranda Lambert album!
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 15:11 (eighteen years ago)
After fiascos like this, Brooks is better off talking about music.
― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 15:13 (eighteen years ago)
I can't wait for Tom Friedman's column tomorrow: "'Chinese Democracy' to be released within next six months"
― Martin Van Burne, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 15:18 (eighteen years ago)
"Young people still need intimacy and belonging more than anything else."
He really knows their wants and needs and can be a very tender lover as well.
― Alex in SF, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 15:18 (eighteen years ago)
But the pose is the product of something real — a response to this new stage of formless premarital life, and the anxieties it produces.
i.e. "I'm David Brooks, NYT columnist. Looking for: independent woman who loves beer and cuddling to High Plains Drifter."
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 15:21 (eighteen years ago)
haha.
― pisces, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 15:22 (eighteen years ago)
I despise David Brooks with a white-hot passion but this is slightly less irritating than his usual standard. Perhaps because he fails to trot out one of his little self-invented buzzwords. I feel there's one on the way, though, he'll find some unbearable little neologism for these kids.
― Jon Lewis, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 15:41 (eighteen years ago)
"iPhone Lone Rangers"?
― Martin Van Burne, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 15:46 (eighteen years ago)
Of course it’s all a fantasy, as much as “The Big Sleep” or “High Plains Drifter.
Yep, in Brook's real world women know their place and they always did. He acts as if there never were women projecting tough personas in music before.
― curmudgeon, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 15:58 (eighteen years ago)
His whole M.O. is fencing off some tiny little patch of ground, then pretending what's happening there is both unprecedented and snazzily nameable.
― Jon Lewis, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 16:01 (eighteen years ago)
Gosh, he's so hip and with it recognizing how difficult life is for young middle and upper class Americans.
― curmudgeon, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 16:08 (eighteen years ago)
I really, really like the idea that this article is him trying to get some tang.
― Jon Lewis, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 16:30 (eighteen years ago)
Totally disagree, guys. If, for a second, you can take your preconceptions about him out of the mix ("Brooks thinks all women should be concubines!"), you can see he hits on some interesting points about how culture is evolving in some unknown direction -- the points about nearly two decades of hooking up and how no one really knows the rules of the game anymore.
I don't remotely read this as Brooks being up his own ass. And as a father-to-be in a matter of days, I've thought a lot in recent weeks about his piece tearing apart people for playing Eno and Radiohead to their kids to make them hipper from birth.
― Naive Teen Idol, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 18:23 (eighteen years ago)
You're gonna play your child Back to the Egg, aren't you?
(btw congratulations!)
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 18:27 (eighteen years ago)
Oh come on, culture is *always* evolving in some unknown direction, and the accepted norms of "courtship" that Brooks mourns were gone long before cell phones. And how is any of this reflected in the songs he mentions?
Sure there are connections you can make between pop culture and changing rules of dating/mating, but Brooks doesn't make those. And he doesn't make them because he wants a shortcut to his usual chorus: social "liberation" seems cool and all but without solid norms of behavior, all is chaos and despair.
― Martin Van Burne, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 18:46 (eighteen years ago)
http://www.jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=words.view&wordid=008F9D59-A28D-4079-8B77B5F1C68CA6F0
― gabbneb, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 19:04 (eighteen years ago)
(Thanks, Al!)
Whether or not Pink/Avril/CarrieUnd songs show it or not, Brooks is def. hitting on something here about how people are kind of desperate for real intimacy today, and dealing with it in seemingly counterproductive ways.
― Naive Teen Idol, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 19:14 (eighteen years ago)
how people are kind of desperate for real intimacy today
When *weren't* they?
― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 19:20 (eighteen years ago)
I guess David didn't get his copy of the Rhino Girl Groups box set. NEW FOR 2007: TOUGH INDEPENDENT GIRLS!!!
― Billy Pilgrim, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 19:22 (eighteen years ago)
I can't imagine what Brooks might say when he learns that some of those girls turn into lesbians.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 19:23 (eighteen years ago)
also xpost:
and dealing with it in seemingly counterproductive ways.
― Billy Pilgrim, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 19:24 (eighteen years ago)
xpost
Are people more desperate for real intimacy now than at any other time, and are they dealing with it in more counterproductive ways than usual? Maybe, but Brooks can't convince me of that, because he's not making an argument. He's just saying "If you share this vague uneasiness about contemporary culture with me, perhaps I can heighten that anxiety in such a way that we can discuss some reactionary options in my next column."
― Martin Van Burne, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 19:25 (eighteen years ago)
haha otm – I can even hear his Quaker Oatmeal delivery on NPR too.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 19:28 (eighteen years ago)
Agreed, except I think his strategy is not so much to heighten anxiety as to justify the reactionary options his readership would tend to support. Not that I read him very often, but I don't think he ever "prescribes," just "describes"
― Billy Pilgrim, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 19:30 (eighteen years ago)
Brooks, being ignorant and mealy and perpetually on the verge of wagging a scolding finger, is unaware that Pink is *celebrating* a good night out getting royally fucked up with the girls, and possibly, in light of the nebulous gender pref persona Lady Delish sports, going home with one of the girls as well, and liquored up on some pocket poker player's dime to boot.
It has absolute zero to do with 'intimacy', a word I'm horrified to find on the same page as 'David Brooks'. It's just her playful inversion of the Toby Keithian urge.
Can't wait for his reading of "Dear Mr. President."
― i, grey, Wednesday, 11 July 2007 06:28 (eighteen years ago)
I feel much more confident in my writing abilities. Thanks DB, PMC thread!
― Tape Store, Wednesday, 11 July 2007 06:34 (eighteen years ago)