The Puritanism of Grunge
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In a footnote in my last post, I mentioned the almost hard-to-remember chapter of American cultural history when authenticity was a mass preoccupation on par with political rectitude today: something interrogated constantly, something universally sought and very often pretended to, something the lack of which led to social scandal. If there was a cancel culture in the 1990s, it hunted the inauthentic. Nothing could be worse for one’s social status than being found to have tried, especially to have tried to be something or to be some way one was not. The present, with selfies and filters and workout tips for getting a certain kind of body and people “hustling” and “building their brand” and asking for follows and all of that would have been utterly unimaginable to us back then, completely mortifying to envision.
The mania for authenticity did not begin in the 1990s, though the grunge scene exemplified it; it may indeed be a timeless, recurring obsession, but I think of the recent form of it as having taken hold in the 1960s. Everything from automatic or stream-of-consciousness writing to action painting to the countercultural rejection of various preparation-requiring beauty standards to the popularization of terms like “sellout” tells the same story, a very 20th century story, fusing pop-Freudianism with generic “rebellious” anti-traditionalism with Rousseauian vibes about the state of nature. What was produced, deliberate, artificial, considered, aspirational, or customary was bad; what was organic, spontaneous, natural, emotional, indifferent, or revolutionary was good. Although The Catcher in the Rye was written in the 1940s, Holden Caufield’s implied philosophy —that it is better to be a miserable dyspeptic wretch who is himself or herself than to be a “phony”— achieved cultural dominance only over the succeeding decades.
None of these ideas has ever had much substance, however persuasive they were to teens like myself at the time. Upon examination, it’s extremely hard to determine what’s “phony” and what’s “authentic”; the concepts rest on a conception of a stable, real, monolithic self that is incompatible with what we know of how minds work, how people are. But they functioned as every generation’s core memetic concepts do:
they provided fresh ways to say “good” or “bad” that didn’t have any unpleasant associations with prior generations’ worldviews, it being paramount for each cohort in America to feel as though it’s discovering a new continent and civilizing the atavistic indigenous peoples who live there, ferreting out the pockets of resistance and ushering in the new manifest destiny; we will remake the world in our image and it will be better, and anyone who doesn’t get on board is a moral problem to be dealt with harshly
they created status games for everyone from elites to the masses to play, sorting people into hierarchies of winners and losers (winners: those whose hair looked good without any interventions when they woke up; losers: anyone who wasn’t sure who to be, or how to be, and sought to draw from inspirations or traditions that were detectable to their peers)
they provided new openings for the production of culture; endless movies and songs and books about the “fake” happiness of e.g. suburban middle-class families and the “real” valor of e.g. drug-addicted itinerants who impregnated and abandoned women while “seeking themselves” (like Dean Moriarty in On the Road)
Because this occurred in the American cultural scene, it’s not surprising that the obsession with authenticity was also, in its own way, highly Puritanical. America is a nation of moral panic. That each generation must rebel against its predecessor means that each moral panic seems new, but in psychological terms, the situation is unchanging: a novel memeplex emerges from the scrum of culture; suddenly, led by the young, everyone is applying its judgements everywhere, and every facet of life is reexamined according to its morality. No matter is too trivial to bring before the tribunal. We recognize this pattern rather easily in the past: there is something very similar about the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Salem Witch Trials, despite their different contexts. But it’s harder to see it in the present, and harder still when the moral panic isn’t explicitly religious or political.
The moralizing around authenticity was neither, but you can detect elements of both. For example, the cult of authenticity introduced a certain niche dilemma: if you were “naturally cool” or attractive, the path was clear: be exactly who you are. If you were not naturally cool or attractive, didn’t happen to line up with the values and aesthetics of the day, you had two choices:
Be “authentic” and be rejected and disliked for who you were (although you were of course supposed to act like you didn’t care, like the idea of caring had never occurred to you; you could go home and pop in a VHS of Edward Scissorhands and reflect on the probability that someday, someone would see your inner beauty and transform your life through their love, right as all the bullies and popular kids realized the error of their ways and lamented how they’d treated you).
Try to be something else—which was inauthentic and thus risky/bad— and/or be uncool or dorky or “cheesy.”
Note, then, that the ideology of authenticity, like Calvinism, is one of predestination: you were born cool, or not; and if not, you merited punishment whichever path you took. There was no real possibility of escape. Coolness was next to godliness, and cheesiness was sin; this is still true today, of course, and it’s marvelous that the simple substitution of slang for religious terms can unleash the inner zealots of the most secular interlocutors. The wages of cheesiness remains death: just ask any unpopular kid in high school.
In America, it always comes back to one’s essential soul. During the grunge era, there weren’t exactly hard and fast rules of “how to be,” but the aesthetic inquisition proceeded apace. It was important “not to care how one looked” but to still look good. It was important not to care about “what other people think” and to be largely preoccupied with your inner existence. The highest moral achievement was probably suicide or self-destructive behavior; Kurt Cobain was “too pure for this world” and “couldn’t conform” and “suffered too deeply.” He was authentic, there can be no doubt, whereas the musicians of the 1980s, with their obviously deliberate efforts to look and sound certain ways, were obviously phony and were rejected seemingly overnight. Like punk, grunge was a moralizing movement, a movement against a newly-perceived sin, a movement that made winners of those with beautiful souls (and faces) and losers of (1) the prior generation’s heroes and (2) those too weak, anxious, confused, or ugly to get with the program and look the part convincingly.
It’s never good to be a loser, but to be cheesy was a slightly worse fate, if I recall correctly. “Cheesiness,” like all moralizing slang-based concepts, was hard to define —a feature of these terms, not a defect— but it ultimately seemed to me to consist of a failure to imagine how one could be mocked by cool observers. The cheesy person, perhaps signing unselfconsciously to an uncool song, or being excited by something not considered “in,” did not demonstrate an awareness of the surrounding mob that might eviscerate them; they were like fauna on the Galapagos: idiotically oblivious to the new predators in their midst.
From the distance of a few decades, it appears to me now that cheesy kids were not what I thought then: pathetic, culturally illiterate fools annihilated by the superior, cuttingly ironic and nihilistic grunge culture around them. Instead, they were the living, thriving embodiment of the repudiation of that culture’s totalizing claims. In addition to being Puritans, Americans are universalizers, colonizers: the worldview-of-the-moment is not only the most important thing to promulgate and enforce, but is actually the only possible way of being, thinking, feeling, or believing, and alternatives are immoral. In this sense, the existence of the cheesy —especially if they were having fun together— threatened the one truth and catholic faith.
Cheesy people were authentic, after all! It’s the most amazing thing to realize: the authenticity freaks were hardest on the most authentic. Perhaps their freedom exposed everyone’s cowardly conformity. Or perhaps they simply demonstrated that there was no relationship between authenticity and coolness at all, a major blow to the implicit theories of the regime; it revealed that this era’s beliefs and values, like all the rest, were mostly fashion. And worst of all: the cheesy often seemed to be having fun doing what they did, being themselves. It was important that they be destroyed for the stability of the cultural system.
Today this dialectic seems really fucking stupid; every zeitgeist becomes a punchline after it passes. The cheesy won, anyway, though not by trying. Instead, the Internet weakened monocultural hegemony and strengthened thousands of niches; everyone is cheesy to everyone else now, whatever they are and whatever they’re doing, and no one cares. I find it delightful. I think few people talk about authenticity in the ways we did, and the world is certainly better for it, even if I still can’t stand to see someone try hard to be cool or attractive or popular. Nowadays Americans have new ideological systems and judgmental slang and moral panics they can use to sort the wheat from the chaff in their local ecosystems. I’m sure it all sums to the same thing, but at least we don’t still have to pretend that we don’t care how we look.
