Birth rates in America were sagging low in the mid-70s… in raw numbers, they sunk down near three million newborns a year. They were cresting relatively high around 1990, with raw numbers topping four million a year. You don’t exactly have to be a sociologist to notice that the sheer size of this age cohort makes its members’ lives, and their relationship with pop culture, a little different from others’. People born during a dip in the birth rate grow up consuming a lot of culture that’s aimed at someone older than them. People born during a boom do not do cultural apprenticeship, because everything is quickly aimed at them; they watch the things that appeal to their age group bloom and succeed, whether anyone else is interested in it or not. This is why some Americans have spent decades clutching their heads as the Baby Boom generation makes big chunks of our world revolve around itself: Large cohorts have a large gravitational pull.

Nitsuh Abebe wrote this great column about someone who called My Chemical Romance my generation’s Nirvana, our boom of MySpace bands, and how Skrillex is a weird outgrowth of that. 

This is how efficient our online music press is now: With a slow enough connection, you might actually see how the sausage was made (and marketed) before you even smell it cooking.

Nitsuh Abebe, Why We Fight: The Imagination of Lana Del Ray

“Personally, I have been experiencing a very different kind of nostalgia: I miss my capacity to fall for everything.

…I miss getting caught— hook, line, sinker, reeled-straight-in— by trends, revivals, passing notions, idiot bastard styles. I am trying to re-cultivate the overwhelming enthusiasm I have had for truly, truly bad ideas. And in that spirit, I think it’s important to confess something I believe about popular music: Its quality is not nearly as important as we make it sound. There are people who will tell you that all the styles, trends, niches, tastes, and subgenres in music are just like a mall— a grand consumer affair that offers you more and more choices, less and less substance. But there’s also the thing any good advertiser will tell you about shopping: The choices you make aren’t about getting the best product. They’re about filling some kind of psychic need for the product that makes you feel smart, or feminine, or responsible. What I’ve always appreciated about music is the way it dispenses with the silly product and goes straight for the need itself; it’s honest.

Maybe you don’t see it that way; maybe I’m just a faker, a poseur, a champion vulture. But when I think back over the music I’ve loved most in my life, I find that huge chunks of that love can be explained by aspirations I had— smelly little personal needs that did not remotely care which musicians played better, sang more in tune, or wrote more inventive songs. Some of the needs were stupid, some mundane, some idealistic, some suspiciously similar to the need to feel cool. First I needed, like everyone, to decide what sort of person I wanted to be, and music is a very efficient way to figure that out by trial and error. Then I wanted to fit into spaces I found attractive; I wanted to understand people I found interesting. There were qualities I lacked, and envied in others, so I tried to steal them from music. There were qualities I had that others didn’t appreciate, so I sought out music that consoled me by saying those qualities were wonderful ones. I confess: So much of it is about what I want. So much of the great music I love traces back to some kind of pretense on my end, something I wanted to do to myself, using the music as a tool.”

-Nitsuh Abebe, Why We Fight #17

… and why was Back to Black beautiful? It’s not, as some cynics might have it, because we take sick pleasure in gawking at artists’ pain, or craning our necks at their destruction. (There are plenty of celebrities whose poor decision-making activates our sense of disdain and superiority, but Winehouse was not one of them; she radiated too much real sadness and heaviness, like someone who long ago ceased to even bother crying.) Nor was it because of the mythic junk romantics will try and sell you — all this talk about the tragic artist’s soul or the illustrious “club” of wrecked musicians who didn’t manage to live past 27. (The people who like to imagine musicians “jamming in heaven” are usually just interested in seeing them as posable action figures, instead of humans.)

The work was beautiful, I think, because Winehouse was extremely smart about how risk works when you’re making art. She understood that the steely, arm’s-length confidence of modern pop singers — the ones who command, demand, and let you know how little shit they take — can only get you so far. You can’t really exhibit grace or toughness without having something hanging over you; it’s like weightlifting without the weights. So the most “retro” thing about Back to Black turned out not to be its period styling or vintage detail, but that streak of woeful resignation borrowed from old jazz records…

Nitsuh Abebe’s two-cents on Amy Winehouse

The latest efforts in music blogging from Andrew Alan McClain.

21, junior at the University of Central Arkansas, journalism major.

This is my music blog.

email me your most whimsical thoughts at andrewmcclain3@gmail.com