Hold it straight together, man
Hold it straight together, if you can
Little fevers wrapped in medication
All strung out on novelty
Collapse yourself and try to comprehend
An angry island, a bitter bee sting
Severing and shattering
Free the self and fix the in between
It's isolation, mark the earth around you
Guess who's on the waiting list
I'll let you in on something secret
Disappear -- Motion City Soundtrack
I've been listening to this song nonstop. I can't get it out of my head. I don't know exactly what Justin Pierre had in mind when he wrote this, but it spoke to me. Earlier this semester, we had a shocking epiphany that we are a generation that has been taught to hate itself. We are a generation that hides behind a mask called cynicism. We are a generation that fakes confidence to hide the fact we know jack shit.
So where do these lyrics come into play? We are strung out on novelty. We buy into the bullshit corporations feed us. Don't get me started on the crap out in the market available for purchase. What we all need is to take a step back and re-evaluate everything. And I mean everything. Our hopes. Our dreams. Our likes. Our dislikes. Our friends. Our enemies. Ourselves.
We have to look into ourselves and ask what's really important. Tune out the noise so to speak. We have to start being honest with ourselves. Question is, do we really know what's honest anymore? Everything is so mixed up that it's difficult to sort out. The problem becomes "Is this what I want? Or is this what they want for me?" We have to stick it out, no matter how much we bitch and moan about shit. "Freeing the self" goes a really long way. It's a difficult journey but well worth it in the end.
In the previous post, I asked who is our generation's voice. Who or what is it that unites us? That represents us as a whole? I had the opportunity to ask Motion City Soundtrack's frontman himself. After nominating figures like Anderson Cooper of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360°, he jokingly slapped a handful of promotional stickers on the coffee table.
"This is gonna unite America like nobody's business," he stated with a firm shake of his fist, even opting to slap a few more stickers down. "If everybody in the world buys that record, we'll have peace."
All joking aside, Justin Pierre arrived to the very spot my class finds itself at. He admitted that this question - Who is our generation's revolutionary figure? - is a difficult one to answer. Ever stop and think that it could be you?
Posts
dang girl this is good. i find myself asking myself some of these very questions sometimes. we do need to start being honest with ourselves...other wise eventually we will forget who we are at our very core.
ReplyDeletethe whole thing about how we are taught to hate ourselves... that's deep. and yeah, whoever posted before me... i totally agree with you. we gotta be honest with ourselves or else we'll forget who we are. but yeah... justin pierre said that? forreal?
ReplyDeleteThis generation is so persuaded by the media, especially now that everyone is so dependent on technology. And now that everything is so easy to pump out, it's so much easier to go along with the trends. As soon as one trend is pumped out and done, we all just follow the next. I think we're just all in the mindset of being overstimulated, we always just want something more and better. As Americans, I think a lot of us get trapped in the mindset of having something bigger and better. We're always obsessed with those with a lot more money and status, such as celebrities. We all forget we're all just humans and just being someone has more status, doesn't make us them a better human being. Media is everywhere. Especially living in this town of LA, it is the core of media. And the media always portrays something fake, so a lot of the people here in this town are fake as well. Haha I can't wait to move out of here.
ReplyDeleteBut I think that this whole culture started with America being known as the country of freedom and coming here to live the "American Dream". Because everything we need is here, we always want something more. Maybe if the we were given something more realistic, we all would be realistic with ourselves and others.
I agree with you completely. It's kind of sickening how overdependent we are as a society on technology. I remember the days when I could recall just about everybody's phone number and punch in the numbers myself. Nowadays, if my contact list disappears from my phone, I have a meltdown.
ReplyDeleteIt is true that we are set in this mindset of having "bigger and better" that it's kind of pathetic really. We forget what truly is important and we get into this dark place where we think our possessions define who we are. And it IS difficult to escape ads and whatnot. Media and marketing go hand-in-hand. Even with TiVo we can't escape it since we have all this product placement in television programs. It just fosters an unhealthy obsession with portraying oneself in a manner that we think is socially acceptable because we saw "so-and-so" from "fill-in-the-blank" using it.
American dream? Fuck. Blind consumption? Is that the American dream? Because I want no fucking part of that.