contact has been made

Today the computer guy was installing a new version of the stupid stinky AS400 on my computer, so I didn’t bother to turn off the radio after BBC World Service. It was on Point with Tom Ashbrook, and he was discussing… oysters. Seriously. They talked about the history of eating oysters and how they are best cooked for AN ENTIRE HOUR. NPR is so funny- only there would you find the one guy who wrote the definitive history of oysters and have not only him talk about them, but PEOPLE CALLING INTO THE SHOW FROM ALL OVER THE COUNTRY just to discuss oysters. It’s like something someone would make up to parody NPR!

The second half of the show was devoted to this chick who wrote a book on how much she loves the cheesy music of the 1950s, and how it’s been ignored and dismissed blah blah blah. They actually had Fabian and Brenda Lee (?) on the show talking about how cheesy 50s music was actually really awesome. People would call in and kiss the ass of sugary pop music. I really wanted to call in and talk about how they’re smoking crack if they think this music has been forgotten– I heard it every day growing up in myriad grocery stores, dentists’ offices, and other waiting rooms and shopping places of all types. I know more songs from the 1950s than probably my dad does. It’s not this rare gem that has lain buried for 50 years– it’s the Muzak of my childhood! But, I’d just sound like another whiny Gen-Xer, apparently what the author of the book was, listening to her Sonic Youth and the Replacements, before she discovered the magic of “How Much is that Doggie In The Window” (which was on a kids’ record that I think had belonged to one of my uncles, which is how I know it).

Well, whatever. basically, the whole thing was a gigantic slap in the face for irony. Everyone was bitching about how the 1950s were made fun of in that ironic sense, and how nobody understood the true magic of schlocky romantic ballads. I’ll admit I get annoyed when people attack irony. I have lived and breathed irony since the day I was born. I didn’t latch onto it as a fad in the 90s. Irony is not like the Macarena– something that the advertising industry attaches itself to and then abandons. Irony is a way of seeing the world, one that I think a lot of people of my generation naturally subscribe to. Irony isn’t something that I made a conscious effort to learn, it developed in me like my shoe size, my affinity for bagpipe music, or my intense hatred of parsnips.

I know I always say that the only people who say irony is dead are those who never understood it in the first place, and I stand by that. Baby Boomers don’t really understand irony, and I don’t think the generations below mine really do either. I really don’t know why people my age can tune into it so readily; Is it a kind of a defense mechanism for dealing with all the schlocky, sanitized nostalgia for the past that never really existed that Baby Boomers constantly threw at us, saying that it was much better than whatever was going on at the time? Does it come fromt he realization that the world of Happy Days never really existed, and that the 50s were kind of a dark time riddled with the Cold War and McCarthyism? Who knows? All I know is that I will continue to see things in an ironic light. I will continue to like critically bad movies, collect weird records, enjoy wearing “ugly” clothes, and generally be silly even though the fad is dead. I will rule my destiny with a fist of irony. Parents just don’t understand.