Gavin McInnes is a funny and interesting character on cable television. He just sort of appeared, but he allegedly was a star of some sort in the New York underground publishing scene. It’s hard to know if that is true, since everyone on TV has a fake back story. Regardless, McInnes is funny and outlandish, but also strikingly sensible, in contrast to the robots on cable news channels. He does his best when he feigns outrage and goes full-on Archie Bunker. It’s a fun act that works well for him.
His writing, however, is a different story. His website looks like what old people do to try and appear hip. The design is cheesy and dated, but the content is like something Boomers thought was funny in their youth. Putting pics of half-naked women in the pages of a men’s magazine was edgy in the 1990’s. There’s a lazy man’s edginess to that sort of presentation. The whole site has an “try too hard” feel to it, like old people trying to appeal to young people. It’s aging hipsters talking about their glory days.
In fact, that seems to be a running theme in his columns and postings. On the one hand he is at the age when he can no longer pretend to be young. On the other hand, he is not ready to be old and finds the whole experience to be mystifying. Sadly, he suffers from that common modern malady of thinking that everything new to him is, in fact, totally new, so he talks about the mundane as if it is a revelation. We live in an age in which no one can seem to remember last week, much less trends from previous generations.
His latest on Taki is a good example of cultural amnesia. Everyone is carry on as if Miley Cyrus is something new, when she is just another version of the same act the entertainment complex has been churning out for decades. Female entertainers using sexual charged lyrics, dress and antics to attract a crowd probably dates to the dawn of civilization. In fact, sex and pop music have been a paring sine the dawn of the recording industry. Just listen to an old jazz or blues collection and you see it.
In the modern era, acts like Wendy O. Williams were selling raunchy sexuality on stage in the 1970’s. Madonna ripped off a big part of her act from Williams. Later female entertainers ripped off Madonna’s naughty school girl act. The only thing new about the Cyrus act is that it is so cheesy and fake. The female sex acts of previous generations at least had some talent and looked good. Cyrus is kind of gross looking and she sounds like a bag of cats. She looks like a bar skank on amateur night at the titty bar.
The thing is though, McInness is not an amnesiac. He’s simply responding to what he sees around him and that is a strange collective amnesia. It’s like American culture has suddenly forgotten the last 30-40 years and is now pretending to be scandalized squares from the 1950’s. Maybe the taste makers of the cultural class have decided that being scandalized was too much fun to let slip away, so everyone now has to pretend these new bawdy acts are new.
On the other hand, it could simply be that the technological age is destroying collective memory. Why remember anything when you can look it up on your phone? No one can follow directions or read a map anymore thanks to GPS. The young literally have never had a need to read a map or understand north and south. It’s not unrealistic to think we are headed to a place where everyone lives in the moment. Once something happens and is experienced, it is forgotten so it can be replaced by the next thing.
