Throughout history, teenagers have been known for a couple key things. They're emotional. They're jerks. And they eat their own alive.
Part of the whole eating-alive-of-own usually means the development of a social hierarchy that puts a premium on a physical ideal, mainstream interests and achievements, and ridiculing anyone who falls out of step or willfully strides alongside, rocking a kool-aid dyed mohawk.
But guess what. There is a paradigm shift going on in the culture of teenage America, and it is sewn into the fabric of every cutesy emo-stripe shirt they sell at Target.
When my parents' parents were in high school...they were making Latvian sausage and Italian mob deals. When my parents were in high school, beatniks (later, hippies) were to be avoided at all costs- as was any view or activity that brought attention to the fact that you weren't a member of the better-off, beautiful class. You wanted to be respectable. You wanted to keep your head down. You wanted to get out of this two-bit town...or live in it comfortably. Forever.
When I was in high school, a scruffy blue-collar affair in a tiny southwest suburb of Chicago, you were a freak if you liked Weezer. "Weezer" was a nickname gifted to me by Bob, Bremen High School's American Eagle-clad Class Clown and bastion of the blue-collar teen values of the day: drinking beer, hating teachers, and loving Dave Mathews Band.
My kind - drama kids and band nerds and writer types and artists who eked out wall-size sketches of cannabis leaves and generous reimaginings of Edgar Allen Poe and Edward Scissorhands, kids who really thought a literary magazine would
work if more people just submitted, kids who played terrible punk shows at the VFW to sad, grey-eyed vets and chubby girls in legwarmers
and short plaid skirts while aspiring to Fireside Bowl headlining glory, did video projects in place of papers and were on Quiz Bowl, who hunted for used cds because we didn't know any better than to hunt for records, kids who shopped at
thrift stores- we disgusted Bob's kind.
The ruling class at my high school - and every high school, I thought up until recently - were the kids with mirthless laughs and dismally bland wardrobes, who drank a lot at each others' houses, all had sex with each other and nicknames and did sports, who scoffed at any sign of genuine interest in anything outside of the aforementioned activities and got good grades because their parents were best friends with the teachers because they had all been classmates together back in the godforsaken old days.
Thank Napoleon Dynamite or Juno or Death Cab for Cutie, but the script has definitely been flipped. Through twists of fate and choice, almost everything in my working life is related to teenagers, and recently I had the opportunity to ask a bunch of teens IN A NOT CREEPY WAY what their favorite "sexy" music was. I don't know what I was expecting in reply, but it certainly wasn't Andrew Bird. Pavement! Came another reply. My Bloody Valentine! Spoon, Sloan, Kings of Leon. I was dumbfounded. "But you're not supposed to know that yet," I thought to myself. "Those bands are for college."
I teach a creative writing class at a high school on Chicago's far northwest side. It is a thing of teen movie beauty, a modern megalithic knowledge and culture big box store, with ESTABLISHED 1999 carved into a stone tablet just outside the main entrance.Speakers blast The National during passing periods. They have Anime Club. And Pickleball Tourneys. Every student in my class looks like they are really interested in who's playing Pitchfork this year. The popular cheerleader wears brightly-colored patterened hoodies with clashing stripes and violet nail polish on not-game days. The most irritatingly intelligent class outcast- who quoted the 1960s "The Prisoner" as his favorite TV Show- has the flyest Nike dunks I've seen outside of St. Alberts. Everyone else is some amalgamation of awesome, not a student without a "thing" they're brazenly into, not an assymetrical hair out of place.
And while I can feel the old hierarchies beneath the surface, the dividing lines that felt hard enough for me to bristle at Bob's witty comments ("Nice glasses, Weezer. Hey Weezer, you hear that Weezer put out a new album? Called Weezer?")and take deepest pleasure in ruffling the feathers of The Fucking Man - have now seemingly gone soft. Is this great, I wonder, as I watch them do their in-class writing assignment in quiet, stoic fury- thirty-five hands pumping away in earnest to describe what they feel right now in this airy, sunny room, chunky plastic bracelets clattering, black rubberbands rubbing against the skin of their wrists and the desks stacked with well-stocked iPods and New Yorkers and essay reviews of Spitited Away.
I think of all the teenagers I have met or spoken to since graduating college and how they all seem at least slightly more put together than me, and how most have known the names of more Smiths songs. How slipping past the double doors of this high school that bears hardly any similiarities to my own plunges me into a dreamworld whipped up by junior executives at MTV and The N: a place culturally fed by the freaks who inherited in the earth and loaded movie soundtracks with obscure indie favorites, dressed leading man-children and women in what they wished they'd worn in high school. How even kids at the considerably rougher alternative high school I taught at last year were obsessed with underground hip-hop, candy colors, and slam poetry in ways that betrayed zero insecurity with showing their enthusiasm. And all these bands and books and movies could just be status symbols, but could be unifiers as well- tying together the lives of people who I used to think were built to want to split apart, or at least stand apart, or even dress down anyone around them they could. It was then I felt like I didn't know anything anymore, not about the people I was sharing this room with. I felt a little sad, a little outmoded, and a little unsure.
Then when class let out, their real teacher and I chatted on our way to the doubledoors. She told me the kids had really enjoyed my classes, except may have turned on me since the last one. We were reading their short plays out loud, and one was a Bret Easton Ellis/Neil Labute wet dream, only written extra badly- and apparently, by the class favorite. I commended the writer on being so bold with his choices, but recommended he either commit to the blatant misogyny of the play so it got even funnier, or ask himself why he was making those choices and how they affected the story. I even recommended he read/see Neil LaBute (gag), and apparently the criticism was grounds enough for him to start hating me, because I "didn't like his play."
I felt irritated and a little slighted at first, but then a smile it up my face. Teenagers still hated their teachers when we didn't "get" them.
As I ambled towards the entrance, trying to suppress my warm fuzzies and put on a straight face, I ran into a girl from my Monday class as she was exiting the library. "Have you ever read this?" she asked, and held up a thick, pocket-sized paperback novel, her finger stuck in the middle of the book to save her place. Her eyes were the giddy kind of wild you get when you realize you are reading something amazing, written almost just for you, by someone you will never physically know but do know and millions know because their book is in your school library, for chrissakes, but it was still meant just for you.
"Yeah, I have." I said. And she smiled.
"It's amazing." She said. Shaking her head, ever slightly, like she couldn't even believe it.
She put The Fountainhead in her bag, and said a quick goodbye.
