Born Gold: Lest Sincerity Eat Itself

Nov 26, 2012 by PORTALS    3 Comments    Posted under: Columns, Features  

In this column, “Lest Sincerity Eat Itself”, Cecil Frena of the prolific Born Gold tells us his take on irony, and how it affects his relationship with music. After reading through, be sure to take a listen to the latest from Born Gold, Little Sleepwalker, released last month on Audraglint.

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Perhaps I overstated the case.

I self-describe as an opponent of irony: my publicly declaimed new year’s resolution, two years running, has been “DESTROY ALL IRONY IN THE UNIVERSE”. Don’t let the caps lock and scare quotes confuse you—that’s no Twitter pisstake, just the volume dial of my intention.

So it was weird that I reacted a bit defensively to a well-written thinkpiece by a Princeton French professor articulating more or less the same thought I’ve been struggling to eject into the universe for ages. In one beautiful passage, Christy Wampole lays it out better than I ever could:

“[The ironic frame] pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself. The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism. The same goes for ironic living. Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.”

There is a generational thing happening in the article that is pretty easy to dismiss outright. Wampole is candid about her age (~35), romanticizes 90s Gen X slacker culture, and surprise—rejects the youth culture of today, which she says is by comparison “too comfortable, too brainlessly compliant” (this comes immediately after somehow managing to describe “eating anti-depressants like candy” as an act of 90′s social unrest). She makes familiarly problematic generalities about the sad rhetorical trope of the apolitical “hipster” (I see you Adbusters), the fictive specter of which she often gets dangerously close to conflating with young, creative class kids or at other times, whatever type of vaguely liberal, privileged living Portlandia is supposed to be about.

But I don’t care about any of that—that’s all really boring and those subjects are well-established in history’s pressure-cooker to lead us directly down the narrow alley of nowhere. What is more useful I think, is the way Wampole’s invested and passionate analysis’ tendency to occasionally erase boundaries and over-simplify gives insight into what we might give up if we actually let go of irony—but only, of course, we accept a correspondingly polarized idea of what irony is.

Irony is too often confused for sarcasm. While it’s true that sarcasm is often a particularly effective tool in the artillery of the ironic frame, it should not be mistaken for the purpose to which it is set. Most definitions of sarcasm reference irony, and it’s easy to see why: in it’s most basic form, sarcasm is saying something you don’t really mean. Isn’t that the same thing as irony? Not exactly.

Sarcasm is just as capable of working in service of sincere expression. Sarcasm can say something very directly by articulating its opposite or surplus and laying bare the speaker’s emotional orientation towards that thing. It’s easy to imagine how you can make yourself vulnerable in conversation by saying something sarcastic. Sarcasm is a means of communicating indirectly, but so is the most earnest poetry. So much indirect communication is visceral and intense, and its indirectness or referentiality does not preclude its honesty. Neither sarcasm nor indirectness is the same thing as the ironic frame and both must be saved from the joyous bonfire we are preparing.

Irony can produce real value. Even if the origin story for the invention or appropriation of a signifier or idea is insincere, once that idea is set in motion down the river of public art it can be reappropriated and used as a vehicle for completely sincere emotional expression or other work that indisputably takes the risks irony fears. What I’m saying is irony and even ironic living is often deeply generative, and if it can be criticized on other grounds, we must admit it continues to produce useful creative output.

Certain works of ironic art are also just really good, and their irony is the fulcrum on which some of that value turns. I consider Mac DeMarco or Ariel Pink to be artists who can veer into the deeply ironic, and while I’ll admit that the songs of theirs that resonate most with me tend be the ones that pretend to vulnerability or real emotion, there’s also the undeniable reality that some of their songs sound like jokes that I, earnest over-emoter, am not in on—and that’s probably why they’re good.

Humor is a crucial prism in some people’s lives, and it seems perfectly honest for people like that to make jokes and absurdity a part of their art, and especially their living. Humor always requires a measure of distance, but distance does not by itself need to amount to disinvestment. Being earnest and not lightening the fuck up on occasion is a pretty egregious sin of its own.

One of the reasons I had an immediate reaction to Wampole’s piece is because of the illustration the article was saddled with: 20-somethings wearing colorful Justin Bieber shirts—shirts which are more or less exactly the kind of thing I wear on the regular. I don’t think there’s anything incommensurate between that and the fact that I make (sometimes awkwardly) sincere music.

Mind you, I wouldn’t wear that shirt ironically either - I can and do deliver conversational sermons on Justin Bieber, R. Kelly, Jann Arden, Taylor Swift, Jimmy Eat World, PM Dawn, and Phil Collins that are just as wide-eyed as you might expect from a teenaged superfan. Is it the fact that I’m not a member of those artists’ main target demographics that makes my appreciation somehow “hip” or even, to outside eyes, “ironic”? If Wampole saw me in her class wearing that shirt there would be nothing to discern me from the “hipsters” that “produce a distinct irritation in [her]”. This is dangerous in its own way, and points to my final concern.

Critiques of irony almost always come with a weird message of normalization in their backpacks, whether intentionally or not. Wampole is cognizant of this and warns that the present age of irony makes us vulnerable to ever-hovering fundamentalism—black and white lines, and the damage they can do. But the same weird normalization pressure she’s wary of comes out in her analysis when she talks about how to “live without irony” when getting dressed:

“Look at your clothes. What parts of your wardrobe could be described as costume-like, derivative or reminiscent of some specific style archetype (the secretary, the hobo, the flapper, yourself as a child)? In other words, do your clothes refer to something else or only to themselves? Do you attempt to look intentionally nerdy, awkward or ugly? In other words, is your style an anti-style?”

Imagine how conservative the world would look where people only dress in clothes which “refer to themselves” — “dressing sincerely” in this sense sounds like the ideal of a bizarre fashion dystopia. But I don’t see any reason why someone couldn’t dress in any of the ways listed both deliberately and sincerely. And as we’ve seen, neither referentiality nor indirectness get to the heart of the problem with irony - indeed, both can be usefully divorced from the concept. In light of all that, it’s hard not read the subtext of “questions” like this as mere distaste for certain types of difference. I won’t actually level that accusation. My takeaway holds regardless:

We can live without irony if we like, and to do that we need not abandon sarcasm, a sense of humor, or ironic art, which is sometimes rad. Most importantly, living without irony does not mean erasing or condemning certain kinds of difference when we see it in other people. After all, even if we correctly surmise another’s intentions as ironic, sleepers can be collaborators, and indeed, ironists often gift something to the earnest.

Curated by Verb/re/verb.