A column questioning the assumptions of popular music
The ongoing attack on irony reached a fever pitch on November 18 when the front page of the New York Times’ Sunday Review splashed the headline, “How To Live Without Irony” followed by the subhead, “Life has become a competition to see who cares the least. That’s a collective misstep.” The essayist Christy Wampole goes on to claim that irony “pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful.”
This is the most breathtaking misinterpretation of irony since Alanis Morissette’s catchy but knuckleheaded song “Ironic.” Morissette at least had the excuse of being a naïve pop singer; Wampole is a Princeton professor. Both women make the fundamental mistake of confusing irony with sarcasm. When you say or write something that you clearly don’t mean, that’s sarcasm. When you point out the difference between the way things should be and the way they are, that’s irony. Far from being modern culture’s most embarrassing flaw, irony is the culture’s greatest achievement. We would be foolish to live without it, for it’s the most useful tool for coping with the world we actually live in.
Invoking the essayist’s license for oversimplification, one could say that there three lenses for viewing the world: cynicism, sentimentality and irony. The cynic looks at the world and concludes that meaning is illusory and action is futile, so why bother. This camp includes not only Wampole’s hipster straw men but also nihilists and people who refuse to vote in American elections. The sentimentalist looks at the world and concludes that good intentions inevitably lead to good results; follow the prescribed path and your reward will follow. This camp includes religious fundamentalists of all stripes, Maoists and romantic-comedy fans.
The ironist looks at the world and sees goals worth pursuing but also recognizes that imperfect human beings will repeatedly stumble and fall on the path to those finish lines. Unlike the cynic, the ironist believes the goal is still worth pursuing, even if it may never be reached. Unlike the sentimentalist, the ironist realizes that nothing is inevitable. True irony is only possible when one can keep in both things in view—the way things should be and the way things are—while trying to pull them ever closer together. In this sense, all our greatest artists and greatest politicians are ironists.
I make my living as a pop-music critic, so let me draw an example from that field. In 1989 Neil Young released a song called “Rockin’ In The Free World,” whose chorus simply repeated the title line four times in a crescendo of electric guitars and hollering vocals that seemed an anthem of patriotism and possibility. Young’s endorsement of American freedom (and rockin’) sounds incontestably sincere. The verses, however, are a gnarled and knotty catalogue of the nation’s failure to realize its goals. Homeless folks are “sleepin’ in their shoes”; religious zealots are calling their enemies “Satan.” College-age kids develop a “machine gun hand”; a crack addict abandons her baby in an alley.
Like Bruce Springsteen’s similar “Born in the U.S.A.,” Young’s song bounces back and forth between its muckraking verses and its idealistic chorus. If he had only given us the verses, with their bleak vision of a benighted America, the song could have descended into cynicism. If he had only given us the chorus, with its soaring motto, the song would have lapsed into sentimentality. By maintaining the tension between the two, he has given us a masterpiece of irony.
Or consider Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” #4 in Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” Like Young and Springsteen, Gaye holds the disappointments of the present in the same frame as his hopes for the future. Calling out through the arrangement’s immense echo, Gaye applies the title’s rhetorical question to matters of war (“There’s too many of us dying”) and dissent (“Don’t punish me with brutality”). But for all his pointed criticism of American society, he maintains a persistent faith in its promise: “We’ve got to find a way to bring some lovin’ here today.” Gaye was another great ironist.
Or consider the presidency of Barack Obama and his “evolving” views on gay marriage, immigration reform and universal health care. To leave a positive mark on history, an electoral politician must be an ironist. He or she must be able hold in mind great ideals while simultaneously recognizing the reality that society will always fall short of those ideals. To abandon those ideals is to turn to cynicism and corruption. To ignore reality is to fall prey to the sentimentality of ideological purity and rigidity. To negotiate between the optimal and the possible, trying to bring them closer inch-by-inch is to draw strength from irony.
A gifted ironist like Obama knows he can’t get too far out in front of the reality of voters’ feelings and the available votes in Congress. He has to be a little bit ahead if he’s to pull reality towards the perfect but not so far that the rope won’t reach. Thus he can harbor his private beliefs about gay marriage until 40% of the voters support it, close enough that he can pull reality forward. Thus he can table immigration reform until an election provides enough momentum to narrow that gap between the ideal and the real. Thus he can sign health-care reform that is far from perfect but closer than ever before.
Irony is the best way to approach our own daily lives as well. Has your career failed to live up to your youthful high expectations? Has your marriage fallen short of pop culture’s romantic reveries? Don’t give up on those expectations and become a cynic. Don’t become a sentimentalist and pretend that those expectations have been fulfilled. Be an ironist and keep your eye on both the prize and the obstacles. It’s okay to be unhappy when you’re slipping backwards as long as you allow yourself to be happy when you make small progress in the forward direction.
The “middle-class, Caucasian” hipsters that Wampole so ruthlessly caricatures in her essay are teetering on the border between irony and cynicism. They are right to abandon the unironic, childish earnestness that believes good work and kindness are always rewarded, because they’ve seen too much evidence to the contrary. The question is: Can they retain their faith in the value of accomplishment and generosity in the face of those disappointments?
Wampole, on the other hand, seems to have crossed the border into sentimentality. Witness her yearning for the unironic simplicity of “very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities.” She seems eager to be willfully ignorant of the shortfall between what the culture promises and what it delivers if only she can never use air-quotes again.