Why is this generation of young professionals obsessed with the band boygenius?
I remember years ago seeing Julien Baker at a small venue in Burlington, purging her Baptist demons. Her solo show at that point was as close to a secular exorcism as existed then. By the end of the show, she was almost crying, and among the sober New England crowd, there seemed to be a sense that we weren’t supposed to see this.
As a part of her female supergroup, boygenius, Julien Baker now sells out stadiums worldwide. Congress is stalled and headless as the most powerful generation in our country’s history deteriorates in front of news cameras. It was 80 yesterday in the mountains outside Seattle. It’s October.
The same young professionals that are in medical school and doctoral programs and at working at land trusts—the ones who signed up for the system, who did well on the SATs, who went to good colleges and are in debt, who trusted that if they followed the rules, our society would continue its ascendency toward some exceptionally progressive American utopia—are now confronted with the cyclic reality of the world. Things get worse.
The biggest repository of accumulated generational social capital in human history is now stuck between purgatory and decay. The boygenius demographic is losing steam, and boygenius feels like losing steam; it feels like being caught between looking backward for soft comfort and wanting to look forward, only to be held down by the cynicism of the Vietnam generation, who loved Seinfeld because it was “about nothing” and loved Trump because he’s funny and who currently holds all levers of power. The neoliberal-hell generation.
The sonic phenomenon of boygenius is a kind of nostalgia that appears not because we want to look backward but because we can’t look forward. Even if all the boomers evaporated, climate change would incinerate the shining city on the hill. A sad fucking band is selling out football stadiums. Walking social capital in the form of Ivy League alumni shows up and finds collective effervescence in sadness. Turn the iPhone light on and wave the lights back and forth to someone singing a song called “Not Strong Enough” with lyrics about “lowering your expectations.”
The music of boygenius is mostly sad, and sometimes its nice to hear sad shit when you’re sad too, but when sadness and songs about depression and mental health fill stadiums with a young and privileged population, red flags should be going off.
In his “Prison Notebooks,” the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." This concept has been widely cited to describe periods of uncertainty and transformation in sociopolitical contexts.
boygenius is the sound of the interregnum.