Selling Out

Well, it finally happened. I flipped on Comedy Central only to see an advertisement for a collection of alt rock hits marketed for my generation. Buzz Ballads. This is worse than the ‘Monster Ballads’ commercial I used to laugh at when I was nineteen, in which lead singers with more hair than most entire households sell out and sing about love instead of screwing groupies (see: REO Speedwagon).

I can barely imagine what would happen if I stumbled across some nineteen year –old punk-ass mocking “Santeria.” Please, feel free to berate Lifehouse’s “Hangin’ By a Moment,” just don’t try and define my youth existence by it.

Seeing the music that defined your younger experience, even the music you didn’t like but can’t help but remember, collected sold for the presumable purpose of recreating that experience has an odd (but altogether unsurprising) way of making you feel on the shelf and irrelevant; that which defines our generation has been identified, boxed and is now available for $26.99.

Right now a younger, hipper crowd that gets laid more often is pushing outside that box, defying marketing firms and their parents to categorize them. Good luck, guys. Like me, you will eventually find your beloved (or not so beloved) songs on at the dentist’s office.

This isn’t, of course, to suggest that Toad the Wet Sprocket and Third Eye Blind were making all the “important” music five to ten years ago, the same way that “I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore” wasn’t really an anthem for the eighties at the time. But it IS the only REO Speedwagon song still in karaoke book. Maybe the what chafes the most about box sets isn’t so much that we are being sold nostalgia as if there’s nothing left to live for, but rather that the nostalgia we are sold is middle of the road tripe. We’re marginalized into celebrating songs not because they deserve it, but because they were our prom themes and senior video background music.