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Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Mischief / History / Media "The Jazz Age Is Bullshit," Says the SF Weekly

Posted by Anna Minard on Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 3:08 PM

Some generations are force-fed misremembered vainglory, some are led off the marbled cliffs of excess—let's take a moment to appreciate Manjula Martin's take on John Roderick's punk-failed-me screed, the exceptional parody "The Jazz Age Is Bullshit." Take it away, Martin:

My experience of my youth subculture is indicative of everyone else's experience.
I, a heterosexual white male in my 40s, really got what the Jazz Age meant. And jazz definitely meant exactly the same thing to other people as it did to me, especially people of color and women and queer folk and younger generations who came after me. I mean, come on. It's not like jazz provided a viable subculture for youth to turn to at a time when many kids were caught between eras, struggling to figure out what to keep and reject of their parents' worlds while battling the larger economic and geopolitical changes at work in the world, not to mention the common brutality of adolescence.

And it's not like flapperism did anything for women, either. I mean, an entire subset of young women doing the things boys did and wearing short hair and showing their gams without fear certainly didn't provide other young women with a vision of life beyond the oppressive gender and sexual norms of the past. I mean, people don't even wear corsets anymore, so what's even the point of the so-called flapper rebellion?

There's seriousness and silliness and it's a hell of a lot of fun. Read the whole thing!