Adults are buying toys for themselves, and it’s the biggest source of growth for the industry
Facebook shot me this article a few days ago and I’ve been thinking about it. “Kidult.”
When I crossed the threshold into glorious, glorious adulthood and shipped off to college, I was excited about my newfound independence and the ability to move past a lot of the trappings that I felt as a lowly high schooler. What this article refers to as a seemingly traditional view of adulthood—being “a very upstanding, serious member of society…intellectually, emotionally, in every other single way”—was very appealing to me. I wanted to go out and try new things and be taken seriously (not that I wasn’t taken seriously in many respects previously).
Now I go to college and there’s student organized group viewings of, like, Hocus Pocus. I have never seen Hocus Pocus and have no interest in doing so, and from what I’ve heard it’s not too great, so I’m not sure why it’s being brought up again besides nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. And nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake is just not something I’ve ever reveled in. My parents just didn’t raise me on Disney films, and none of the TV shows I watched or toys I played with as a kid really stuck with me in a connected or personal manner. I’ve never even seen a Star Wars movie.
A wide scale shift towards multimedia franchises aimed at children is mentioned in that article, and it seems like getting ‘em while they’re young has worked in some respects. In fact, it is so entrenched in our society that the “Disney adult” is an easily recognizable archetype. We make fun of Disney adults and made fun of all that Ready Player One manchild crap a few years ago. But we also lap up whatever new wave of popular nostalgia comes our way. We look to the past for comfort, even though we would never be able to survive a day with only a flip phone or, alternatively, no phone at all. We are told that the past was great, back when we didn’t have brains developed enough to make informed decisions about what was shoved down our throats. So we use current day, dumbed down tech to recapture the times we thought were simple because we could barely think in the first place. I had a really happy childhood and learned later that my parents were dealing with the recession and (successfully) trying their hardest to keep the associated anxiety from rubbing off on me simultaneously. Ignorance is truly bliss.
Today, I go to the dollar store, where a good amount of the items are more than a dollar thanks to good ol’ inflation, and there’s licensed Barbie dolls alongside the wonky off-brand ones. Then I walk past the toy aisle when I’m running errands, and I see shiny new toy lines that emphasize copy-paste blind box “surprises” and literally theming characters after every color of the rainbow for collect-’em-all domination. I’m not quite sure if I understand it, but it’s strangely fascinating to see. It’s weird how seemingly disposable they seem, because they seem like they were produced solely to be bought and discarded. They seem algorithmically generated and kind of crappy. They still make the old ones, or at least updated versions of the old ones, most of the time. Time will tell if these new toys, tailor made for the current ADHD social media generation, have any staying power. Or maybe we’ll all just move onto another “next big thing” before we take the time to remember them.
Before my mom got married, she actually dyed her hair because she didn’t want her highlights to make every photo from her big day scream “early 2000s.” If I were to raise a kid in this day and age, I’d follow a similar philosophy: curiously observing and playing around with whatever trends life throws at us, but never forgetting the value of timelessness.
Going Wild For Jihad Jerry
Monday, July 12th, 2021I made a spur-of-the-moment post a few weeks ago upon the release of DEVO bassist Jerry Casale‘s new single, “I’m Gonna Pay U Back.” The song’s music video came out on the 8th, and upon watching it, I think I got a taste of the “positive brainwashing” I’ve been longing for recently. For the rest of that day, I was as excitable and positively charged as ever, coinciding with a period of creative stimulation in my own regard. Three days later, the wave of excitement, relief, and emotion that drenched my mind has (for the most part) subsided, allowing me to write about the matter at hand with more precision.
The music video coincides with the widespread reissue of Jerry’s 2006 solo album as the venerable “Jihad Jerry,” who wears turbans that match his suit coats and declares that “[his] is not a holy war.” The album itself supplies hard-hitting blues rock injected with an indie-electro twist, and Jerry is flanked by two soulful female backup singers to help him spit his de-evolutionary bars. Three DEVO rarities and a Yardbirds song receive updates for the twenty-first century.
Me discovering the album due to my exploration of the DEVO discography was cathartic. Jerry’s declaration of a “war against stupidity” instead of one against drugs or any specific religion was a refreshing statement for an angry, skeptical girl in a prejudiced, complacent world to hear. The project was satirically bent and just plain baffling at times, just like DEVO’s tactics of confusion and absurdity that made their medicinal messaging go down so tightly. It was bold and funny and refreshingly weird, and it spoke to me unlike much else had. (I touched on this here, too.)
With CD copies being scarce, I always hoped it would receive the reissue it deserved someday, though I did not entirely expect that to happen. I figured it would be too easy for a naive public to decontextualize Jerry’s tomfoolery and try to rip him a new hole for his alter ego, and part of me wondered if the project would get buried in the sands of time in the name of “playing it safe.” Cue the album getting reissued after all, with Jihad placed front and center, burning with passion and pride in woodblock effigy, on the album cover. Go figure.
It’s the perfect time to reissue it, too: nostalgia holds a fifteen year cycle, and fashion magazines seem to be plugging “Y2K” trends as the hottest thing a lot recently, though the low rise jeans and flip phones they promote seem more “mid-ohs excess” than “late 1990s techno fear.” Even I’m not completely immune: I ordered a brand new iPod for my birthday, as I still haven’t jumped the shark from MP3 collecting to streaming. (And now I can listen to remastered Jihad Jerry on it.) It seems like everyone is looking back on that dark and trashy time, trying to find refuge from an increasingly dire present. But is mindless indulgence and glamorization the best way to deal with thousands of faceless humans dying on the other side of the planet? Jihad Jerry asked this question back then, and now he asks it again.
In his new music video, Jerry confronts his alter ego in acknowledgement of his past and the mutinous multitudes he contains. It’s a daring example of self-expression, and Jerry is still bold and unapologetic in his seventies, despite various societal aggressions that the role of the elderly is to gripe about the youth from their high rocking chairs. (Not that he doesn’t look a good twenty years younger than he actually is without the video’s sci-fi Prisma filter.) He remains a spirited misfit and provocateur just as he was back in the day. But times have changed since then, and the future is even more uncertain than it was fifteen years ago. That also explains his urgency, his willingness to be so forward. Best to let yourself be heard while you still have the ability to speak.
Tags:DEVO, influences, media commentary, music, nostalgia, personal experiences, reviews, the good fight, the past, things I enjoy
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