2022年11月23日发(作者：3分钟演讲稿)Why Does Pop Romanticize Dying Young?为什么流行音乐让英年早逝变得浪漫
Narcissism, the economy, and a fascination with gangster culture all play into the resurgence of "live fast, die young" themes in today's pop culture.
Leah Sottile 利娅 索蒂尔
Nov 1 2013, 9:30 AM ET Tweet 7
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Swedish duo Icona Pop, known for the single "I Love It" (Danny Moloshok/Reuters)
Bieber with his swag, Miley with her tongue, Skrillex’s stupid haircut ... There are tons of reasons to tune out modern pop music that don’t have a thing to do with the music itlf.
But if you do listen—really pay attention—you might find something in today’s pop that’s a lot more bothersome. There’s an apocalyptic, we’re-all-gonna-die-anyway theme that keeps popping up—a YOLO-style message to do whatever you want right now becau tomorrow you might be in a box.
Twenge’s team obrved a steady upswing of narcissistic themes and first-person singular pronouns—words like “I,” “me,” and “mine—in pop Pop’s song “I Love It” is an ode to crashing cars, throwing someone el’s stuff down the stairs and esntially doing whatever the hell they want, all the while proclaiming “I don't care, I love it." In “Die Young,” the always-prolific Ke$ha tells someone she just met to "make the most of the night like we're gonna die young." There’s Fun.'s "We Are Young," One Direction's "Live While We're Young," Rick Ross and Kanye West's "Live Fast, Die Young."
None of the people expect to actually drop dead tomorrow, I assume. But could this message be reflective of something bigger? And is the fact that songs like the resonate with so many young Americans kind of glitter-coated cry for help?
Dr. Jean Twenge, a psychologist and the author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Asrtive, Entitled—and More Mirable Than Ever Before, says that music, alongside TV shows, movies and books, is always a product of what’s going on in a culture.
“[It’s] a way of eing what our culture values,” she says. “I think cultural products are a really good way of capturing the zeitgeist, the spirit of the moment.”
Twenge has done some studies of her own on pop music. In a paper she co-authored, Twenge and her colleagues studied hit songs from 1980-2007 and found that pop lyrics have slowly started to be less communal, and more individualistic. There’s far less of that sweet “I Want To Hold Your Hand” vibe than there once was in pop music. That’s not to say it’s gone (remember “Call Me Maybe?”), but Twenge’s team obrved a steady upswing of narcissistic themes and first-person singular pronouns—words like “I,” “me,” and “mine—in pop music.
“Changes in popular music lyrics mirror increas in narcissism over the past 27 years, with musical lyrics becoming increasingly lf-focud over time,” they wrote.
“Eve
rything in the ’80s was ‘love, love, we’re together,’” Twenge says over the phone. “It was sappy and insipid, but it was about togetherness.”
This shift is reflective of her studies and book, which find that young Americans are increasingly extraverted and confident, albeit narcissistic. And so when pop music gets death-obsd, it is reflecting tho attitudes. “Narcissism is correlated with risk-taking,” Twenge says. “And we know that narcissism is higher in this generation than other ones.” So, she says, of cour music with “me” themes would appeal to them, and messages of taking risks becau you’re likely to be dead soon would resonate.
This isn’t to say the “I Want to Hold Your Hand” days of pop were dominated by church-going teetotalers unwilling to get a little crazy. Jim Morrison, who sung “Hello, I Love You,” was no stranger to the bottle. And even pop darlings such as Whitney Houston in the 1980s were struggling with pill addiction while they were singing of “we” and “you.”
This theme of living fast and dying young, something that has long fascinated rock and roll artists and fans, is arguably a byproduct of something bigger and more deeply-rooted in the psyche of pop , if drug-u statistics are a gauge of generational recklessness, then young people certainly are reckless. The Substance Abu and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has en a steady ri in illicit drug usage in people aged 18-20 over the past six years (particularly in Ecstasy u—a drug both Rihanna and Miley Cyrus reference in some of their most popular songs).
But John Covach, director of the Institute for Popular Music at the University of Rochester, says youth recklessness and a dramatization of death has always had a place in pop. He points to the “splatter platters” of the 1950s and ’60s (songs like “Leader of the Pack” and “Tell Laura I Love Her”) and The Who’s “My Generation.”
“If you dig deep enough, not only just in rock culture, but in post World War II youth culture, you can find this kind of attitude of live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corp,” he says. “That part of [pop music] is not new. The die-young, James Dean deal—that goes back to the ’50s.”
Covach says that in some ways, the Mod culture that The Who was writing about in “My Generation” had similar threads to today’s pop.
“[The Mods] took amphetamines and danced all night and were very concerned about their appearance and the way they were viewed by others. ‘My Generation’ was kind of the theme song of the Mod movement and what made them feel like they were distant from their parents’ generation,” he says.
Covach adds that the message in pop music pos a sort of chicken/egg question. Did the message come first, or did pop create it? “Music is not so much a cau as it is a symptom,” he says. “Music can tell you what’s going on under
the surface of a culture.”
While emingly trivial, pop is worth paying attention to, says Robert Fink, a professor of musicology at UCLA. But this isn’t the first time Top 40 stuff has gotten a little morbid. Fink points to the do-what-you-want-now attitude that Prince hinted at back in 1982 with his hit song “1999.” To refresh your memory on the chorus: “Yeah, they say two thousand zero zero party over/Oops out of time/So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999.”
But the key difference between “1999” and today’s apocalypti-pop is a reason for partying. In “1999,” Prince talks of Judgement Day, war everywhere. “That song was an interesting touchstone becau it basically says … ‘we could all die any day but before that happens I’m going to dance my life away,” Fink laughs. “The only possible solution to annihilation is to party.”
It’s an attitude that may have been reflective of that time. In the 1980s, America was caught up in the Cold War and pop culture reflected a fear of death by nuclear weapons (the 1983 TV movie The Day After, which focus on characters living in post-apocalyptic America, was initially viewed by 100 million people). Fink says that might be why we’re hearing this “party since we’re about to die” attitude in today’s pop songs. The economy has crashed, political lines are deep, the government shut down, there’s global warming, Syria, Iran, the Taliban.
“You might be able to make a link periodically between moments in the culture where there is more of an apocalyptic feeling, like it’s one of the things floating around the culture,” Fink says.
But he also says this theme of living fast and dying young, something that has long fascinated rock and roll artists and fans, is arguably a byproduct of something bigger and more deeply-rooted in the psyche of pop consumers.
In 1957, Norman Mailer penned his controversial essay “The White Negro”—a piece in which he discuss the fascination with jazz and swing music that so captivated young whites that they began to adopt black culture as their own.
“His argument is that there’s a way of being where you live in an existential way, that you could die at any moment,” Fink says. For blacks in the 1920s jazz scene, for example, that certainly was a reality, and Fink says that’s still something relevant for many African Americans today. Just being black pos a certain risk, regardless of your own personal choices (e: Trayvon Martin). “You’re basically living a dangerous life. You go through life and every encounter could end in violence.”
“There’s a n that [Mailer] links to jazz… he links that to the kinds of experiences when you have to throw down in the moment and be real,” Fink says. “There’s a kind of cultural matrix where the music of African Americans has a certain kind of code of [living] with death at the door. If you want to trivialize that you’re going to s
ay you’re going to party like it’s 1999.”
After years of extruding the African American experience through a pop music filter, saying to "live fast and die young" is to say you're , Fink says, “live fast, die young” isn’t embodied by the James Dean motorcycle rebel, but by the African American male—and not necessarily by choice. Hip-hop has been the focal point of popular music for the past 15 to 20 years: a genre where rappers like Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.—two young men who lived fast and died young—are en as patron saints. Legions of rappers embodying that same lifestyle have followed, and like Mailer’s white kids embodying the jazz life, white America has begun to idolize this gangster character, too.
“There’s this unusual moment where the history of rap was about parties. And then at a certain point it becomes about gangs and crime. And now it’s about parties again,” Fink says. “It’s all about being in the club and making it rain. The truth is the people in the club making it rain are in the position of being gangsters.” And, unlike the “Leader of the Pack” motorcycle rebel who died tragically, the gangster lives in a world dictated by random violence.
And so eventually, after years of extruding the African American experience through a pop music filter, saying to “live fast and die young” is to say you’re hard. You’re tough. You’re gangster. And you might as well live it up in the club right now becau, who knows, tomorrow you might get blown away.
And the most interesting part, Fink says, is that pop music and pop culture has been saturated with this attitude for so long now, that a song doesn’t even have to sound like hip-hop—the very thing it derives its inspiration from—to carry the same message.
“It’s a cultural position that is almost in the air that people breathe.”
如果你真的去听——确实用心的看——或许会发现如今的流行音乐中有着某种令人极为不安的东西。世界末日，我们终究难逃一死这样的主题不断跳出来——一种带有“生命只有一次（YOLO为you only live once的首字母缩写——译者注）”风格的思想，让人们及时行乐，因为没准明天就进了棺材。
我猜想，他们当中没有谁认为自己真的明天就会倒地死去。但是这种思想能否反映某个更大的问题？这样的歌曲让如此之多的美国年轻人产生共鸣，这一事实是否是某种包裹着精致外衣的呼救声？
心理学家 《我一代：为何如今的美国年轻人比以往任何时候都更自信 更有冲劲 更有权利——同时也更痛苦》一书的作者琼 特文格博士对流行音乐做了自己的一些研究。在与他人合写的一篇论文中，她和同事研究了1980~2007年期间的热门歌曲，发现流行歌曲的歌词慢慢开始少了些集体主义，多了些个人主义。
这种转变体现出她的研究结
果和著作，其中发现美国年轻人越来越外向和自信，不过也变得自恋。所以当流行音乐痴迷于死亡题材时，它就在体现这些态度。特文格说：“自恋和冒险有关。我们知道这代人比其他代的人更自恋。”所以，她说，“我”主题的音乐自然更投他们所好，因为你可能很快死去所以要去冒险的思想会引起共鸣。
但是罗斯切特大学流行音乐研究所所长约翰 科瓦奇说，年轻人的不计后果和戏剧式表现死亡向来在流行音乐中占有一席之地。
科瓦奇还说，流行音乐传达的这种思想提出了类似于鸡生蛋还是蛋生鸡的问题。是这种思想在先，还是流行音乐造就了这样的思想？他说：“音乐与其说是症状。音乐能告诉你文化表象下的事情。”
加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校的音乐学教授罗伯特 芬克说，流行音乐虽看似无关紧要，却值得关注。芬克指出，Prince（美国歌手——译者注）早在1982年就在其热门歌曲《1999》中暗示了及时行乐的态度。
这种态度也许反映了那个时代。20世纪80年代，美国陷入冷战，流行文化体现了对于核武器带来死亡的恐惧。芬克说，这也许就是为什么我们在如今的流行歌曲中听到“尽情欢乐吧，因为我们将要死去”这种态度。经济一落千丈，政治路线根深蒂固，政府关门大吉，还有全球变暖 叙利亚 伊朗和塔利班。
但是他也说，这种长期让摇滚艺术家和歌迷着迷的时光匆匆 英年早逝的主题或许是某种更大的 在流行音乐消费者心中更根深蒂固的东西的副产品。
1957年，诺曼 梅勒撰写了引发争议的《白种黑人》一文，在文中探讨了痴迷于爵士乐和摇摆乐的现象，这些音乐彻底俘获了年轻白人的心，他们开始把黑人文化接纳为自己的文化。
芬克说：“他的观点是，有一种活法是以存在主义方式生活，你随时可以死亡。”比如，对于20世纪20年代爵士乐领域的黑人来说，现实的确如此，芬克说，时至今日，这对于许多美国黑人来说仍意义重大。
因此最终，在多年来通过流行音乐滤器挤压出美国黑人的体验后，说“时光匆匆 英年早逝”就等于说你厉害。你强硬。你匪气十足。眼下你也许倒不如在俱乐部纵情狂欢，因为谁知道呢，明天你也许就一命呜呼了。（李凤芹译自美国《大西洋》月刊网站11月1日文章）
