The "Loop" and
How it Affects You

I don’t know when it happened, but at one point, I started coming to the realization that I had found myself out of the “loop.” “The Loop”, as I put it, (and falling out of said loop) is what happens when most people reach a certain age and what is hip just becomes silly or confusing to them. No one ever thinks it will happen to them, of course; when you’re younger, you think you’ll be frozen in place always seeking out what’s new, what’s current, what’s hip. But it inevitably happens and you can accept it or begin to buy clothes and listen to music that make you look silly.

So I was prepared for being out of the loop; when I watched a band on TV with a high voiced, whiny male singer detailing his torment over pop punk, I would say to no one in particular, “Fucking christ man, these kids suuuuuck,” and then think about how much better it was back in the day. I would end up trashing magazines like SPIN because I stopped caring about why I didn’t recognize the people on the cover. I leaped into not giving a shit and it felt good.

But then I was in a room with some long-unseen relatives who were young enough to be in the “loop” and we were watching MTV and FUSE. The two kids, aged 15 and 17, were dressed in the standard rebellious uniforms watched video after video of ring tone rappers, styled-up white kids screaming over guitars and pop kiddies and buried all of 'em. The only videos they did like, oddly enough, were Guns N Roses and NWA of all things. So, after watching them trash every new band for over an hour, I asked them why they liked the two acts who haven’t even made a new album in their lifetime.

“Guns and NWA were real, man,” the two kids said. “You could tell that they didn’t give a shit and just played their music.” The sentiment there is interesting, both in how educated they are about music that came before them, but also in the fact that every new band they trashed got the label “poseur” from them. I went home a bit later and re-thought my status of being outside loops.

What if it’s more than getting older and not paying as much attention anymore? What if the “cool” actually did die and maybe the kids were right after all when they called out the weaknesses of the new school? I’m not going to fully support this by saying that I am still really into it; don’t think I got some sort of self-absorbed epiphany here. But, there is a theory in all of this and it is simple: the two groups the kids mentioned were both very organic in their honesty and their music. So, if this is the case, is there no real chance for anything honestly creative to survive these days?

Options are great, but what I tend to go back to is the fact that sometimes when the options and the field are so wide open, everything gets buried and nothing can rise above the middle. Record companies, movie and television studios and businesses in general are down all over and it seems that they’re spinning their heads over trying to figure out what the average young person likes. Thousands upon thousands are spent trying to figure out the hearts and minds of youth; the conclusion is the youth don’t trust or don’t care about anything else than exactly what they like. And EVERYONE likes something completely different from the next. Everyone, at least in the eyes of mainstream culture, went “out of the loop,” because there’s no need any more to get served up what the big companies are selling, because we’ve been given the freedom to get it ourselves.

And what does this say? Well, I’m thinking that it’s great in the short term and decrepit in the long term. Because the hype mongers can’t get a read on us, things come and go with rapid delivery. A band gets popular and comes out of nowhere due to My Space or i-Tunes. The record label signs them and rushes to overexpose something that people only had a passing fancy on in the first place. Juno was a mediocre movie at best, but everyone who wrote a review latched onto it because it felt natural. And, even though it got all the hype, the backlash started up on it five seconds afterwards because no one wants someone to go insane over something that you casually like.

What needs to happen is a re-tooling of how entertainment is promoted. Entertainment has a short life span now and it is because when you’re so overloaded with content, you always want to check out what else is out there; even when you like what is already in front of you. This is okay on the surface, but you need to discern the wheat from the chaff and, when there are no limits, it all comes up to the amount of annoyance you get with the hype surrounding it. And I’m not sure if there’s any real answer as to how this can be fixed, but I know I can take comfort in the fact that even if I am out of the loop, it appears that another loop is rushing down the line soon.