Letting The Beetle Out.

About a month ago, I was eating dinner with my Dad, and I mentioned the music I had been listening to lately. I have this thing where I'll make a CD, either of one artist or a mix, and then listen to it over and over and over again. I'm one of those people who can do that without eventually hating the song.

I mentioned a few of the artists I had on this CD, and my Dad smirked.

"Earnest," he said. "Earnest, earnest, earnest."

He didn't make it sounds bad so much as...cute. As if these singers were children who are trying so hard to be real musicians, isn't that precious?

I get what he's saying--almost every song by these artists does have this earnest, urgent note to them. These songs have a message, this message is important, it is the most important message in the history of the world, we are the first people to sing about this message, and, by God, you will hear it and you will be moved. This attitude is great, until you've continued it for more than, say, one whole album, or three songs per album. Then it just feels...false. Not like the artist doesn't mean it--they do, don't you ever doubt it! But they mean it too much, to the point where it stops to mean anything to anyone else.

Ever since that smirk, there's been a beetle in the back of my mind, buzzing about earnest. After a few weeks of this, I've decided on something:

We need earnest.

I don't mean the global "we", the "we" of the whole world ("The citizens of all nations need to hear this so they can understand their mistakes!"). I mean my "we". We, the generation that straddles Generation X and Generation Z--those born in the 1980's but raised in the 1990's and 2000's.

I tend to think that we were raised in one of the most cynical decades in living memory. The business- and money-focused attitude of the 80's was still present, but the realization that this capitalist way of life could not be sustained was beginning to set in with all the tenderness of an elephant settling on an hollowed egg shell. Just listen to the music of the 1990's--Nirvana, Green Day, Pearl Jam, The Offspring. Their lyrics span from subtle cynicism to blatant bitterness. Our country experienced The Gulf War, the Oklahoma City bombing, Bill Clinton's scandal with Monica Lewinsky, and many other events that divided and scarred the country in numerous ways.

And that was just the 1990's. For me, ages 4 to 14.

Even from the very beginning, the 2000's have been a hard decade. They've been hard on everyone, but imagine coming of age in them. The past 9 years have brought upon three highly publicized and controversial elections, and a war that has divided the country in a way that we haven't approached since the Civil War. We experienced the attacks on September 11, which are to many of my generation what Pearl Harbor was to our grandparents, what JFK's assassination was to our parents. Our economy has crashed, and millions have gone from a safe, middle-class lifestyle to poverty, losing their jobs, their insurance, their homes, the lives they had become accustomed and attached to.

If any other teenagers and children had parents even vaguely similar to mine, they grew up listening to rants and rambles, yelling and crying. We grew up with hands being thrown in the air and eyes being rolled with disgust and hopelessness. We grew up hearing things like "What is this world coming to?" and "I can't believe this is happening," or even "What are we going to do?"

Every generation grows up with the combined hope and threat that they will be in charge someday. They will be the ones to take the reigns, clean up the mess, change the course of civilization, and so on and so forth. Growing up hearing that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, being told in the same breath that "this will all be yours someday"...that's quite a bundle to be handed.

So it any wonder that we've been drawn to music that has our voice, our worries, our hopes, our frustration? Songs like the all-star cover of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, American Idiot, The Lovers Are Losing, and Land of Confusion?. Songs with lyrics like "We're the new face of failure/Prettier and younger, by not any better of", and "Burning down the capitols/Wisest of the animals" and "People can no longer cover their eyes"?

Yes, the singers are earnest. Because we need earnest. We need hopeful. We need angry, we need dedicated, we need pissed off.

Every generation thinks it has it worse off than the one before, that it has better reason to be pissed off than the one before, that the previous ones will never understand what it is we're going through. To a degree, every generation is right.

Our grandparents were handed the Depression and World War II, bread lines and a military draft.
Our parents were handed Vietnam and its aftermath, Nixon and his lies.
We are handed the Iraq war, the aftermath of September 11, the bill for the environmental spending of the previous decades.

Every generation is given a country that is broken and needs to be made whole. And each time the country is handed down, like a quilt made by a forgotten ancestor, it is a little more threadbare, a little more stained, a little harder to patch up.

My generation currently has the ragged ends of yet another unwinnable war started by the previous controversial president, the worse economic recession in 20 years, an overburdened environment in danger of giving at any moment, state-by-state fights for basic human rights, and a political tug-of-war over our health insurance.

We need our own versions of Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Jackson Browne, The Clash, Bruce Springsteen--you want to tell me that they didn't want to move the world? That they didn't have a message that you are going to hear and by God learn from?

We need our songs filled with anger, frustration, worry, and hope. We need those voices articulating the feelings that we can not, made more poignant in ways that only music can accomplish. We need those emotions out where everyone can hear them.

We need earnest.