SO SICK OF PERMA-YOUTH by Rise Read

If I see or listen (under duress) to another Tinchy Stryder/Alex Turner something X, I will enter into music rage of the nth degree.  I am so sick of hearing the same song sung slightly differently to suit whatever market they are aiming at next.  I don’t care about style anymore as it’s all become so meaningless. The young may have talent, looks and energy but they don’t yet have character, fresh stories or experiences that make you sit up and listen.  Lily Allen is how boring but it’s not her fault, bless her. There’s only so much you can fit into twenty odd years.  Their shapes and voices have no resonance or substance, as amorphous as tadpoles squirming, squiggling, fighting to become real: the big, mighty, fly-gobbling, warty, ugly, substantial FROG.

So to masquerade as ‘experience’ you get the constant harping back to past decades.  Lest we forget: the retro video, references to Beatles and Stones and anything pre-1990, anything to escape the MTV conveyor belt, the High Street branding, packaging, reshaping, pick-and-mix what-am-I-today?: trendy, alternative, nu-rock, nu-goth, metal-head, retro-rock, Libertiney, mod-rock, pop, hip hop, r n b, garage, house/dance…the list goes on, like a catalogue of viruses forever mutating. As soon as immunity to one is achieved, a hundred more spores appear, covering the delicate rage of (lost) youth with its plastic heavy fungi. Lamb is dressing as mutton and mutton is still dressing as lamb.  I am so sick of mint sauce.

Oh yes, the style may be old but at least back then youth were allowed to tell their own story; they had a pain to scream beyond their generation.  Now a marketer tells the youth what the story is.  And they go along with it if it will give them fifteen minutes of fame, glory or just pure cool.   The sole purpose of the creation of the teenager back in the 1950 was to develop a new market after the total slump and recession of the war.  In other words, a teenager exists solely to be exploited for cash.

Which is bad enough but now things have gone beyond mental.  Because now, you too can stay young for as long as you like! Yes, with new-improved Friends United, Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, friendly fashion (so you can finally wear the clothes you could never afford ‘back then’ and no parents to scream ‘You’re-not-going-out-dressed-like-that!’), skin creams, plastic surgery, hair extensions, teeth whitening, ‘disposable’ incomes, careers, gap years you can take any time, satellite, computer games and any drug to ‘sort you out’, you too can remain a teenager forever! (Subject to status -married with children is a problem-  and terms and conditions apply: you must remain a consuming teenager, even if in debt).

I am so sick of being young! It seems the only way out is to grow old.  I am so desperate to be wise, to be a home-maker, to be a hippy, to learn what vegetables grow best in what season, to think J Lo is a cleaning fluid for skirting boards and not to be able to recognize anyone from Big Brother or ‘Skins’, to experience a new selfless heartache of parenting or just being bothered about anyone apart from myself.  I want to be able to hear music that moves me, that shares what I’m feeling instead of importing some angst-ridden drone of drug addiction, tormented sexual desires or misunderstanding about a phone call.  It all just sounds like the same cash register to me.  I want to hear a voice that rattles and aches with real pain and screams with real joy, not the puppy yelps of plastic youth.  But, above all, to be cured of this endemic me-ness.  We scorned the old for so long, sought the elixir of eternal youth sold to us and now we’re rotting, festering in this new ‘perma-youth’. 

Let’s hope Iggy Pop doesn’t get a face lift. Faces used to tell a story, show that you had lived; now they’re just a calling card for the plastic surgeon or the cosmetics industry. Our human condition is programmed to age.  It is a natural yearning for wisdom and experience and joy, which only comes through things you’ve lived through. But this is being over-ridden by the media’s message of ‘permanent newness’. This is not life, or even something like it. Deep down, however hard we try to deafen it, we know this. We were created to learn from our mistakes, we were created to grow, to live and then to die. But fear of death is no longer dealt with spiritually: it is dealt with by the growing array of sinister physical and pharmacological methods. The political engine churns us out, genetically modified ‘ideals’ of our distorted young fantasies.

And what is the point of memory? No wonder everybody wants to lose brain cells by drinking themselves stupid or getting wasted.  In this climate, memory has no function whatsoever.  If we remember, we lose the moment which is basically re-living what we did last week and the week before and we will quite happily keep on doing til we drop dead.

I have decided to learn the art of dusting as the first of many movements towards my goal and dream: to be real, to grow old (but not before I am wise – hey! I never said I wasn’t vain) and to show the grace others have shown to me. The worst case scenario would be to be foolish, selfish and wrinkled ten years’ from now.

I just hope my plastic prince will turn into a real frog when I kiss him.