The NYT Op-Ed I Just Took a Kill Fee For
cintra.substack.comI had to look up what a kill fee is.
From https://www.liveabout.com/what-is-a-kill-fee-1360477 :
> A kill fee is a payment on a magazine or newspaper article that a publisher makes to a freelance writer when their assigned article is "killed," or canceled.
> As a Gen Xer, I cannot be tortured enough to care about these bland, apolitical, self-commercialized, professional personalities and, as far as I can tell, neither can most of my peers. When my crowd was coming of age, we called this sort of thing “selling out.
> We identified with Naomi Klein, who back in 1999 wrote No Logo, the book with which you waged an intellectual war against identifying with any kind of branding. Branding (especially yourself, God forbid) was anathema to Ms. Klein and to us, too.
Well, the '90s were a totally different time. It was infinitely easier to get a well-paying job with reasonable working conditions, but the economy is massively more unequal and feels way more all-or-nothing now. Basically (and I'm exaggerating for effect) you either sell out or you eke out some kind of meager existence, and who wouldn't seriously think about selling out in that kind of situation?
As someone who wasnt that young in the 90’s, i can assure you that young people then complained about the same stuff that the young people complain about today.
Now isnt a particularly unique or special time.
The current employment rate in the US is 60% - but between ~1985 and ~2008 it was never below that level, and at times was as high as 64% [1].
At the same time, although the US was party to some international scuffles, prior to 2001 was a time of relative peace. And the full scale of the climate crisis was not yet clear.
So I can see how someone born in ~1975, who didn't really follow the state of the economy until ~1985 might recall the 1990s as a time of peace and prosperity.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate
For labor force participation, you'd need to look at demographics. Note that the rate now is higher than the 1960's which was <60%? That's right when baby boomers entered the work force! And 2010 is around when they'd retire. Not a coincidence.
Prior to 2001 we had the Gulf War, Panama in '89, Somali in '93, Bosnia in '95. Compared to then, it's been pretty peaceful since 9/11 and the Iraq War? Especially compared to the Cold War?
Don't get me wrong, the 70's sucked, and the 80's and 90's were better.
But my point is - the kids back in the 90's complained about wars, the economy, the job market, education, etc. All the same stuff.
> Prior to 2001 we had the Gulf War, Panama in '89, Somali in '93, Bosnia in '95. Compared to then, it's been pretty peaceful since 9/11 and the Iraq War? Especially compared to the Cold War?
Cold war was largely over by the 1990s, and the wars of the 1990s were generally short, UN-lead, and either small-scale or successful. The US sent 441 troops to Somalia for 2 months in 1993 - small beans compared to the 8 years and peak of 500,000 troops in the second Iraq war.
US soliders’ corpses were dragged through the streets of Somalia.
The US bombed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia.
At the time these were not viewed as minor interventions.
But regardless, compare to today - the US doesn't have troops in active war zones anywhere?
> But regardless, compare to today - the US doesn't have troops in active war zones anywhere?
OK, let me state my argument a bit differently.
Imagine the state of the world follows a sine pattern with a 20 year period. On average over the long term, the mean is zero - but there are some 10 year windows of constant ascent, and some of constant descent.
But I think for an American who started paying attention to the state of the world just as the cold war ended, the period from then through to 9/11 was the sine wave rising. There weren't no wars, America couldn't possibly go a whole decade without at least one or two
The pandemic was, of course, a downslope on the sine wave. The people young enough not to remember the pandemic won't be writing NYT Op-eds until 2070 or so. Maybe we're about to see 10 years of relative prosperity - you never know!
I agree, it is a totally different time.
And, maybe this is a good time to ask why that is. It's been enabled by a whole generation of people who just can't throw themselves under the bus of corporate domainance fast enough.
Just keep selling out. You think housing is unaffordable now? You think work is inequitable now? Just throw your entire life gushingly at Goggle and Apple and TwerkTik for another decade or two. The fucking hasn't even started yet. Your lives are gonna be ruined.
It's gonna be the great depression of the 1930s all over again, except with the population so stupid and distracted they'll vote for the fucking Cheeto, or some other biullionaire criminal, because they're "trending".
Of course the aternative, putting down the god damn phone and looking up at the real world, you know, the one outside your little brain, is totally off the table.
The modern first world generations can't even propogate the species without an acct at AT&T. Corporations have insinuated themselves all the way into individual's sex lives.
I never though I would have read an article by a Gen-Xer with this much insight... But by the time the Gen-Z is that old, it's gonna be WAY TOO LATE...
‘91, the economy was not so hot.
I'd go further and say that all online identity politics is about branding and buying an identity to be shown to others and yourself online.
It's brand loyalty and consumer capitalism in another new form.
old man shouts at cloud
Really old man it seems. He says “those of us who grew up in an age before the absurd legal fiction of Corporate Personhood” which puts him at well over 180 years old in the US.
Yeah, that part really threw me. It really made it seem the author had no idea what the concept of corporate personhood meant.
*she
Ok, that made me laugh. Well done.
Yeah, if I were NYTimes, I would pay a kill fee for that op-ed too :). Doesn't matter if there's valid source ideas, its writing is so poor and voice so immature.
I'm in my early 40s myself, so a gen X-er as they define it, but I'd say it's not only "old man shouts at clouds" thing, as I've stumbled upon lots of people whom I supposed were younger than me (and I suppose part of the gen Z age-cohort) and who were against this entire consoome mindset. I'd say it's the millennials who were the most affected by it (one of the many similarities between the millennial and the boomer age-cohort).
One kind of intriguing thing when it comes to the near obsessive degree at which "the younger generation" (it's really mostly just a really loud subsection) is linking "buying merchandise" to "having a personality/showing you are a good person" is that they've basically managed to start calling for a recreation of the Hays Code.
For anyone who didn't know, the Hays Code is the reason why so many old Hollywood movies had these overly stiff, Dudley Do-Good vision of the world. It was a moral code that was written to be as inoffensive as possible to the lowest common denominator. You couldn't depict something morally wrong without there being some kind of punishment for the wrongdoer, that sorta thing. Sounds not bad on paper, until you remember that this was written in 1920 and sensibilities of the time meant that things like gay people would have to be punished for being gay, or that you couldn't put a black person in the same sort of starring role a white person would get, because that could upset people who'd never seen a black dude before. It got scrapped in the 1960s (due to the European movie scene having no such restrictions and they wound up basically crushing Hollywoods output for 6 years straight) but was softly derided by movie makers in the decade before that.
Up until very recently, an informal version of the Hays Code still existed for syndicated childrens entertainment (if you ever wondered why villains in 90s saturday morning cartoons often ended up being more interesting than the heroes this is why; writers had less limitations writing them compared to the heroes who had to always be morally righteous and upstanding as long as they did a token punishment for the bad behavior at the end. Skeletor and He-Man are probably the archetypical example of that), but that kinda just fizzled out around the turn of the 2000s.
The problem with the modern situation comes in when you grapple with the fact that both people and stories are these complex things with lots of different emotions and that nobody is going to be a perfect human. Yet this younger generation wants to have this "perfect" vision in their media because they paid for it. They've been taught "you financially support something you morally agree with", and if something as a result does something they disagree with, it's easier to demand the work to be changed (or vilified) rather than think critically about why they're upset and think about what the author wants them to think about such things.
It's how you get things like "villainous character does morally reprehensible thing, clearly the author must support doing this morally reprehensible thing" being brought up as arguments.
I don't think it's something to be too concerned about (teenagers believe so much stupid shit, reality will flush most of it out with time), but it's definitely concerning to see this stuff morph into a second call for the Hays Code.
As GenX myself, this resonates. How the generation directly after us embraces the literal opposite of our core values is an astonishing example of human nature.
What this essay severely lacks is the recognition that directly between GexX coming of age and these influencers is the dawn of hip hop and the recognition within hip hop that "refusing to sell out" is a suckers game and "getting paid" is everything. Hip hop fully embraces that perspective, and our influencer generation had the dawning of mainstream hip hop during their childhoods just as that message was omnipresent in hip hop.
You don't understand hip-hop nor its history.
Your comment comes across as rude (to me at least), since you don't explain why OP doesn't understand it, or what they miss about hip-hop or its history.
While nobody in hiphop was ever so committed to the truth that somebody rapping about dealing drugs could be convicted on the basis of their lyrics, there's a long history of rappers policing each other's authenticity in terms of things like claiming to be a gang member when they weren't; and authenticity to the art form, in terms of not moderating lyrics in search of radio airplay and commercial appeal.
Of course, these matters are complicated because there are other dynamics at work too. There are some fairly nuanced distinctions - a lot of gangster rappers didn't see Will Smith's family-friendly rap as selling out because he'd never claimed to be a gangster. Among rappers a less well known performer can gain a lot of publicity from starting a feud with someone well known, so some of the criticism has mixed motives (accusing the successful of selling out is a classic choice). And if you believe all financial success is inherently inauthentic, hiphop's bragging and bling celebrating financial success might seem like an embrace of inauthenticity - but I think most such performers would say they were poor and they're now rich and that's the reality they're authentically representing.
However, it's certainly not true to say that hiphop has wholeheartedly embraces selling out, or did so from the start.
Of course hip hop does not embrace selling out, it condemns the culture using "sell out" as a weapon against artists.
As Randall Kennedy writes in Sellout: ‘The Politics of Racial Betrayal‘, ‘When used in a racial context among African Americans, “sellout” is a disparaging term that refers to blacks who knowingly or with gross negligence act against the interest of blacks as a whole’ (2008: 5). For rap artists, commercial success or brand partnerships are not necessarily subject to accusations of selling out, as long as artists don’t use their newfound wealth to abandon the communities that nurtured them. https://www.thestateofthearts.co.uk/features/the-story-of-se...
Every statement made is incorrect or inaccurate.
The OP conflates the genesis of hip-hop with its commercialization. For example, the dawn of hip-hop predates the "influence industry" by 30-40 years.
No shit, I am describing the childhood roots that enabled the 180 degree value shift from the generation before them.
The commercialization of hip hop is what transformed hip hop from a sub-culture into a market and mainstream force. A large part of that was hip hop's lyrics condemning the "no sell out" culture.
Look into the commercial roots of hop hop. What I am saying is documented, with formal research. Serious.
https://www.thestateofthearts.co.uk/features/the-story-of-se...
Every time someone in my office mentions TikTok, my mental reaction is always “gag me with a f*cling spoon.”
careful -- that may become the new tiktok craze
"influencers are insincere and suck" is not a hot take. It's not even a lukewarm take.
And it's not even a new thing. Previous generations already said the same, but they used the term "celebrities". The term "influencers" is just a re-branding, but it's the same as always.
Such irony