It’s been a while. I, along with some associates at the magazine, were out with a thing that’s going around that resembles the flu. Quickly catch up by reading 3 hybrids by Janelle Cordero, “Songs without Words” by Melissa Wiley, “Scenes from a Marriage” by Adrienne Marie Barrios, and “Mimicking” by Alicia Byrne Keane. We also have a cartoon series from poet/novelist Alan Michael Parker.
Dear Identity Theory Readers,
I’ve been struggling to string together words from a place of energy while getting over a month of exhausting illness. Today I feel like writing about rock stars and podcast bros. Read on if you’d like. I promise you nothing of quality in these vaguely connected anecdotes.
I Saw Her Naked Before We Met
Ten years ago, I was living in Asheville and needed a place to move quickly. A friend found a cool place but wasn’t allowed to take it because of her cats. So I went to check out the house.
“Have we met before?” asked the woman who opened the door when I arrived to look at it. She seemed certain we had.
“No,” I replied confidently.
Technically, I was correct. But it turned out I had seen her naked many years before. She had been an uncredited extra in the 1992 Oliver Stone film The Doors, dancing fully un-clothed in a scene at Haight-Ashbury. I learned this after I moved in.
The Doors was one of Stone’s better movies—it’s hard to screw up a film that features Kyle MacLachlan and Val Kilmer.
There’s that part where the two are sitting on the beach in L.A., talking about forming the band.
“Let’s make the myths,” MacLachlan’s character says.
I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night
In the mid-late ‘80s, I had an older stepbrother who was in high school. He exuded an aura of coolness but was not the most efficient or ambitious guy. He was super into ‘80s rock and lined the walls in his bedroom with full-page photos from Hit Parader magazine. His favorite band was KISS, to the point where I became well familiar with the obscure solo albums of the band members through cassette tapes. (AMA about Ace Frehley.)
My stepbrother would often paint his face like the band members.
He bought an electric guitar and spent countless hours learning it.
The rock stars were the makers of his myths.
Das Backstreet Boys
In 1996, after graduating high school, I went to Germany and saw in the wild a poster for an embarrassing-looking boy band called Backstreet Boys. I took a photo (with real film!) of the poster because it was so goofy.
My family joked about how dumb this band that seemingly couldn’t make it in America looked. We called them “the factory boys” as if they were produced in a plant.
When they caught on in America, I felt bewildered that this would be the new big influence on American youth culture. This new breed of boy bands became hyperlocal, too, when NSYNC formed, featuring Joey Fatone, a kid who a few years prior had been one grade above me at my high school in Orlando.
In the early 2000s, I had a friend in Orlando who was a singer/actor who wanted to be just like Joey. He signed with Lou Pearlman, who repped a lot of those kids and promised them the dream of becoming cultural myth makers.
Lou Pearlman died in prison.
You haven’t heard any of my friend’s music.
You’ve Heard of E-Commerce, Bro?
A few years go in Las Vegas, someone invited a kid to stay at our place while he was visiting town. The place was a half mile from a grocery store—one might say walkable, and indeed that’s how I got there, I walked—but this early-20s kid (who was in good enough shape to where he devoted time to posting shirtless selfies on IG) wasn’t up for walking and wanted me to drive him. So I did.
On the drive, he told me he was into e-commerce. “Oh, cool,” I told him.
“You’ve heard of e-commerce, bro?” he replied.
(He ended 100% of his sentences with “bro.”)
I confirmed that I was, in fact, familiar with the obscure concept of online sales.
“I am just getting into it, but I don’t like dealing with the taxes,” he explained.
A few days later, he launched an “entrepreneurial mindset” podcast from a quite intrusive setup on our dining room table.
He left oily dishes everywhere because, as a devotee of bro podcasts, he was super into the keto craze and not super into dealing with the tax of cleaning up an entire bottle’s worth of olive oil from a pan.
It was clear he was a kid trying to find his way in the world, as we all have been, and it was also clear he had grown up in an era of boy bands and Tim Ferriss podcasts. His mythmakers weren’t rock stars, they were “entrepreneurial gurus” whose main product was the dream of getting rich but who mostly encouraged an entire generation of entrepreneurs to become knockoff self-help influencers.
I don’t have anything personal against these podcast bros—the 4-hour workweek guy has some good interviewees sometimes. I do find it funny that they use testimonials to an absurd degree when promoting things. Tim Ferriss, for example, seems to always say “I use this every day” when pushing products, and as best I’ve determined, his typical day is so full of the self-help tricks he’s advocating, from meditation to acroyoga to fancy workouts to planning meals with optimal carb-to-fat ratios to testing esoteric biometrics, he probably only has a few spare hours to do actual work.
So the 4-hour thing makes sense.
And then what?
I guess what’s always missing for me when I listen to these podcast bros is, “And then what?” Like, yes, my VO2 Max is on point and I’ve hyper-optimized my mindset and I’m super rich…so what now?
(Editor’s note: none of those statements are actually true for me, especially the one about being super rich.)
With the rock star idols, the and-then-what part was pretty clear: death. Sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, etc., that whole era was self-destructive, embracing the ultimate reality of death to the point where it brought on the early demises of Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison, Cobain, and so many others.
These new podcast bro idols seem to ignore death and self-destruction completely except when they’re pushing stoicism as a mental trick for getting rich.
I may be exaggerating. I can’t speak in depth about that bro on Spotify who interviews the COVID deniers because I’ve never listened to his show, but from what I’ve read, he’s brought on guests who deny that COVID actually kills people and simultaneously promotes miracle cures for it. (It doesn’t kill people, but Ivermectin will save you from not being killed by it!)
This the podcast bro ethos in a nutshell: deny the reality of suffering and death, except when promoting supplements to turn you into an ubermensch.
And then what?
Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World
Instead of having a generation of people who grew up sitting in bed all day listening to L.A. Woman on vinyl, we have a generation of people skipping through influencer podcasts and all genres of music on Spotify at breakneck pace on their smartphones.
Is one better than the other? What are the consequences of this change?
I don’t know.
The Gen-X-and-earlier set didn’t grow up with on-demand, unlimited access to targeted workout videos and diets. We had, you know, Richard Simmons on VHS, and maybe a few cookbooks or magazines or whatever.
We know how to be quiet and to be alone with the prospect of death, and we know how to take in music without getting too distracted.
Which is cool. But it probably doesn’t make up for what we didn’t have.
It’s a huge advantage to grow up with the information kids have today, assuming they can use it right. The podcast bros have the opportunity to make the myths that can help people become great at whatever pursuit they choose. But many of them are too concerned with the hows and not the whys, the dollars and not the responsibilities.
So much influence, so much potential, is going to waste.
I don’t know where the balance is. Apparently, Neil Young couldn’t find it, either.
He told Spotify they could have the rock star or the podcast bro, not both, and he pulled out access to his music.
Then Spotify lost billions of the dollars, and suddenly they found a tiny shred of the responsibilities—just enough, you know. Just the optimal, minimal amount, as the podcasters would advise.
Anyway, I’m worried about this generation of people growing up on podcasts and chasing 4-hour-workweeks.
They’ll be the ones with access to all our data. They’ll be the ones in charge of the bots. People under the influence of this dream are already creating predatorial bots and sicking robo-lawyers onto people all over the internet to make maximum profit on minimal work.
They’re going to keep pushing to find new exploits in the system to live out the myths promoted to them by the entrepreneurial mindset podcasts.
And then what?
Welcome to (the new) Moe’s!
Last summer, we road-tripped through Tennessee and saw a Moe’s off a highway exit.
Moe’s is a fast-casual burrito chain in the southeast U.S. themed after dead rock stars. They have pictures of dead rock stars on the walls and play music from them in the restaurant. I hadn’t seen one in ages. I was excited to revisit one.
When we entered, I noticed immediately how times had changed: the rock stars had been stripped from the walls. The dead-rock-star music was no longer playing.
Maybe there was a legal reason for this new look. Or maybe the owner had been listening to podcasts about how to optimize for more profit. Either way, Moe’s killed the dead rock stars. And the new experience was terrible.
It appeared the people in charge forgot to ask, “Okay, we kill the rock star theme…and then what?”
You Have to Throw Up
Shifting gears to a different theme and a better restaurant.
Several years ago, I got sick to my stomach at an inconvenient time.
Alan Michael Parker, a writer whom I had recently interviewed for Identity Theory, was in town, and we had reservations for Lotus of Siam, a world-famous Thai restaurant in Vegas.
“I don’t think we can make this dinner,” I told my partner as I writhed in agony on the couch.
“You’re going to have to throw up,” she told me.
I hate throwing up. But I did it anyway. It was awful, but I felt much better. I made it to Lotus and managed to drink the broth of one of their fine soups. It was glorious.
I think about this anecdote regularly when I know I’m going to have to experience something bad to experience something good.
Sometimes you have to force yourself to throw up.
Late last year, I was wondering what Alan Michael Parker had been up to during the pandemic, and he checked in to tell me that he was on sabbatical from his teaching job and was judging the National Book Award for fiction. He mentioned that he was taking a break from writing fiction and poetry and was dabbling in cartoons.
So I decided to have him write about this journey and post some cartoons to Identity Theory.
Here’s an extended clip from his essay, “Why I Cartoon.”
Why do I cartoon? In part, because what you've just read is how my imagination works—and as an artist, I've been pillaging every sad, metaphorical fridge for a way to honor my imagination. But I'm also interested in how your mind works, that little fridge: do you see color first, and then process the picture? Do you read the caption on the top and tell yourself a story that the image revises? Does your gaze move counterclockwise, taught by Time? What about your laughter—are you someone who guffaws, or maybe you're a titterer? Maybe you snort thrice when you can’t help it? Which cartoon style might serve your way of laughing? What color combos are funny? And when should color not be comedic? We've got seven seconds, before you close the fridge door: how are we going to spend together this tiny life?
And yes, life feels tiny to me, now that I'm here. Because in 2016, the Politics of Rage tested my values, and then COVID-19 trivialized my self-worth. And that's when I discovered a boatload of truisms, and why they're true. Futility isn't creative. Inertia actually means not moving. Loss means less. And chutes and ladders are no fun when circumstance only gives you chutes. So when the pandemic began, I stopped writing my novel... and then I stopped writing poems, my go-to for decades.
But my need to make something wouldn't go away. And so I started playing with images. And then I began to work in various pre-existing forms for almost a year—filling in irreverent Bingo cards and fictional subway maps and satirical infographics—all the while looking for new ways to make meaning. I had help, a terrific assistant (s/o Adelle Patten!) and dear family (s/o Daniel Lynds! s/o Eli Parker! s/o Felicia van Bork!). As my assistant, Adelle would do all of the digital stuff I couldn't, and her ideas were always great. But when Adelle's handwriting didn't “sound” like I “heard” the letters, I was stuck again. Because that was quite a shock—the drawings were “in a voice”? I guess I had to do it all myself.
You can follow his quest through the cartoon world in our blog section Ampydoo Cartoons over the next few months.
And Now For the Exciting Conclusion (Actually Postponement)
I have a lot of wonderful things to say about the works of Adrienne Marie Barrios, Alicia Byrne Keane, Melissa Wiley, and Janelle Cordero, who have recently found homes on our site. I’m extremely proud to have published them. But, reader, I am out of steam, and you likely are, too. So I’m going to save my thoughts on those pieces for the next newsletter, which should go out later this week.
I just felt like checking in and dumping the thoughts of the morning into your virtual inbox, breaking back into the writing of newsletters in the new year.
One final note
We are looking for one more fiction editor. And we are looking to fill our stable of book review editors. More info on those openings here.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading.
Love always (even after you unsubscribe),
Matt Borondy
Editor-in-Chief
Identity Theory