Continuing on our theme of musical absurdism, behold “Youngest Child” by Gabriel Sayer, a mashup of references that I’m fairly certain is crafted to troll us (in part because the artist is also a comedian). That dish-soap album art is our first tipoff. Then you start in on this rock beat that quickly gets swallowed by electronic riffing and a splash of bass — both human and instrumental — that’s too ebullient not to be up to something. What it’s up to, if you’re paying attention, is making digs about naïveté and birth order, which flows very specifically into a forthcoming album entitled, Beautiful Relaxing Music. Play and be played, know what I mean?
If Sayer isn’t confounding enough, I’m going to tag on a bonus track in Porches’ “Back3School,” a new single in which he actually sings the word “to” in place of the “3” and is in no way trolling us with the shorts-and-oxfords schtick.
Remember how college debt is a trap? (Same with the admissions industrial complex.) None of that matters to US News & World report, which leans on those rankings for survival and has therefore branched out into ranking public elementary and middle schools for a little extra cash. The collateral damage? Just a little status anxiety and class divide.
In order to dive beyond test scores and help free-time-endowed parents select the Best Institution For Their Offspring, the report ranks states and school districts “in the context of their states and demographics”— though they do “provide considerable weights for scores themselves, too, because we believe parents value environments where most children arrive prepared to learn.”
Sure seems like SOMEONE didn’t listen to Nice White Parents — or, for that matter, any news about Covid, as these rankings were based on data from 2018-19. Nonetheless, “we hope readers benefit from the sophistication of our analysis.”
Before you work on getting your kid into a good school, you’ll want to give them a good Zodiac sign (there’s only so much charisma you can impart if your kid’s already a Gemini). Now that the Snake People* are aging, this is what we get: a whole bunch of parents timing their pregnancies for astrological order. This seems like a fallible strategy in that children are not always born or conceived right when you plan for them to be, which maybe is a metaphor for the amount of control we have over our lives in the first place? Hence: astrology.
*Millennials
Speaking of our aging cohort, let’s hear it for the Buttegieg-type shoulder Millennials who refuse to identify with the generational label that’s been slapped on them. For starters, they can afford avocado toast and a mortgage, and more importantly, they don’t identify with the whole emotionally-needy-and-socially-engaged thing.
Finally, that generational slipperiness has been validated by the New Yorker’s hot article du jour: “It’s Time To Stop Talking About “Generations.” The argument: Not only are generational labels prescriptive (is every Boomer a blowhard?) but it turns out the generational hype was created— surprise, surprise— in order to sell people things. How can employers understand Gen Z? By buying “insights.” Illuminating. What if we’re all just humans with astrological signs?
