Generation Zen: "IYKYK"

First, my caveats:

(A) My caveats will be multiple and lettered, (B) I’ll be giving major “old man professor,” (C) I got an D in Bio 121 (and had to cheat my ass off on the final to achieve even that), (D) I won’t let that stop me from quoting a famous biologist shortly (I read about him in my horoscope), and (E) I’ll risk undermining my points by concluding with the very act of cringe my observations caution against.

Because my theses are these: (1) IYKYK, (2) if you insist on an explanation then you can’t possibly know, and (3) you might be tunneling in the dark, one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction of knowing.

Knowing comes first. Explanation is extra.

My problem statement is that much of what we think we’ve learned about music, curation, and marketing in the last twenty-ish years suddenly seems to work less well. And it’s difficult to pin down why.

Vibe’s off.

Meanwhile, something seems to be causing dots to connect sometimes, but that doesn’t seem to be marketing per se. What is it? Shrug emoji. Tastes shift all the time. Usually those changes are evolutionary. And evolution might be less like a linear ladder upward and more like Stephen Jay Gould’s “branched bush”: some branches grow strong, bear fruit, or produce green shoots. Some stop. Some wither and die eventually, but they flourished for a time. The bush grew.

Other times those changes are revolutionary. Eras end and others begin. Sometimes what emerges is “better” and represents a leap forward. Sometimes it feels retrograde in the moment and looks minor in retrospect. Some revolutions are dramatic and even violent. Some are quiet and even boring, and we only realize we’ve been in them after they’re deep in progress. What makes them revolutionary is not their size or seismic impact, but that they represent a break from what led up to them and grow in rejection of and opposition to the dominant hegemony. The evolutionary bush is not branching off again. We’re looking at a new bush.

Revolutions don’t require the self-consciousness of the revolutionaries. Rejection of conventions can begin as passive non-participation. Vibe’s off. Opposition to majoritarian hegemonies doesn’t require the composition of a list of grievances or the nailing of a manifesto to the church doorway. IYKYK. And when the incumbent politics or prevailing aesthetics are self-consciously built on legibility, scrutiny, and community—and enforced by centrality, majority, and access to the levers of power—it shouldn’t be surprising when the opposition prints as vague, inscrutable, and individualistic. I tend to assume it’s intentional and reactionary.

Power Meets Knowledge
Younger people drive tastes while their elder gatekeepers try to maintain control of the gates. That’s not original or unique to this present moment. In his book Hit Makers, Derek Thompson explained this dynamic one way: “For adults, especially those with power and money, the rules are what keep you safe. When you’re young, every rule is illegitimate until proven otherwise.” Older adults have cultural Power, and younger people have access to emerging cultural Knowledge. It’s not supposed to be fun for the former—turns out the youth-for-power tradeoff is tough on the ego—and it’s bound to be frustrating for the latter.

Pegging your cultural value to your youth isn’t a recipe for lifetime relevancy in the first place. So when your time in the spotlight ends, you’re bound to be defensive or in denial. And younger people in their moment should move with a sense of urgency. That’s true whether the turnover is evolutionary or revolutionary.

When it comes to current pop culture, Millennials no longer have the youth or the direct access to the production of Knowledge, but their numbers and seniority have enabled them to aggregate Power over the previous two decades. And what seems quietly revolutionary this time is that while Power naturally demands that Knowledge explain itself, this time Knowledge won’t do it. For reasons of its own.

Millennials tend to frame this insubordination as inability, while Gen Z presents it as intentionality. And because this shift seems non-linear—and, I believe, generational—the refusal of Gen Z to fill the knowledge gap (for reasons of its own) leads Millennials to define that gap via their own established epistemological framework, which in turn prints as condescension, misapprehension, or impertinence.

Back to my fifth caveat, I am accusing Gen Z of having constructed an epistemological framework. Too corny, I know. (Do young people even say “corny” anymore? The fact that I need to ask should be my answer.) But I’m positing that “IYKYK” is the defining tenet of an aesthetic that values apprehension over comprehension. “It’s giving...” is a construct that politically privileges experience over expression. And just because younger people won’t name causal effects or bother to make legible the underlying conditions, shrugging that the vibe’s off doesn’t mean the vibe’s not off.

Young people don’t need me to mansplain their aesthetics back to them, or for an old person to situate their aesthetic in the traditions of the Beats or Hume—especially if that old person basically got a B in every philosophy course he ever took. That’s not what I’m attempting here.

Kindly Dig It
But it feels pertinent to note that IYKYK as a construct sounds both familiar and kinda Zen. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—his Silent Generation-coded inquiry into capital-q Quality—Robert Pirsig paraphrases one friend’s objections to his line of inquiry: “Man, will you just please, kindly dig it ... and hold up on all those wonderful seven-dollar questions.” Digging an object is as valid a mode of experience as explaining it. To dig is transcendentally Hip, to explain is inherently Square. Leaving room for interpretation is Hip, systematizing relentlessly is Square. One is Jazz, the other is more like Classical.

Squareness moves to codify, explain, perform, and categorize identity; and it situates taste as emergent from that process. Hipness rejects this process on the basis that taste is “just” what one enjoys. Squareness insists on acceptance of its rubric as the price of admission to the conversation. Hipness opts out of the conversation as beside the point. Declaring the rules, the taxonomy, the community norms, the language for participation, and the correct display of enthusiasm—these are all Square rhetorical tactics to consolidate power and implicate audiences around a specific underlying value system (its own).

One legitimate benefit of this Square legibility becomes its endless scalability: individuals didn’t have to like the same things for taste to become commodified, for the explanation of taste to get industrialized—or for cohesive music curation and marketing machines to be enabled. A “monoculture” wasn’t necessary for mass success in Square terms because the means of marketing were consistent and repeatable, so long as the definition of success conformed to the stated rules.

Hipness meanwhile recognizes the value of a thing prior to the application of rules and independent from the launch of its marketing plan. Hip Quality precedes and transcends the Square rubric: a thing either has Quality or it doesn’t. Swerving the prosecutorial burden of defending it can print as a lazy dodge (“I know why it’s good, but I don’t wanna say”). But in this discourse Hipness deploys a valid epistemological counterstrategy to Square demands.

Hip taste can be cultivated; but reducing a good thing to its component parts or to situate it within an established framework is not necessary for experiencing or understanding it. The more you attempt to codify what Taylor Swift signifies or to circumscribe the correct politics around liking her music, the further you get from her aura and her music.

Taylor’s historic success largely was powered by Square scalability. Coincidentally, her music itself is objectively possessed of Quality—her songbook should be studied as a masterclass in the craft. Quality—and not marketability—explains why she’s one of my personal five or ten favorite artists of all-time.

But I often find myself reminded that mine might not be the right reason for liking her. Her easter eggs sail over my head. I don’t know the lore and rarely know which of her exes the songs are about. I’m here for the choons—generally clueless about celebrity dating and endlessly uncurious about artists’ personal lives. Maybe that’s problematic. I’m also the wrong gender, generation, and identity to be a Swiftie. I just happen to think her music is really, really good; and I came to that conclusion without all the other stuff. I work in music, have listened to maybe ten million hours of it in my lifetime, and could probably distill what makes Taylor Swift’s music so good. But I don’t feel like it. She doesn’t need me and no doubt would be less successful if more of her fandom looked like me. Her success tracks along both Square and Hip axes. But she’ll always first and foremost print as the off-the-charts standard of successful Square scalability.

Aging In
Some Millennial-aged artists with measurably strong current Gen Z appeal seem to have reached peak popularity by meeting younger fans where they are, inadvertently reaching scale while being first and foremost good over time. Phoebe Bridgers (born 1994), Charli xcx (1992), and Tyler, the Creator (1991)—to take three examples—are as uniquely difficult to stuff into genre boxes as they are reluctant to declare their intentions in terms of the Square taxonomy.

Aging up is mandatory for all of us, aging out is a decision. And these artists have “aged in,” jumped the Square lab, and gained traction with a new cohort of fans—whom they delighted by shifting shapes, pushing boundaries, and blending genres. They tapped into a Hip vibes-based shift in favor of iconoclastic, self-styled outsiders who’ve run long since out of fucks about anyone’s rules. Exciting, but harder to scale. And willful rule-breaking behavior is bound to confound many in a generation of gatekeepers who put tremendous rigor of thought into codifying the rules.

Doing It Wrong
So I’m generalizing. Let’s take that as read. Generational similarities and differences can’t cover every snowflake. But they’re helpful in giving context to the broader blanket of snow with which curation and marketing concern themselves. The current generational hegemony has been built upon legibility, identity, community, fandom—codified by the in-group as lore. Intentionally or not, the seeds of that legibility can take root as orthodoxy. A close cousin of community is conformity. Deviation gets interpreted as anti-social transgression—by members of an out-group—and enforcement sounds like “you’re doing it wrong.”

Hear that message often enough, you’re bound to internalize the notion. When your friends seem to be doing it wrong too, you may naturally wonder what’s the point of doing it right. Doing it your own way might start out feeling rebellious and fun. As a Gen Z colleague framed it, “Please let me do so in peace.” Stick with it long enough, you might find you’ve created a new hegemony: one that values experience over explanation, attendance over observation, and existence over categorization. Standing for something new—accidentally or on purpose—will read as rejection of the prior thing, of being pigeonholed, analyzed, and lumped into fandoms.

Plenty of non-Gen Z individuals have long preferred Phoebe, Charli, and Tyler to more popular Millennial stalwarts (e.g. Taylor, Katy, and Drake). So while this cultural inflection point happens to track along generational lines and to resemble a generational inflection point—a transitional period where the incumbent possessors of youth and cultural Knowledge find themselves suddenly and unwillingly forced to cede centerstage—perhaps the most useful line of demarcation isn’t chronological. It feels more epistemological (says the B student).

If you genuinely believe that taste must be made legible for it to be valid—and that anyone unable to signify their consumption on your terms might be doing it wrong—you are on one philosophical side of the cultural discourse. But if you believe that IYK, Y really do K—and that if you need to ask, you’re never going to understand—you’re on the other side.

As opposing approaches to aesthetics, one is inherently Square: rooted in the Western tradition of intellectualizing and defining rules around taste. The other is self-consciously Hip: situated in an equally longstanding school of thought that Quality occurs in the moment of perception and before intellectualization. One establishes and enforces orthodoxies. The other is kinda Zen in its willingness to sidestep both analysis and prescription.

One also happens to be easier for super smart machines to learn and scale, while the other is more intrinsically human and unpredictable (I’ll come back to this later). The former strikes me as typically Millennial, and the latter looks a lot like what I see from Gen Z.

Generation Zen. Kindly dig it.

Seven-Dollar Questions
So here I am, admittedly the absolute worst fucking kind of Gen X—and you know exactly which fucking kind that is. I don’t crave community, especially one that would have me as a member. And I believe that you personally have a fifty-fifty chance of having below-average taste in music, regardless of when you were born, and I will judge for myself. We had our chance to be twenty-two and forty-two and have been a constant source of disappointment to all concerned at every life stage. I’m almost always doing it wrong. When I like the right things, I’m sure it’s for the wrong reasons. I enjoy a lot of music you would classify as Pop, and it’s largely because the gigs tend to have shorter lines for beer and the men’s room. I love Geese and Addison Rae—which should validate suspicion of both as “industry plants”—and at the latter’s LA show, I was acutely aware that I profiled as somebody’s dad, a pervert, or a cop (and that the latter amounted to the least-cringe aspiration).

Nobody asked for my take on a discourse that might exist entirely in my head. But at the same time, as a lifelong practitioner of what’s now called “human curation,” I try to be endlessly curious about where music is going and to not judge what I find when I get there. When I know the music isn’t for me—and, let’s face it, that curve creeps steadily upward and leftward towards “always”—the best I can do is take it on its own terms and try to experience it through the eyes and ears of the humans it most directly serves. Maybe one person’s “cultural anthropologist” is another’s “culture vulture.” Or maybe I’m a vampire.

I believe that music will keep us young if we let it, that both clauses of that statement are equally important, and that sometimes “letting it” means not understanding or insisting on an explanation.

Bringing it all the way back to music curation and marketing, two characteristics typically used to explain Gen Z tastes have been “individuality” and “authenticity.” These can be simultaneously apt and inadequate. These individualists still create and gravitate en masse to “hits”—things still achieve virality—and some such phenomena are widely recognized as manufactured or bought. “Anti-marketing” is still marketing. And marketing still “works” no matter how sophisticated and self-conscious the subjects are about it working on them, or how resistant they are to deconstructing it for the benefit of corporate marketing teams.

The forces behind this shift feel more like (1) the aesthetic choice to value feeling and experiencing over interpreting and categorizing, and (2) the concurrent rhetorical decision to opt out of scrutiny and legibility. If we operate under the assumption that this is why the old ways don’t seem to be working—and stop ruining everything with our seven-dollar questions—Power might dig or at least learn something from Knowledge’s opposite epistemological approach.

For starters, we might learn how to successfully curate and market music again.

Nobody enjoys getting older, nor do we require a Square explanation why. As with evergreen resentment of “kids these days,” it might be human nature that serves some higher-level purpose on the branched bush of our evolution. Aging generations keep us from taking too many unnecessary risks, wearing our jeans too baggy, or having too much fun. And younger generations challenge ossified conventions and remind us that in the wild our comfort zone literally will kill us. It’s also natural that nobody enjoys being told they’re doing it wrong.

Millennials and Machines
Just as Gen Z resist explaining themselves to older generations, they’re also breaking out of their “algocages” and pushing back against AI. There are many valid reasons for doing both. In this context, the instincts strike me as interrelated—or the same instinct broadly deployed. Legibility, taxonomy, and scalability inadvertently make your aesthetic rubric easier for AI to learn and replicate—to “aura farm” (as the kids may or may not still say).

In this context, Gen Z’s embrace of vagueness and vibes looks like a potentially useful evolutionary hack engineered to confound Millennials and machines alike. The timing of the vibe shift serves a powerful purpose in the wider context of human history: as machines get better at reproducing whatever humans can make legible, humans will lean into the quirky and inscrutable aspects of human aesthetic tastes.

As a much older person heavily vested in the value of human curation—with a career spent asking and answering seven-dollar questions about what makes things hits—my current hypothesis is that while my generational ship sailed on being allowed to decide what gets to be cool, my experience and my reps will enable me to recognize what has Quality when I see it. I can try to cultivate Hipness and overcome the urge to explain everything (he said, after expending a few thousand words trying to explain everything), by reminding myself to shut up and kindly dig it. Maybe by becoming less Square, I will also make myself less like (and/or replaceable by) a robot.

Maybe I can even take myself off the hook for liking some of the right things for all the wrong reasons.