Earnestness versus Cynicism: Fashion, then Politics
Today the earnest progressive lyrics of 10,000 Maniacs feel extremely dated, which may help us understand why "resistance" in 2025 has become so bogged down in aesthetic rather than political concerns
For all the Nineties-revivals and frequent cultural callbacks to REM and The Pixies in the 21st century, I rarely hear anyone talk about 10,000 Maniacs. They were one of the marquee “college rock” acts in the years before Nirvana broke, standing shoulder to shoulder with U2, INXS, and The Sundays. They appeared on SNL twice and did an MTV Unplugged. There was even a very brief moment when high-school seniors chose “These Are Days” as their graduation song.
But it's fair to say that 10,000 Maniacs have fallen out of the canon. Their music feels increasingly like relic: art that serves as a marker for a certain time period yet fails to resonate with contemporary audiences. This is unfortunate, because 10,000 Maniacs’ composition and production are superb, and singer Natalie Merchant’s voice is still powerful in its odd idiosyncrasies. The problem is their lyrics, which can be so unbelievably earnest about social issues as to be almost unlistenable.
Their breakthrough major label album In My Tribe opens with “What’s the Matter Here?” — a highly catchy jangle-pop song about child abuse. Their catalog also includes “Cherry Tree” about adult illiteracy, “Don’t Talk” about alcoholism, and the unwanted-pregnancy dirge “Eat for Two.” The hardest to stomach is “Please Forgive Us,” a cloying apology to Latin Americans for the CIA’s meddling. Even their greatest bop “Candy Everybody Wants” is a critique of demagoguery. They were so earnest that they covered Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train” and then so earnest they pulled the song from the album when Yusuf Islam made statements supporting the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
Certainly 10,000 Maniacs were a bit over-the-top, but they fit seamlessly in the general aesthetic of “alternative” culture. Progressivism was cool in the 1980s. Merchant worked at a health food store, and before joining the band, considered a career in special-needs education. She was the one who pushed REM’s Michael Stipe to lurch towards more political content. These were the Reagan-Bush years, and artists resisted by drawing attention to the social ills that conservatives didn’t care about. This encouraged musicians to embrace progressive causes very earnestly. Suzanne Vega had a child-abuse chart-topper with “Luka” (which The Lemonheads then covered). Almost every major alternative act contributed to a compilation to support Greenpeace.
Despite society still considering child abuse, adult illiteracy, and alcoholism to be bad things, the 10,000 Maniacs' songs now feel quite incongruent with the last three decades of pop music. In an age of “Turn Down for What” and “California Gurls [sic],” 10,000 Maniacs’ lyrics are definitely not “fun,” which has become the singular criteria for valuing culture. There is a deep discomfort with pop stars tackling soft "bleeding heart"-type liberal issues of broad social welfare, especially when presented in an educated, upper-middle class sensibility. Occupy Wall Street failed to attract any top-shelf celebrities who weren't already known as leftists. (Wait, wasn't Radiohead supposed to do a free show at Zuccotti Park? No, Malcolm Harris just made it up.) Capital accumulation is somehow the most transgressive act possible. "I just might be a Black Bill Gates in the making," proclaims Beyoncé in her political anthem "Formation."
As much as we believe our aesthetic preferences and ideological beliefs are adopted in good faith, both are conventional, and like all conventions, they inevitably morph over time in fashion-like patterns. Alternative culture in the 1980s centered around college campuses, and as it trickled down to grunge, the progressive politics combined with a blunter, more comprehensible cynicism (“I’m so ugly, that’s okay, ‘cause so are you.”) And in an aesthetic pushback against the 1980s, early Nineties music embraced irony, thus returning detachment to the center of coolness. They leaned out, not in.
But like with all fashions, success breeds lower-status imitation, and grunge's aggression and angst trickled down to manufactured pop stars like Alanis Morissette and gleeful non-sophisticates like Limp Bizkit. “Everything is fucked, everybody sucks,” sang Fred Durst, the world’s least Natalie Merchant-like person, and then Woodstock ‘99 erupted into thuggish violence. Meanwhile irony opened the door for an embrace of Swedish pop production with meaningless English lyrics. Debbie Gibson and New Kids on the Block were earnest pop stars; MTV blessed Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys with the wink of “aren’t they outrageously camp in singing such globlish nonsense!”
The Nineties' detached cynicism, however, still coded left-wing. A week after 9/11, conservatives called for the "end of irony" as part of cultural martial law. Time memoirist Roger Rosenblatt wrote, “For some 30 years — roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright — the good folks in charge of America’s intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously.”
This dramatic historical moment called for another shift in indie aesthetics, and it was too early for a return to 10,000 Maniacs-like earnestness. The wayward Canadians behind VICE magazine showed up in New York at the exact right time, and they proposed a new vibe for the new century: a maximalist nihilistic cynicism centering transgression on debauchery and self-harm. In the pages of VICE, no one could do too much PCP.
But as the pendulum remained on the extremes of cynicism, VICE’s editor Gavin McInnes tried something new. Instead of turning his cynicism against Bush and Cheney, he identified a new foe: college-educated liberals. The true oppressors, screamed McInnes, were all those “no means no” Lilith Fair types. In wanting to mock the professional upper middle class people who dared to believe that society could be slightly better, VICE made a vibe-alliance with anti-intellectual provincial white culture, as represented in Pabst Blue Ribbon and trucker hats. By 2003, his true politics were clear: McInnes was wearing Nazi rock band pins on his jacket and contributed an article to The American Conservative, where he bragged about spawning a “new breed of kid that isn’t afraid to embrace conservatism.”
The shift from earnest liberalism to cynical liberalism to nihilistic conservatism was, at its heart, aesthetic, and in this sense, these are all “arbitrary” conventional changes. But the resulting conventions benefited some groups more than others. (Edna Ullmann-Margalit calls these “norms of partiality”). VICE’s cynical anti-liberalism has had profound political implications. For many people, Obama's election further proved that McInnes-style anti-liberalism was the true “transgressive” ideology against “the man.” There should be no surprise that Gavin McInnes went on to found the Proud Boys. 4chan made a similar shift in these years: drifting from nihilistic anti-liberal trolling to anti-semitic Pepes that “memed Trump into the White House.”
Evgenia Kovda wrote a recent essay about her experiences living in Russia as a child, where aesthetic nihilism was a core symptom of social collapse: “This vibe was the only thing I knew: pervasive cynicism, apathy, and a mockery of anything that wasn’t just about making money. There was the widespread belief that anything that sounded like a ‘do gooder’ slogan had a hidden agenda behind it…that any politics that even vaguely tried to help people was a scam.”
There is no question that this aesthetic has now become core to American pop culture, which explains the irrelevancy of 10,000 Maniacs. So who benefits? Besides conservative politicians, the private equity firms, hedge funds, and crypto schemes are finding it a lot easier to strip society for parts when the entire value system of youth culture revolves around piling up cash by any means necessary. Pop stars are free to bend their entire artistic practice towards corporate needs when fans fantasize themselves about one day bagging corporate sponsorships.
The American Left is seemingly unified in the belief that Donald Trump is very bad for the United States and the world. The obvious solution would be to organize and resist him. But ugh, “the resistance” is so cringe. Here we see the total capitulation of politics to aesthetics: Political organization is decried as an outré act akin to wearing skinny jeans.
The majority of thinking people continue to find “fashion” beneath serious analysis, which is ridiculous because so much of human life is conventional. Ideologies come in and out as a byproduct of social dynamics. The most important thing to understand here is the directionality: This nihilistic aesthetic is not the result of a right-wing conspiracy. The fundamental mechanics of fashion elevated the nihilistic aesthetic and turned it right-wing.
But with ideologies and aesthetics, intervention is always possible. I don’t think that we’re going back anytime soon to the earnest progressivism of 10,000 Maniacs, but we need to remember that such an aesthetic mode was possible. Nihilism may feel good, man, but in 2025, the outcomes couldn't be clearer.