The Triumph of Hipster Irony

Back in my day, there was a mini-craze among hipsters for semi-clueless musicians who couldn't hold a note but seemed compelled to perform music from the bottom of their hearts. There was the manic depression of Daniel Johnston and the schizophrenia of Wesley Willis. And now we have William Hung.

The current craze for the American Idol reject baffles me. What Hung has in common with Johnston and Willis is a a certain naivite about creating songs coupled with a compulsion to create them. They're all bad singers who don't seem to know it, and that's part of their charm.

It's as if they each embody the spirit of Allen Ginsberg: first thought, best thought. The more you edit and question your actions, the more you separate yourself from a primal experience. In this case, it's the simple joy of singing a song. There's an irony in liking something that's as wonderfully bad as Willis' "Rock 'n' Roll McDonalds" or Hung's redition of "She Bangs."

That irony is based on a performer's understanding being completely different from the audience's. Willis thought of himself as a rock god; hipsters thought of him as a crazy man singing weird songs. Hipsters' love of Johnston and Willis (leaving aside the individual merits of their songwriting) is based on envy of their spontaneity and freedom, but also an appreciation of the distance between their knowledge and the performers'.

Johnston and Willis struggled through mental illness and small independent labels to produce an incredible amount of work that was a kind of therapy, while Hung is an engineering student at a prestigious university who says it's his professional dream to make music. Hung isn't handing out cassette tapes in the streets of Texas like Johnston -- he's parlayed Fox television appearances into a global marketing and licensing extravaganza.

The Village Voice predictably calls Hung-mania hateful racism. There might be that element in it. But I don't think people who are stirred by Hung's jerky dancing think of it purely as something unlike themselves. When you watch the crowd, people will imitate his flailing limbs in a form of flattery. There may be a little bit of mockery, but mostly it's people enamored of someone who seems nice, believes in the dream, and doesn't care that he's grossly unqualified to be a pop star.

But Hung is a pop star now. People who might hate the streamlined characterlessness of the real American Idol can choose to put their love in a supposed reject of the system. Now there are more performances, more interviews, more articles, and more giddy assessments of how an anonymous no-talent can make it big by being genuine and letting his charisma shine through. The public taste for Hung is the triumph of hipster irony as co-opted by multinational corporations.

Anyways. I'm boring myself. You can probably catch me at the Knitting Factory when Daniel Johnston visits on Thursday, April 15.