4. Courtney Barnett - “Depreston”
This song is steeped in a heavy dose of existentialism. It tackles the endemic theme of our generation’s discontent with society and life in general. It’s a discontent with a number of causes, but I believe that ultimately it can be boiled down into two, with one rising from within and the other rising from without.
The first is a sort of forced temperance or self-flagellation, meaning denying something, not because you don’t want it, but because it’s impossible to attain. You see its easy for us to shirk the lives of our parents or even willingly slow down the typical process of growing up, because disguising it as a conscious decision and placing it on some sort of intellectual high ground allows us to feel like we have some sense of choice or control. Do we want to get married? - No. Do we want to be successful? – No. Do we want a family? - No. Do we want a house? - No. Do we want the perfect suburban life? - No. Now don’t get me wrong, there are perfectly good and valid explanations for each of these denials, but I believe that underlying all of them is the fact that even if we were to want these things, the ability to achieve them – at least in the fashion that our parents did, would be impossible. Those opportunities don’t exist anymore. So out of fear we shun them. Rather than trying to attain them and falling short, we claim to have never wanted them to begin with.
But that explanation seems too simple. Our discontent must be fueled by something more than a sense of inadequacy or self-preservation. After all, our generation is often accused of being self-centered and unrealistic by those who came before us. We idealize the world. We shun the established order. We misplace our priorities. It’s a list that could go on and on. These accusations are often hurled at us from those who passed us the baton. The same individuals who after the most rigorous set of mental gymnastics humanly possible somehow manage to rationalize claiming no sense of responsibility for who we are. To them it’s as if we sprouted into existence out of nothingness, emerging from technology to plague the earth with our awful presence. None of them seem willing to examine their own role. They can’t fathom - or don’t even care to examine, the meager and slow rise in wages, compared to the exorbitant rise in the cost of living, price of education and healthcare. It’s easier for them to make us into the ‘other’, rather than blaming the system that formed us - the very same system that they created. For them the problem lies in our unrealistic ideals that challenge the established order of things, or the lack of a character that aligns with theirs. They see the solution lying in the past, within the idyllic and halcyon days of yore, days that conveniently didn’t involve us and barring the development of a time machine, will never come back. The future, the vanguard of progress and the semblance of fact are to be greeted with skepticism. In this scenario, it’s not our own sense of inadequacy that motivates us, but rather the inadequacy forced on us by others. We are told we are inadequate, and want to prove them wrong, only to be greeted by a world that, shaped by our forebears, confirms said inadequacy.
Either way there are conflicting emotions at work. The desire to prove ourselves wrestles with the desire to deny ourselves, and it is under this dual yoke that we greet adulthood. After all, we all eventually reach the tipping point where we realize that we are no longer a child and strive for some sort of normalcy, but even as we strive for normalcy we’re greeted by the emptiness and futility of it all. We feel like we’re selling out even though we’re only doing what the system necessitates. We feel guilty, and we don’t know where to reach, because every solution only carries partial answers. We want to pick and choose, but we live in a world that’s too often forced into a dichotomy. We’re scattered, reaching every which way trying to find balance when the very nature of life denies that balance.
It is this struggle for balance that is perfectly illustrated throughout this song. It’s young adults fleeing to the suburbs, following in the footsteps of their parents because they can, because they feel its time and even want to. They desire the silence and self-sufficiency that adulthood entails and they’re unsure of where else to turn. However upon getting there they feel the miasmic emptiness of suburbia begin to strangle them. They see themselves becoming the previous generation - the generation they despise, and they feel obligated to throw out the baby with the bathwater, condemning the good of that generation along with the bad. They can’t unsee the boredom of it all, the ennui of the quotidian as it arrests the homeless and invades the seclusion of a gaudy house. They see the slow death that crept on the previous owner, the throes of a wasted, albeit attractive life that so perfectly exemplifies the suburbs. They feel trapped, like their invading someone else’s tomb, but there’s no way out, and the closing refrain acts as a sort of echo chamber. It’s a haunting reminder that there is no escape, even as it comes doused in the irony of an old realtor stating innocently and matter-of-factually that in order to truly start anew all they need is a spare half a million. It signifies the impossibility of it all, the sheer absurdity that anyone in our generation would ever have a spare half a million. No, instead they’re stuck merging with the life of their forbearers, picking up the baton and assimilating into the ranks of the dead. There’s no other option, and their lives will always be torn. Little by little their existence will chip away at their souls, reminding them everyday that happiness and comfort will forever be mutually exclusive.
