6. George Clanton - “It Makes The Babies Want To Cry”

I feel like this song epitomizes the climate of modern millennial love. It highlights the struggle between the two conflicting desires of wanting to be held and wanting to be free, revealing the pandemic and youthful aversion to both being lonely and being smothered.

So often we find ourselves living in a relational world where effort has become anathema, and love - at least the type that is steadfast and built through commitment, is shirked at the nearest sign of difficulty. It’s a world of convenience, an equation with only one variable taken into account, or rather an equation where each variable is inversely related and constantly fixated on decreasing the other’s value in order to increase its own. No one ever wants to be suspected of having more feeling, because feeling - the hallmark of human relationships, is taken as a sign of weakness. It’s like the twilight zone of love, a world of regression where the threshold is always receding, and rather than reaching toward new heights, it’s constantly stuck looking over its shoulder as it tries to spot the nearest exit or most convenient route of retreat.

It’s a climate fixated on less, with participants that are more self-aware than selfless. It’s a culture of irony that praises the proliferation of a love built on openness, plurality and freedom, yet exercises a draconian focus on said love, making sure to mete it out in only pained and measured amounts. It’s a culture that threw out the baby with the bath water, mistaking sex for love, it obliterated the humanity of it while embracing the animality. It denies the most beneficial and resonating aspects of love for the ephemeral, transient and ultimately empty and short-lived moments of pleasure. As a result, it’s participants are left never truly satisfied and constantly grasping for more, and that’s because humans have the capacity for more. It’s both the blessing and the curse of our minds. Yet somehow the devolution of humanity has gotten grafted to liberalism, where we now strive to reduce ourselves to the ancestors from which we evolved. We want to be animals, better yet we claim it as if it were some sort of crown of rational thought. We confuse ease for progress, rightfully embracing post-modernism for its destructive tendencies, yet then asserting out of laziness or fear that nothingness is an end in and of itself. We claim it as the pinnacle of human knowledge, rather than seeing it as a stepping stone and then getting our hands and minds dirty to investigate what comes next. The past was certainly imperfect and ripe for a coup, but that doesn’t mean we can’t rebuild something better with its pieces, instead of simply throwing them away and wandering around in hedonistic aimlessness.