A very interesting take on YA literature:
The older books depicted girlhood as a preparation for a future where happiness demands sacrifice and the suppression of unbecoming qualities that may very well be “who we are” as adolescents but will not suffice for who we aspire to be in adulthood. In these books, as in life, coming of age requires agency, a conscious and concerted formation toward an ideal of who one hopes to be. When adulthood is no longer a moral achievement but a hormonal eventuality, there is nothing to aspire to or prepare for—no higher education, no vocation, no marriage or motherhood (except as an undesired mistake). Despite their ignorance of second-wave feminism, Louisa May Alcott’s and L. M. Montgomery’s protagonists became, even in adolescence, significantly more intellectually and even professionally accomplished than Blume’s.
It would be unrealistic to deny the existence of young readers who wish for books to play back and amplify their struggles and anxieties, to wrap them in a hug of affirmation for who they are right now, rather than trouble them with the risks and possibilities of who they might one day become. It would be likewise unrealistic to deny that middle-aged women might wistfully recall their own experiences as such readers. As Blume has admitted, the Margaret movie is not for children so much as it is for the “nostalgia audience,” their parents who grew up with the book.
But what would be most unrealistic of all would be to believe that such books speak to the deepest or most universal desires of girlhood. In its quest for realism, YA has lost sight of the fact that young girls possess equally real aspirations for intellectual and ethical self-development that can’t be satisfied or replaced by literary sex ed. An adolescence that never even threatens to issue in adulthood is a distortion of experience, not its honest rendering.
Passionate music fans are unprofitable. They consume too much at the all-you-can-eat music buffet. They can’t be steered to cheap AI music. They’re skeptical of fake artists. They don’t like to be manipulated.
So they must be replaced by passive listeners…
….
The only positive thing in this whole story is the first stirrings of a music counterculture that operates outside this vicious circle.
I see signs of it on Bandcamp. I see it on Substack (even here at The Honest Broker). I see it on Patreon. I see it in the artist-centric music startups that reach out to me on a regular basis. I see it in the clubs and in various other fringe and niche areas of the music scene.
So let me conclude by quoting Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
It’s increasingly clear to me that this will be our only genuine solution. If that happens, I might even be grateful that streaming platforms and record labels got so lazy and incompetent—because they will have forced us to create something better.
Charlotte was Both 