Here's how to test if this “Anxious Generation” stuff is true

Also: My rocker past, Bill Burr’s take on the WNBA, the words of campus protests, how tech obliterated media, and Bourdain on travel.

Comedy: Colorado! This weekend, I’m telling iokes in Denver and Boulder. I'm getting oxygen right now to prepare. Jun 14-15 at Denver Comedy Lounge and Jun 16 at Boulder Comedy Show. Ticket info here. (Arlington, VA on June 21 too.)

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Quickies

🎯 A good way to test if this “Anxious Generation” stuff is true: Check in on Amish teens. How they doing with their mental health? They helping Harrison Ford put up a barn or what?

🎯 I drink English Breakfast tea in America at 3pm because I’m a goddamn rebel.

🎯 Rhythm gymnastics is just a prank, right? Like, you just run around with a ribbon and then they score ya and someone "wins"!? C'mon.

🎯 Kinda crazy how many New Yorkers perceive Connecticut as “classy.” Hang out at the New Haven train station at midnight. I didn’t even know meth heads could use oxygen tanks.

🎯 Shrooms were more fun when they were “dangerous” and illegal. Now, nothing is wild and every shroom biz feels like it was hatched by a guy who used to work at McKinsey and sees “a market opportunity.”

🎯 I assume every woman in a blazer is very smart and every man in a crewneck is extremely sensitive. #fashiongullible

🎯 This is the golden age of folks selling out 3,000 seat theaters and me going, "Who the hell is that?" Most recently: “Parcels is at Red Rocks.” Huh? Is that a band or did my Amazon shipment wind up at the wrong address?

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Politics

🎯 Can't believe rednecks are mad about Hunter Biden getting high and trying to buy a gun. Are they like, "Hey, that's our IP!"

🎯 Politics in America: Republicans are a comedy club crowd and Democrats are the HR department. And the party of “Party!” will always have a big electoral advantage over the party of “You really shouldn’t say that.” (Excerpt from my new book Amusing Ourselves to Fascism.)

🎯 Old people run the country. Young people run social media. That’s why the former is so ineffective and the latter is so immature.

Israel/Gaza

🎯 How the watermelon emoji is used nowadays is making organizing this Sabbath picnic very difficult.

🎯 Being Jewish means CONSTANTLY having it drilled into your head – via every holiday, every trip to a synagogue, and every reading of the Torah – that we are victims of oppression and Israel is our ancestral homeland. So when others scream that we are oppressors who have colonized Israel, the result is a massive disconnect. Jewish brains react like this: "404 Page Not Found Error."

🎯 Did you know a lot of crowdwork is really just written material in disguise? Slipped this one in through the back door…

Social

🎯 Social media is the answer to “What would happen if we gave the most power to teenagers, morons, and shut-ins?”

🎯 Whatever you post online doesn’t make you a good person. You have to accomplish that elsewhere.

🎯 The problem right now is sane people rarely post on social media so we wind up thinking insanity is mainstream.

AI

🎯 "AI will revolutionize everything: ChatGPT novels. Bot therapy. Fake vocal tracks. Wow!"
"Uh, do you want to read those novels, get that therapy, or listen to those songs?"
"No."
"Yeah, that sounds about right."

🎯 AI is the redux of what iPads were back in the day: Tech execs making stuff for OUR kids they would never let THEIR kids use.

Generations

🎯 Our generational chasm is the result of a chemistry experiment gone wrong. We mixed Taylor Swift droplets into a solution of Limp Bizkit and it is not going well.

🎯 Boomers timed it all perfectly. Sexual prime AFTER the invention of the pill and BEFORE the onset of AIDS. And abortion was legal the whole time. And now they’re trying to take it all away from us. So cruel. They’re pulling up the ladder right after they came inside it.

🎯 Each generation has its own weird kink....
Gen Z: Eating a**
Millennials: Choking
Gen X: Making eye contact
Boomers: Home ownership

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My rock past

In the late ‘90s and early 00’s, I was a different human being. I lived in Chicago and played guitar/sang in a rock ‘n roll band called Plastics Hi-Fi.

Got a pleasant/weird reminder of those days recently: A big profile of the band came out in the Reader (Chicago’s alt-weekly) as part of Steve Krakow’s Secret History of Chicago Music series that spotlights "pivotal Chicago musicians that somehow have not gotten their just dues."

Right on. We’re pivotal! We are due dues! It wasn’t all just a fever dream!

Krakow was a fan of the band back in the day:

To my ears, Plastics Hi-Fi played dream pop that sounded halfway unraveled, thanks to a strain of wildness added by loosely swinging drummer Richard Harper and unhinged lead guitarist Kevin Henretta. (Henretta and I talked about Syd Barrett after the gig.) Bassist and keyboardist Greg Kane gave the music a baroque garage-rock flair, a la the Seeds, and singer and guitarist Matt Ruby had a sighing, slippery voice that reminded me of David Gilmour, Jason Pierce, or Lou Reed without sounding like any of them. 

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It’s nice to be remembered, but…oof, that headline:

This makes it sound like we were crass commercialists just out to make a buck. Nah, we just wanted to be able to sell records, tour, and make a living. Our drummer, Rich, put it well in this response to the piece:

I have to say though, I don’t think we “missed” by “trying to be on the radio,” as this guy says. I think we wanted people to like what we were doing. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. A lot of the bands we liked at the time were on the radio. (Radiohead, Strokes, Oasis, Green Day if you were Rich, The Verve, blah, blah, blah.) We wanted to make a living at it. How else were we gong to do that if not be commercial? And in my mind, commercial is far from being inherently bad. David Bowie wanted to be on the radio. The Stones, the Who, Tom Petty, The Beatles all wanted to be on the radio. We were in good company. So I think. I don’t believe that cheapened anything we ultimately created.

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure anyone even knows what radio is anymore. Actually, here’s a message for the kids…

Radio is this thing that used to play random music and could break bands. An alt-weekly was a newspaper that told hipsters about cool stuff before social media. A band was a group of people who played instruments together in a room. Instruments make music by moving air and/or strings around (they are what GarageBand tries to emulate). Actually, just ask ChatGPT about the rest.

The Reader piece discusses my approach to songwriting (and quotes extensively from this essay of mine about the band days):

Ruby didn’t consider himself a great singer or guitarist, but he had “shaggy hair, weird clothes, and chutzpah”—and plenty of musicians have built careers on less. “I quickly realized that songwriting was the best way for me to earn my keep in the band,” he wrote. He studied Beatles sheet music like a holy text, collected poetry, and took voice lessons. Holed up in his room, he’d experiment with song snippets, lyric ideas, and chord progressions. “Every once in a while, something would just pour out that was good and I’d think, ‘Where’d that come from?’ Then I’d hit record on my tape recorder to capture it before it evaporated and bring it to the boys.”

“I didn’t hide my influences well, but I figured no one else was going to mix them all together in quite the same way,” he wrote. By his reckoning, their song “Walk the Walk” is a mishmash of Luna (the chord progression), W.H. Auden (the lyrics), the Ventures (the surfy prechorus), Iggy Pop (the sneering vocals), Instant Karma–era John Lennon (the slapback echo on the vocals), Television (the fuzzy guitar solo), and the Raspberries (the hooky chorus).

Is it a bummer we never sold more records? Sure, but as I wrote in my piece:

These days, I think more about what the four of us went through together than the music itself. Time has told me how difficult it is to connect deeply with even a single person, much less three. I used to obsess over our lack of commercial success, but now I celebrate that we did something beautiful and hard, we did it together, and the purity of it all. There are certain things you only get to do once in your life; they require an engine that burns on naivety and youth. Older and wiser may be more sustainable, but it’s less combustible. 

More:

• Reader: ”Plastics Hi-Fi aimed for the radio and missed”

• Essay I wrote about my band days: ”More Me in the Monitor”

• Plastics Hi-Fi albums on Spotify: “Home Brewed” and “Corduroy.”

• Matt Ruby solo album: “I Never Do This Sort of Thing”

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Comedy

🃏 We use the word "comedy" to describe things like The Bear, Fleabag, Atlanta, & Louie (all incredibly sad shows at times) because there is no category for "human."

🃏 Get jokes, info, and clips of my standup via social media: Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and YouTube.

🃏 3 million views on IG for this one! Crazy.

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🃏 My other newsletter is Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian. It’s about comedy craft.

🃏 Listen to my podcast: Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby.

🃏 Road dates coming up: Denver, Boulder, Arlington (VA), Boston, and Victoria (BC). Ticket info.

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5-spotted

🗯️ Q: Why do men get so many more sizing options than women, especially when it comes to pants? A:

As anyone who has tried to comparison shop can attest, when it comes to women’s sizing, those numbers are more concept than reality. They can vary widely from brand to brand, in large part because there is so much social prejudice around body size, and conventional wisdom has it that brands will move more product if they make consumers feel smaller than they actually are.

🗯️ Bill Burr’s take on the WNBA and entertainment has “more uncomfortable truths than not.”

Bill Burr was just doing a comedy routine, and if you can absorb it the way he wrote the material it’s not as sexist as it sounds. He’s indicting the desire to watch empty, mean-spirited trash TV over content that should inspire an audience, and a gender. There is an audience for women’s sports, and specifically WNBA basketball, it just doesn’t compare to that of the Real Housewives.

🗯️ The Role of Words in the Campus Protests by Zadie Smith. [New Yorker]

This is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words—where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do.

🗯️ Over Three Decades, Tech Obliterated Media by Kara Swisher:

There are better paths for all of us, for the health of our democracy and to restore our sense of truth and social cohesion, than allowing the angriest and loudest and most nonsensical voices on social media (and I am not just talking about Musk, but him, yes, perhaps most of all right now). Which is why we need to continue to press our elected leaders for guardrails for tech to limit its unaccountable power and put in place reasonable protections around a range of inventions that have the potential to cause more harm.

🗯️ Anthony Bourdain's Most Poignant Reflections On Life And Travel:

Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks – on your body or on your heart — are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.

Thanks for reading. If you dig it, share it.

-Matt