Start Making Sense: “Say Hello to Metamodernism”

“Just as [Greg] Dember’s generation inherited modernism and felt a need to rebel, today’s younger generations have inherited postmodernism and no doubt feel the same urge to keep the sense of cultural evolution progressing.”

Sometime in the early 1980s, there was a point when rock bands noticeably stopped taking themselves so seriously. Rather than presenting a clear message, the music started being about attitude and style. Out with Joni Mitchell, in with the Talking Heads and Elvis Costello. As Greg Dember, author of the newly-released book Say Hello to Metamodernism!, writes, “It was music for smart people, but music that urged smart people not to think more, but to dance more. As David Byrne sang, to… ‘Stop Making Sense.’”

This was part of a broader cultural trend toward postmodern sensibilities: less sincerity and belief in grand narratives, more irony and lack of faith in clearly defined truths.

Dember is a Seattle-based writer and musician who studied literature at Yale University. In his new book, he describes the thrill of going to college in the 1980s during the height of—as he terms it—the postmodern episteme. Dember writes, “All of this postmodernism stuff was exciting because it was a liberation from the burden of some kind of presumed truth…It was about seeing the world as it was coming to seem to actually be: a fractured, self-referential jumble of mutually contradicting points of view. There was nothing solid to stand on, so the game was to toss humor and cultural details back and forth as we bounced past each other in some kind of aesthetic bumper-car ride.”

The world today is even more fractured, even more of a jumble of contradicting points of view. Yet this reality has lost all sense of being exciting or liberating. Just as Dember’s generation inherited modernism and felt a need to rebel, today’s younger generations have inherited postmodernism and no doubt feel the same urge to keep the sense of cultural evolution progressing.