Teen Angst, Teen Comedy

Back when I was in my teens I often had the sneaking suspicion that the adults in my general vicinity were laughing at me behind my back. Chalk some of that up to generic teen paranoia. But my suspicions were in fact justified: they were laughing at me behind my back. I was an intensely serious teenager. And there’s just nothing funnier than an intensely serious teenager.

When one is young, platitudes are blinding revelations. Questions about existence or the Meaning Of It All seem so very deep, so meaningful, so trenchant. One bobbles about in a fog of existential angst, wondering Why Am I Here and How Can Existence Exist While Existing When The Existence Of Existence Exists? On the whole it’s really kind of sweet. But when some kid is stalking about in the conceit that he has unlocked ontological prison doors, comedy is sure to follow. Teenagers are typically thin-skinned, prickly, and reactive. And since your average teenager is an immortal who lives at the precise geometrical center of the known universe, looking hilariously askance at said average teenager’s philosophical musings is sure to cause breathtaking surges of anger followed by sustained sulking. A pretty picture it is not, but it’s kinda funny.

Such came bubbling up to my mind as I had the opportunity to listen to an old copy of the double LP This Is the Moody Blues, a remix of faded flowers from the Summer of Love. I ignored the Moody Blues back when they were new, just as I ignored every other aspect of my contemporary world. I may be the only Baby Boomer in the USA who has never heard so much as a blurp of Moody Blues. That is, until this little experiment of late. There’s nothing particularly offensive about the record itself, consisting as it does of dinky little ditties tarted up with a raft of experimental electronica: a touch of ring modulation here, a dash of Mellotron there, a pinch of FM synthesis there. But from time to time one of the band members begins intoning perfectly wretched doggerel poetry over billows of electronic mush, all presumably to invoke the mental disorientation that comes with the ingesting of certain, ahem, controlled substances.

And that’s what I had almost forgotten about the tie-dye sideburned granny-glasses’d ethos of the late 1960s: all those kids taking themselves oh so very seriously. No humor in any of it, no sense of the ridiculous. That’s too bad, because the ridiculous is on full and, I might add, sublime display in this album. I can just see them sprawled on their beanbag chairs, stoned and sandalled, muttering how deep, hey man how profound, as those childish couplets intone out of the speakers to the squeal of modulated synthesis and tinkle of bell trees while a few freelance violinists scrape away discreetly in the background.

I sailed right through the hippie heyday with mind, haircut, and wardrobe intact. But I was every bit as silly in my own way, making my earth-shattering discoveries of age-old bromides and flying into a rage when the oldsters (ancients in their 40s) chuckled benignly instead of gaping in astonishment at my philosophical savvy.

At least I didn’t spout pompous couplets. Or at least I don’t think I did. I think I was too busy putting on airs for having read a few pages of Common Sense and concluding that I had the Answer To Everything.

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