It's Muh Party
Wah!
I awoke one morning with Lesley Gore’s 60s teeny-bopper single It’s My Party sawing into my psyche like a mad lumberjack.
I literally hadn’t heard that one in years, and I never wanted to hear it, let alone have it randomly surface through the foggy mist of my dreams to attack me throughout the day.
Did I have a dream or memory in my sleep involving the song and just not remember the dream, only the song? Or did the song float to the top of its own accord, unconnected to any sort of memory or image?
It’s My Party is a product of the sort of cultural engineering that arose in the 1950s and crystallized in the U.S. in the early sixties.
The story about the lyrics is that Seymour Gottlieb’s daughter cried about her grandparents coming to her sweet sixteen birthday party, and he turned the incident into this song about Johnny running off with Judy and leaving the narrator heartbroken.
The notion that the girl should have been so invested in romance is a common human sentiment, but here it aims at a target: the teenager as a commodity.
Written by a team of people and passed along to someone with no direct lived experience connected with it, the song itself is a product being sold to the masses through the manipulation of a common emotional lever.
It exists at the juncture where art collapses into entertainment, just beyond which, entertainment degrades into marketing, sometimes even where it markets itself.
Art challenges people to think, entertainment appeals to their basic emotional biases, gives them a means—an excuse, even—to stop thinking.
This serves the purpose of relieving the pangs of consciousness, but where it becomes so dominant that it is all most people consume, we tend to decline.
The old saw about bread and circuses comes to mind.
Looking back through history, it’s hard to tell if such cultural morasses are a cause of that decline or merely another symptom of the inevitable.
Culture, like the individual, changes.
The social engineering ploys of the 1950s failed. Big. Within only a few years of Leslie Gore’s 1963 megahit It’s My Party, the country looked like the polar opposite of the Norman Rockwell painting it tried to become.
The Vietnam War had a lot to do with that, but it’s hard to imagine that painting coming to life, even in a world without ‘Nam.
Everyday life does not conform to systems.
Systems inevitably conform to the chaos of everyday life.
Adjustments will always need to be made. Utopian futures are an unachievable ideal that tends to reveal more about our biases than our capabilities or our hopes.
It makes sense that people should want to look toward the misadventures of Johnny and Judy and away from the horror that hides behind the thin veneer of our flavor of the decade ideal, or the battle between competing ideologies that always seems to arise there from.
To what extent is this pleasant distraction weaponized by the system, and to what extent does it drive the system, which has to adapt to the masses?
Systems and people—the collective and individual mind—are always at odds.
Even where they conform, they do not always complement.
One must take advantage of the other, and neither can lay claim to sovereignty, as they are inextricably linked in a tragically codependent relation.
Any individual who would free the self from that morass has a lofty task. All of us have been inundated from birth with the messaging of the collective refined through the machine of the state and filtered down to us in the form of entertainment, of marketing.
Is the version of the self to which we lay claim really the best version of the self we could be or just a caricature of self, imposed by the haphazard conditioning of our culture?
What value arises from the development of the self?
Is the narrator of It’s My Party upset by Johnny’s disinterest, Judy’s supposed treachery, or by her own reliance on an external marker of validation?
To sell something, the marketeers will tend to inspire in the target audience either fear or envy, usually thinly veiled by identification.
A song like It’s My Party sets the tone of identification within the culture which goes on to inspire the fear or envy that causes young girls to be more concerned with romance.
This same fear of missing out or envy of those joining in, may then be used to encourage the sale of everything from beauty products to romance novels.
The culture has changed and the music with it. The attempt at a state-imposed vision for U.S. culture having been a failure, the need to continually sell to perpetuate the boom-and-bust economy nevertheless remains.
The counterculture succeeded in undermining that Norman Rockwell narrative but has been usurped into the broader narrative of fragmented ingroup thinking which is the hallmark of today.
The only thing that’s progressed is the market, with more audiences to target, and more fear and envy to inspire than ever.
Fear of the other now goes hand in hand with envy of one’s compatriots. Who will be the hero today? Who will defeat the villain? Each respective faction naturally thinks itself the hero and “the other” the villain, and there’s no end to the products and services available to ensure that their CULTure War will be well fought in the name of whatever they decide it’s about today.
The marketeers keep up with this and shift their strategies according to what they think people want. In our global consumer society, this ever shifting need to keep business rolling is what ultimately dictates cultural convention, social policy, and law.
In other words, the fickle, generational whims of the collective are the real master and even the most filthy-rich among that collective are slaves to the grind.
This is why only the most amoral opportunists come out on top. They’ll pretend to be anything you want.
This freedom to choose a faction in a desperate struggle to be on the right side of history or the receiving end of good fortune—is it freedom at all?
It’s your party, I guess.