Towards a Theory of Trads

Not even fifteen years ago, “cool” Americans could be found holding up, as praiseworthy, musical exemplars such as this:

Or this, from 2016, less than a decade ago:

Around the same time these recordings were made, the TV show Portlandia featured a skit about the return of the 1890s, and emphasized what a rage had swept across that same class of Americans for such pastimes as curing and pickling.

Most of this was happening in the first half of the 2010s — the last moment in history when members of Gen X could make any plausible claim to be the apex drivers of mass culture, and indeed the last moment in history when the apex drivers of mass culture remained internet non-natives, carrying with them, in their musical and creative sensibilities, some significant memory of a world still mostly unmediated by screens.

Many moments might be pointed out as marking the end of this now-extinct sensibility, or rather of this sensibility that has metamorphosed beyond recognition, but still, like a dinosaur become bird, technically exists. But I take the end of it to have been decisively announced the moment Andrea Long Chu began confessing her guilty habit of ducking into Taco Bell for some scarfing on the down-low. Ever since then, the progressive left, or even just the left-by-default but mostly apolitical world of musical and creative Bohemia, gave up any claim at all to roots, to ancestral ways, to folksiness, and threw itself, entirely and incoherently, into the welcoming arms of the biomedical establishment, of Hollywood franchises, fast food, and infantilizing fandoms centered on corporate IP.