I understand Kirby’s point: irony is angular, it needs clear demarcations and pivots and distance, and saturation or swaddling in cultural ’stuff’ fills up the space that would normally exist to let one step back, demarcate, and adopt an ironic posture.

(I’m reminded of Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, and the whole lyrical turn of the late 1700s that followed an era of cool couplet satire. It’s online and worth reading.)

But there’s a slender line between looking at the world with child-eyed wonder and coming across as puerile. To me, Ze Frank crossed that line.

New Sincerity may be a fancy name for: it is now (more) OK (than ever) to be a geek, to be special, to be interested in something odd, niche, long tail. Mass culture has less of a grip, but I bet there are still kids and grown ups getting bullied for not being average and bland.

Great blog Roo. Will steal from and quote you when I blog - in Swedish so you can’t see how much :-D

@Alice: Jamaica jokes are a subject for a whole other blog, but if you don’t believe that they’re awesome then you’ve not heard a good one yet. New site to prove that particular point coming very soon.

I was wondering if that might cause a problem for you?

Random example of current culture plucked from the air: I thought Eagle vs Shark was quite New Sincerity in it’s uncomplicated exuberance. Much more so than Napoleon Dynamite perhaps, which seems to have some of the same qualities but was originally spoiled for me by being massively marketed by MTV. I suppose that shouldn’t matter, but regardless of promotion or artistic intent there’s still some soul in Eagle vs Shark that’s lacking in Napoleon Dynamite.

I’m struggling to know at what level I’m appreciating most things, and I’m sure I will continue to. My plan is not to overanalze anything though, and just enjoy things for what they are. If the New Sincerity cuts through the old irony, it can’t be a bad thing.

I think it may be a function of getting ‘tired’ of reprocessing stuff, of the work needed to parse the layers in to that seen-it-all mode - tiresome cognitive work. It links in to that funny thing of giving only positive comments in places like flickr too - so much easier just to go ‘this is awesome’ than actually form an opinion.

Incidentally - New Sincerity is everywhere in adverts at the moment - look at the orange ads for gigs etc, and pretty much anything Fallon does. The Dairy Milk gorilla is another good one.

I wonder how much of it will be subsumed again by advertising, necessitating another adoption of a contrary position? And what might be the shape of the anti-new-sincerity?

Look to the teens, I guess. It’ll appear there first.