Replacements - Sixteen Blue

Submitted to the academy the assertion that “Sixteen Blue” is the Replacements’ One Great Piece Of Art with a capital A. Apropos yesterday’s post on Iris Murdoch/Art/Sex and Sixagon’s pointing out (as if it would elude us) the irony of selflessness’ connection to connection.

Now, the line of thought yesterday was that anything short of Great Art is immoral because it tries to substitute a pseudo-object/egoistic fantasy for a unified whole, an object apart and self-sufficient. One approach to the unified whole/object apart is through the active pursuit of the Good, whose closest terrestial manifestation is the Beautiful—ie , Eros. The ironic aspect of this moral endeavor is that in order to transcend selfish egoism it is necessary to satiate desire and engage heavily in the Erotic—a seemingly selfish pursuit.

I would argue that every act of self-effacement is a striving to transcendance—ie, to transcend the pseudo-object/cracked lookingglass of the servant/essentially schizoid self. For this reason exist drunkards, home plate umpires, and philanthropists. In no other place than the arts do we find more self-effacers. Self-effacement comes in various levels of degree and execution. Davinci saw an inherent perfection of man, and in Davinci’s art we find Davinci himself, since he is himself a member of mankind. John Cage, for all his blustery musicology, is a master of self-effacement. The Replacements fall into about a hundred sub-species of effacement, self- or otherwise, and yet this song is their finest iteration of the gesture.

Love is one of those big words that we fear because it makes us so unhappy, but in its perfect execution it shows how care of the other becomes care of the self. I argue that advice is a subset of Love, which being more common has a shallower but more voluminous effect in our lives. For well-executed advice has the properties of perfect self-effacement and simultaneous care for others, which allows the advisor to sniff the trail of the Good. The Replacements’ “Sixteen Blue,” besides being a love letter to nostalgia, reads as the most eloquent, heart-breaking advice ever set to record.

It’s a boring state.
It’s a useless wait, I know.

To begin with what we know best and proceed to what we know least, sixteen is a fucked up age. Everyone is different yet easily assimilable into various, hierarchical classes. Even the popular kids’ lives are tinged by the inherent ennui of having 24/7/365.25 filled with useless schooling, summer vacation, and extra-curriculars of scholastic, alcoholic, and sexual natures.

Brag about things you don’t understand.
A girl and a woman, a boy and a man.
Everything is sexually vague.
Now you’re wondering to yourself if you might be gay.

Of course, the sexual nature of sixteen is distributed bell-curve-like across the studentry. Who has developed? Who hasn’t? Who kind of smells weird? Who’s parents are out of town? With mathematical certainty, most of us fall in the middle of the curve, but we all feel as if we’re in the lower concavity. Not everyone can be a Laura Palmer. Who even wants to be?

I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be sixteen, now. I doubt Westerberg would even attempt to write about it. Maybe he’d write “Twenty-one Dun,” to describe the kind of post-adolescent depression that accompanies the slow slide into paying rents, buying birth control, and finding a job. But sixteen? MySpace harassment, sexting, the word “gay” being the most prolific adjective on the lips of every boy? Growing up sounds like a parodic episode of Dateline. It sounds nothing like the Carver-esque delineation of the Replacements’ song.

Drive your ma to the bank.
Tell your pa you got a date.
But you’re lying. Now you’re lying on your back.

A friend said last night that everyone likes the Replacements and I immediately thought of someone else’s telling me a few weeks ago that everyone likes Carver. These two statements are undeniably true of the type of person who would have read this far into this post, right? You like the Replacements and you like Carver. Who doesn’t? The kind of people who don’t like briefly yet specifically detailed accounts of sadness intermixed with a sort of ironically noble pathos—that’s who. I recall having pneumonia about the time I was sixteen. I read a lot. I talked a lot, on the phone to a girl I couldn’t wait to hang out with listening to music in my parents’ basement. There was a lot of lying and lying on my back.

This song may not strike you immediately as member of the advice genre. I think it’s advice. It’s saying, ‘Hey, look. You feel as if you’re alone on an island, different from everyone else. But listen to this. Isn’t this how you kind of feel? Well, everyone feels like this. And if you realize that everyone feels like this, then you will have taken a step on the path of being not-sixteen. Of being more like an adult. Because you will understand that everyone kind of feels the same despite the fact that we’re all different. This is called empathy, which is the most important emotional skill you will ever learn.’ That’s some good advice.

Advice is one of the higher forms of self-effacement because it dialectically transcends the self-other opposition. It calls for empathizing with the other and calling forth from the self’s store of knowledge, creating a new kind of relationship between self-other: It creates an object totally present of understanding and compassion. A shared worldview, a congruous world-constitution. In good advice, the advisor doesn’t seem particularly smart and the advisee doesn’t seem particularly stupid. Self-other become of the same plane, as it were. And everyone feels better at the end of the day.

You’re looking funny.
You ain’t laughing, are you?
Sixteen blue.