‘Everything is Awesome’ is the Anthem of Our Age

So the Oscars were on over the weekend. And although The LEGO Movie may have been snubbed in the nominations for Best Animated Feature, it was very present in the evening’s rendition of ‘Everything is Awesome’, which included Oscar statuettes made out of LEGO blocks and a heavy metal interlude by Will Arnett (as Batman):

‘Everything is Awesome’ feels like the weird theme song of our times. Take this excerpt, rapped by SNL’s The Lonely Island:

Life is good, ‘cause everything’s awesome!

Lost my job, it’s a new opportunity—

more free time for my awesome community!

Stepped in mud, got new brown shoes:

It’s awesome to win, it’s awesome to lose!

Blue skies, bouncy springs, we just named

two awesome things!

A Nobel Prize, a piece of string,

you know what’s awesome? Everything!

Everything you see, think, or say is awesome!

Are they serious about handling adversity so positively? Maybe, maybe not. But in the wake of things like the credit crisis, the rapidly dwindling job market, and armed conflicts in Palestine, Syria, and Paris, these words feel at once ridiculous and right. What else can we do but handle the challenges thrown at us as best we can? Over on Vulture, LEGO Movie star Chris Pratt also weighed in on the song’s relevance to our contemporary world:

I think it follows the theme of this movie, which you think is just some Lego movie made to sell toys – and it’s actually a really subversive, interesting, thought-provoking commentary on society […] The song itself represents that, because it’s saying that everything is awesome, but it’s the anthem of this strange world that exists halfway between America and North Korea, you know what I mean? Twenty or 30 years from now, I think people will look back at ‘Everything Is Awesome’ and it’ll be more than just a cool pop song. It’s really reflective of where we are right now, and that’s what art is all about.

 

While it may seem strange to some that Pratt refers to a song from a children’s film as art, he’s put his finger on something that resonates with a lot of the theories on popular art in which I’m currently immersed. One thing I’m especially into at this moment is called metamodernism. Recently a lot of people have been speculating that postmodernism has run its course, and that something new is taking shape. What is this something, you ask? I’ll let Luke Turner explain:

[R]ather than simply signalling a return to naïve modernist ideological positions, metamodernism considers that our era is characterised by an oscillation between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism. We see this manifest as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism, a moderate fanaticism, oscillating between sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and affect, attempting to attain some sort of transcendent position, as if such a thing were within our grasp. The metamodern generation understands that we can be both ironic and sincere in the same moment; that one does not necessarily diminish the other.

Basically, modernism places us in a world that, ontologically speaking, may no longer exist, and postmodernism’s relentless deconstruction makes it epistemologically difficult to move forward. Metamodernist art (and criticism) lets us have our cake and eat it too, in ‘a kind of informed naivety’. It believes in a world that it logically knows will never come to be.

So what does this have to do with ‘Everything is Awesome’ and The LEGO Movie? More than you would think. Seth Abramson’s got a great article from almost exactly a year ago on how The LEGO Movie represents ‘the first unabashedly metamodern children’s film in Hollywood history’. Specifically, he talks about the simultaneously ironic and sincere impulse behind the song that swept the Oscars last weekend:

In the pre-metamodern world, these lyrics would be immediately (and rightly) received as ironic. These days, not so much. In fact, it’s impossible to tell whether the exuberance behind the song above is real or feigned, as it’s simultaneously the anthem for a repressive totalitarian state run by Lord Business and an unbearably catchy, optimistic tune the high-spirited Emmet continues to enjoy even after its sinister intentions are revealed.

Though it’s a lot to wrap your head around in practice, this pairing and blurring of the ‘real’ and the ‘feigned’ are everywhere in contemporary art. Appropriately, in a blog post over on Notes on Metamodernism, Kyle Karthauser explores the notion of ‘the awesome’ as the metamodern equivalent of the sublime:

Etymologically it gestures at the sublime through “awe,” an experience that mingles abject fear and profound ecstasy. In today’s vernacular, it denotes delight (“Hall & Oates is coming to the state fair? That’s awesome!”) And while the everyday use of “awesome” may be used to describe mundane, not-terribly-profound things, in the broadening of its definition it forces us to broaden our aesthetic understanding of the space between the sublime and the beautiful. From a classical or postmodern standpoint, there is no space between the two, and absolutely no overlap.

The entire post is well worth a read, even if you only skip through to Karthauser’s analysis of Evel Knievel as an emblem of the awesome. There’s also an interesting look at the opacity or surface-heavy quality of  the metamodern era, and the moments of revelation an encounter with these surfaces can produce:

After 30+ years of the postmodern paradigm, an experience of this sort is genuinely mind-boggling. When the dominant critical practice is that of dissolving texts into various discourses, of tracing allusions, sniffing out irony, and contemplating the terminally arbitrary nature of signification itself, you aren’t prepared for Evel Knievel. You aren’t prepared for the Star Wars Kid. When someone tattoos this permanently onto their body, your belief in irony as the be-all-end-all of enlightened cultural expression has to be shaken.

These experiences certainly don’t negate our cultural and political obligations to be informed in the long term, but they do allow us a few precious moments of naivety. They give us a break from the numbing cynicism that might otherwise threaten to overwhelm and immobilise us. Especially given the vast inundation of often-negative information with which we are continually bombarded.

 

‘Everything is Awesome’ (and The LEGO Movie in general) hit a nerve in our culture because it’s simultaneously so simple and so over the top. You can read it on a number of levels – deeply and superficially, ironically and sincerely – and all of those readings would be correct. Is everything awesome? Probably not. But if we behave as though it is, we may well achieve something meaningful through that informed naivety. And we might actually enjoy ourselves in the process.

Embrace your metamodern side and listen to ‘Everything is Awesome’ here. And maybe also watch this video of hamsters eating tiny burritos.