adult swim and shameless corporatism

I don't think that it would be a stretch at all for me to say that Adult Swim - or [adult swim], if you wish - is a cultural phenomonon, even if it's still sort-of underground.

But, then again, I could be romanticizing my own generation (look what that did to the baby boomers, eh).

See, I think that my generation - in an inexact sense - has found its new "late night radio." Or Midnight Special, Headbanger's Ball, whatever you want to call it. Only, our Wolfman Jack is named Frylock, and the late-night musicians we worship reside in a different reality, one where a metal band can rule, not only a country, but the world as well.

The group that has been affectionately called the Reagan Babies and unaffectionately called Generation Why is finally coming into its own, and the resulting cultural reality we live in is so postmodern it's not even funny.

Well, actually it is.

Adult Swim has done for the Gen Yers what late night radio and Headbanger's Ball did for previous generations: it lets us disengage from reality. While the Gen Xers were underachievers, unable to succeed with what they were given, the Pepsi Generation has taken the idea of underachieving and set the bar pretty high for it, if that's even possible.

In that respect, my generation parrallels the yuppies of the 1980s, though we are a bit more cynical. While the brokers on Wall Street realized that "greed is good," they still clung to a little bit of that idealism from the fifties (why else would Huey Lewis have a career).

That doesn't exist today. We are underachievers with high hopes, people who want to spend money without doing anything for it, unlike the Gen Xers, who didn't really want the money at all.

We don't have the belief that we can change the world - and that may have something to do with the situation in the Middle East - so we have nothing to hold us back from being completely self-absorbed.

We have XBox, iPod, PSP,TiVo, H2 (and the obviously ridiculous H3), PS3, Blu-Ray DVD technology, and square tomatoes.

And then there's Adult Swim. Adult Swim is the perfect embodiment of today's youth, myself included, and Aqua Teen, for that matter, is the perfect example of what I'm talking about. The show centers on instant gratification. At 11 minutes long, there's no need to muck things up with plot, so, being the creative geniuses that they are, the guys at Williams Street strive to make ATHF seem as though it were just thrown together, the television equivalent of a Jackson Pollack.

But it takes a lot of effort to make something look so simple. And that, my friends, is the beauty of our generation.