So I still take the trash out, does that make me too normal for you?
For some reason this evening, Internal DJ decided to start playing Liz Phair: "Extraordinary." I like the song and I went to go find it on YouTube and play it. I used to love hearing it on the radio, when I still listened to the radio. It's funny, I go get videos on YouTube as the go-to, instead of looking them up on Spotify. I suppose it may have something to do with Spotify's practice of running advertisements between songs for free accounts.
Anyway, I found the video and played it. I started thinking about the song. The tune came out in 2004, just three short years after the Towers came down. It was the year I moved to Livermore, about six months after my wife left. I've always thought of that time as a time of such chaos and change. It was that, but reflecting upon the time that has elapsed since the video debuted, it now seems as if those initial years of the twenty-first century were the last sane, stable, years of Western Culture.
I commented on the video that the song seems so emblematic of that time, a remnant of a disappeared culture, an anthem for a breed of women now seemingly extinct, an artifact alien to the time that followed it, just one generation later. The world has changed so much. Liz Phair is 56 this year. She was born the same year as my ex wife. I can hardly imagine high school girls today thinking this song spoke for them or about them.
I watched the video a few times. I recognized the movie playing as a backdrop to the music video. It is "Raising Helen," also released in 2004. Remembering the movie, I started to understand what I was thinking/feeling about this song. What do I mean when I say that this song is an anthem of a breed of women now extinct? "Raising Helen" is a romantic comedy about a "wild-child" maturing but young single woman who ends up trying to raise her sister's three children after her sister dies in a car crash. Go find it on Wikipedia and read the plot. I wonder if that movie would sell today. I doubt it. Motherhood as maturing and spiritually fulfilling for a woman? Straight monogamy as a rewarding life-choice? A loose, "sex positive," fast, party-girl lifestyle portrayed as characteristic of a woman trapped in childhood and dodging her maturity? The idea that single-motherhood is not a circumstance equivalent, or even less-preferable than marriage? Eeewwww! That would be the reaction. It is almost illegal these days to make a movie suggesting that a child needs a mother and a father or that a mother alone is not as ideal for a child as an intact hetero-nuclear family. We live in interesting times.