Reflections: The Vibe.

The Vibe.

There’s a globally ubiquitous trend of youngish old people who are either 45 or 23, or somewhere in between, listening to chill-hop music and drinking coffee, wearing what I call doodled tattoos well-paired with pastel-colored faded tees. There are local variations of course. It’s a type of pop bourgeois culture of the present moment. Inclusion and exclusion coincide like in any society. It is certainly not God’s Kingdom—at least not yet. The colors and vibe make it a sort of adult Sesame Street. I went to a corporate event recently in Seoul and it had that vibe. Elder millennials in their 40s were speaking to trendy 20-somethings about community building. There was purple LED lighting made to look like neon in a room filled with long noodle-shaped body pillows. Clearly these pillows were made custom. The reception area was a DJ booth and more LED lighting made to look like neon, just in a different color. The DJ was playing chill-hop. We all sat on the floor. Everyone wore plastic hairnets over their fancy sneakers to protect the body pillows that covered the floor. It was the same vibe that I saw in Denver two summers ago. I saw it again at the Ace Hotel in Pittsburgh. It’s at the RYSE Hotel in Seoul. I stayed at a hotel in LA last spring—it had the same vibe. It’s the vibe of a Virgin Atlantic cabin from 2002. This vibe has surprising longevity. There’s a certain degree of cool removal and a preference for Ethereum in this vibe. Everyone talks about building community whether you own a bar or build websites or invest in crypto. It’s easy, yet somehow expensive at the same time. Is this just yuppie culture a la yoga, surfing, and chill-hop?

I’m listening to a very appropriate playlist as I write this. While listening, I just realized that the go-go beat of this endless song (?) is helping me type faster and enter into my flow. It’s maybe why the global meritocratic bourgeois culture likes it. There are no meaningful lyrics to this kind of music. It’s just pretty sounds over a monotonous and uncomplicated beat. If there are lyrics, they’re spliced from attractive sounding vocalists in non-offensive ways simply for the sake of making a reference. The human voice is another accompanying instrument in a chorus of effervescent mechanical sounds. If there is a story, it’s all about the vibe. The vibe is the story.

The De-skilled Life.

A German musicologist friend told me the other day that one mustn’t study music in Germany if one desires to study tonal music. Not knowing anything about “music,” I was bemused at the deep divide yet total affinity between mind-numbingly simplistic chill-hop music (and its visual counterparts) and what I think of as disembodied music theory in the German academy. Another recent conversation I had was with an American friend who is an artist and college professor. We spoke on the phenomenon in contemporary art called “deskilling.” It’s been talked about for a couple decades now. And maybe its roots go even further with the Avant-garde in Paris in the mid-1800s, namely the Impressionist painters. It's just a little awkward now that challenging inherited “skill” is squarely part of the “skill” that needs to be learned in the academy. In the least, it’s part of the repertoire that one needs in order to do “good” work. It’s courage without a cause. It leads to the worst kind of cowardice, the kind that assumes the mantle of real courage. These virtues have become mechanically habituated without serious reflection. It seems true that there’s a lot of skill needed to be “deskilled.” When someone tells me that this or that graphic designer is “irreverent,” and this is meant as the ultimate compliment, I’m assured that this designer is a competent practitioner in reproducing the vibe. To be irreverent is code for high vibe-competency.

This brings us back to the vibe, which for the most part seems like a sort of return to the basics. It’s like adult Sesame Street. Basics are good, but at some point, you want to build with those building blocks. ABCs mean nothing unless something is being said. There is no mature focus, goal, or content in the vibe. At the same time, this bland, location-less art, this culture without a cult is that there’s a lot of finessing required to get the vibe just right. A lot of skill is needed to master its language and to be fluent in reproducing the vibe. The vibe is more than simply the basics. It’s actually a culture of basics, and not the basics themselves.  

The word culture has the same root word as cultivate and cult. It comes from the Latin word cultus, which means to worship or to adore. To tend to the soil means to cultivate it so that it brings forth produce. To be a part of a culture also means to tend to it, and be tended by it, so as to re-produce it. A culture is something that grows as the result of tending to a shared set of values, those things that are thought to be worthy; the things we worship together. This worship grows into a culture and grows within that culture.  

So, what are we worshipping when we worship “deskilling.” Perhaps it’s the worship of the new and the different, the alternative perspective and the minority report. This isn’t a bad thing. I am pretty deskilled myself and in my own schooling, it was the best way I learned. But being irreverent without a cause is poison. The result is cowardice of the worst kind, the kind that makes a mockery of courage. There’s a value to learning through doing. There’s even a value to learning from those who themselves have learned through doing, but again, not without a serious cause.   

Vibe without a Cause.

This vibe is about the experience of it. Usually those experiences involve kombucha, chill-hop, surfing, yoga, and pastel-colored faded tees. In the vibe, friends are for sharing the vibe. Money is for having vibe-experiences. A job is about reproducing the vibe for others. To be paid to do this is to be a serious and fluent practitioner of the vibe. A dog is a good accoutrement in the vibe. Working out has to be a vibe. The vibe is infantile and narcissistic, nurturing and charming all at the same time. The vibe is Sesame Street for adults. It's ironic that this new website is very much a vibe. It’s ironic that I am perhaps a de-skilled artist. It’s Nike-meets-90’s Helmut Lang, the designer turned post-minimalist artist. People in this vibe either wear Loewe or Carhart or an organic cotton tee that’s pastel and faded. DS & Durga over Diptyque any day.   

A very close friend of mine who is, I believe, in this culture once described to me a thought piece written by some unnamed cultural critic who described this polished and smooth world of iPhones and Teslas and doodle tattoos and faded pastel-colored tees as a symptom of the desire for the perfect. This critic used Roman Catholic liturgical vestments as an example to illustrate his point. The seamlessness of the chasuble—that poncho-like garment that priests traditionally have worn to celebrate Mass—was about the desire for the smooth perfection of God; the smoothness of the iPhone is somehow a continuation of that same desire. These smooth analogic arguments are so smooth that they’re slick. Greasy analogies help make smooth and easy sense of the world around us. They lubricate those tough and gritty gears. Offering my own slick analogy here, gears are meant for traction. Without teeth, designed to reliably give measured and controlled traction, you simply have spinning wheels that get nowhere. The slick analogies have the smoothness of switching this for that. It’s the smoothness of becoming “like God” by easy fruit. A is for Apple and so therefore B is for Yellow. Unfortunately, not all bananas are yellow, and not all apples are red.

Adult Sesame Street is smooth, but it’s not the smoothness of the sublime. The clarity of a moral argument about something as heavy as mortality seems needless in this world of pastel-colored faded tees. The image of a suffering body, offered and received, becoming both the source and the summit of life is indeed smooth, but not in the same crude and basic way. There is only the perfection of seamless love there. The world is far more deeply beautiful and tragic and gloriously bathed than adult Sesame Street could ever imagine.

I too am narcissistic and infantile. I too am a de-skilled artist who hears too many conversations about Ethereum. And it is no wonder that many of us exposed to the vibe are narcissistic and infantile, charming and nurturing all at once. We’re products of adult Sesame Street. And in that vibe, we reproduce it for ourselves and for others. Without a focus on the real, we’ve chosen to lather on smoothness for its own sake, and then spin our wheels without destination. Infantile narcissism bereaves one of the real.

Life with a Cause.

I recently met a former Benedictine monk who entered the monastery young and left as an old man. His challenge came in the form of a homeless women with whom he fell in love. Coincidentally, he had grown cold of his decade-long post as a cook. He had wrested control back from God in his very human way only to realize that he was free all along. God was just brining him to a place of freedom, not inside or even outside the monastery, but within his own prayer, sacrifice, regrets, suffering, and compassion.

People build community where ever they are, and not just so-called bar-owners-turned-community-builders or their web-building counterparts. People receive mistakes-turned-painful balms. What’s more, they begin to see with God’s eyes. They begin to love with his heart. They begin to see that God desires to redeem a person, not undo a mistake. People struggle and fall. People try and succeed. They chase after money or reputation. They seek affirmation and sometimes hoover after missed opportunities. People are broken and childish. People are infantile and narcissistic. But they are never mistakes. Neither are people smooth kombucha cocktails. People are not chill-hop beats. When a priest puts on a seamless chasuble, though I doubt many chasubles are actually seamless, he is indeed putting on the seamless love of God. But it’s anything but the smooth polish of the latest iPhone, or the fresh crispness of Nike Air Max sneakers by Virgil Abloh. It's really not that feeling, or at least I hope it’s not. I’ve never been a priest so I wouldn’t know. What I do know is that no priest I’ve ever met wore Nikes by Abloh. (If anything, chasubles today are closer to cheap table coverings.)

The smoothness of God is in his simplicity and perfection that doesn’t cover over the messiness of infantile human desire. God does not placate infantile desire, smoothing it over like chill-hop music and Nikes by Abloh. God’s perfection is one that perfects imperfect things. It embraces human desire and completes it. The perfection of God makes this desire new, and young, and mature, and bear fruit all at once. God’s love isn’t slick grease that leaves your wheels spinning in an effervescent chil-hop dreamscape. (And yes, I believe there are certain forms of Christian worship that imagine this to be the case.) God’s love focuses on the realness of all that grit, the stuff you’d rather grease over. It’s this grit that gives you the traction to get somewhere real. Perfection is in having a goal and the traction to get there. God’s perfection cultivates soil, tends to it, and makes it like itself. Desire is no longer infantile and made to grasp at slippery chil-hop dreams. Instead, God grasps the infant’s hand as they walk up and down the hills of life together and finally board a ship. That ship is the goal. It’s the Body of Christ. It’s the Kingdom. Maybe it’s a vocation. It’s the Church. It’s all of those all at once. It’s young, mature, and bearing fruit all together. It is cultivated soil. It is a culture that reproduces itself by and for its participants. It is desire matured to full stature, no longer infantile. It’s a man fully alive, with or without Nikes by Abloh.

P.S.
I do like Nikes by Abloh. And may God rest him.