ARTICLE:Current popular culture--especially the movies, music and celebrities of the day--are always a good indicator of what society is valuing at the moment. And it appears this generation's zeitgeist is you only live once, so go nuts. With One Direction telling us to live while we're young (or Kanye's more direct Live Fast, Die Young), Pepsi's ads reminding us to Live for Now, and the popular expression YOLO! (you only live once) appearing everywhere, perhaps it isn't too surprising. We have romanticized the idea of living fast, playing hard and dying young. The roots could stem from the risk taking behavior, which is correlated with narcissism, something uniquely pervasive in this generation. A survey of songs from 1980-2007 found songs have become less communal and more individualistic--or narcissistic--using more words like "I" "me"and "mine," and more themes that are focused exclusively on the individuals wants, needs and thoughts. Substance abuse seems to also reflect this recklessness, with the rate of 18-20 drug users growing steadily over the last 6 years. We seem to think this life is just about us, and we're going to do whatever we damn well please to make it look exciting and romanticized (hello, instragram filters). What's the cause? Probably the feeling of helplessness, courtesy of the economy, decade long wars, unemployment--the usual horsemen of the apocalypse.
The article speaks extensively about how music reflects or creates the apocalytpic-pop attitude, how African American males have become the James Dean archetype for today's youth, and how this attitude has roots since the 1920s, and again in the 1950s. Not an incredibly deep view, but a wide one.
SITE: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/why-does-pop-romanticize-dying-young/280920/
