Tropical Depression

When I meet people traveling, I tell them I live in Bangkok, and I can always see a certain look cross their faces. This can go one of two ways. One way, perhaps the more predictable way, is the assumption that I am that lowest of creatures, the Western failure who goes to a supposedly more permissive clime to engage in multifarious degeneracies and perversions, someone with an insatiable yen for white male privilege, cheap booze, and local pussy.

But there's a second look, one of jealousy, that I get to live in said supposedly permissive clime, an assumption that I live a carefree life of sea, sex, and sun (as that king of the lechers Serge Gainsbourg put it), an eternal Valencia-filtered happy hour under whispering palm fronds.

A certain irony, given my buttondown, stale-coffee sort of life.

It's a particular sort of myth, one that has been perpetuated by the tropical milieu that has come to occupy a central position in the public imagination. Sure, those of us who come from cold-weather lands have always looked up to all things tropical – how long have Americans flocked to Cancun and Fort Lauderdale for Spring Break? – but it seems more ubiquitous than ever. You see the countless pop music videos set in exotic locales, the house remixes that name-check Ibiza, Goa, Bali, and every other place that seems to elude the strictures of Anglo-Protestant morality. It is found in every palm-print t-shirt at H&M and Zara, in every “nomad” type blog, in every Instagram photo that features flowing linen beach dresses and chilled glasses of Prosecco.

Photo Credit: Chompoo Baritone, whose work is one of the better skewerings of bullshit I know of

These things come in phases, don't they? Eventually this will seem just as dated and embarrassing as, par instance, the fetishization of an ostensible hedonism in early '80s hair metal-era L.A., or that hiccup in the late '90s when everything marketed to teens was required to be X-treme.

Which is why I hate all of those “look how millennials be” think pieces – sure, my generation might have slightly different shit that it gloms onto or rejects, but the fact is that the shit itself isn't nearly as interesting or worthy of commentary as the conditions that surround it.

While culture invariably moves in waves, crazes, fads, and gestalts, they all, in a society saturated with mass media, seem to have their roots in a terrible and unseemly lack, something missing from daily experience that is latched onto first by artists, musicians, and designers, and then following suit, by media companies, corporate marketers, and advertising agencies. Some collective dream that we see faintly, a mirage of a better life that seems so real, even if distant.

It was a little less than 10 years ago that I first noticed this tendency. It started with the musical trend for “Balearic” music in America, an interpretation of the long-enshrined European experience of those Spanish islands well-known as a place for Northerners to escape from the winter drizzle and beery neurasthenia, before music critics settled on the repugnant and much-mocked name of “chillwave.” Consider the cover of 2009's Washed Out's then-overplayed but still excellent Life of Leisure EP, with its lavender tones and its sea-nymph cover girl going for a sunset swim with seaside hotels in the background.

The context, of course, was that the global economy was falling to pieces. We couldn't have the life of leisure, so we listened to it.

And the tropical gestalt has continued in its way since, with some variations – samples of cheesy '80s soft rock here, yachty fashion trends there, little nods to the pop culture and music of France, Japan, or Brazil, all times, milieux, and places close enough to the youthful American consciousness to be superficially familiar, all distant enough for any incursions of ugly reality to be kept safely at bay.

I'd seen it before, during the darkest years of the Bush regime, as my nation plunged headlong into a particularly insane and pointless war. Mainstream American liberalism seemed to respond with callow, smug irony in lieu of action, the world of top 40 radio was peppered with shitty pop music remaining more or less unaltered from its lousy late '90s self and hip-hop in its absolute lamest phase, and meanwhile, the world of independent music – a place that had long prided itself on standing against the bullshit going on in the world at large – seemed content to traipse about in a folky dreamscape that seemed utterly unmoored and unwilling to confront the horror of contemporary foreign policy.

So we are like the Depression-era family playing Monopoly as the bank threatens to take our house. The stack of $1000 bills on goldenrod-colored paper gives some comfort.

A woman is driving home from downtown of Des Moines or Milwaukee or Omaha or Cincinnati. The fucking asshole wants her in on Saturday. She drives past the campus of the university where her psychology degree sent her 30,000 dollars into debt, further down the freeway, to her home, a cheaply built townhouse where newly paved asphalt roads run down into the cornfields. An icy gale is blowing in from the Northwest. Her parents called, she's not calling them back. Lying down on her couch, she vaguely wonders what there is to eat in the fridge, and goes through her phone. She opens up Instagram, past coffee, of charcuterie plates, of yoga balls and spandex, and sees a radiant Bella Hadid in front of a Costa Rican waterfall, her eyes dancing with some point beyond the camera's lens, and presses the heart-shaped button.