Julie Beck stops to ask why everybody seems to be flipping the bird to 2016 in ‘Fuck You, 2016’:
The way people lament 2016 on Facebook, on Twitter, is not just despairing that it’s been a bad year. They anthropomorphize the year, give it agency, and thus make it worthy of blame for the things that happened in it. 2016 took Prince and David Bowie and John Glenn and Muhammad Ali. 2016 gave us Zika, and Brexit, and so many police killings. “Hasn’t 2016 done enough?” people ask above a link to some new large or small injustice.
(Vereshchagin Dmitry / Potapov Alexander / ILYA AKINSHIN / By-jkphotograph / Shutterstock / Zak Bickel / Paul Spella / The Atlantic)
Claire Wilmot delivers a heart-breaking critique on how social media can aid in expressing public mourning, but can be damaging for allowing the personal grief of closer loved ones. Read Wilmot’s personal essay The Space Between Mourning and Grief:
The way people mourn online has been the subject of much cultural comment recently, particularly in the wake of mass tragedies and high-profile celebrity deaths, such as those of David Bowie and Prince. Some argue that the likes of Facebook and Twitter have opened up public space for displays of grief that had been restricted to private spheres of secular culture. But rather than reconstructing an outlet for public grief, social media often reproduces the worst cultural failings surrounding death, namely platitudes that help those on the periphery of a tragedy rationalize what has happened, but obscure the uncomfortable, messy reality of loss.
Social media has increased the speed and ease of communication to an unprecedented degree, and yet sites like Facebook and Twitter are poorly suited to grief’s strangeness. By design, social media demands tidy conclusions, and dilutes tragedy so that it’s comprehensible even to those only distantly aware of what has happened. The majority of Facebook posts mourning Lauren’s death were full of “silver linings” comments that were so far removed from the horror of the reality that I found them isolating and offensive. Implicit in claims that Lauren was no longer suffering, or that “everything happens for a reason” are redemptive clauses—ones that have a silencing effect on those who find no value in their pain.
It makes sense that those who knew Lauren sought some kind of meaning in her death in an attempt to re-order a universe disrupted. My sister was a smart, kind, athletic business student and a social entrepreneur—and she had an incredibly rare form of brain cancer that ended up killing her. It’s naively assumed that good, healthy people deserve good, healthy lives. When they’re robbed of what cosmic justice is owed to them, the laws that many believe govern human lives become suddenly suspect, or are revealed as illusory.
Origin stories are in high demand. Even the early years of the extensively covered Beatles have been attracting renewed attention lately. There’s a new compilation of unreleased recordings they made for the BBC, starting with material from 1962. Which actually is relatively late: The recently released first volume of Mark Lewinsohn’s Beatles history ends in 1962, after 944 pages.
If 944 pages feels overlong, or you’ve heard enough about the Fab Four for the time being, the Numero label has quietly put together a different kind of musical origin story: the compilation Purple Snow, which explores the music that bloomed in Minneapolis in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, right before Prince exploded into national consciousness.