Elterman/bradelterman.com
Twenty-five-year-old Mac Demarco has been called many things since he broke onto the indie scene with his third album, Salad Days: "Goofball," "brohemian hero," even the "Salvador Dali of indie rock." Above all, "slacker" was widely used to describe Demarco, who recently released Another One, a 7-track EP which was critically received the same way Mac welcomes his fans into his New York City home. The Guardian described this new album as the "amiable slacker's charming return." Sounds just like a Sundance movie, doesn't it? New Musical Express (NME) took a step forward and crowned Demarco "The Slacker Superstar" in an article published in July. A bit more than a year ago, Spin saw in the drumstick-up-the-rectum multi-instrumentalist a "slacker with a Heart of Gold".
Demarco's apparent frivolity may be thanked for casting a somehow brighter light on an expression mostly used in a derogatory manner which referred to striking laborers. It seems to have been popularized during WWI and WWII, alluding to anyone reluctant to commit to the war's effort. The word has since been applied to anyone that is generally unwilling to work, get up in the morning or find the inner motivation to do anything at all besides slumbering, a syndrome generally referred to as Sofia Coppola syndrome.
Generation X
The expression gained a new meaning when, then a struggling moviemaker, now a universally acclaimed director, Richard Linklater released Slacker in 1991, a $20,000 budget non-narrative movie depicting the wanderings of twentyish social misfits. Shot with non-professional actors, using mostly autobiographic details and homemade accessories, the film follows oddballs, nobodies going in circles from one place to another and having the kind of conversations you would have with wannabe hippies on some remote Indonesian island. They are all slackers, as imagined by Jim Jarmusch in his 1980 film Permanent Vacation, which resonates as a great slacker motto, by the way. Allie, a young man, is strolling through New York City, peeping, talking to strangers, before eventually sailing penniless on a ship to Europe.
While no one in Slacker sets sails, these estranged, askew characters portrayed a confused, yet unflinching post-modernist generation willing to go astray in spite of society looking down at it. At the same moment, author Douglas Coupland, a Canadian slacker-lover, published a much applauded fiction, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. The book described the lives of three friends, Andy, Dag and Claire, in their endearing journey on top of Maslow's pyramid -- self-actualization, which eventually culminated in the opening of a hotel in Mexico. "Don, like so many people I know in their twenties, can do anything he wants, but instead he is doing nothing. Or, rather, he is doing many things, but there is no seeming pattern and he has no long-range plan in mind. His biggest fear in life, like that of British aristocrats in Evelyn Waugh novel, is boredom." Here is the gist of slackerdom, as stated by Andy, the book's main narrator.
Linklater and Coupland, both regarded as spokesmen for the X generation, met for the first time on Sonya Live, hosted by CNN, in a fiveteen minutes window. The interest put in the two hyped guys' respective works was marginal, though. As Linklater reports it in another meeting with Coupland arranged by Wired's editor in 1994: "Right after our segment they announced: "Well, thanks guys. Next, how to teach your cat to use your bathroom." And they showed a cat walking around a toilet seat. We were sandwiched in between cats peeing in toilets."
Slacker's Legacy
Interestingly enough, both Coupland and Linklater admitted that Generation X probably did not exist. Coupland was the first to publicly debunk his own pretentions on CNN in 1994: "This is going to sound heretical coming from me, but I don't think there is a Generation X. What I think a lot of people mistake for this thing that might be Generation X is just the acknowledgment that there exists some other group of people whatever, whoever they might be, younger than, say, Jane Fonda's baby boom." Anyway, slacking as a lifestyle eventually achieved recognition. Slackers were the main subject of 90s indie movies: Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991), Kevin Smith's Clerks (94), Larry Clark's Kids (95), , Wes Anderson's first feature film, Bottle Rocket (96), and, of course, Linklater's following movies, especially the Before Sunrise trilogy spread out over twenty years which still conveyed a somewhat romantic, bohemian idea of slacking, exemplified through Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's never ending love story.
Although undergoing tremendous variations, from Larry Clark's depiction of desperate, incestuous skate-boarders in Kids to Wes Anderson's melancholic, suicidal idlers in The Royal Tenenbaums, slackerdom has been since thriving through stoner movies: How High, Pineapple Express, Harold and Kumar, etc. The Cohen brother's film The Big Lebowski brilliantly demonstrated how slackers grow older in a self-deprecating way, allegedly. Think Hank Moody in Californication, or even comedian Louis CK in the eponymous show Louie, whose life of self-loathing basically consists of doing nothing but jerking off and eating ice-cream.
Society Loves Losers
It does, and we do. We love losers. More than anything else, we love successful losers. We bask in the idea that most successful musicians, businessmen, athletes once were slackers; drowsy, flagging, idlers. And we tend to forget that most of them had to undergo years of "McJobs" as Douglas Coupland puts it to refer to low-qualified, low-paid jobs, years of unhealthy life, hanging by a thread. One good example of slacker romanticism concerns Grammy-winner, American musician and singer Beck. Beck was just a small, underground musician whose blatant inability to rap and a great deal of self-deprecation led to write Loser, which became a worldwide hit in 1994. How ironic. As a 1994 Rolling Stone article then put it, Beck had "landed himself a major-label deal and become the face of the slacker generation." The artist, then 23, was portrayed by RS as a slacker-cliché: "Beck dropped out of high school in ninth grade, worked some lousy jobs and started playing in public. [...] He doesn't want to discuss whether or not he was ever homeless." One can almost feel the thrill in the journalist's voice when asking: "Were you ever cold and beat up?" Twenty-one years later, now safe and sound, Beck declared to The Big Issue that "almost everyone I knew worked menial labour on minimum wage -- we all had jobs, we took whatever we could get. We didn't have any money. The whole slacker thing was just incredibly condescending and wrong. It was a way to marginalise an entire generation."
In that respect, Demarco belongs to the slackers' tradition. Before moving to a new home in Far Rockaway, New York City, whose address is given at the end of Another One's last track, DeMarco shared a cupboard-sized room with his girlfriend Kiera. As he himself put it in an interview for the Guardian dated from March 2014: "I mean, I live like a scumbag. But it's cheap." There probably was nothing glamorous about recording his album Salad Days in what could have been Bin Laden's hiding cave. Salad Days, besides referring to a common idiom originated in Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra, may very well literally refer to Mac's own slacker life doing McJobs, namely stocking vegetables. "Salad days are gone."
Think twice.
"A more modern notion would be people who are ultimately being responsible to themselves and not wasting their time in a realm of activity that has nothing to do with who they are or what the might be ultimately striving for." Linklater's own definition of what slackers are, as stated in an interview given to the Austin Chronicle in 1991, is appealing. It even is the subject of Nick O'Kelly and Patrick Schulte' aspirational book, Live on the Margin. Both leading successful careers, they decided to give way to unpredictability and a life full of surprises and short-term plans. Slackerdom truly has been an evolving notion since Linklater's misfits' discussions on death after life, conspiracies or freemason. Was it all a beautiful, social fantasy ? One thing is sure: no one wants to be called a starving loser. "Slacker" sounds much more glamorous.