This post is about the Kennedy assassination. Carles adapts the inescapable question for those of the Baby Boomer generation -- Where were you when you heard that Kennedy had been shot? -- to make it applicable to a passing trend in pop culture. While it is obvious that Carles is making a trenchant comment about diminished political engagement and the disintegrated social sphere that today's youth face, and the way in which a hypermediated society fixates itself on trivial, staged culture-industry pseudoevents. But more subversively, Carles suggests that the Kennedy assassination too was a pseudoevent, a prearranged media spectacle (along with its sequel, the advent of Jack Ruby) meant to propel any number of lucrative entertainment-industry opportunities and kickoff the acceleration of the news cycle as an accepted inevitability. And in this way, political assassination is trivialized, neutralized as a revolutionary gesture and assimilated into the society of the spectacle.
But then one must consider the other implications of the implicit comparison Carles is making, regarding the conspiracy that led to Kennedy's death and the one that has led to Animal Collective's popularity. Carles, in the guise of offering random quotes from readers, actually assembles a rogue's gallery of co-conspirators: the "tween" son of an alcoholic, expressing his codependency and confusion by latching on to the band's ersatz tribalism; the middle aged parent who is trying to preserve his cultural relevance in face of the socially enforced isolation and dyadic withdrawal that comes with modern parenting in capitalist cultures; the colleges student floundering around for cultural tokens that can be her generation's calling card; the underemployed culture-industry attache looking to hype a trend and establish his reputation as intermediary and dependable flunky; and the stupified drug addict who perhaps represents the projected ideal fan conjured by the labile and somnolent musical approach favored by the band. The unlikely amalgamation of this cohort has turned the group into a signifier for something larger than its insignificant music. As Carles declaims, "WE MADE IT, YALL. THIS IS OUR TIME." Animal Collective stands in as the unifying force among an idiot vanguard who have achieved a coherent visibility on the contemporary social scene. Their defiant inconsequentiality has become a revolutionary force of its own, foretelling the ultimate triumph, as the privilege of boredom finally becomes a universal right.
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