Youth Culture Costs Too Much For The Youth

The Rogers Sisters “Money Matters”

The best songs by The Rogers Sisters offer moments of ecstatic catharsis but never let go of a central tension. Their records came out during the middle of the George W. Bush era, and reflect an anxiety and hopelessness particular to that period – offended and angry, but also resigned and powerless. It’s the sound of getting worked up about something, but then realizing you’ve achieved nothing at all.

Most artists who made anti-Bush music in the ‘00s were roundly mocked for it. Not by right wingers, but by left-leaning indie music critics who felt like any statement made in a song was ham-fisted and gauche. So even The Rogers Sisters, whose lyrics fell in an odd place between direct statement and cryptic suggestion, were criticized at length in the Pitchfork review of their best record The Invisible Deck for being too strident and pedantic. (Brian Howe is a good writer, but the tone of that review is extremely unfair.) I remember feeling this peculiar anxiety too, and thinking that nearly any “political” sentiment in art was awkward, and that somehow any statement of dissent needed to be extensively vetted or something. Everyone was so embarrassed to be caught being anti-Bush or left wing in public, even if that’s exactly what they were. Doesn’t this all seem quaint now? These days you’d be more likely to be dragged for being apolitical.

“Money Matters” is hardly a pedantic song. It’s actually rather oblique in structure and hard to parse beyond its skepticism of the way “youth culture” and indeed most other forms of counterculture require the purchase of goods and services as a form of gatekeeping. Jennifer Rogers sings the song with the bitter pithiness of an outsider looking in – observant and wise, but removed and alienated. It’s not necessarily an anti-capitalist song, at least in as much as Rogers doesn’t see capitalism as anything she can escape, but it’s definitely about the way money and class permeates and corrupts everything, even opposition to such things.

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