Before we get into this list, we have to talk a little about the term ‘yuppie’. Coined in the 1980s to describe a Gordon Gekko-style fixation on conformism, materialism and valueless self-pleasure, the term has been much used and abused over the years, and finally dispersed so widely that most people are not even really sure what a ‘yuppie’ is anymore. You still have the classic 1980s-style yupsters with the Young Republicans membership and the BMW, but there are also Green Yuppies, Indie Yuppies, Hipster Yuppies, and many other designations and classifications to contend with.
The working definition that I use is very simple. Yuppies can pretty much be boiled down to college-grad, mid-to-high-wage earners, nearly always in white-collar “settin’ down” jobs, who tend to gravitate toward major metropolitan centers. The definitive shared characteristics of all yuppie derivatives is simply this – that they value the “comfort bubble” that they live in higher than anything else in life.
In other words, when you meet a person who walks around all day with ipod earbuds in because they want to be in “a comfortable and soothing cocoon of their music”, odds are very very good that they are a yuppie.
Now, there is an absolute slew of yuppie music out there, but here I have selected ten themes that I think are emblematic of the yuppie perspective and way of life. Let’s begin –
10) Huey Lewis & The News – Hip To Be Square / I Want A New Drug – In a nod to the 1980s roots, we begin with the kings of original yuppie music, Huey Lewis and the News. This band is actually probably not that popular with most yuppies of today; however, pretty much their whole musical catalog is one big testament to (and celebration of) the yuppie ethos. It was difficult to select just one song – that’s why this entry is a tie between two, the peppy paean to conformism ‘Hip To Be Square’, and the song that proved Aldous Huxley’s prophetic vision, ‘I Want A New Drug’. With lines like ‘I used to be a renegade / but I couldn’t take the punishment / I had to settle down’, Lewis spoke directly to the Boomer generation who had grown up in the midst of the 1960s counterculture, and subsequently abandoned it for a nice, safe, comfortable suburban existence suckling at the teat of big business. And while ‘I Want A New Drug’ may not exactly be about drugs, it perfectly encapsulates the 1980s yuppie’s quest for comfortable oblivion and pleasurable submission (‘One that won’t make me nervous / wonderin’ what to do’).
9) Calloway – I Wanna Be Rich – Calloway’s childish, repetitive, vaguely calypso-ish fantasy about ‘cold cash’ would be his one and only hit song, but it apparently struck a deep chord as it ushered in the 1990s, an era that would be more P.C., touchy-feely, wishy-washy, but not really a whole lot less self-obsessed.
8) John Mayer – Waiting On The World To Change – Transitioning from the 1990s to the present, John Mayer’s inescapable song is the anthem of our latest batch of up-and-coming young yuppies. To paraphrase the lyrics – “We know that things are wrong all over, but we just don’t have the willpower to shake off the consumer-culture training we’ve grown up with, so we’ll just sit here and listen to our iPods and sip lattes at the coffee shop while we wait for someone else to do the heavy lifting. Talk to those proletarian guys, maybe they’ll do it.” Unlike the 1980s yuppie, the modern yuppie is likely to know the score about where their wealth comes from, and maybe even incorporate social justice into certain parts of their lifestyle, but when you come right down to it – if it’s a choice between egalitarianism and justice, and giving up their comforts, the comforts are going to win every time. The most wonderful irony of this song is how John sings “One day our generation / is gonna rule the population” as a 30 year old man who has the power to reach and communicate with millions of people, then turns around in interviews and calls himself a “lifestyle artist” who “doesn’t do politics. Guess we know exactly what to expect when “your generation” is in charge of the population, huh?
7) Vanessa Carlton – Making My Way Downtown – Ms. Carlton, in her obnoxiously overplayed song, paints a perfect portrait of the modern young city woman, pushing her way through faceless throngs “downtown” with a blank stare, lolling around in her own self-pity, thinking that some man or another – possibly the only genuine emotional contact she has ever had since starting her yuppie life in this unspecified metropolis – is the center of the universe and the answer to all her problems. It’s simple-minded, self-indulgent, sloppily sentimental, has a very calculated sound to it without much genuine emotion in spite of the ostensibly emotional lyrics, and is in all ways the perfect theme song for the modern Sex And The City / Ally McBeal-esque young yuppie woman’s life.
6) Dave Matthews Band – Satellite – Is Kenny G and “smooth jazz” just a little too lame for you, but the Grateful Dead is just a little too scary and ‘counterculture? The Dave Matthews Band was made for you, my friend. The long, meandering ‘jams’ of the 1960s hippie bands meet with radio-friendly, sedated melodies and the kind of generic, male-submissive romance lyrics calculated to make ladies a bit wet in the vag when coupled with a ‘cute but intense’ stage persona. Anyway, ‘Crash Into Me’ is clearly their most radio-abused single, but I would personally choose ‘Satellite’ as best representative of their whole “numb yourself with fantasies of self-centered romance” style, full of just enough unintelligible vocal expressions to make you think that the nonsense lyrics are somehow “deep” and “meaningful”.
5) Steely Dan – Deacon Blues – Steely Dan deserves special representation here, for presaging the whole yuppie movement from the 1970s, long before it actually surfaced in the cultural milieu. Though there was no formal “yuppie” at the time, their songs were written directly to the yuppies, albeit a slightly more sexually deviant and frequently more publicly intoxicated ‘primitive’ version of yuppiehood. Conservative commentator William F. Buckley once wrote something about them having a “compelling and mysterious” sound – there’s no mystery to it, Will, that was the sound of them pandering to your tastes and world-view, combined with purposely obfuscated lyrics. They’re really the musical equivalent of Henry James – all they ever wrote were dense passages devoted almost entirely to the sexual dalliances and peccadillos of the ‘upper classes’. Anyway, any of their songs about various bourgeois seduction fantasies would do I suppose, but I would single out Deacon Blues for the yuppie playlist – a transitional song for the boomer-hippies who would become yuppies, as they resolved themselves to lives of hedonism and not giving a shit about anyone but themselves, thinking that they would be outcasts from society for it, but then going on to find out in the next decade that so many of them were going that route that they could make a dominant cultural movement out of it. For bonus points, it is also total whitey blues that I can picture Chardonnay-sipping Marin County residents nodding their heads in rhythm to at a wine-tasting party, which I am sure has happened more than a few times in the history of the country.
(Side Note : Hey 19 was *almost* my choice for them, but I decided it was a little too introspective and honest for the average yuppie. Plus, most yuppies these days are actually pretty young, and 30somethings with 19 year olds isn’t that big a deal anymore anyway.)
4) The Shins – Caring Is Creepy – Oh, how could I *not* choose Caring Is Creepy for this list? What song has a more perfect title for a generation of alienated, self-absorbed isolationists? I don’t even need to say anything further, the name alone is enough.
3) Arcade Fire – No Cars Go – Most yuppies today want ‘indie’. They want ‘hipster cred’. However, they don’t want anything truly independent – that’s a little frightening, and those guys tend to say disturbing stuff about taking apart the whole socio-economic system that the yuppies depend on for lattes and cheap electronic gadgets. The ‘indie’ band that wants to pander to the yuppie demographic must thus walk an incredibly fine line, but if they can pull it off, they are rewarded by very good financial and commercial success. It isn’t even that there is so much specifically remarkable in terms of yuppiedom with them, it’s just that they are presently on the crux of this whole faux-indie wave that includes many other bands such as Neutral Milk Hotel and Guided By Voices. If I have to pick one song by Arcade Fire it’ll be … uh … No Cars Go, because it’s the only one I can remember right now, and hell if I’m listening to all their songs for some AC article. Any one is as good as another, really.
2) Ryan Adams – I Taught Myself How To Grow Old – Ryan Adams is up there with Dave Matthews and John Mayer in the “sensitive guitarist who drives the ladies wild” mold, except that he has slightly more hipster cred because the radios don’t give him any play. Oh, and he released an album that said “Fuck you” one time. Adams is a little different as he’s part of the ‘alt-country’ genre, which is country infused with just enough navel-gazing, vague spirituality and self-indulgent romantic nonsense that it suddenly becomes palatable to the modern urban yupster. My choice of his for this list is definitely I Taught Myself How To Grow Old – “Most of the time I got nothing to say / When I do it’s nothing and nobody’s there to listen anyway / I know I’m probably better off this way / I just listen to the voices on the TV ’til I’m tired / My eyes grow heavy and I fade away. Comforting sloppy self-pity and willfull jerk-off powerlessness at it’s absolute finest, ladies and gentlemen.
And now, the reigning heavyweight champion of Yuppie Tunes –
1) Paolo Nutini – New Shoes – Apparently this song started to get ‘buzz’ online in America about a year ago (probably initiated by the record companies themselves), and is now currently annoying the shit out of everyone by being in a Puma commercial that is run approximately 100 times a day on nearly every station. Aside from the lyrics, which can be summed up as basically saying “Hey, the world is going to hell, but I got some NOO SHOES and a party to go to so everything is OK!”, everything else about this song is completely pre-disposed to the modern yuppie sensibility – catchy hooks and vocals, cooing singer who does the “guitarist-ladies man” thing, and even has a Portuguese-sounding name that appeals to the rootless yuppie desire to consume as many tasty nibbles of other cultures as possible (even though the kid is actually Scottish – go figure where he got that name from). Anyway – just buy some nice little consumer good, and all the troubles in the world go away. What lesson better sums up the yuppie ethos than that?
