There's something really deep about #metoo, "Cancel Culture," and "wokeness" in general. Among it is what I think is a general rejection of the edgelord culture that burst in to the mainstream in the late 1960s with Woodstock and continued on through Generation X, with grunge, gangsta rap, MTV, Lollapolooza, violent video games and reality television.

When I was in an Uber car last year, I noticed a driver was playing nothing but instrumental music. This is something I liked growing up but it was atypical. It was the instrumental hip-hop variety - Blockhead, DJ Shadow, DJ Krush, Massive Attack, etc. I asked him why he chose this kind of music and he said that it did not alienate or trigger (another woke term) clients. He added that the lyrics to some hip-hop, which was still his favorite genre, was just "too much."

There's a radio station up in Seattle, Washington called KIXI. It's an easy listening station. Their tagline is "music as cool now as it was then." The station has been playing "beautiful music" since 1951, but when it was being marketed during the early 2000s, it seemed to appeal to Christian families that wanted something to accompany their right wing talk radio. While listening to it recently, I couldn't help but think that that Uber driver would appreciate it, and indeed I did recommend it to him. 

All that edgy music from the 60s in to the 2000s, ultimately, was the music of free market capitalism. It was the soundtrack of people fiending in a stripped down system in which you had to hustle and work non-stop if you wanted to survive. If you didn't work, you had to come up with some scheme to get people to throw money at you. 50 Cent encapsulated this the best with his classic 2003 album - Get Rich or Die Trying. That was as close as mainstream rap ever got to a concept album (underground hip-hop did it plenty of times) with the concept being the triumph of a parentless young black boy in a system that literally tried to kill and discard him.

Wokeism differs from the liberalism of Baby Boomers in that, whereas Boomers deconstructed norms, millenials appear to be seeking to establish new ones. They are not simply going back to what was there before Boomers took on the task of deconstruction (although the rise of the Alt Right and Trumpism certainly represents that) but are establishing new norms and showing that they are serious about these norms by enforcing them.

The "Marilyn Manson Reckoning," as the New Yorker called it. The accusations against the rock star are fairly hard to deny - he has taken promotional shots wherein he has shown off his swastika tattoos, and fellow goth rocker turned soundtrack composer Trent Reznor disowned him long ago in the 1990s, calling him someone who would "step on anybody's face to succeed and cross any line of decency." Wes Borland, formerly of Limp Bizkit, confirmed that the accusations were true and that Manson is "fucked up."

Manson's whole aesthetic was being fucked up, and he lasted as long as he did because the Generation X audience loved it. Millenials don't and so he is cancelled. There were plenty of people on the Religious Right who tried bringing down Marilyn Manson, blaming him for the school shootings that occurred in the late 1990s and 2000s, but it was largely liberals like Michael Moore who defended him. His documentary Bowling for Columbine extoled Manson as intelligent and in no way responsible for mass shootings:

From Moore's podcast, it seems that he sees himself every bit as part of the woke progressive movement, and Google search results show that Moore has stayed totally silent about accusations leveled at the rock star. Manson's reckoning rejects the notions of Bowling for Columbine though - his accusers are asserting that his music completely represented what Brian Warner (his real name) was like as a person.

Over the past few years, Manson has also enjoyed a second career in Russia, which has had correlation in time with a rising Alt Right movement that is also seen as having support from elements in that country. (Given that the Columbine shooters were overtly racist and fascinated with terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, it wouldn't be difficult to tag them as early signs of Alt Right extremism.) All that might make Manson's comments about "listening" to the Columbine killers a bit disconcerting 20 years on. 

Time will tell what culture will come out of wokeism. Some burgeoning pop stars, like Lil Nas X, seem to have just recreated the shock of Marilyn Manson for a whole new audience. However, there may be an audience for a new set of norms.