On Pretentiousness

Commonplace Newsletter #44

I did an image search for ‘pretentious’ and men wearing berets cropped up quite frequently. But this guy seems happy enough with his sartorial decisions. Which is kind of my point…

As I type this opening sentences I’m listening to the new Cookin Soul tape through headphones. Cookin Soul- for those of you who aren’t clued in- is a Hip Hop producers from Spain. He makes beats from 90’s style boom bap drum kits and sample flips from dusty old vinyl. The visuals he makes to accompany these tracks on his YouTube channel are all mash-ups of anime and Michael Jordan dunks and black cinema, all bathed in post-production faux VCR tracking lines.

Yes, these computer produced videos are carefully crafted to deliberately look like a copy of a copy of a copy of something recorded onto Memorex from late night tv in 1995. It’s a highly effective aesthetic.

But when combined with footage of the man himself and his consmopolitan Spanish penthouse with its vintage samplers and vintage games consoles and vintage vinyl and vintage toys and trinkets it can all come across as a bit, well, pretentious. A European man living in a fantasy land version of a prelapsarian hip hop America that never was.

But even if all of this is pretentious, then so what? Why do we throw out this accusation so readily? Why do we care? What’s so bad about being pretentious anyway?

Let’s see if we can figure this out...

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Pretentiousness, Authenticity and Playing at Adulthood

As regular readers know, one of the leitmotifs that runs through these essays concerns how words change their meaning over time and how digging into the etymology of everyday bits of language is often an enlightening experience. It always pays to own an old physical dictionary or two.

So. We have pretentious, from the Latin, pretentiously enough, with prae meaning ‘before’ and tendere meaning ‘to extend’. So the pretentious, then, is something that you hold out in front of you, like a mask or a shield. It is a front, a form of protection.

It also has associations with pretending and playing. And this I suspect is where the revulsion towards pretence starts to come in to effect. It is fine for children to play make-believe and to try on different personalities and roles. It is fine for children to have imagination because pretending is how children navigate and figure out the world around them. It is a way of experimenting with your environment without risk. Which is acceptable if you are a child.

But by the dawning of adulthood this becomes less permissible and such play becomes a pretentious activity. You are supposed to have things figured out by the time your teenage years have ended. Authenticity is now the name of the game, whatever that means. You identity should be as static as the unmoving photograph on your drivers licence which confirms that you are now old enough to drink and vote and marry and play the lottery. The time for childish things is over.

This authenticity ideal is all well and good. In theory. But anyone who has held a job knows that such authenticity crumbles in the face of the world of work. Jobs are performative. You pretend to be upbeat, or to be professional, or to care, or to hold whatever nonsensical set of ‘core values’ that the company asks/demands/implies/coerces you to hold. You aren’t so much a waiter as you play the role of a waiter, you aren’t so much a nurse as you are someone playing the role of a nurse in a never-ending Samuel Beckett meets J Arthur Rank production called ‘Late Shift’. This is what adulthood is for the most part.

So pretentiousness is bad, or at least culturally frowned up, but performance is necessary so you don’t lose either your mind or your job or both. 

It’s all a question then, of playing the game of not playing games. Of pretending to be real rather than really pretending. Certain forms of pretence and role playing are fine and are not readily labelled as such. Others lend the lie to the whole thing and must be shot down. Hence why the accusation of pretentiousness is usually wielded as a weapon. It keeps people in line...

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Pretentiousness as Means Of Escape

Reflecting on my recent piece about ‘The Wall in The Head’ I see that the way that I scaled my own personal wall was through a bit of covert pretentiousness. I faked it until I made it. I imagined my way out. And I saw that the insult/accusation of pretentiousness was often used against dreamers such as myself as a means of keeping the wall in place and the would-be escapee stuck behind it. 

No one wants to be called pretentious. It is the opposite of the supposed virtue of authenticity- it smacks of being stuck up, of putting on airs, of having ideas above your station, of thinking you are better than the rest of them. All of these are forms of class betrayal, and so all means by which the crabs keep you from shimmying up the side of the bucket to freedom. 

To be called pretentious is to be told you are acting out of turn, that you are doing things that you are not qualified or allowed to do by virtue of your background and socio-economic status. To be pretentious, then, is a snub, a rejection, a palm in the face of the place you are from and of the people who live there.

(And still people wonder why writers drinks, why artists do drugs, why creative people of humble means appear to not quite be the full ticket.)

But you can look at this a different way. A more hopeful way. If pretentiousness is an accusation and a threat to keep you in your place in the societal pyramid, then that must be because it works. You get more flak when you are over the target, as the saying goes.

As Howard Devoto of the punk bands The Buzzcocks and Magazine once said: ‘Pretentiousness is interesting. At least you are making an effort. Your ambition has to outstrip your ability at some point.’ So even if you are a pretentious knobhead wearing a ridiculous outfit, at least it shows that you haven’t given in yet. That you still care. That you still have dreams and an interest and belief in art and culture and life and fun.

Ridicule is nothing to be scared of, as the uber-pretentious Adam Ant once sang. I mean it is actually a little scary of course, but it inevitably turns out that was once labelled pretentious and ridiculous suddenly becomes eccentric and charming once the person doing it becomes successful.

Success is the philosophers stone that turns base material to gold. 

See, art that is labelled pretentious is often risky, and risk entails failure. But failure leads to success. It shows you are trying, that you are taking chances and trying to be innovative. Pretentiousness then is a necessary condition of the artistic process. It shows you are perhaps over-reaching, as Devoto says, but how do you discover how long your reach extends, or where your current abilities end, unless you try and reach beyond them?

Pretentiousness as a pejorative is a lazy dismissal from people who hardly have any skin in the game. It’s potshots from the sidelines from the intellectually insecure, it’s the crab claw trying to pull you down from the barrel lip. To be pretentious is pretty harmless but to accuse someone of it is anything but. Because it can have awful consequences. It can make a promising beginner give up. Imagine how much poorer the worlds of art, literature, music, cinema, cooking, design, fashion, would be if every youngster who took a shine to them was successful discouraged by the puts downs of the ignorant.

Art and aesthetics and beauty and the act of creation makes life worth living. And such things necessitate varying degrees of pretentiousness. Don’t allow yourself to be shut off from them by crab-bucket convention. And don’t police others in the self-same fashion. Because the world that that leads to is a boring place of endless beige. A place where the Spanish penthouse is just four walls and a roof.

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