Altered States

America's in trouble. Where are the artists?

Long time no see. I apologize for the long pause between posts, but I spent the last month in the United States. This was the longest time I have spent in my home country since moving to Tokyo twenty-three years ago, in the spring of 2003. I was giving talks in Hawaii and Chicago, and helping Hiroko promote her new book, Eight Million Ways to Happiness, at a special event in Washington DC. I highly recommend giving it a read, and not simply because the world could use a little happiness right now. It’s an amazing book all around. But more on that in a later post.

Most of the time, I have to watch American happenings at a fourteen time zone remove in Japan. For this last month I was able to experience things in realtime. While we had a great trip on a personal level, all of our travels and triumphs and travails played out against a backdrop of sad and scary times. As sad and as scary as any I’ve experienced, and I’m saying that as someone who was living in the Washington, DC area during 9/11, working just a stone’s throw from the Pentagon, and who lived in Tokyo during the earthquake and nuclear meltdowns of 3/11.

The rule of law seems to have been replaced by Presidential whim, and masked militias of true believers are terrorizing American cities, even murdering citizens, with seeming impunity. Watching things unfold in daily installments on the news, something nagged at me. It wasn’t that I was surprised things were going badly. But it felt as though something were missing from the equation. It took a while for me to put my finger on what it was. Where were the artists?

I grew up, as did many a young American Gen X’er, immersed in the artistic products of Sixties and Seventies counterculture. Newsreels of protests. Movies and novels and comics, posters and poetry, peace signs and slogans, all echoes from the Boomers’ great coming of age. And most of all, the music. By the time I was a teen, deejays and admen had already repackaged voices such as John Lennon, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan into the neutered genre of “classic rock,” but there was no sugarcoating the ferocity of their songs. There’s a man with a gun over there / telling me I got to beware, sang Buffalo Springfield in a 1966 song that could well have been written in 2026. So might Neil Young’s refrain about soldiers cutting us down in “Ohio.” Growing up in the far less tumultuous Eighties and Nineties, I could only imagine an America so tormented that its artists felt compelled to pen lyrics like these. It felt almost like fantasy.

No more. Yet I don’t seem to be hearing songs, or seeing posters or slogans or much of anything, really. Far be it from me to demand anyone create art. But it’s hard to remember another time when things went sideways and artists weren’t among the first responders, culturally speaking. When I left Maryland for Tokyo back in 2003, plenty of tastemakers were pushing back against the invasion of Iraq before Dubya even had a chance to declare his “mission accomplished.” We had Outkast’s “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad),” Green Day’s “American Idiot,” and The Black Eyed Peas’ “Where is the Love?” among many others. And consider that the George Floyd / BLM protests spawned a great deal music and art in the 2020s, too.

So where are the artists now? I don’t really have an answer, but the question reminds me of W. David Marx’s 2025 book Blank Space: A Brief History of the 21^st Century, which describes how American cultural innovation has seemingly ground to a halt. There is no counterculture anymore, he argues. Rather, there is a “counter-counterculture” of conservative cynics, and a mainstream culture where “selling out” has become the singular goal for creatives. There is little room for artistic innovation in either of these paradigms, which is why things felt stagnant even before the unpleasantness of the current moment.

Now I wonder if the current moment is actually a product of that cultural stagnation. A lot has changed in the five years since the artistic outpouring of BLM. In a bizarre moment dominated by shameless characters doing bizarre things, there isn’t much satisfaction in criticism, parody, or speaking truth to power. Meanwhile, the online platforms where we gather are run by uber-wealthy sycopants who curry favor by eagerly quashing anything that might upset the authorities. Combined with the ceaseless flow of bad news it’s no wonder things feel hopeless.

But hopeless times are exactly when and why we need art. And maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places. Just this morning, on the most recent installment of his Garbage Day newsletter, Ryan Broderick wrote of being moved to tears by a song about Alex Pretti, the man who was murdered by ICE on the streets of Minneapolis last week. Garbage Day is quite possibly the most terminally online newsletter in existence, but tellingly, Broderick didn’t hear the song on the internet. He heard it live, in a tiny club in Brooklyn.

One protest song in one club does not a movement make. But it shows the artists are out there. Maybe the movement is just getting started. Maybe the day will come when future generations have to listen to their work to imagine what it must have felt like to live through such trying times. One can hope.