In a series called Mondo Bullshittio, let’s talk about some of the most glaring hypocrisies in pop culture… and all that it affects.
During this, the coronavirus apocalypse, or what some insensitive youths (for insensitivity has long been the hallmark of youth) have decided to refer to as “boomer remover,” Aaliyah’s old adage/song, “Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number” simply isn’t ringing true anymore. At least not for those in the age bracket that COVID-19 is most dangerous to. Then again, the grand hypocrisy of the song was that it always applied to young people. Those who felt that their “teen-ness” was getting in the way of being taken seriously. It’s something Billie Eilish has also ripped off of late, with her most recent world tour discussing, among other topics, the reason why she chooses to be the sexless icon of a century. Even so, Eilish still never one-upped Aaliyah in terms of getting her start so early. Because yeah, it’s cool to record a sleeper hit at fourteen, but did you get signed to a label at age twelve, whereupon you were introduced to the wolf that is R. Kelly as your “mentor”? Na, didn’t think so. Just another tick in the Pussy column for Gen Z.
Any who, back to the fact that Aaliyah and those in her demographic (at the time of releasing the track) wield the “age ain’t nothing but a number defense” only for themselves, finding it shouldn’t apply to those who actually transcend into that “undesirable” category: being full-stop old. What use do they have for such a platitude when their life is over and no one wants them around anyway? Finding them irrelevant and anachronistic enough to warrant the advent of something like “boomer killer.” And then, with regard to how we see ourselves versus how the world sees us, there is this other element regarding the death toll of coronavirus: old people do not want to view themselves as old. Sometimes cannot, no matter how their body screams at them internally and from the reflection in the mirror. Because yes, they, too, believed Aaliyah on some level when she declared that infamous lie.
As the melodramatic piano opening ensues during the music video, Aaliyah peers at us over her then signature shades, as though to let you know her mysteriousness is why you should trust her to have all the answers. But it doesn’t take long to realize that the entire reason she’s been touting this little “ism” was thanks to R. Kelly’s grotesque influence (the lyric, “Your eyes are callin’ me to your heart” is enough to make one retch… we all know what “heart” is a euphemism for to Kelly). For as her crew approaches a slightly “more mature” dude’s crew, it’s clear she’s just using this line as an excuse to make him see her as a viable sexual object (kind of like when Liv Tyler as Corey in Empire Records claims, “I’m not a baby anymore” to Rex Manning [Maxwell Caulfield] in the midst of trying to seduce him). As if that was ever an issue for Lolita types. It has nothing to do with empowering those in a 50+ age group to not feel as though their life has ended because everyone treats you like a pariah when you show the slightest sign of a wrinkle or a gray hair (and, no, Helen Mirren’s existence is not enough to change the way things are).
Yet many “boomers”–a now all-encompassing term, it would seem, for anyone who is not Eilish’s age (even if millennials are still in denial about that)–have taken it upon themselves to embrace this message at a time when it has never been more perilous for them to do so. For if you played this song to Corona, he would laugh in your face as he proceeded to let his death properties overtake your aged and decrepit body, snickering sadistically as he whispers, “Still think age is just a number?”
Right now, more than ever, the pandemic is serving to remind us all that this world has always belonged to the zygotes, what with their superpower of immunity and inherent nonplussedness–and we’re just living in it until we all get Logan’s Run’d by the natural putting out to pasture that comes with such phenomena as not having a TikTok account. So maybe “boomers” do know what they’re doing when they choose to flout the warnings about the especial dangerousness of this virus to them. Who wants to remain in such an ageist realm anyway? Let the non-boomers see how it feels when “the passion that flows within,” as Aaliyah mentions at one point during the song, curdles up inside of them and congeals. Rendering true understanding of the distortion behind the hit that launched this icon’s career.
