J.D. Salinger and The Rebellious Youth

J.D. Salinger developed perhaps the most resonant and pervasive portrait of a rebellious youth in the post-war period. That conceptual personage, embodied by the textual life of Holden Caufield, has informed the aesthetic spheres of not only other literary works but also music, film, and visual art. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye is still a staple for American high school English curriculums, read equally in the hills, valleys, plains, and inner cities of America. In the coming years, I imagine we will only begin parsing out Salinger’s influence on our understanding of maturity, moral dissonance, integrity, and ennui. The Guardian started in the right direction with an article meditating on whether the reclusive writer might have laid the groundwork for the contemporary rock star.

It’s often said that the character of Holden Caulfield invented the teenager. I’d argue that, in some sense, Caulfield also set the mould for our modern notion of the rock star – damaged, hyper-sensitive, infinitely cool, creative, hungry for sensation, an authentic voice in a world of phonies. Kurt Cobain, Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen, Richey Manic, Gerard Way are all Holden Caulfields in their own way. Even Thom Yorke, with his “lost child” shtick, on songs such as Street Spirit (Fade Out) – the thin-skinned loner wandering the streets at night, adrift in a sea of heartless modernity.

I might qualify that Caufied’s character represents more so a conflicted self-awareness of the impossibility of attaining pure authenticity. It’s a tense sentiment which I believe is paralleled by the most poignant musicians of our time.

Jump to the Guardian article written by Luke Lewis.