The Evolution of Neurodivergence and Modern Rock Music
A quick look back over 75 years of mass survival behaviors propagating rock music and the epigenetic functions of gene expressions under constant duress.
Not to geek out on generational differences, timelines, public tolerance, and mass acceptance of non-typical behaviors in human beings, but the non-diagnosed guy writing this newsletter is a bonafide, unapologetic, 100% Grade A, galvanized Gen X’er. For all the Millennials, Gen Z’ers, and Gen Alphas reading this: you are welcome.
We took the beatings so you didn’t have to.
No, I am not here to tell you how great things used to be in the 90’s. It sucked. It didn’t suck any more or any less than your current world sucks. It was just a different sort of suck that absolutely did not bend to non-binary views on mental abnormalities and disruptive behaviors spawned by the very machine marching to the militaristic cadence of conforming predictability; a 4/4 time signature locking in the repeatable and profitable formula of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, BIG guitar solo, end. At some point in the human evolutional sequence, that formula had to break out and spawn something new. The environment demands it. The neural network generates it.
The neurotypical ruling class and institutions didn’t get the memo. By the time 1990 rolled around, teenagers were in full-blown masking mode without the slightest idea masking was a thing. We just knew we got punished if the weird and unusual thing inside us ever saw the light of day. When an organism hides a part of itself to blend in with the status quo, it creates a tense friction inside the neural network: a misread between mind and environment. Without an adequate and safe outlet to explore the weird and unusual things, the organism must regulate its own tension buildup. In the late 1980’s the medical and science worlds secretly coined the term “self-stimulating” or “self-stimming.” If we were caught doing this in a formal setting, like church, school, funerals, or theater rehearsals, we got popped in the head, thumped on the hands, or punched in the arm. Worst case: expulsion.
Fast forward to the 2010’s and social media, the public world became well aware and arguably more accepting of these self-regulatory behaviors to manage the weird and unusual things within. By the 2020’s, “stimming” was a universal term and behavioral approach to emotional and sensory self-regulation. Stimming was no longer punished or verböten; it was a welcome characteristic of child-like and youthful individualization in a world increasingly accepting of divergence.
Now just for a moment, go back to 1990. What was the weird and unusual thing we had to mask? What was so strange and unruly about the monster living inside us? What was the evolutional mutation being seeded in our psyches that scared the normie world to sheer shock and panic where they had to literally beat it out of us?
It wasn’t an evolutional mutation. It was an environmental assault on an analog organism under arrest by digital optimization and algorithmic compliance. Seemingly overnight, the artificially-engineered environment became the aggressor to a biological organism unable to escape and unwilling to collapse. We won’t see the actual gene mutation for another 20,000 years. What happens to a global organism who cannot escape, or mutate fast enough from an environmental assault that leads to a perpetual fight-or-flight syndrome in an artificial reality?
Epigenetic fawning. The primordial backup survival mechanism activated in a real-time, hostile environment by a flood of continuous stress signals from the brain. Epigenetics is the chemical tagging of a fixed DNA system; fawning is an autonomic nervous system response to survive a threat it cannot defeat or outrun. As we get older, masking becomes the conscious and cognitive defense function to hide the weird and unusual thing within us to mimic neurotypical behaviors to fit in. To not get punished for the self-regulatory system within us that keeps us from exploding.
Epigenetics is the chemical switch (methyl tags) that turns gene expressions ON or OFF in order to survive the real-time assault in the environment. If we do the epigenetic math of calculating an unknown amount of continuous exposure to a threat, we have to look at the generation and environment that birthed Gen X’ers. What the hell happened between 1950 and well into the 60’s and 70’s to birth an entire generation with methylated gene tagging to survive the hostility sensed by the brain but unacknowledged or undetected by the mass psyche of the time?
The forced implementation and wide-scale use of fluorescent lighting; an economical magnetic ballast operating at a mandated 60Hz from a standardized industrial power grid. What this means is that the “booming” working class generation of Post War America, operated in factories, schools, churches, hospitals, aircraft manufacturing plants, military hangars, and public buildings from 1950, through the 60’s and well into the 70’s where the shadowless, oscillating, white light turned off and on 120 times per second, creating the artificial and hostile environment sensed by the brain, undetected by the mind. Humans were the first organisms dumb enough to engineer an artificial threat in the environment where epigenetics had to be used as a last resort to advance peak human and industrial optimization, nearly 24 hours a day.
Gen X’ers were not the first ones born with neurological misreads of perceived safety between the mind/brain/environment complex embedded in their DNA by their parents. We were the first generation to witness the divergence from an analog, tactile life into a digital, artificial life with methylated DNA functions turned OFF. If an organism refuses, or is unable to leave a hostile environment, and continues to mask to keep the peace and conform, the options are: 1) loss of biological integrity (health) to ensure systemic compliance or 2) radical neurodivergent isolation by shutting down social and environmental receptors to fawn compliance and regulate stress.
Peak human optimization and compliance was the goal, fluorescent lighting was the gateway drug. And if you think Gen X’ers had it bad, you should have seen the trauma imposed on indigenous groups and black slaves who were yanked from analog tribes and cultures and forced to “adapt” into an artificial society of hierarchy and industrial routine. Non-compliance punishable by death.
Let’s bring it home. If methylated epigenetics can be turned OFF by the chemical stressors of the brain, it means they can be turned back ON by the chemical opposites of prolonged threat and constant survival mode. Remove the threat and allow the body to heal itself.
What was the weird and unusual thing back in 1990 we had to mask? If we haven’t received the gene mutation yet, there is zero difference between a hyper-focused, hyper-fixated organism of the hunter/gatherer tribe, ancient African tribe, or any indigenous group of the modern world and the organism sitting inside a classroom in Anytown, USA in 1990, self-regulating to survive the environment. The weird and unusual thing became the environment itself, culminating in biological rejection; those reliably predicted to not conform to peak modernization and industrial optimization within an artificially manufactured society.
Neurodivergent kids who could walk into a classroom and literally count the number of times the fluorescent lights flickered on and off were being tracked and filtered by the algorithmic egregore of compliance. Instead of being unconditionally accepted by the tribe as an elite hunter or ecological pattern predictor, the modern environment began rejecting those who diverted from compliance, forcing the organism into internal coping mechanisms like stimming and asymmetrical expressions in art and creativity. Or addiction. And/or suicide.
In 1990, the modern progression of rock music, simultaneously deviating and evolving from the thing before it, demanded a departure from predictable 4/4 patterns and conformity of the established formulas of profit and success, strictly by existing in the era of its own temporal and spatial intersection. If psychedelic rock of the 60’s and 70’s spawned synthesized rock of the 80’s, using digital electronics to mimic analog features of mechanical forces to stimulate the mind, the departure would have to either incorporate the stimming of rejection or the masking of individual behaviors to reflect the painful thing we had to hide.
In 1990, the rock band Tool chose to illuminate the thing hiding in the shadow by forcing the listener to walk through it. Whether they knew it or not, Tool began a somatic departure from modern rock music like grunge and alt rock to construct a functional blueprint exit strategy out of collective rejection and into one’s own sovereignty and unconditional acceptance of self. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it was the life’s work of Carl Jung, using dream analysis to drop our fragmented conscious state down into our pristine subconscious to resolve the tension of prolonged masking and fawning.
If you are indigenous of any land, past or present, where the tribe embraced the gifted structure of super fast mental processing through intense and geometric pattern recognition and the gestures of movement invisible to neurotypical minds, then this may sound a bit familiar to you also. It was the practice of most surviving hunting/gatherers who walked the earth before agriculture and sedentary abundance. Our ancestors didn’t call it a subconscious; they called it spirit and it was introduced by story, ceremony, ritual, and dream sharing. Any departure from one’s own spirit was a departure from the land; there was no separation between the soul of a heartbeat and the pulse of thundering buffalo or stampeding of wild horses.
The evolution of modern rock music mirrors the tragedy of individual suffering by way of systemic rejection or unconscious rejection of self. The music will either keep us stuck in martyrdom or illuminate reconciliation with the soul. The trick is to take the mind out of the equation and let the music drop into the body so the epigenetic methyl groups can turn gene expressions back ON. Music thus becomes the latent and somatic frequency removing noise and static from the cellular communication. Once we remove the noise and static from the channel, the cells can then read the damn biological sheet music and the result is full-fidelity DNA sequencing, with healthy, unfiltered, tactile expressions of analog reality; spiritual gifts and wisdom from our ancestors merged with the experiences and sensations of our own in the present, writing the code for both our own sovereignty and the generations to come.
No, music will not cure us. Music just turns the fear centers off in the brain, if only for a moment, so the bodily cells and the cranial white matter can recognize the repeatable, scalable, and blissful sensations of internal silence.
Silence is where all potential exists before the first note is played.
Stringer
