How one song from a Tony-winning musical kind of explains the tumult of the 21st century.
One of my favorite show tunes is “For Now,” the concluding number of the terrifically entertaining Tony-winning musical Avenue Q, which ran on Broadway from 2003 to 2009, then ran off-Broadway from 2009 to 2019. The show posits a sort of Sesame Street for 20-somethings, set in a neighborhood populated with both puppets and humans who learn important lessons about entering adulthood.
“For Now” sums up the musical’s ultimately sunny message: Nothing in life will last forever. You are going to be fine, no matter how terrible your current circumstances seem and no matter how much you might long to go back to college. How could you possibly not be fine? You’re young and, if you’re at the theater, presumably financially stable. Things are great! “For now, we’re healthy. For now, we’re employed. For now, we’re happy, if not overjoyed” goes one lyric. (The song brims with the bouncy sincerity that is the hallmark of multi-award-winning composer and lyricist Robert Lopez, who co-wrote Avenue Q’s music and lyrics with Jeff Marx.)
The crescendo of “For Now” builds to a sequence where the company shouts various things that are only for now, like so:
Sex!is only for nowYour hair!is only for nowGeorge Bush!is only for now
Here’s a video that will give you a sense of what the number is like (though it’s not from a stage production):
Avenue Q isn’t plotless, exactly, but it has about as much story as any given episode of Girls, if you were to replace most of the show’s characters with singing puppets. “For Now” works so well as a closer to Avenue Q because it’s a reminder that — as nearly the last lyric in the whole musical goes — “Life may be scary, but it’s only temporary.” When you’re in your 20s, right after college, it’s easy to dwell on things that feel like they might last forever, but none of them will. You’ll figure it out. You’ll have new problems, but those will only be for now as well. You’re going to keep going up and up and up.
I still love this song as much as I did when I first heard it in 2007 (when the show’s terrific touring cast swung through Southern California). But it’s also a lie.
When George W. Bush left office in early 2009, replaced by Barack Obama, the creators of Avenue Q held a contest to replace the exclamation of “George Bush!” in “For Now.” They called for fans of the show to contribute their own spins on the lyric, with options ranging from “recession” to “Prop 8” becoming contenders. In the end, the show’s producers ultimately decided that “George Bush” worked better than any possible replacements and decided to just stick with it.
That decision wasn’t the end of the story. Over the years, many alternatives (“recession” and “Fox News,” among others) were swapped in for “George Bush” in “For Now,” and in the last years of the off-Broadway run, somewhat appropriately, “Donald Trump” replaced “George Bush” and provided an unexpected symmetry. Two Republican presidents, both assumed to be broadly disliked by the theater-going audience, both things that are only for now. (Here’s a really great timeline of Avenue Q lyric replacements.)
“For Now” isn’t the most famous song in Avenue Q (though it should be). No, the most famous song in the show is either “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” (“Everyone’s a little bit racist, sometimes/ doesn’t mean you go around committing hate crimes”) or “The Internet Is for Porn” (the title is really the most representative lyric). Both of these songs have become strangely passé since the musical launched. “The Internet Is for Porn” feels dated because, while the internet remains a wonderful repository of porn, the idea of the internet as either a wonderful new invention or a den of sex-soaked depravity feels extremely early 2000s.
But “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” is dated in a more interesting way. The song is all at once a chuckling eye roll at the notion of overstepping PC culture, an attempt to argue that microaggressions are no big deal (though the song would never call them microaggressions), and a satire of both of those views — one designed to make the audience complicit in its central assertion that we’re all a little bit racist.
If you read the lyrics on Genius, you’ll see the annotations are filled with people arguing about the “true” interpretation of the song. Does “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” mean to tell us that we should stop caring about microaggressions and other racist statements and actions that don’t rise to the level of hate crimes? Or is it creating a rich and layered satire of anti-PC comedy by turning the idea that “everything’s a little bit racist” into a literal children’s song? Children’s songs almost always present overly simplistic morals, and many of the other songs in Avenue Q present overly simplistic morals, too. “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” might be doing just that.
But whatever interpretation you choose, one thing is clear: “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” is part of the last gasp of a particularly pernicious cultural narrative from the 1990s: Caring about how you or others feel isn’t cool. What’s really cool is being above it all and not making a fuss. And for as much as I love Avenue Q — and I loveAvenue Q — it can’t escape all of the ways in which it hides its big beating heart behind a faux edginess, meant to seem cool.
