X Ambassadors – “Renegades”; or, When You Probably Shouldn't Go Determinate

I don’t have a lot to say about this song because it isn’t really good or bad: it’s a catchy piece of radio fodder with a message fitting for our age—be yourself, do your own thing, don’t just go with whatever society tells you, be a special snowflake just like everyone else, etc. (It’s not surprising that this quickly got picked up by a Jeep commercial.) 

All of this is well and good and generally uninteresting except for the one point where its generic and bland exhortations to do something different actually gets specific—at that point this song gets stuck in my craw:

All hail the underdogs
All hail the new kids
All hail the outlaws
Spielberg's and Kubrick's

Even if we can overlook the conflation of underdogs, new kids, and outlaws with renegades, the choice of Steven Spielberg as one of the only two concrete examples of a “renegade” in the whole song just shows how ludicrous the song’s understanding of what it means to be a renegade really is. I’m not trying to put down Spielberg—I’ve enjoyed his movies, and it’s clear that he is a very creative and talented person who has had a big influence, but none of that makes him a renegade in any meaningful way. If he was ever an underdog, new kid, or outlaw, Spielberg hasn’t been one in a very long time. (I’m also not entirely sold on Kubrick as an example either—sure he was original or perhaps even pioneering in many of the things he did, but I don’t know if that’s the same as being a renegade.) I guess the band decided to go all renegade on the definition of renegade.