"It's All Good" -- All?

What is it about “It’s all good” that makes me think bad thoughts? Especially about the speaker? Makes me shudder like dragging fingernails on a blackboard. This is a current hipster idiom drawn I believe from 90’s hip hop which has been, like popular music throughout the ages, a fount of neologisms, some artful and lasting, some more contrived or, for whatever reason, dated, so that the only appropriate use of them is in the ironic sense (“far out”).

Pop music born neologisms get appropriated across communities of young people if these new words and phrases are found to be clever or if the artful use provides some sort of elite status, i.e., makes you seem “cool.” Some neologisms even get picked up by older generations and while young people may object in this instance, so what? The evolution of the language requires artistic talent and we elders appreciate it when it’s elegant and clever. I, for example, have always liked the use of “down” to suggest approval . . . though I use it judiciously. I’m not 28 after all (and for all I know “down” may be down and out now).

“It’s all good.”

No. It’s not. I hear this faux-Zen expression usually in response to someone’s apology for some small transgression. An elevator passenger asks me to press "5." I press "4" by mistake and I apologize. “It’s all good,” says the seemingly blissed out fellow passenger.

I shudder. Why? How’s it different from the tried and true, “Oh, that’s alright!”? Or the “Eh, fuhgeddaboutit”?

Because the more traditional responses come with a “Hey, I’ve been there, buddy” comaraderie and a smile, even a pat on the back at times, that binds the miscreant and the victim, such as they are, together in the human lot of comic frailty and error.

Whereas, by comparison, “It’s all good” gives off a mellower-than-thou, blithely hip affect that separates the parties involved as if to say, “You’re a fuck-up, but I’m so far above any possible inconvenience you could cause me that you must wish you could be as Zen as I am.” There’s no eye contact, no binding in the human comedy, no acceptance of the apology. No, it’s just Buddha-wannabe and loser. What’s more, it suggests a cosmic order, a determinism, that no one need get stressed about. So not only does it attempt to toss me into a caste of the ignorantly striving, but it also denies me my free will.

Just what does the “all” in “It’s all good” cover? How about if I steal your purse?

Yet this hipster non-chalance is such an obvious veneer – because I know in my heart of hearts that I can piss off anyone without much effort – that the person expressing the Panglossian idiocy of “It’s all good” comes off as mindless as a Haight Street stoner and, well, kind of small. And why? Because “It’s all good” means nothing more than that a person wants to say "It's all good" and seem blithely hip.