Taylor the Teacher

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Dear Baby Boom Generation:

This article, which I just discovered, explains a lot. It’s written by one of your own, a Boomer. In it, Mary Eberstat explains the reason we kids listen to such “vile” music nowadays. (I know, I’m 36, but you still treat me, and I still feel like a kid. I’m okay with it.)

Here’s the answer: we listen to vile music because we grew up in a vile world.

Eminem is famous, popular, successful, not because we are brainwashed, but because he’s singing the songs our hearts have been singing. He’s one of us with the verbal talent to “spit it” clearly and fiercely. But he’s not saying anything new. We’ve been telling you this forever. It took Eminem to be balls-y enough to say it in a way that would force you to listen.

Eminem’s truth is the truth as we see it. That’s why he’s popular, and the reason he will never go away — the louder you exclaim that he’s “dis-gust-ing” the more you confirm our reality.

That article is fantastic. Read it. At least read the intro and the part about Eminem. As I read the article, I realized that I was replaying an old dialog that my generation has been having with yours for a long time. Even though the author’s analysis is dead on in some ways, she still sounds like a boomer in her way of framing it up.

I first realized this when I read this part. I realized out loud. Mary Eberstat writes,

In a nutshell, the ongoing adult preoccupation with current music goes something like this: What is the overall influence of this deafening, foul, and often vicious-sounding stuff on children and teenagers? This is a genuinely important question…

Nonetheless, this is not my focus here. Instead, I would like to turn that logic about influence upside down and ask this question: What is it about today’s music, violent and disgusting though it may be, that resonates with so many American kids?

I chortled, “That’s ‘upside down, to you? That’s how we think. That’s right-side-up!” You didn’t know that people listen to music because they identify with it, not the other way around? How long has it been since you rocked out to “Won’t Get Fooled Again” or “The Kids are All Right?”

Did The Who make you that way, or did they give voice to something you already innately understood?

This lack of understanding between us has been chronic. You look at us like, “What’s your problem?” We feel the same way about you. You gave us some important things that I wouldn’t live without: civil rights, women’s liberation (?), concern for the environment.

But then you spent the 80s running around trying to keep up with the Jones’, and meanwhile you pretty much ignored us.

But I’ll play along with her question. Okay, what did you conclude, Mary Eberstat, after asking this “upside down question?” She writes,

…to put this perhaps unexpected point more broadly, during the same years in which progressive-minded and politically correct adults have been excoriating Ozzie and Harriet as an artifact of 1950s-style oppression, many millions of American teenagers have enshrined a new generation of music idols whose shared generational signature in song after song is to rage about what not having had a nuclear family has done to them. This is quite a fascinating puzzle of the times.

Is this tongue in cheek? This point is unexpected? Did you Baby Boomers even watch “The Breakfast Club?” If so, were you paying attention? We’ve been saying this in the media for at least two decades. We’ve been saying it inside for as long as we can remember.

I’ll say it again for posterity: This. is. one. fucked. up. world. you. left. us. with. As John Bender (the quintessential hero of us Xers) puts it in this sound bite, just before he shows the cigar burns on his arms inflicted by his angry father,

He said it right there. “Yeah, dad. What about YOU?”

What about you?

But I agree with Mary that this is a fascinating issue, and I’m glad you acknowledge that the paradox has two sides. We cannot be figured out without examining you. Are you sure you’re ready to do that?

I’m not as mad as I sound. More exasperated. I gave up long ago trying to explain this to you. Now that you seem willing to talk, I’m just wondering if you’re sure.

We all have some examining to do. That’s what we Xers have been trying to say. Forever.

Sincerely,

One Generation Xer