Ah, it got quieter
Sep. 26th, 2004 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonneI went to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
metahacker's place for auditions of his new radio drama. Several of you were there. I think we all had fun. After that wrapped up, I was only one town away from my cousin's place so I bothered her as well.
She and I decided I'd be a good a person as any to learn about pair programming (two geeks staring at one monitor until the bytes flow right), so we did a hello world project on this embedded
She turned on her iPod and found it was stuck in a rut of Beatles but not a beat of Rutles. On came a beautiful live version of "Sea of Joy" by Blind Faith. She asked me "are you like a lot of people your age? I mean, you know a lot about music from the Sixties but you weren't even born yet."
My experience has been that most people from my generation (let's say, those born during the Nixon and Ford administrations, even the Carter births) are much more familiar with music from the 1950s and 1960s than Baby Boomers are with music from the time shortly before they were born. She said to this, "When I was young, I had no knowledge of the music from, say, the 1940s. I figured our music was pop music so I grabbed as much of it then as I could. Yet it's all still around."
I have a couple theories about this as well, of course. One is technological: the vinyl LP and durable single have only been around the public since 1948. Before that, you only had lacquer platters and the needles that wanted to eat them. You also didn't have BMI for music licensing -- only ASCAP, which refused to license songs for radio airplay. This meant the hit songs on the radio were not available in stores and vice versa. (Sound at all familiar?) After that, anyone could buy an album and have it around for a long time.
Another theory is based on economics and population figures: there are more Baby Boomers than people from my generation. They like their music a lot and will pay top dollar for constant immersion in it. They've merged all the radio stations into one single station that can be guaranteed to play "The Locomotion" at least once a day. For the slightly younger (or less productive) Boomers, every city is also equipped with another station with Pink Floyd (but never the Syd Barrett years) and Led Zeppelin. In contrast, the music I liked when I was in high school is guaranteed to remain obscure (anyone here think The The will wind up in car ads? Oh wait... the Violent Femmes did). My generation doesn't have the purchasing power of the Boomers because there are fewer of us -- blame ZPG, eh? (Hands up -- which of y'all even remember Paul Ehrlich?)
We're a much more jaded generation, if only because we got to watch what the Boomers did over and over and over on TV all of our lives. We got told over and over that anything we liked was derivative and lame cuz we missed the Acid Test, maaaaaaaaan.
She theorized that my generation must have the feeling of being in two cultures: hers and our own. It's a form of subjugation: my generation knows everything about hers but hers has no idea ours exists. She had a great analogy but it's not politically correct so I'll simply say it's how Canadians know way too much about our culture and their own but we barely notice there even is a Canadian... anything.
So yeah, I know her generation's music well. I like it, too. I also like to turn her on to newer bands because it lets me re-experience the joy of finding a band. She is not typical of her generation, however: she is tired of only rehashing her youth and wants new things. In turn, I have tons of that in my house.
A warning to all of you Boomers: you're doomed. Neither you nor us will be able to retire based on Social Security. However, we know this with forty years to prepare. We are not interested in taking care of you because you blew all the fun quotient for the next five generations. You called us lame as soon as we were born: don't expect us to coddle you. When you buy the same '68 Charger you traded for a frickin' Pinto in 1971, we'll be there with the detailing kit in one hand and your money in the other.
I've put a more appropriate heat sink onto my Athlon 2800 CPU. It's a huge hunk of copper with a more efficient fan. This means I now have the exact hardware combination to get all that vinyl onto MP3. I am almost out of excuses for stalling on several projects. Once I have both the Linux side set up at all and finish setting up the Win2k side, I'll be able to write. Oh, maybe even find my resume...
I feel better having exploded about the Boomers. Don't you?
metahacker's place for auditions of his new radio drama. Several of you were there. I think we all had fun. After that wrapped up, I was only one town away from my cousin's place so I bothered her as well. She and I decided I'd be a good a person as any to learn about pair programming (two geeks staring at one monitor until the bytes flow right), so we did a hello world project on this embedded
She turned on her iPod and found it was stuck in a rut of Beatles but not a beat of Rutles. On came a beautiful live version of "Sea of Joy" by Blind Faith. She asked me "are you like a lot of people your age? I mean, you know a lot about music from the Sixties but you weren't even born yet."
My experience has been that most people from my generation (let's say, those born during the Nixon and Ford administrations, even the Carter births) are much more familiar with music from the 1950s and 1960s than Baby Boomers are with music from the time shortly before they were born. She said to this, "When I was young, I had no knowledge of the music from, say, the 1940s. I figured our music was pop music so I grabbed as much of it then as I could. Yet it's all still around."
I have a couple theories about this as well, of course. One is technological: the vinyl LP and durable single have only been around the public since 1948. Before that, you only had lacquer platters and the needles that wanted to eat them. You also didn't have BMI for music licensing -- only ASCAP, which refused to license songs for radio airplay. This meant the hit songs on the radio were not available in stores and vice versa. (Sound at all familiar?) After that, anyone could buy an album and have it around for a long time.
Another theory is based on economics and population figures: there are more Baby Boomers than people from my generation. They like their music a lot and will pay top dollar for constant immersion in it. They've merged all the radio stations into one single station that can be guaranteed to play "The Locomotion" at least once a day. For the slightly younger (or less productive) Boomers, every city is also equipped with another station with Pink Floyd (but never the Syd Barrett years) and Led Zeppelin. In contrast, the music I liked when I was in high school is guaranteed to remain obscure (anyone here think The The will wind up in car ads? Oh wait... the Violent Femmes did). My generation doesn't have the purchasing power of the Boomers because there are fewer of us -- blame ZPG, eh? (Hands up -- which of y'all even remember Paul Ehrlich?)
We're a much more jaded generation, if only because we got to watch what the Boomers did over and over and over on TV all of our lives. We got told over and over that anything we liked was derivative and lame cuz we missed the Acid Test, maaaaaaaaan.
She theorized that my generation must have the feeling of being in two cultures: hers and our own. It's a form of subjugation: my generation knows everything about hers but hers has no idea ours exists. She had a great analogy but it's not politically correct so I'll simply say it's how Canadians know way too much about our culture and their own but we barely notice there even is a Canadian... anything.
So yeah, I know her generation's music well. I like it, too. I also like to turn her on to newer bands because it lets me re-experience the joy of finding a band. She is not typical of her generation, however: she is tired of only rehashing her youth and wants new things. In turn, I have tons of that in my house.
A warning to all of you Boomers: you're doomed. Neither you nor us will be able to retire based on Social Security. However, we know this with forty years to prepare. We are not interested in taking care of you because you blew all the fun quotient for the next five generations. You called us lame as soon as we were born: don't expect us to coddle you. When you buy the same '68 Charger you traded for a frickin' Pinto in 1971, we'll be there with the detailing kit in one hand and your money in the other.
I've put a more appropriate heat sink onto my Athlon 2800 CPU. It's a huge hunk of copper with a more efficient fan. This means I now have the exact hardware combination to get all that vinyl onto MP3. I am almost out of excuses for stalling on several projects. Once I have both the Linux side set up at all and finish setting up the Win2k side, I'll be able to write. Oh, maybe even find my resume...
I feel better having exploded about the Boomers. Don't you?
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-27 06:31 am (UTC)Also, as a non-representative sample, I think it's a combination of exposure and suckitude. I own a book of greatest hits from the 1920's -- I knew a fair number of them when I picked up the book, which surprised me. As a certified music geek, I know a LOT of songs from the 30s and 40s -- mostly show tunes -- and a larger number than I like to admit from the 50s, mostly from listening to radio stations that don't play that format any more (e.g., "OLDIES" 103.3, once a bastion of the sock-hop era, now can be heard playing not just prog rock but actual 80s music. It's scary.)
"Restore 'em, don't crush 'em" is a common refrain now. I think it's more of restoration of status quo than a new thing; it's more like, in the 60s-early 90s, we were obsessed with new; we didn't even have a good "retro" sitcom on the air (like MASH or Happy Days or That 70s Show). Somewhere in the suckitude of the late-90s (the cars: bland; the clothing styles: styles?; the available music: rehashed) people started looking backward again, or rather the people who had *always* been driving cool muscle cars and listening to Simon and Garfunkel1 started infecting their friends again.
Ah, well, back to watching Donnie Darko...
1 While moving my little cousin in to college, the girls across the hall were (of their own volition) listening to Sounds of Silence. I remarked to my cousin's parents that it was probably the same music they'd listened to moving in to the dorms...Kind of amusing.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-27 06:53 am (UTC)Note: this is far more the case with white people than black. It seems to me that it wasn't until the emergence of hip-hop that the generation gap became a significant factor in black popular music.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-27 11:58 am (UTC)am i just showing my ignorance of pop culture again? i can't honestly remember the Boomers ever addressing a sentiment of any sort to me, or to my generation (whatever that is), nor do i know whom i might consider a Boomer mouthpiece.
where does this idea come from?
i think i have difficulty perceiving a generation gap because i don't particularly identify with "people my own age", given that i can't draw too many generalizations about "people my own age" because i see them as comprising a number of quite disparate groups.
-steve
p.s. psst.