Lileks on Generations

James Lileks, one of the most engaging and perceptive commentators on mid-twentieth-century American pop culture, has a nice little riff on generational memories in America and the peculiarities of the boomers. He writes:

...boomer lingo lingers on, unkillable, seeping out in the dialogue of Disney channel shows in 2005. It makes you wonder if parents in 2045 will hear their child pronounce those new hovercars the shinizzle. Probably not. Ever since the boomers, it’s been nothing but fragmented demographic slices. Generations X and Y and Z, each with their own sliver of culture to define their childhood and adolescences. They seem to be better equipped to enter adulthood and claim their own place in the culture, too – can’t possibly imagine they’ll fetishize the music of their youth the way the boomers do. They have no Rolling Stones, no Beatles – and good for them. Their generations will be defined – if they’re lucky – by brief widespread shared memes, not self-important products of lightweight pop culture. What counts, after all, is knowing something that all your peers know about. Once upon a time it was the delicious theory that Paul was dead – listen to the album backwards, you’ll hear the clues! Now the common bond is something like “All Your Base Belong to Us,” which serves the same purpose. Something everyone knew at a certain time for a certain reason.

I was born during WWII, a little before the boomers, and so watched their development from the outside. The age difference was not so great, but there was gulf in sensibilities there that gaped wider and wider over time. I enjoyed the music of the sixties and early seventies, but for me it never carried the emotional freight it did for the boomlets, and occasionally there would be a moment when it became apparent that we just were not inhabiting the same conceptual universe. Lilek's remark about fetishizing music brought one back.

On the day after John Lennon died I went to visit a friend of mine -- a boomer -- in West Philadelphia, not far from where "American Bandstand" was broadcast. When I entered he and several of his friends were sitting around, dead eyed, listening to a local FM station that was broadcasting Lennon songs one after another nonstop. "Hi," I said, and was immediately shushed. Then I made the mistake. I blurted out, "What's the big deal? He was only a rock and roll singer?"

It was like that moment in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" when the pod people realize that there are humans in their midst. Every head in the room swiveled toward me with glaring eyes and my friend just made a disgusted sound as he hustled me out of the house. It was clear that we would get no work done that day, so I just excused myself and left. We remained friends, at least until both of us married and moved to different cities, but a gulf had opened between us. He was a boomer and I wasn't, and the gap was real, and it would never close.

Read Lileks' "Bleat" here. And while you're there browse around the site. Lotsa good stuff there. I particularly recommend "Joe."