Talkin' 'bout my generation
Commentary/ by Joel Brown
Sunday, August 4, 2002
I used to rock 'n' roll all night, and party every day. Then it was every other day. Now I'm lucky if I can find half an hour a week in which to get funky.
Just how friggin' old am I, anyway?
A trip to see The Who, or half of it, at the Tweeter Center last week brought me face to face with the final, horrible reality of big-time baby-boomer rock tours. I'm just 43, from the tail end of the boom. But the people getting falling-down hammered in the parking lot before the show all seemed to be eligible for the senior discount at the House of Kegs.
Maybe their walkers slipped. Bada boom!
Jokes about the sad, co-dependent relationship between aging boomers and the rebellious music of their youth are, of course, way past g-g-getting old. With The Who, Robert Plant, Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones and the slightly younger Bruce Springsteen all rolling into town this summer and fall, Geritol will feature in many a weary punch line.
The boomer-controlled media - this section included - has been reverent about Bob Dylan's return to the Newport Folk Festival yesterday, his first visit since the historic - to boomers, anyway - brouhaha he caused there in 1965. It's a cliche to note that such moments mean as little to most of today's youth as our parents' World War II hardships meant to us when we were kids.
I'm the last boomer scribe to turn up for this pity party. Most of those who have whined before me lament the commercialization of the music and the consolidation of the entertainment industry. Oh, and the worst sin of all: that their favorite old peace-and-love anthem is known to their kids as the music from that car commercial.
C'mon, people now. We have, truly, no one to blame but ourselves. When we were kids, we all ran out and bought the same records and went to the same concerts. We were the first youth market, with the emphasis on the second word.
You can't blame the AOL Time Warners and Clear Channels of today for driving our nostalgic, complaisant herd down a narrow chute into a pen where we can be more easily stripped of our cash - which is exactly what it felt like, driving that maze of concrete barriers into the Tweeter Center to see The Who.
We're especially fat cattle - literally and otherwise - who can afford $91 tickets to sit in the last row of the pavilion as Roger Daltrey tries to hit those high notes one more time. The $6 beers are both anesthesia and part of the slaughter.
This doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to knock some sense into the dimwits who paid $60 - Sixty bucks! - for those extra-special tie-dyed Who shirts. Getting completely 'faced seems a cheaper and more realistic exercise in nostalgia for fans of a band that sings about ''teenage wasteland.''
Of course, Pete Townshend and Keith Richards remain compelling musicians, even though they've run out of new songs and their lead singers are past the age when pelvic thrusting is doctor-approved. There are still a few compelling cranks, like Dylan and Neil Young, making art rather than product. And there are plenty of less compromised alternatives to the boomer-band mega-tours - did I see you at Los Lobos last week?
Still, we continue to shell out for the fat, bald, out-of-tune bands, too, even as we decry the hollow, assembly-line music sold to ''kids today.'' It's OUR nostalgia, OUR consumerism, that has brought us back-row seats for $91 and turned even outcast anthems such as ''Lust for Life'' and ''London Calling'' into jingles for cruise ships and luxury cars.
When it comes to touting the superiority and idealism of our rock 'n' roll culture, we boomers have very little leg - or even walker - to stand on.
Good for a laugh or maybe a comment or two
Reg
location: back to the wilderness
listening to: static
registered: 1999.11.22
posts: 6470
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–--
'The only way to avoid getting crushed by absurdity, is to humbly include the absurd in our calculations.'
'The only way to avoid getting crushed by absurdity, is to humbly include the absurd in our calculations.'
Reg
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Talkin' 'bout my generation
Commentary/ by Joel Brown
Sunday, August 4, 2002
I used to rock 'n' roll all night, and party every day. Then it was every other day. Now I'm lucky if I can find half an hour a week in which to get funky.
Just how friggin' old am I, anyway?
A trip to see The Who, or half of it, at the Tweeter Center last week brought me face to face with the final, horrible reality of big-time baby-boomer rock tours. I'm just 43, from the tail end of the boom. But the people getting falling-down hammered in the parking lot before the show all seemed to be eligible for the senior discount at the House of Kegs.
Maybe their walkers slipped. Bada boom!
Jokes about the sad, co-dependent relationship between aging boomers and the rebellious music of their youth are, of course, way past g-g-getting old. With The Who, Robert Plant, Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones and the slightly younger Bruce Springsteen all rolling into town this summer and fall, Geritol will feature in many a weary punch line.
The boomer-controlled media - this section included - has been reverent about Bob Dylan's return to the Newport Folk Festival yesterday, his first visit since the historic - to boomers, anyway - brouhaha he caused there in 1965. It's a cliche to note that such moments mean as little to most of today's youth as our parents' World War II hardships meant to us when we were kids.
I'm the last boomer scribe to turn up for this pity party. Most of those who have whined before me lament the commercialization of the music and the consolidation of the entertainment industry. Oh, and the worst sin of all: that their favorite old peace-and-love anthem is known to their kids as the music from that car commercial.
C'mon, people now. We have, truly, no one to blame but ourselves. When we were kids, we all ran out and bought the same records and went to the same concerts. We were the first youth market, with the emphasis on the second word.
You can't blame the AOL Time Warners and Clear Channels of today for driving our nostalgic, complaisant herd down a narrow chute into a pen where we can be more easily stripped of our cash - which is exactly what it felt like, driving that maze of concrete barriers into the Tweeter Center to see The Who.
We're especially fat cattle - literally and otherwise - who can afford $91 tickets to sit in the last row of the pavilion as Roger Daltrey tries to hit those high notes one more time. The $6 beers are both anesthesia and part of the slaughter.
This doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to knock some sense into the dimwits who paid $60 - Sixty bucks! - for those extra-special tie-dyed Who shirts. Getting completely 'faced seems a cheaper and more realistic exercise in nostalgia for fans of a band that sings about ''teenage wasteland.''
Of course, Pete Townshend and Keith Richards remain compelling musicians, even though they've run out of new songs and their lead singers are past the age when pelvic thrusting is doctor-approved. There are still a few compelling cranks, like Dylan and Neil Young, making art rather than product. And there are plenty of less compromised alternatives to the boomer-band mega-tours - did I see you at Los Lobos last week?
Still, we continue to shell out for the fat, bald, out-of-tune bands, too, even as we decry the hollow, assembly-line music sold to ''kids today.'' It's OUR nostalgia, OUR consumerism, that has brought us back-row seats for $91 and turned even outcast anthems such as ''Lust for Life'' and ''London Calling'' into jingles for cruise ships and luxury cars.
When it comes to touting the superiority and idealism of our rock 'n' roll culture, we boomers have very little leg - or even walker - to stand on.
Commentary/ by Joel Brown
Sunday, August 4, 2002
I used to rock 'n' roll all night, and party every day. Then it was every other day. Now I'm lucky if I can find half an hour a week in which to get funky.
Just how friggin' old am I, anyway?
A trip to see The Who, or half of it, at the Tweeter Center last week brought me face to face with the final, horrible reality of big-time baby-boomer rock tours. I'm just 43, from the tail end of the boom. But the people getting falling-down hammered in the parking lot before the show all seemed to be eligible for the senior discount at the House of Kegs.
Maybe their walkers slipped. Bada boom!
Jokes about the sad, co-dependent relationship between aging boomers and the rebellious music of their youth are, of course, way past g-g-getting old. With The Who, Robert Plant, Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones and the slightly younger Bruce Springsteen all rolling into town this summer and fall, Geritol will feature in many a weary punch line.
The boomer-controlled media - this section included - has been reverent about Bob Dylan's return to the Newport Folk Festival yesterday, his first visit since the historic - to boomers, anyway - brouhaha he caused there in 1965. It's a cliche to note that such moments mean as little to most of today's youth as our parents' World War II hardships meant to us when we were kids.
I'm the last boomer scribe to turn up for this pity party. Most of those who have whined before me lament the commercialization of the music and the consolidation of the entertainment industry. Oh, and the worst sin of all: that their favorite old peace-and-love anthem is known to their kids as the music from that car commercial.
C'mon, people now. We have, truly, no one to blame but ourselves. When we were kids, we all ran out and bought the same records and went to the same concerts. We were the first youth market, with the emphasis on the second word.
You can't blame the AOL Time Warners and Clear Channels of today for driving our nostalgic, complaisant herd down a narrow chute into a pen where we can be more easily stripped of our cash - which is exactly what it felt like, driving that maze of concrete barriers into the Tweeter Center to see The Who.
We're especially fat cattle - literally and otherwise - who can afford $91 tickets to sit in the last row of the pavilion as Roger Daltrey tries to hit those high notes one more time. The $6 beers are both anesthesia and part of the slaughter.
This doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to knock some sense into the dimwits who paid $60 - Sixty bucks! - for those extra-special tie-dyed Who shirts. Getting completely 'faced seems a cheaper and more realistic exercise in nostalgia for fans of a band that sings about ''teenage wasteland.''
Of course, Pete Townshend and Keith Richards remain compelling musicians, even though they've run out of new songs and their lead singers are past the age when pelvic thrusting is doctor-approved. There are still a few compelling cranks, like Dylan and Neil Young, making art rather than product. And there are plenty of less compromised alternatives to the boomer-band mega-tours - did I see you at Los Lobos last week?
Still, we continue to shell out for the fat, bald, out-of-tune bands, too, even as we decry the hollow, assembly-line music sold to ''kids today.'' It's OUR nostalgia, OUR consumerism, that has brought us back-row seats for $91 and turned even outcast anthems such as ''Lust for Life'' and ''London Calling'' into jingles for cruise ships and luxury cars.
When it comes to touting the superiority and idealism of our rock 'n' roll culture, we boomers have very little leg - or even walker - to stand on.
–--
'The only way to avoid getting crushed by absurdity, is to humbly include the absurd in our calculations.'
'The only way to avoid getting crushed by absurdity, is to humbly include the absurd in our calculations.'
