I did far too much driving today, and towards the tail end, when it was in the dark, my brain began to muddle. I thought back to life in my teenage years. All the things I thought were interesting, and important, and modern, and timeless. I was big time into boomer media at the time- the beatles, simon and garfunkel, movies like apocalypse now, taxi driver, and the godfather.
The modern media I was interested in seemed to want to probe and explore the same older media that had caught my fixation. Movies like Pulp Fiction, Almost Famous, Forest Gump- they all sought to unpack the large volume of artistic work that would ultimately surmise the boomer generation.
Someone once asked me what Yacht Rock is exactly, and after thinking about it, I told them that it’s the cream of the boomer music that has floated to the top over the years. The good stuff. The greatest hits. The stuff that fits into today, without cringe. But what about the rest?
What about the rest of all the great boomer media and art that I had opined over like it was the sum of all wisdom and curiosity, just waiting to be understood? What about Stairway to Heaven and All Along The Watchtower? Surely they and their hippie acid induced ideals stumbled into The Great Truth, and somewhere in their works was the blueprint for everything. I thought this was kind of the universally understood mission- the singular sun that all earths would ever orbit.
But no one cares anymore. Other than the Yacht Rock cream, the rest is fading to black in the public consciousness. We have other generations to consider. Or do we even, anymore? Was the boomer ‘generation’ the last of it, in a sense?
When boomers were of child bearing age and the center of the world culturally and economically, we were budding teenagers. Our elders were World War 2 veterans and Depression survivors. People who remembered the horse drawn carriage days. There was integrity there, that generation knew a True thing or two.
Now our elders are Boomers. I passed one the other day struggling down the sidewalk in his walker, a giant speaker around his neck like a neckless blasting the grateful dead. I realized that we now have a generation of elders that is pathologically narcissistic, a new feature in american life.
My finger has long slipped off of the pulse of modern culture, but it’s hard to summon the idea that anything really matters when I think about where people’s heads were in the 1990s compared to today. How fast and completely the entire world shifts into a completely different set of people.
I don’t believe we “grow,” I believe we just become new people, and don’t realize it until we can look back through a few gradual changes at someone utterly unrecognizable today.
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