Time marches on
In case you’ve been wondering where I’ve been for the past
month or so, I’ve been taking an extended holiday at the blue waters of South
Beach. Actually, that’s not true. I took advantage of the holiday season to
nurse The Cough That Never Goes Away. It is down to a dull roar, so I thought
I’d check in and see what was going on in the universe beyond the four corners
of my bed. Happy New Year, by the way. My 2014 was rather like all fifty years
of Days of Our Lives rolled into one,
so I figure I can handle anything that 2015 throws at me. Or should I say
throws up at me? (Sorry, I can be quite sophomoric.)
So, let’s see . . . it seems a lot of people (I assume
mostly baby boomers) flipped out over some Kanye West fans never having heard of Paul
McCartney. How, people rhetorically asked, could anyone not know who Paul
McCartney is?
Call me lucky for being a college professor, but I get
reminded constantly that time marches on. My first-year class last semester
pretty much was born in 1996. For me, the year 2000 feels like yesterday. But
it’s been fifteen years, long enough to produce a high school student. For my
students last semester, 2000 perhaps is dimly remembered at best—a “long time ago.”
For folks who came of age in the 60s and early 70s, our parents
and their Glen Miller or Duke Ellington records seemed to have crawled out of
the Stone Age. Could the same species that rocked out to “Light My Fire” or “Cloud
Nine” also have jitterbugged to “Take the ‘A’ Train” or “String of Pearls?” Yet
this was a time gap of twenty or so years. By contrast, the Beatles hit the
U.S. over fifty years ago. Yep, that’s right, a longer time gap than young baby boomers had to deal with in terms
of popular culture. In fact, at least twice as long.
Sure, Paul McCartney went on to have more hits after the
Beatles split up, but he is seventy-two, and as one would expect from a
seventy-two-year-old, he has not dominated the charts for a while. “When I’m
Sixty-Four,” indeed, which seemed impossibly old during the Summer of Love.
Surely such a fate did not await eternally young us. Yet Sir Paul, as he is
formally known, is a grandfather. In fact, his teenaged grandson has been
spotted making the rounds at London hotspots.
It seems that some generations have more trouble adjusting
to aging than others. One factor here is that the Baby Boomers, like the
Flaming Youth of the 1920s, were very, very into being young. Youth was branded
onto our souls. We saw ourselves in relation to not being the older generation. We wore the scars of the Generation Gap like army medals. Everything we liked, believed in, or did, seemed connected to our
youth. We had little respect for or interest in the times that our elders dealt
with, such as World War II or the Great Depression. For our parents, growing up meant finding some sense of personal identity and
liberation despite the harsh forces of fate. For Baby Boomers, growing up often
was looked upon as something that would never happen, or if it did happen it
would be worse than death. When, at the end of Peter Pan, Peter tragically declared, “Wendy, you’ve grown up,” he
might as well have said, “Wendy, you’re dead,” as far as we were concerned.
The conflicts of white youth of course did not match those
of youth of color, but “youth,” “young person,” and “young folk” were important
buzzwords across ethnicities, all but inspiring the burning of incense. Some of
our elders clung to their older cultural values, but many graciously stepped
aside to let The Young People of Today solve what heretofore
seemed irresolvable: war, racism, poverty. Fifty or so years later, these challenges are still before us.
Genuine social change is much harder than we realized because we were young—we were not mature enough to see
how complex the seemingly simple truly was.
Some of us became more conservative in
politics and/or lifestyle, some of us got lost in the riot of the times and
were trampled to death. But many of us took on the identity of a kind of
honorary youth. Musically, Glen Miller was father away from the Beatles than
the Beatles were from Coldplay. As the old song said, rock and roll is here to
stay. Youth culture music in recent decades largely has been a recycling or
remixing of genres that are thirty to sixty-something years old. The break-up of the
Beatles or the Supremes still is discussed as if it just happened, when in fact
these events occurred almost half a century ago. So pop culture (and we could
even include some politics here) makes it possible to kinda sorta still seem
young. One is not fifty years old. One is twenty-thirty years old.
Like many Baby Boomers, much of my life
was lived in a state of unhappiness. I should have changed my name to Arnie Angst. Occasionally
someone would say, “You’re young, you should be enjoying life,” but I knew
better. Or so I thought. In more recent times life suddenly has become too
short. My biggest regret is having squandered my youth on an Ingmar
Bergman-like existential crisis that seemed to never end. When I partied I was
miserable. When I went backpacking in Big Sur I was miserable. When I saw
legendary rock performers in concert I was miserable.
Youth, as has been said many times, is
wasted on the young. If you are twenty-five, in only twenty-five more years you
will be fifty, and you will look back at those past twenty-five years as though
only five minutes have passed.
Yet somehow it’s all come together for
me, and I am starting to feel that maybe I don’t even regret my misspent youth.
I simply feel gratitude for having been given the gift of life. I guess that
makes me a grownup.
So, returning to the question: How
could someone not know who Paul McCartney was? I offer the following responses:
Because Paul McCartney became less of a presence in the music scene before they
were born, because there remain cultural and ethnic divides in our society,
because younger generations seek to claim their own reality just as Baby
Boomers did, and because knowing who
Paul McCartney is may well be becoming a liability, rather like knowing who Mary Pickford
is. (Mary who?) Why don’t they know who Paul McCartney is? Well, why should
they? The onus is put on the youth culture rather than face the simple fact:
dude, you’re old.
Paul who?
ReplyDeleteYou must be young.
ReplyDeleteThank you,Jon.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting, Julie.
ReplyDelete