Paul Who?

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.