Music and Generations

I was riding in the car with my 16-year-old daughter when an old song came on the radio and I said, "junior year of high school." She said, "It isn't like that for me. The songs I listen to now were mostly recorded before I was born."

It struck me that the relationship between an age group and a style of music has been broken. From the beginning of the radio age until the introduction of the iPod, music defined the generations. Not strictly, of course -- there were always outliers, regional and class variations, and so on -- but the relationship was real. Not any more.

My kids hardly ever listen to the radio. They get their music over the internet, and the songs they are into could come from any time in the past 60 years. I was working in the kitchen recently when a 17-year-old friend of my eldest son sat down at the nearby computer and called up Youtube. What, I wondered, was I about to be subjected to? Answer: Frank Sinatra. A solid hour of Frank Sinatra.

My goth daughter listens to The Cure, Depeche Mode, and other black-wearing bands of the 80s and 90s. My sons like raucous rock, but they are just as likely to listen to Metallica or Led Zeppelin as Three Days Grace or Breaking Benjamin. The "alternative" music stations I listen to these days, in an attempt to inject novelty into my life, have lately been playing stuff like Steely Dan and Bonnie Raitt. A few years ago I got a new kid on my crew, a recent college graduate, who was into Bob Dylan and The Beatles.

I think this is mainly to the good; people should listen to what they like, not what the programmers force on us. But the shared knowledge of hit music was something that tied generations together, and its loss means another weakening of our common culture.