Dear Young People: Stop Behaving Like Old Men

Once upon a time, there was a band called the Beatles. I’ve heard they were pretty good. They recorded a number of terrific albums, many of which are resting in my CD rack right now, as we speak. And they basically invented the standard operating procedure for any band who wants to be taken seriously: growing ridiculously ornate facial hair. Seriously, do you want to know when a band is preparing to make their “difficult, adult” record? When they start looking like MLB pitchers.

But they released their last album 40 years ago. When Nixon was president.

So, I bring this up because recently I’ve been hearing a lot of people under the age of 40 talking about the Beatles. And not in a “Hey, man, they were pretty cool” way. In a “no good music has been produced in my lifetime" way. In a “I’d rather listen to one track off of the Yellow Submarine soundtrack on repeat for the rest of my life than listen to any of that modern crap on the radio” way. And I thought I would address this.

The Beatles recorded their last piece of music together in the spring of 1969. (It would be released as their penultimate album Abbey Road.) On July 20, 1969 was the first ever manned moon landing. The first test tube baby was born in 1984. On July 5, 1996, Dolly the Sheep, the first successful cloned mammal was born. So to sum up: since the Beatles wrapped the Abbey Road sessions, mankind has walked on the moon, developed in vitro fertilization, and made cloning a reality, but has not been able to record any more decent music.

I think depending on the age of the young person you are talking to, this cut-off date, this “good music ends here” moment, might be further along the timeline. Some young people make an exception for Led Zeppelin. They may have invented hard rock, but you can’t tell me that if you read the lyrics to “Stairway to Heaven” in isolation you wouldn’t be convinced it was written by a sheltered 14-year old who refers to his parents’ basement as “The Shire” and battles imaginary Orcs with a multi-faceted die and a blanket over his head. I’ll admit that I own many Led Zeppelin records as well, and I won’t pretend I don’t crank up the “Immigrant Song” on the old car stereo and try and mimic that cat in heat impression that only Robert Plant can manage, but I wouldn’t make them the cut-off point.

You have to really young, like 14 or 15 year-olds, to get anything approaching modernity. I’ve had my high school freshmen asking me if I remember when Kurt Cobain was still alive with the same awed hush as if I were a survivor of the Titanic. “What was that like?” they’ll ask and I’ll tell them to just listen to any modern rock radio station, because modern rock radio apparently sealed their bio-domes approximately 1995.

I expect this from teenagers. There has always been a tendency to fetishize the past. But then your balls drop and you move beyond it. Or one should hope. That’s not to say you can’t like the Beatles. That’s not even saying that the Beatles can’t be your favorite band (although the idea that half of your favorite band is dead has the same kind of melancholy sadness as saying you’ll never love a lady as much as you love your mom.) But I think we’re running the risk of developing into a society of Harold Blooms, little Hobbit like creatures who believe the best art is already behind us, if you believe popular music can be art, which I do.

And this isn’t limited to music, although I mention it because it’s an art form that is common to most of us, but there are people who insist that we will never makes movies like Coppola and Scorcese did in the 70s, that comics will never be as good as when Jack Kirby drew them, and that American journalism died with Walter Cronkite (who didn’t die, but don’t tell them that.) And I can’t believe that.

Or look at it this way. When we’re all old men, sitting around complaining about how crappy everything is nowadays, no one will want to listen to us, because we’ll have been saying it for a half century by then. So, ladies and gentlemen of Generation Whatever This Is: pull your waistband below your nipples. Let the kids walk across your yard. We’ve gone from whiny teenagers to whiny old men. Let us act our age for once.