We got up late today and listened to Brent Bambury's less-than-superb Go radio show on CBC with our coffee. He was talking to an audience of teenage-to-twenty-something kids, who were eating up his every word, about what makes the perfect pop song. It was a celebration of blandness. Is it just me, or have we not seen a generation so accepting of the status quo since the invention of pop culture after WWII? I can't remember when was the last time I heard about any youth-generated phenomenon that snowballed into a loud buzz by telling us old farts we're doing it all wrong and have made a mess of everything.
Which we definitely are, and have, so why are all these kids just sitting around happily consuming whatever garbage music and clothing and video games and iPacifiers we hand them and tell them they should like? I realize my generation — fittingly labeled with an inexpressive 'x' thanks to faux-punk Billy Idol — wasn't exactly an earth-shattering bunch of political revolutionaries. We definitely disappointed our hippy forebears, who had hoped we'd carry the man-sticking torch for them by the time they'd grown fat and nostalgic. But at least we hated everything. Y'know? Now I'm fat and nostalgic, and the kids are alright with that.
I used to listen to Brent Bambury on Brave New Waves in the 'eighties, when he was a young man, educating me and all my unseen comrades about weird, alien, excitingly anti-establishment music that we never would have found out about otherwise. Record labels hadn't invented the term "alternative" for it yet. He and others made me realize that there was another, oblique-looking possible world out there beyond our immediate bleak-looking one, and even if we might all destroy ourselves tomorrow, we could at least live in that world today simply by believing in it. Now he's an old man telling our youth about the history of popular music by playing Phil Collins and Taylor Swift songs, and instead of throwing eggs at him or at least giving him the finger, they're cheering him on. What gives?
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