Ack!

Ok, I feel UTTERLY inadequate here...feels just like grad school!

But here's a distinction that I think you're missing Kyle, and which may be at the root of the reaction Jan, Andrew and I are expressing...in the 80's we moved away from the free love and peace movements of the 70's and 60's, we ABHORED the sterotype of the 50's subjugated housewife, we wore different clothes, listened to different music and ran after the almighty dollar as though money was all that would make us happy (or make us feel powerful). We crawled out from under the crippling fear of nuclear annhiliation, the wall came down, and Pink Floyd's music meant more, not less because of it. I'm sure I'm missing some of the cultural recycling that we did, but honestly, in a quick retrospective in my brain (which really ought to be figuring out master documents and styles for a development standard I'm writing) I just don't see it...we traded bell bottoms for peg leg jeans, we traded pencil skirts and blouses for trousers and shirts and ties like men wore. We said: that isn't us, THIS is us.

But the college freshmen are reaching back and saying: this is us too. But they don't have Floyd in them the way we have Floyd in us. The Wall was never up for them...and I just don't get it. In my head they're saying "this is us" without knowing what "this" is...it isn't a reaction against anything - or, more appropriately, I don't see what they're reacting against, it seems much more like a passive: "Huh, this looks cool, I think I'll wear it." or "It's got a good beat and you can dance to it." Or as a friend of mine once said: "That can't be their music: they haven't earned it, they don't deserve it." I don't know that I'm willing to go that far, but what I don't understand is how they can like it when they aren't anchored in it.

I liked Jan's comment about the defiling of music she used to get stoned to; there's a depth to that comment I don't want us to gloss over. That music became part of the tapestry of our lives. It was new when our thoughts and personalities were solidifying and now 18 year olds are cutting up that tapestry and taking bits and pieces and leaving the whole in tatters: I think that alone evokes a reaction, and at the same time I'm not opposed to them cutting up the tapestry, per se, but I get confused about what seems to me to be an attempt to make a collage out of various tapestries rather than weaving their own. It seems so passive to me; there seems to be so little action or even reaction...just this mindless, ipod wearing, sustained individuized personal entertainment.

I suppose I'm blending this notion with my (recent) personal interaction with high schoolers who were trained to follow rules and perform and follow through with tasks, who were celebrated for their mediocrity and who received no training in logic or reason in school. This is who I assume are the people appropriating the culture of the 80s. So to some degree, on a personal level, I'm reacting to that in my thought process.