It's Just Noise

One thing that makes my eyes bulge in their sockets--though please bear in mind I did not go to school in the hippest part of the US, but rather the hippiest--is seeing college-age kids, who were at the time I attended college about four years younger than me, all wearing t-shirts proclaiming their love of musical artists of the 60s and 70s who are for the most part dead. 

I feel like I understand why a Boulder resident would choose strategically to wear a Bob Marley or Grateful Dead shirt.  I suppose Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin have their own rebellious, binge-drinky appeal, and professing reverence for Jimi Hendrix would certainly help justify one's decision to irritate other Native Americans with a hipster headdress.  It is a bit more opaque to me why someone would want to broadcast their love of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones (who no longer benefit from the cachet of not being the Beatles, as no one seems to remember that they once had a Blur/Oasis-style rivalry [though of course it is deeply insulting to the Rolling Stones to allow them to be compared even momentarily to Oasis]).  It strikes me as sort of like wearing a shirt announcing your enjoyment of inhaling air and exhaling somewhat more carbonated air; it's not like it's avoidable.  I'm sure even the Black Sabbath and Sex Pistols kids (who, again, may feel free to choose a band whose collective ages total under two centuries) love Helter Skelter or Happiness Is A Warm Gun or Savoy Truffle or something. 

Dead artists and the canonized living are safe to like because their meanings have become fixed; they'll never again produce anything which will be subject to critical scrutiny.  And god knows there's a broad enough range that could be expressed by a Beatles shirt to be the stiking-up point of a conversation with a stranger: so which is your favorite Beatle?  What was their best album?  What's your favorite of their songs featuring beating up women?  Would you like to experiment with some drugs with me, in case it makes us creative? 

But this is the music of our parents and grandparents.  They weren't burning up the dance floors with ragtime and the Charleston in the sixties, they were out seeing contemporary bands and screenprinting their names on really thin cotton t-shirts and wondering when the sexual revolution would reach them.  I wish keenly for a popular culture not controlled by Baby Boomers and their sensibilities, but more and more I think that we are not built for populism the way they were, and are doomed to narrowcast all the deeper parts of ourselves while our video of a cat falling off a chair gets seventy million views.