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Talkin’ Bout My, Uh, Your, Um, Our(?) Generationby Jim ShahinBeloit | Jimi Hendrix | Eminem | the Beatles | the TimesOkay, class, get out your pencils. Today we have a pop quiz. The times, they …A. are a changin’B. are a changin’, but not enoughC. are a changin’ is ungrammaticalD. What. Ever. E. Oh, shut up!F. Dude, where’s my Zeppelin CD?G. None of the aboveH. All of the above. All right. Pencils down. Every year, Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, publishes something it calls “The Mindset List.” It is a collection of references that remind college professors they are older than their students. This year’s list notes that most of the current crop of college freshmen were born in 1984. It goes on to list 50 references that professors know, but their incoming students don’t. Some of the examples:They have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era and probably did not know he had ever been shot. Tiananmen Square means nothing to them. The statement “You sound like a broken record” means nothing to them. (They have never owned a record player.) Most have never seen a TV set with only 13 channels, nor have they seen a black-and-white TV. They cannot fathom not having a remote control. Michael Jackson has always been white. Jay Leno has always been on The Tonight Show.They never take a swim and think about Jaws.The Vietnam War is as ancient history to them as World War I, World War II, and the Civil War. They’ve never heard: “Where’s the beef?,” “I’d Jukebox Cd E walk a mile for a Camel,” or “De plane, de plane!” There has always been MTV. The Mindset List cocreator, Beloit professor Tom McBride, was quoted as saying that The Mindset List is “an alert for those of us who may be suffering from hardening of the references.” I thought, A cholesterol analogy — there’s another reference they won’t get.As I wandered into a greasy spoon and took a seat at the counter, I was contemplating, as the Stones sang, what a drag it is getting old. A waitress standing a few feet away, unmoored from customers at the moment, sang along to an Elvis Presley song from the Fifties playing on the jukebox. As I listened, I realized she knew every word.The waitress was about 20. Elvis had been dead more years than she had been alive. How, I wondered, did she know the words to an Elvis song? And not to just any Elvis song, but one from the Fifties?I don’t know the words to, say, a Count Basie song. Okay, Count Basie songs don’t have words. The point is that this girl — and, yes, she seemed to me just that, a girl — was extraordinarily familiar with a song that was so ancient as to be practically Biblical. (And Elvis begot The Beatles, and The Beatles begot the English Invasion, and the English Invasion begot hair bands, and hair bands begot punk, and punk begot grunge, and grunge begot thrash-metal-indie-ska-hip-hop.) At 20, I did not possess the same effortless knowledge of my parents’ music. We started chatting. “I love classic rock,” she said. “Led Zeppelin. All that stuff. Everybody in my generation really likes that stuff.”The next day, I stopped to check out a poster sale. The posters taped to the outside walls, presumably to entice customers, weren’t of anything having to do with the current generation. One was of Muhammad Ali glowering over a flat-on-his-back Sonny Liston. Another was of Jim Morrison. A third depicted Jimi Hendrix coaxing fire from his guitar. The only poster remotely related to current times showed Kurt Cobain in performance. What, I wondered, am I to make of this?Is there a generation gap or isn’t there?You don’t hear the term generation gap anymore. I used to think that was because we simply assumed it existed and didn’t need to identify it any longer. But is it possible that the baby boomers so dominated youth culture as to have defined it for generations to come? What with those aging boomers going with their kids to Foo Fighters concerts, has the gap narrowed to a thin fissure?Of course, there is Britney and Eminem and Blink 182. But will college students 30 years hence be singing Eminem songs and purchasing his likeness for their walls? Or will they still be singing old Elvis songs and buying Hendrix posters? Sometimes I don’t know what to think. Let me rephrase that. Almost always I don’t know what to think. But sometimes it’s worse than other times. This is one of those times. As for the times themselves, I have no idea what they are a doin’. I only know that it’s always been fun to use bad grammar.
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