Somewhat related to the previous entry (well, they both involve music, nostalgia, and grumpy old man-ism, at least), Lileks related a story today about his encounter at his local coffee house with one of those Damn Kids™ I’m always grumbling about. Here’s his comment about the young lady’s ignorance of “99 Luftballons,” the infectious ’80s classic about an accidental nuclear exchange (ah, the Cold War… those were the days!):

Kids today. No respect for kids of yesterday. Thing is, we were required to know every fargin’ thing about the 60s when we were coming up, being schooled in the ways of the Most Important Musical Genre Ever. You were required to nod at your elder and respect their sage ways, and thus I found myself in a few dorm rooms listening to peers explain why Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Reefer and Cocaine were incredible not just for their harmony and song-writing skills, but their ability to make music that [went] on longer than three minutes. To which you could only say: may all your girlfriends take “Love the One You’re With” to heart everytime you’re out of town.

Lileks’ real point here is, of course, less about the kids of today than his own resentment toward the ’60s — he strikes me as a man who is convinced that everything went Horribly Wrong long about 1967 and it’s only gotten worse since then; come to think of it, that’s not entirely incorrect, depending on how you look at it — but he touches on something I’ve considered myself from time to time, which is the way Boomer culture has always dominated the conversation and how people my age dealt with it, and more importantly (to me, anyhow) how that’s different from the way kids these days deal with my generation’s culture.

We who came up in the ’80s were inundated by the pop culture of our parents, the generation that came of age in the ’60s. Their music was the most obvious artifact — it was quite simply everywhere, in the advertising and the movies and television programs, and of course on the radio. And it seemed like every six months or so, the media was observing the anniversary of some watershed event or other from “that turbulent decade”: the killing of JFK, RFK, MLK, the release of Sgt. Pepper, the Summer of Love. We 80s kids had our own pop culture happening, too, but it was running neck and neck with this pervasive nostalgia for a decade most of us weren’t even alive in.

But here’s the thing: I don’t think anyone really minded. The truth is, I loved The Wonder Years and The Big Chill, and I listened to The Rolling Stones and The Doors and Janis and Jimi, and I have a lot of friends who are big Beatles fans. We respected what had come before us — for the most part, anyhow — and we even liked a lot of it.

I don’t see that happening nowadays. Granted, I don’t know any teenagers, really, but judging from what I see in popular culture and my general impression, it seems that the culture of my time doesn’t get a lot of respect, not even from the people to whom it ought to matter, i.e., my own generation. Familiar old synthpop tunes appear in movies and commercials as punchlines to show how lame someone was in high school, or perhaps still is. Everyone rolls their eyes at mullets the way people used to roll their eyes at bell-bottoms, before those came back into fashion. The movies and TV we loved is fodder for lame-ass remakes that, by their very existence, insinuate that the originals are no longer good enough for “today’s audiences.” And as for commemorating the important events of the ’80s, forget it… no one even remembers any of them, including the folks who were there. Back in the ’80s, people thought the ’60s were cool. Here in the ’00s, folks think the ’80s were silly and lame. Where’s the justice in that?

This ties into a larger idea of mine that I’ve had for several years now, which is that my generation — and presumably the gen of most of the people reading this, Generation X or whatever we’re called these days — has gotten lost in the demographic shuffle between the all-pervasive Boomers and the Millenials coming up behind us. We straddled the divide between analog and digital. We were there at the rise of, well, everything that defines our current culture: video games, the Internet, home computing, 24-hour news, the blockbuster movie… but do we get any kind of credit for it? Are we even really present in popular culture? Not so much, no, not from where I’m sitting. We had a brief moment of attention and representation in the ’90s before somebody decided the Gen Y kids were more interesting, and now we’re depicted as just the moms and dads who stand in the background while the teenage stars dominate the spotlight and read dialog that makes them out to be smarter than we are. We are the invisible gen, lost in the shadow thrown by those who came before and those who follow. The Boomers and the things they loved were revered; the things we loved are exploited, remade into shitty movies and crappy Chinese-made fashion revivals that come and go in the blink of an eye. And yes, this all bothers me, more than it should, I know, but I feel what I feel.

I admit I may be projecting my own personal feelings of inadequacy here, but… I don’t like the feeling that of being passed over before we — I — even realized it was our (my) moment. I don’t like the twentysomethings at work telling me that the original Battlestar Galactica was stupid, that “old” movies from the ’80s move too slowly or are cheesy, that it was a good day when grunge killed off hair-metal. I’d happily wear a mullet these days if it meant I could have my hair back instead of this stupid balding dome. And all you Damn Kids™ buying fake rubber dog collars at Hot Topic and thinking they look tough? We used to wear the real thing, bought from a freakin’ pet shop! And we had film directors who understood how to make a visually comprehensible action scene! And our music had actual melody instead of simply percussion and auto-tuning.

Gaaah. What does an irrelevant and graying generation have to do to get a little respect, anyhow?