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July 1, 2009
Busy Being Born or Busy Dying? Why Many Adults Hate New Music and New Movies
I hear it and read it all the time. Baby boomers claim that the best rock and roll ended about 1976, along the time that punk rock broke and became popular... before Disco hit the scenes. Even many of the teens I teach claim that classic rock of the 1960s and 1970s blows away everything recorded today. But is this true?
The same thing seems to be true with movies and the baby boomer generation. Movies from the 1930s through the 1970s are the only ones that matter. Many boomers bemoan the death of the delightfully unreal Technicolor movies, replaced by the de-saturated color photography of the 1970s and beyond. Many boomers feel classic cinema died by the late 1960s, or at least by the mid-1970s.
People of my generation constantly argue that art created today is just not as good as art created 30 years or more ago. And to their way of thinking, they may very well be right. Remember when dialogue in movie screenplays was literate, adult and intelligent? Not so today!
Basically, when we are pre-teenage or teenagers, or even college age 20-somethings, movies and music are perhaps the most important way how we define ourselves. Just as we may dress preppy or punk, watch classic Hammer or AIP black and white teenage monsters wreak havoc or listen to garage bands, Phil Spector's Wall-of-Sound, Prog or Psychedelic rock, we define who we are by what we watch, what we listen to and all this affects what we wear. Or at least, during adolescence, this is very much true. During those days, for baby boomers, waiting for the new Rolling Stones album to arrive was a life-altering event. In the mid-1960s, Bob Dylan sporting leather and plucking an ELECTRIC guitar was huge, after deserting his corduroy cap and acoustic guitar. The art we enjoyed was life defining, or at least life altering. The movies and music that touched our psyches during adolescence were the most profound of our lives. And for most generations, this truth is a constant.
As we age, it was never a case of becoming un-cool. People who enjoyed the free form jazz of the late 1950s, people who grooved on Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman would not suddenly embrace the Beatles a few years later (of course, some jazz fans actually would, but not the majority). The same is true with people who grew up in the 1950s grooving to the swinging pop sounds of hip Frank Sinatra. These generally were not fans of rockabilly and Elvis Presley.
As we baby boomers matured into our 30s--where career, marriage, savings accounts, preparing for retirement, relationships and the harsh realities of life took the forefront of our energies--music and movies still were important, but they were put on the backburners, squeezed in between these harsh slaps that life dished out, and while music commanded so much of our time, it soon became something to do while driving to the store, after putting the baby to sleep or perhaps during a few stolen minutes grabbed here and there. The new music was not OUR music. It belonged to younger people, or so it seemed. People who "got" the Beatles and the Stones perhaps "got" pre-punk such as The Stooges or The New York Dolls, but when the Ramones and The Sex Pistols came upon the scene, it became more difficult to embrace such new sounds and musical styles. The pressure was on to grow up musically, to stop being an adolescent and to embrace more adult sounds. And my god, how could we deal with Disco and Saturday Night Fever! Time surely had passed us by! And even if you were one of the few who simply followed the new music, and tried to embrace it, it become increasingly more and more difficult to understand Rap, Dance/Trance, World Beat and electronic-created/computer generated rock. (Was it still rock... with the guitar downplayed or omitted and drumbeats being just as often played electronically and not pounded out on the actual instrument we call the drums?). How can a baby boomer today relate to bands such as Grizzly Bear, Death Cab for Cutie, Deer Tick, LCD Soundsystem, Pains of Being Pure at Heart or Animal Collective??? Some of us try, because wouldn't it be sad to think that the best music of our entire lives was created by the time we turned 26 or so!
Well, some of us still try to be relevant. We live by that great Bob Dylan line that "he who is not busy being born is busy dying," and if we reject everything that is new, then we are dying artistically and becoming the old fogy that we always dreaded we would become. It's okay to love classic horror cinema, but when we state that splatter films repulse us, or that the nudity and sex quotient is overdone for our tastes, are we actually admitting that our tastes and sensibilities are becoming old? That we who ranted and raved in favor of eccentric and cutting edge New Wave music and French Cinema would now shut down when it comes to anything that smacks of cutting edge today? Are we just too zoned out, tired or lazy when it comes to appreciating today's movies and music? Since our adult lives are pulled in too many different directions, perhaps we simply don't have time to sit down and watch and listen and try to understand. Instead we assume that anything new is not as good, and when we listen to those vocal harmonies created by bands such as Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear, we remember that the Beach Boys did it first and did it better. It seems so much of today's modern art is too similar (meaning inferior in the sense of having been there, seen that, heard that) to the great movies and music of the past, and that when movies or music try something radically new or different, that it pales compared to the creativity of the best of (movies) Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks and Whale or (music) Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan or The Velvet Underground (let alone Big Star or The Replacements!).
At least the best music of the past was collaborative, even solo artists recording and creating with a band, either in a garage or in the studio. Today, so much music in insular, created by one guy holed up in his bedroom with his computer, creating the equivalent of musical masturbation.
And with digital camcorders and computer-based editing systems such as Final Cut Pro readily available, now anyone can make a feature film at home for lots less money (of course, this is not saying such movies are any good!).
Movies today seem to either be the Big Products earmarked for the teenage demographic or the low rent independent production that frowns upon any commercial considerations. The best movies of the past combined the best of both extremes, without committing exclusively to only one.
Bottom line--I don't know if the baby boomers are simply getting old, complacent and too pooped to rock or really focus on current cinema, or, if the music and movies of the past were simply superior and we are sick and tired of being force-fed mediocre music and movies.
As Bob Dylan sang in 2006 on his classic album MODERN TIMES, "For the love of God, you ought to take pity on yourself."