Talking 'bout My Generation

… and moaning about the next one.
Maria's post about her experience with a house full of twenty-somethings woke up a bugbear of Old Dive's …

Designing schools for a living as I do, I get to hang around kids a lot, and over the years I have noticed something rather dispiriting: The Young are fast becoming what the Old were when I was young (if you follow me).
Though the flipside of that, however, is that my generation have become irrevocably and indisputably cool (which we knew all along).

Grab a coffee and let me explain …

I'm going to hit fifty this year, yet I feel younger, cooler, more culturally aware and way more of a rebel than most of the dull, grey kids and twenties I see these days.
Kids - and I use my usual definition of "kid" here: anyone under the age of thirty-seven (or indeed over that age but "a bit too excitable") … kids seem to me now as boring, conventional, dull and lacking in any department that could possibly be connected with "cool" as my grandparents appeared to me back when I was a kid.

Youth is indeed wasted on the young.
As the admirable J.M.Barrie observed in the equally Admirable Crichton: "I'm not young enough to know everything", which was kinda mean, coming from the guy who wrote Peter Pan, but also true. At seventeen, kids know everything; then again at twenty-seven. It's only when they hit thirty-seven that they realise they know fuck all and start to learn stuff for real.
Even though the young people of today are generally opinionated, self-obsessed and a bit too full of themselves they are - rather tragically - totally unable to comprehend that they know "nothin' 'bout nothin'", and that they have created or achieved nothing of any value that has not been created or achieved before; usually (much to their chagrin) by their own parents.

The teenagers I go to college with on Thursdays bizarrely think I'm "cool" for my musical tastes and for having done all the crap I've done (and because I really am cool) and they are forever "borrowing" stuff off my iPod and asking my advice on bands, clothes (! … this is inexplicable to me, but the kids at college buy the same shoes as me and dress much the same - Louisa even sent off to Kyoto for the same 浴衣 as I wear), movies, drugs, relationships, all sorts of crap.
It's genuinely weird when I'm sitting in the refectory, reminiscing with Lin, the only other forty-something still in college and a bunch of seventeen-year-olds are hanging on our every word, mouths agape with amazement (and not just amazement that people can live this long and still be sentient).
When I was a kid, people as old as I am now were dead to the world (and smelled of wee). At seventeen I would never have dreamed of asking a fifty-year-old about new and cool music (they'd have just said "I don't understand all of that rock and roll rubbish; it's just noise."), or where I could get shoes like theirs, let alone the finer points of "how to give a good blowie" (thanks for asking that one, Louisa; it's just a shame that you insisted on using our thumbs for the demonstration … hey ho; at least it made Lin laugh stuff out of her nose).

Anyhoo; Maria was bemoaning feeling old among the twenty-something kids …
But listen up, my fellow baby boomers:
We are the lucky generation.
The cool generation.
The best generation.
We grew up when it was all NEW!
We did it first and we fucking loved it.
We were the first Beatles fans; the first punks; the first metal-heads; we saw Dylan and Bowie The Clash when THEY were young!

Por exemplo, from the potted history of Old Dive:
I'm a fifties kid; born with rock and roll; from the post-war generation, whose dad came home from messing about with nuclear bombers in the air force carrying boxes of Black American music; Fats and Chuck and John Lee (we're talking real R&B … not the derivative crap "product" the marketing morons call R&B these days) and of course Elvis.
Boy did we hit the sixties swinging …
Along came The Beatles and I got my first guitar. I went to school surrounded by mini-skirted dolly-birds, the pill and the space race and the very first colour TV (back when they had programmes worth watching).
We didn't have wimpy fucking al Qaeda to piss about with, we had full-on nuclear armageddon, to the accompaniment of dope and psychedelia and CND and Vietnam and presidents getting shot or impeached, and it was cool and it was fun, waiting for some twat to press the big red button.
I was eighteen when Punk happened and it was brilliant (when kids call themselves "punks" these days it is so pathetically sad), playing in bands and having a fucking glorious time.
I dropped out of college and played lead guitar in rock bands back when it was the cool thing to do.
As my generation has got older, "cool" has moved along with us.
And conservative, reactionary, responsible boredom has moved the other way until the kids these days think and act just like my grandparents did.

Look at your kids …
Unless you're Chavs, they don't smoke or drink and they disapprove of recreational drugs.
They're conscientious and responsible.
The closest they come to rebellion is wearing a Nirvana hoody (for fuck's sake, how long has Cobain been dead, you cretins?) or acting sullen (yeah, that's new).
They "borrow" cool from our generation (the Nirvana hoody, the Ché teeshirt, Converse All Stars, anything "punk") because they have neither the wit nor the imagination to do or to create anything remotely cool themselves.
Shit, even the teen pregnancy rates have stalled; daughters no longer come home at five in the morning, tattooed and pregnant (again, Chavs are fighting a brave but lonely rearguard action here).
They listen to dull, derivative muzak product; anything remotely new and exciting is too "weird" for them (it's all noise, like rock and roll was to my grandparents). Shit, even today's most "exciting" indie and dance bands are just pale and insipid re-hashes of seventies and eighties music. We've heard it all so many times before. Come up with something new, you fucking morons!
They watch the cookery channel and they go to the gym instead of hot-rodding old cars and cruising for girls (Phil was so totally awesome at customising cars, and he's mercifully never grown up) with a back seat full of beer and the music up FUCKING LOUD ("Fucking Loud" copyright Bob Dylan; Manchester Free Trade Hall, 1966, kids; listen and learn).
They manage their money and SAVE (fucking hell) instead of blowing their student loans on guitars and riotous living and sleeping in a squat and stealing milk off doorsteps and food from the backs of supermarkets.
They talk about mortgages and insurance!
They wouldn't know how (or why) to kick against the pricks, they're such dumb, TV-addled crap-corporate-consuming retards.
The fucking idiots believe what they're told!
They don't make bombs and blow shit up like we used to (okay, so maybe that was just me).
They are "sensible". They have "careers advice" instead of just saying "Fuck the future; I'm gonna play in a band, take drugs and screw around." (Hey, it worked for me)!
They don't sit in a dingy room with a bag of grass, a couple of pipes, some pretty guitars and some very pretty girls and not worry that the only food in the house is half an onion and a sausage (maaaaan, those were good times).
They don't go on protest marches and photograph the secret service men who are photographing them (that was always so much fun).
They don't drive around the city following a police car, tokin' on a monster Camberwell Carrot and waving it at the nice coppers.
They have fucking pension plans (kill me now).
They don't try to bring down multinational corporations; they apply for fucking JOBS in them!
They cut their hair! Sweet Cheeses of Nazareth, what is the world coming to?
And THEIR PARENTS EMBARRASS THEM!

As Douglas Adams put it: they're so un-hip, it's a wonder their bums don't fall off.

The sad conclusion I have reached is that The Young Are The New Old.

Our children have squandered their glorious inheritance … all of our hard work of rebellion, sexual freedom, irresponsibility and FUN has been subsumed by the unimaginative, the responsible and the tedious.
One can only hope that the next generation rebels against this pathetic lot of uninspiring sad-sacks and kicks their sorry arses hard!
They so richly deserve it.
Townshend was almost right in "My Generation" when he said "hope I die before I get old"; what he should have written was "hope I die before I get to see my kid grow up to be a fucking accountant."
Kids; we're not angry, we are just very, very disappointed.