Boomer Music goes Bye-Bye

Vox Day posted the original article with some commentary. I'll offer my own, with the caveat that since I agree with Signore Day on this issue, some of what I say will be similar to what he says.

Back in 1959, on the cusp of the Swinging Sixties, I was posted to Germany as part of my National Service and quickly found myself a new niche.

In those days, the Forces radio station played an endless diet of Bing Crosby and Peggy Lee — both wonderful singers, but their music was the sort of thing we young servicemen associated with our parents.

We wanted something different, something to call our own — and we'd found it in rock 'n' roll. 

It's an amusing note on the infamously tone deaf tin ears of the Boomers; what they expected for their generation, i.e., that they wanted something different from what their parents listened to, shouldn't be expected for their own children. In spite of his assertions later in the article, it's not my experience that Generations Jones, X, Y, Millennial, etc. really care very much about Boomer music or hold it in high regard other than repeating like parrots the assertions that their parents make uncritically about, say, the Beatles. 

This was the dawn of two decades which would usher in some of the greatest music ever made and the greatest lyrics ever penned — written and performed by bands and solo artists whose names are now etched in the music hall of fame.

From Elvis and the Beatles to the Rolling Stones and The Who, Bob Dylan and the Kinks, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Queen — the music that emerged from that era has more than stood the test of time and is loved by baby boomers and their grandchildren alike.

Yet not, it seems, by the bigwigs at Radio 2.

As the Mail reported yesterday, it appears that they have quietly asked their DJs to 'scale back' on playing songs from the Sixties and Seventies in favour of music from the Eighties onwards.

Or we can make a much more likely and parsimonious null hypothesis—Boomer music wasn't some of the greatest music ever made and the greatest lyrics ever penned, and the music hall of fame should be capitalized, because it's not something generic. It's a specific organization made by Boomers to celebrate their own generation. And that the children and grandchildren of the boomers don't love the music of the boomers and are demanding something different, just as the Boomers did before them. As a Generation Xer who was born in the early 70s, I have to admit that starting the roll call with the 80s, the music when I came of age and thus "my" music, is a good choice. But it's a good choice for me because that's my generation. I'm not so narcissistic as to think that everyone from every generation loves the stuff from my generation the same way I do.

It's my own observation, biased though it may be, that the 80s is the music that the Millennials and Gen-Z people are more likely to respond to if they need to listen to older music. Just as the 50s was what we listened to in the 80s if we wanted older music, or at best the early 60s before the Boomer hippy revolution ruined pop culture and just culture culture overall in the West. The 80s and the 50s, especially in America but also in Britain (especially for the 80s) were a time of national pride, patriotism and love of our peoples and our cultures. A last gasp before the Satanic claws of globalism and liberalism (really Marxism and foreign influences generally) tried to forcefully separate us from our own heritage. The 50s and the 80s were periods in which the forces conspiring against us were much more on the ropes than they are currently, or during the second half of the 60s and most of the 70s.

But it's another observation of mine that in general, nothing can get past the hard-coded self-esteem that the Boomers have, and their confidence that they truly are the most specialest generation that ever was ever in the history of the human race. Observation and data are hardly likely to convince boomers that nobody actually wants to hear their music other than themselves, and nobody really thinks very highly of their "contribution" to our current situation. Arrogant, spiteful narcissists that they are.

Curiously, this video is no longer available on Youtube. Used to be. And if you followed the link to the original Daily Mail article, have you ever read a boomer screed that didn't boil down to "What about meeeeee!!!!?????"