We got dumped on, along with much of the Western world, especially America, and I spent a good hour and a half huffing big piles of snow out of our driveway and walkway this morning instead of jumping right on work, like I'd normally have done. I probably should have woken up my teenaged son, but I was caught a bit off guard by how much snow we had, so I didn't, and before I realized that I was a bit over my head in terms of getting it down quickly, I was already well underway and just went with it. Because sitting outside in the snow shoveling by myself for the better part of an hour and half (maybe about an hour, really—after that my neighbor was out too and we chatted while we worked a bit) is a good excuse to think about stuff. Granted, your mind is likely to wander anyway. Anyway, in the order I thought of them, here's a summary of some of the stuff that crossed my mind.
1) I had some Beach Boys songs stuck in my head while working, at least for a while, and I got to thinking of the British Invasion, which put the entire music style of the Beach Boys and their pop trajectory out of business—with the curious exception of the Beach Boys themselves, who weathered the change fairly well for a time. As near as I can tell, however, with the exception of the Beatles, almost nobody who's not a Boomer is very impressed with the British Invasion music, and even the Beatles themselves are mostly coasting on the reputation that the Boomers gave them. It's not fair to say that the Boomers made the Beatles while the Beatles had no talent; they were talented, and would have probably been stars regardless. But the best band ever? That's a bizarre boomer affectation that some other people have believed because they repeat it like parrots. The reality is that other than the boomers, the Beatles stock isn't really super high, and I have a feeling that when the last boomer finally dies, the Beatles will become more or less as forgotten as Glenn Miller, Peggy Lee or Guy Lombardo is now; known to a few music historians, and not exactly unappreciated by those who hear them, but otherwise getting a shrug of ignorance from the mainstream.
2) Why has "marketing" or whomever it is that's done this, collapsed generations so that entire generations are now "missing" from the list of generations? Everyone knows the boomers for various reasons—most of them unflattering—and the same is true for the Millennials. (Also unflattering.) And everyone knows Generation-X, although their profile is more understated compared to their narcissistic, attention-whoring older groups mentioned before. But the boomers didn't give way to Gen-x who in turn gave way to the Millennials; book-ending Gen-X are two other generations which are largely forgotten for some reason; Generation Jones and Generation-Y. Why this is the case isn't exactly clear to me, as there are notable differences between those generations and the ones on either end of them, so combining them is a poor idea if you want to understand the generations generally, I think.
3) Speaking of which, in some ways, you can define the generations by the pop culture of their time. (The same can be done to some degree with decades in general, although the 60s, for instance, would come across as schizophrenic if done this way; the early 60s was what most people think the 50s were like, and the late 60s and early 70s is what most people think of when they think of the 60s. If from a pop culture music perspective, the Boomers are defined by the British Invasion, you could almost suggest that Generation-X is defined in large part by the second British Invasion, and the impact that its music made on domestic music in general. It seems like the sinking of Gen-X music in the 90s in favor of the grunge wave could be compared to the Disco Demolition Night and the backlash against disco that it represented. However, the backlash in the late 70s was real and organic; the backlash against New Wave was artificial and driven by the labels looking for some way to reorient themselves. The 80s was even more defined by the tribalized music subcultures than by the second British invasion itself, and the New Wave pop was, if anything, the closest thing to mainstream success during much of the decade until some hair band rock started reasserting itself; artists like Bon Jovi, Poison, etc. But later in the 90s, grunge itself kinda disappeared, as well as the rest of the self-important, "activist" type music that was so popular in the 90s, to be replaced by pop music that sounded more like an organic growth from where the 80s had been. Gen-Y's music seems to have been a strange discontinuity that we've mostly "paved over" and ignore as much as we can, as if it never really was important. In general, if you're still pretty young, in your 20s, and you find yourself thinking something akin to "kids today and their terrible music" your generational cohort has probably recently rolled over.
4) The gamma male personality is one that can be made or not at a pivotal point in a young person's life. Some people naturally have that tendency, of course—especially if they're a little different than mainstream in their interests or personality. Someone who, like me, for instance, grew up liking science fiction, liked academic curiousity (on certain topics, at least), was fascinated with Dungeons & Dragons, and listened to aggressively stylish music and disassociated myself especially from country music, which in Texas in the 80s, was a pretty mainstream kinda thing—can find themselves outside of "polite society" in the cutthroat Lord of the Flies environment that is the American school system. Guys like Adam Reader of the Professor of Rock channel on Youtube, for instance, talk a lot about being bullied, and hiding from it in their walkmans, or whatever. This is exactly what you don't want to do if avoiding turning out gamma is your goal. Don't hide. Don't look for an amenable authority like a teacher or whatever to fight your battles for you. You have to figure out a way to deal with it yourself. If you don't, you'll lay patterns for resentment, lack of self-respect, and bitter entitlement that will be extremely difficult to overcome as an adult; the hallmarks of the gamma male personality. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean getting into fist fights with would be bullies, although often that is the best solution, but it does mean that you need to come up with something that you are responsible for to deal with the situation, so that you know that you solved your own problems, and have the confidence and self-respect that comes from exactly that pattern. And if you are going to go different than the world—something that as a practicing Christian, I certainly encourage—then you also have to develop the habit of simply not caring very much what other people think of you, because the world will never accept you, because you reject it.
5) On a lighter note, for literally years I had been trying—albeit not in any kind of concerted way—to figure out this minor hit from the middle 80s that I had heard a few times on the radio, but never got the title or artist, and then couldn't find. I stumbled across it completely by accident recently; "Calling America" by Electric Light Orchestra. So... nice! Although those guys were pretty whack looking, even for by 80s standards. Like the comments in this video point out; the leader of the band looks like your stereotypical campus marijuana dealer.
