I think GenXers are learning from the mistakes that the Boomers made. I would like to think that we have less of a “win at all costs” mentality than they did, and we don’t let profit get in the way of ethics in the same ways they did. In practice, it’s more like a principle that is attractive to us even if we don’t always follow it. I guess it’s progress that we at least do lip service to ideals that would have been laughed out of the boardroom 30 years ago, but there’s still a lot of work to do.
The cultural stuff is a big deal. 60s music is looked on with more reverence than 80s or 90s music, even though there’s no special meaning to their music that our music doesn’t have. The music I grew up thinking was 60s music wasn’t even counterculture music, even though it’s dressed up as such. I like their counterculture stuff, but I had to seek it out myself. The commonly played 60s music is no more or less meaningful than the stuff I grew up with, but it’s given a lot more significance than I feel it deserves. Maybe I’m just rambling.
This. I worked with a bunch of older and much older boomers at the bomb factory and the new ones coming in were all millennials. Even my direct employer was lumping in genx with the they are old and we can hire kids out of college for 1/3 the cost. So unless you wanna be a manager the job prospects are not great.
I don’t know about that. The recording industry, though, is another field still generally dominated at the top end by boomers. Gen xers (and some late boomers) built a viable alternative to that, though, which still influences how we think about the production of music.
I argue that we don’t get what we think of a “countercultural” music until later, when you have that network of independent labels, etc, that came with punk. Plenty of mainstream music in the 60s expressed countercultural ideals, because that was where the market was. I guess you could count some of the outsider/artistic music as countercultral, though (John Cage? Musique Concrete, etc). [quote=“LearnedCoward, post:143, topic:86928”]
Maybe I’m just rambling.
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We GenXers are old, but not the revered elder type of old that the Boomers seem to be. We’re old in the sense of “no longer fresh”. That’s not even the good kind of old.
I can’t express myself on this topic nearly as well as you can, and I don’t know the ins and outs of the record industry. What I was trying to say is that the Boomers give the music they grew up with some special magical counterculture implications that my generation’s music doesn’t have, even though they were really just listening to watered-down marketable versions of the real counterculture music. Maybe I’m imagining it, or maybe they actually think their music is the real thing and not just a market friendly substitute.
I like the 80s and 90s punk and feel nostalgic for it, but I don’t ascribe any magical meaning to it.
Of course you can! You’re a smart cookie and nothing I say is any more correct than what you say. I’ve just read some books on the industry cause I have to and there are plenty of people who understand it more than I do. I do hope that what I have to say about the recording industry and punk makes sense and sparks some good discussions, but I don’t imagine that I can express myself better than anyone here, honestly speaking.
All that’s fair enough, I think. I guess it also rests of what the word countercultural actually means? That’s probably a moving target depending on one’s generation or ideals. I think for the 60s, the idea that the music being created by the recording industry making anti-war statements was more than enough to count as countercultural. I think the major connective tissue was the anti-war movement, not the leftist/Adorno view of the culture industries. Punks invested much more into the idea that the culture industries were themselves part of the problem and that crafting an alternative method of sharing culture and being an artists of popular culture came to mean more than a particular political stand point. I think the term (countercultural) was/is always sort of influx and is always in tension with the culture industries, which actively cultivate a youth market over the course of the 20th century.
I think there is a industry attempt to imbue the music of the 60s with those magical qualities, sort of the whole nostalgia industry at work, if you will. There have been attempts to do so with punk. But then you got the Johnny Lydon’s letter to the R-n-R Hall of Fame when they inducted the Sex Pistols into the museum. He essentially points out the disconnect from cultural rebellion as he understood it and being accepted into an industry sanctioned organization… it really shed light on the split between the industry and how many (but probably not all, of course) punks feel about the mainstream music industry. I don’t think you get the mind set that Steve Albini expressed in his famous article about the recording industry, without punks in the late 1970s into the early 90s actively creating an alternative mode of production and consumption of popular music.
I see what you mean here and totally grok it. My thinking on punk is that it made material changes to the industry and how it operates. And punks (and postpunks and many hip hop fans/musicians) themselves have actively resisted the sort of nostalgia that the 60s have seen. Hence you get the industry inclusion of some bands (the first wave punks), but not the bands that I think many of us consider “real” punk - the independent stuff. You’re never going to see bands like Black Flag or Bad Brains inducted into the Hall of Fame, because they are still sort of outside the margins of the industry in a lot of ways.
Also, systematic subjugation of women and homosexuals, and the certainty of nuclear armageddon at any moment. Fallout shelters in the backyard and playing “smear the queer” in the front yard.
By @LearnedCoward’s definition, I am a boomer. By @anon67050589’s definition, I am not. For most of my life I have not been a boomer, since my Dad was too young to serve in WWII, but in the 21st century I seem to have been retroactively boomerized.
