Rock of Ages

Joan Anderman, writing
in today’s Boston Globe, has some very interesting observations on inter-generational
taste in music. She
is a music critic, and up on Foo Fighters or Ben Harper or Korn or Sheryl
Crow, while her kids go nuts for the Doors, Cream, Led Zepplin and Yes.

It reminds the Dowbrigade of our #1 son, now residing in the mountains
of Peru trying to simulataneously build and manage a small hostel on
a piece of land we bought 25 years ago because it was the most intensely
beautiful spot we had ever seen. When he was 3, we lived in a tourist
hotel in Huanchaco, a beach town known chiefly for its excellent surfing
and reed boat fishing industry.  The Dowbrigade taught English Literature
and Linguistics at the National University by day, and ran the Bar/Discoteque,
named "Joey’s Pub" after self-same #1 son, by night. Which might at least partially explain what he is currently doing up in the Andes.

It was a wild and
extreme part of our past, and there wasn’t much time for sleep. The whole period
is admittedly hazy in our mind, but we do remember that every night, just
as things were starting to ramp up
at
the disco
next door, and Joey was being put into bed, he would insist on having
Pink Floyd’s "Atom Heart Mother" put on the stereo. With his blankie
and his He-Man Jammies, and Floyd’s orchestral masterpiece booming in
the background, he was inevitably sound asleep by Gilmore’s guitar solo.

A few years later, the same son refused to board the school van in the
mornings without first listening to the Who’s "Magic Bus" at high volume
(this
was in the days before kids were born with walkmans). On the other hand,
his younger brother, who just enlisted in the Marines, has never liked
the "old stuff" and listens to an extraterestrial collection of whirrs
and clicks and swooshes which can only marginally be classified as music. Go figure. Anyway, Joan writes…

I live in a disco. It opens at 7 a.m. I rise to the primal flow of "Jungle
Boogie," brush with "Mr. Big Stuff," stumble downstairs
to "Super Freak." My daughter is the DJ. The music is coming
from her bedroom. She’s 12, begins every day blasting the "Pure
Funk" compilation, and would rather eat a tomato than allow Avril
Lavigne to infect her record collection.

There are more like her at my house. A 10-year-old who sleeps under
a wall-size poster of the "Stairway to Heaven" lyrics. A
15-year-old whose massive collection of downloaded music is anchored
by what appears
to be every Grateful Dead bootleg ever made.

But there’s been no calculated effort to steer them toward “good” or “real” or “substantial” music. This is no gingerly insinuated nostalgia trip. I’ve never put on a Jimi Hendrix album and I have no idea how my children discovered Pink Floyd. One could argue that this is the way a forward-looking rock critic’s kids rebel — by dismissing mom’s newest favorite lo-fi indie-pop band and embracing the dinosaurs.

from the
Boston Globe