Music of Our Youth

In the fall of 1968, I was a junior in high school. Richard Nixon was running for President, promising a “secret plan” to end the American war in Viet Nam which he would accelerate and expand once he was in the White House. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had each been shot to death within the previous few months. 

I listened to WNEW-FM on a radio that was about 8” by 6” and probably weighed 2 lbs. Radio mattered. In the evening, a DJ named Rosko played whatever he wanted – in whatever genre - and read poetry by Kahlil Gibran and Yevgeny Yevtushenko and antiwar columns by Pete Hamill. Artists that caught my ear on the radio then included Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, the Temptations, and Miles Davis.

I also had a plastic record player that I equipped with a high-end stylus to be certain that I was caring for the LPs that I listened to over and over again. That fall those records were “We’re Only in it for the Money” by the Mothers of Invention, “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter” by the Incredible String Band, and “Meditations” by John Coltrane. That last was not a new release (Coltrane died over a year earlier) but I just got it. I was still listening often to Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, and Jimi Hendrix. My friends and I saw Jefferson Airplane the previous spring in East Orange. The opening act was Iron Butterfly who had not yet released the song “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

Fifty years later I am a retired high school educator. We have a mid-term election coming up in which I am hopeful that at least one house of Congress will have a Democratic majority so that there can be (at least) committee investigations of, and (possibly) an obstacle to, President Trump’s corruption, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and endless lying. In the past few months I have been most agitated by campaigns of voter suppression; attacks on journalists, including arrests and murders; kidnapping of children at our southern border; and the ongoing and callous disregard for the people of Puerto Rico, still struggling to recover from a hurricane over a year ago.

And what new music do I hear now? And where do I hear it? I have an iPhone. I look at the playlist and I see -- along with tracks from throughout the last sixty years -- “Cuba” by Arturo O’Farrill and “It’s Time” by Las Cafeteras. But they haven’t received nearly as much play as the older music. Songs that got multiple plays were “DNA” by Kendrick Lamar, “Bodak Yellow” by Cardi B, and “Despacito” by Daddy Yankee and Luis Fonsi. Those are all from last year, which shows how little I keep up. And the truth is, none of that newer music means as much to me as the stuff from before.

So what does that mean?

I am so tired of hearing people my age arguing that no contemporary music can possibly compare with the music of our youth. The truth is, I am tired of hearing people in their late twentiesarguing that no music of today can compare with the music of theiryouth! The simple response is that the culture hasn’t gone downhill; you have.

When I was in my teens and early twenties the music was everything to me. I studied mimeographed magazines like Crawdaddyas if they were sacred texts to learn what was going on outside Top Forty radio. The LPs I bought were generally the ones that I couldn’t hear even on FM radio stations that (at that time) allowed the DJs some freedom to play non-commercial and album tracks. I thought that our music was transformative by itself. 

But I think the role of that music as a soundtrack to everything else in my life gave that music a much larger resonance. I hear “A Very Cellular Song” by the Incredible String Band and I think of a girl I went out with in 11^thgrade. I hear the opening bars of “Volunteers” (1969) by Jefferson Airplane and I am transported to the moratorium against the Vietnam War and the local demonstrations my friends and I organized and attended. Even a track like “Jumping Jack Flash” by the Rolling Stones, which I never owned, makes me stand up and dance. And that is so significant, because it says that even a song that I didn’t love, a song I didn’tlisten to over and over, is coded in my memory with the feelings of being sixteen. I hear “I Wish It Would Rain” by the Temptations or “Born to be Wild” by Steppenwolf and I am  sixteen.

Each of us has a special connection with the music of our youth. And some of it has held up, too. I can listen to “Are You Experienced?” by Jimi Hendrix with the same enthusiasm as I did the week it was released in 1967. “Disraeli Gears” by Cream, which I compared to it at the time, failed to keep my interest even a few years later. I still listen to “Surrealistic Pillow” (1967) by Jefferson Airplane. I don’t care as much about “The Doors” (1967) as I did that year when I couldn’t stop playing it. But all those tracks bring me right back.  I will never care about the music of today in the way that I cared back then. That doesn’t mean that I have some compelling need to belittle Beyonce as failing to live up to the “giants” of my high school days. I ask that you refrain, too.