Yesterday, one of my students stopped by my desk to discuss her paper. At the end of our meeting, she said, “I found your blog. I felt it’d be dishonest if I didn’t tell you.”
I guess that I’m in luck because the majority of my blog is still missing: Ben still hasn’t gotten the server online again, which means I still don’t have 12 years of my digital life available to me (or for that matter, anyone else). I figure that bored students (or potential client, or boss) will Google me at some point. My personal long tail is offline. It’s like starting fresh, but with a weird sense of amnesia.
In other news, the article “Up with Grups” went out on an email list I’ve been on for over a decade. I am 34, just old enough to see myself in this article. For example:
And then these Clash-listening kids grew up and had kids of their own, and the next generation of kids started listening to music, like Franz Ferdinand and Interpol and Bloc Party, that you might assume their parents would absolutely despise. Except it doesn’t really work that way anymore. In part, because how can their parents hate Interpol when they sound exactly like Joy Division? And in part, because how can their parents hate Bloc Party when their parents just downloaded Bloc Party and think it’s awesome and totally better than the Bravery!
and
I spoke to an undergrad class at NYU recently. And it was terrifying how much we had in common. I’m looking at these kids who look about 12, and we’re all going to the same movies and watching the same TV shows and listening to the same music. I don’t know if it’s scarier for them or scarier for me.”
Do my students realize I’m 13, 14, 15 years older than them? Do they find this scary? Am I supposed to feel more of a gap, cause I don’t. And it seems that that’s the case with what New Yorker New York magazine (Update: thanks, harriedgirl, for correcting my error… it seemed weird this would be in the New Yorker) is saying about these hipster grownups with low slung jeans and indie rock on the iPod. I seem to be part of a trend. Sigh.
Here here from a 35 year old grup.. I think that the key to the whole “Grup” issue is another trend that has been recognized over the past 5 years or so. It is called “Perpetual Adolescence.” Our generation simply refuses to grow up. While not particularly alarming at this poing, I believe that there will be repurcussions in another 50 years or so. It would stand to reason if our ilk bring forth a new era of neo-conservatism.
The article appears in New York magazine, not The New Yorker.
Along the music lines there seems to be a confluence of a few factors: poor management at record companies, miserable radio that aims at lowest common denominator, rap is the new rock, and we did not grow up.
Another factor may also be that we are super media literate and have stayed attune to the changes in media taste through out our lives. We grew up sampling and acquiring our taste broadly, we had MTV (when they still played music), P2P, Internet radio, usenet discussions and downloads, robust college radio, diverse print media covering music taste, and diverse digital media coverage.
We have “grown-up” discussions in our house as I keep picking up new music that I like and sampling widely from iTunes, XML radio, Amazon, P2P services, etc. (oddly my best resources are KLM in-air music options and videos and NPR). The other adult in the house has not greatly emerged her music taste, but is always asking what the people in her office are listening to.