It’s been a bumper week for middle-aged journalists enthusing about Taylor Swift. Broadsheet music critics attending the Edinburgh leg of her ongoing Eras tour seemed positively high on second-hand oestrogen fumes as they filed their encomiums. And there were further excitable contributions from parents, writing about the joys of taking teenagers to the show.
In the Times, correspondent Ben Hoyle wrote that going to the concert with his wife and children had acted as a bonding experience for the family, during which he realised “he couldn’t be happier”. An accompanying picture showed him resplendent in a hot pink feather boa, which he said had been urged upon him by his teenage daughters. Meanwhile, in the Mail on Sunday Bryony Gordon recounted the story of what was, for both her and her 11-year-old, “the best night of our lives — and made all the more magical for getting to enjoy it together”. According to Gordon, the concert had “united the generations in sparklingly spectacular glory”.
Less cynical minds than mine probably read this stuff with approval. Assuming that parents and children are increasingly mutually alienated, lost in different online worlds, isn’t it refreshing to read about a relatively innocent communal activity taking place in the open air? But I’m afraid I’m going to be the voice of doom. If you want that sort of thing, do a Parkrun together. In my ideal world, adults would get their vampiric mitts off young people’s music and leave them to it.
Reality is not ideal, however; and I’m as guilty as the next Gen X-er of having a Spotify playlist that ill behoves my advancing years. In fact, with my own kids, it is as if the poles have reversed — when my 18-year-old tells me he has an “absolute banger” he wants me to listen to, more often than not it’s by Fats Waller. It’s all a far cry from the late 20th century, where an informal social contract still existed between teenagers and their parents, dictating that the right and proper attitude towards the other party’s music should be suspicion bordering upon downright contempt.
Youngsters could feel rebellious in virtue of whatever fresh aural hell was emitting from turntables and tape recorders, while adults in the vicinity would mutter gratifyingly about the culturally impenetrable noise. Concerts and raves were places for older kids to engage in Dionysian excess — dancing, moshing, screaming, crying, snogging, crowdsurfing, ingesting stimulants, and acquiring eardrum injuries — as their parents worried about them impotently, far removed from the action.
But then the mobile phone came along, spoiling live music in a number of ways — and not just because now, at emotionally charged moments, you had to wave your phone torch aloft instead of a lighter. Soon, certain brains would automatically translate nascent feelings of excitement into an imperative to film something; to adopt a shrewd directorial eye towards incoming sensory experience, treating it as a product to be sold on later to others. This also meant it was no longer possible to dance like no one was watching. Another result was that now young people were never very far away from their parents, psychologically speaking — only a call away, in fact, which seems at some point in the 2010s to have morphed into “only a few feet away” instead.
Nowadays, there is much talk about helicopter parenting, but in the case of music, the metaphor should probably be that of a grasping hook — though one which steals nice things from teenage girls not boys, since the latter still seem able to go to rap and rock gigs without chaperoning. The main site of familial musical appreciation is commercial pop music like Swift’s: consumed by vastly more females than males, and scarcely much of a prospect for adolescent defiance anyway, either in terms of decibel level or parental advisory warnings. Instead, what pop music does best is give visceral melodic form to desperate feelings of love and heartbreak, topics very close to young hearts. Doubtless such themes are perennial. Still, when you are belting out a ballad along with your idol, pouring forth all that rejection and self-doubt like an exorcism, do you really want to hear your mother singing it too?
That music has become so horribly inclusive is not entirely the fault of us oldies, though. As others have noted, largely thanks to internet streaming we seem to have arrived at the doldrums phase of musical history: stuck in an eternal present with no forward momentum. All musical periods are available all the time, and artists — even great ones like Swift — don’t so much create new styles as put old ones in quotation marks. It’s also impossible for youth subcultures to get going in quite the same way, since an infinity of choice atomises listeners.
Globally, there might be lots of fans of a particular act, but locally there are unlikely to be enough to feel part of something meaningful. And even when you stumble across something you love, there’s a relative lack of physical objects in which to ground the intense feeling: fewer records and CDs, music venues and record shops; no weekly music papers to pore over; virtual fandoms rather than organised fan clubs. Sounds float weightlessly, easily accessed and more easily lost. Megastars like Swift, capable of filling stadiums and shifting merch at scale, hoover up the surplus adoration.
Though it sounds fogeyish to say it, musical quality has also definitely deteriorated, as record companies aim for whatever is most likely to achieve virality on TikTok. Songs are getting shorter and also simpler, lyrically and melodically; the album format is dying; the “loudness war” continues, reducing aural dynamics; human composition and performance are now indistinguishable from AI. New bands make practically no money from streaming and can’t afford to tour. Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that this year’s festivals include headliners whose heydays were decades ago: Coldplay at Glastonbury; Pet Shop Boys at the Isle of Wight; Liam Gallagher and Blink 182 at Leeds and Reading.
Some may protest that great tunes speak to everyone; and anyway, the absence of aesthetic boundaries between family members is not all bad. Given the state of the housing market, you will probably all be living together forever anyway — so why not lean into the psychic enmeshment? At least that way you won’t be fighting over what comes out of the speakers.
Still, I suspect the lack of generational differentiation — musical or otherwise — has a cost. In a reboot of The Picture of Dorian Gray, as adults refuse to grow up, Gen Z-ers seem to get ever more straight-faced and anhedonic in compensation. Booze and sex are out, apparently; antidepressants and staycations in the Cotswolds are in. It’s as if they are desperate to make a psychic break with older generations, and have concluded that moderation, responsibility, and excessive worry about the future are their only options. Every time a political leader arses about on a waterslide, a 20-something on Love Island gets enough facial fillers to make her look like a Milf.
A perhaps healthier means of mentally detaching from your elders — and perhaps of getting a bit of revenge too — is by featuring them in your social media content, in order to make them look endearingly foolish and pet-like. That seems to be what 24-year-old Francesca Scorsese, daughter of film director Martin, has been doing for a while now: getting her famous and apparently compliant 81-year-old father to pronounce upon the function of various “feminine items” of hers, or otherwise clown around, then putting the outputs to ironic music. A recent TikTok trend which also mines the narcissistic tendencies of parents involves getting them to dance to Bronski Beat like they “would have danced in the 80s” and then filming the results.
Parents might think they look cutely uninhibited, but the kids are presumably watching a whole different show. After all, “cool” is an attributive adjective, changing its standards of application relative to context. Just as a “large” mouse still looks small next to an elephant, a “cool” parent — at least in the eyes of other parents — can still be a source of high mirth or mortification to subsequent generations.
It’s almost enough to give the unselfconscious concert-going mum and dad a dose of paranoia. While you were uploading those happy family selfies for Instagram, who knows what your darling offspring were posting about you on Snapchat? Maybe next time, instead of playing the glitter-strewn ghost at the feast, try to restore the natural order of things: drop them off at the venue if you must, but with the parting shot that whatever they are about to hear is a load of rubbish. And then go and take selfies at a National Trust property instead.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/