The other day, I was leafing through my Flipboard phone application when I came across an article on one of my music sites. The author was of my generation, Gen X. The headline was reaching across the techno void to the younger generations, begging to learn if they’ve heard — even cared about — the 40 songs he listed in the article.
The first few songs were bangers from my college days. I scrolled further down to find more. It was a well-compiled list. They weren’t necessarily hits, but they’ve all played through Walkman headphones. If they aren’t presently in my CD collection, they are tucked away on some external hard drive. As amazed as I was by the list, I can’t remember a single one since I read that article.
To be honest, I didn’t read the whole article.
My generation is getting old. Not me, though. A few days removed from reading that piece, I understand it was an attempt for the author to find relevance in today’s world. Do the lyrics of his favorite songs still hit hard, or should they all reside a slow, burning death on a contemporary radio station? Well, I’ve got the answer.
It doesn’t matter what they think.
What episode of Daria made you think our generation cares about fitting in? We infiltrated TikTok during the pandemic. We participated in all the silly dances. Put them all in a figure-four leg lock. Yes. It was cringe-worthy at first. But we occupy all the bandwidth now just as grandma did the same to us on Facebook. We do whatever we feel like we want to do, gosh!
Whoa. Did I just compare us to Mom? We’ll just pretend like that never happened.
The New York Times called my generation a mess, but I’d argue that we’re more in tune with ourselves than the cohorts around us. When you’re a latchkey kid, you have time to reflect. We didn’t develop anxiety until we found a need for a side hustle. Our childhoods didn’t involve itineraries. We made our own friends. If we wanted to play sports or an instrument, we asked without thinking about how it looked on a college application. But, as parents, we somehow muddled that for our kids. Maybe it’s because we got ourselves in trouble with all that idle time.
It’s not my intent to dismiss the opinions of others. The point, however, was that our songs are important to us. They don’t have to be for others. There’s this creeping sense of legacy, and I get that. Right now, I’m staring down a bowl of chicken broth before my colonoscopy tomorrow. I miss being 20 and not giving a crap about this.
The writer is editor-at-large of Capital District Family Now.
