Ta-Nehisi Coates has put up a couple of interesting blog posts lately about Barack Obama’s (at least somewhat) faux bashing of video game consoles and iPods, which seems for all the world to be a kind of proud old-fogeyism that we all have encountered. Of course, the exemplar of the form is Andy Rooney, who, as Ta-Nehisi notes, is right on cue with a rant about how he doesn’t get young people and their music. He seems genuinely surprised that, as time goes on, pop music changes. (And even then it kind of doesn’t. The overwhelming power of the Baby Boomers as a giant demographic is such that artists from the 60s and 70s can still chart by repackaging their old stuff in handy new forms to give as gifts.)
It’s a pretty standard issue use of self-deprecation in order to conceal what’s really an implication that Kids These Days are stupid, which is why he rounds the piece off by saying that he may not know who Lady Gaga is, but Kids These Days don’t know who Ella Fitzgerald is. Which caused me to roll my eyes, and I was glad that Ta-Nehisi saw it the same way:
When I was a kid at Howard, I used to go into Ben’s Chili Bowl and hit the jukebox. I always played Otis Redding, The JBs, or Sam and Dave. I knew this music for two reasons: 1.) It was what my parents played, and on long road trips their music, not mine, was the soundtrack. It’s like being black in America—I knew that part of their world in a way that they could not know mine. 2.) Hip-Hop created a culture of Digging In The Crates. The notion was that digging through crates and crates of records to find a gem was something to be prized.
Whatever you think of the music, no self-respecting hip-hop head, at that time, could ever get away with saying, “Man, I don’t be listening to no Ella Fitzgerald!” Your friends would have looked at you like you were crazy. Knowledge—not the kind of ignorance Rooney evinces here—was prized. I remember going into Ben’s and the old heads looking over and going, “Son, what you know about that?”
I rolled my eyes because just last week I spent the entire week burning my CD collection, and it spanned the 1920s through the 2000s. (With some Ella Fitzgerald mixed in—-both original recordings and remixes from our era.) And, like with Ta-Nehisi, this isn’t some thing that has come over me in my 30s, some desire to get in touch with my past, but it goes back to my whole life, for similar reasons to his. This isn’t really unusual with my generation or the generation that came after us, the ones that are being dubbed Generation Y or the millenials.
I think Rooney probably just doesn’t know that. I think what happened is he dusted off a rant that he’s being keeping in circulation since the Boomers were the Kids These Days he was ranting about. I remember being a kid, probably in junior high, and coming across a piece he wrote in 1980 where he talked about how sad John Lennon’s death was, because even though he didn’t get the Kids These Days that liked Lennon, the man did seem like a good husband and father at the time of his death. So, this is something that’s been up Rooney’s butt since roughly forever. He’s just reusing old material, but it doesn’t really fit anymore.