Title says it all. I first heard the phrase in The Offspring song The Kids Aren’t Alright. Surely they didn’t invent it?
I first heard it in the Who’s The Kids are Alright, which certainly predates the Offspring song. I assumed it was just a phrase people used around the time they wrote it (1965, I think - is Offspring from the '90s?).
The Offspring took it from The Who.
There was a movie (The Who) in 1979. If it dates earlier, I don’t know.
Thanks for the replies, guys.
The song was released in 1998.
nvm
Moved from General Questions to Cafe Society.
samclem Moderator
I’m both a big Who fan and a research librarian, and as far as I can tell the expression originated with the song. I’m sure that particular string of words had been spoken before, but it doesn’t seem to have been a popular expression. There are no hits in Google books prior to 1965, and with only one exception* everything from 1965 through 1979 appears to be either about the song or the 1979 documentary about The Who.
It looks like starting in the 1980s the phrase began appearing as the headline for magazine and newspaper articles about the doings of young people. I would imagine that the 1979 film popularized the expression.
*“Having to call home all the time to see if the kids are alright, or if Judy has taken too many pills” from a 1977 book on clinical depression.
When the song was released, there was a hell of a lot of chatter indicating that the kids were anything but all right. Not that every older generation hasn’t said much the same thing (Socrates is famously on record raving about it), but after the Baby Boom, there were just so many kids that the articles proliferated more tiresomely than in years past. If Pete Townshend hadn’t written it, someone would have had to.
The song by the Who was not a song about generational conflict:
It was about a guy trying to decide if he should break up with his girlfriend. So it wasn’t the equivalent of their song “Talking 'bout My Generation”. It was only later that it was interpreted as being anything except a typical love song.
In concert they transformed the song over the years, it became kind of an anthem of hope for new generations.
Good to know. I’m just so used to finding out that phrases I thought were invented by particular musicians were actually around before them, that I’ve started to take that as a baseline :o.
In fact I seem to recall reading (somewhere or other) the *Who *song was titled after, or rather as a response to, a newspaper headline along the lines of “what’s wrong with kids these days ?”. Can’t seem to find a cite however, so take that information with sodium chloride in crystal form.
Wrong band.
Out of curiosity I also checked on the phrase “going mobile”, which I saw just the other day as the name of a workshop on mobile devices, and that does predate the 1971 Who song. I was interested to discover that even in the '60s and '70s the phrase was used to refer both to traveling, which is what the song is about, and communication technology (radio).
Not far, though - Townsend said that Cobain was the same as him, except, Kurt was ‘pretty’.
It was common enough to be recognizably parodied in “Bye Bye Birdie” (“Why can’t they be like we were-- / Perfect in every way? What’s the matter with kids today?”)
Nitpick: The correct term is “all right.”
Not when one is discussing the the Who song “The Kids Are Alright” or the later Offspring song “The Kids Aren’t Alright”. In bother cases the song title uses the spelling “alright”.
IIRC the Who song was actually criticized in its time for just this reason, but was defended by either Pete Townshend himself or the band’s management with the explanation that “The Kids Are All Right” could be taken as meaning “The Kids Are All Factually Correct”.