That is exactly why we didnt like him.
Old people, and the “Doris Day/Gisele MacKenzie/Patti Paige/Doggie in the Window people” from the early 1950’s bought Pat Boone.
Pat Boone was not rock and roll, and he had nothing in common with the Beatles nor the 1960’s generation.
[quote=“Susanann, post:14, topic:509267”]
NO we didnt.
Pat Boone (State Fair) was pretty much an old has been by the late 1950’s, and definitely: not cool. We made fun of Pat Boone and his white shoes. Absolutely no one tried to look like him. Pat Boone was an uncool dork. He sold his records to the old people, our parents, not to us younger people. We may have been curteous to him, but no teenager ran out to buy his records after the mid-1950’s.
99% of the time we listened to music done by OUR generation, by other kids OUR age, like the Beach Boys, the Ronnettes, the Chiffons, Connie Francis, etc who were OUR!!! age and who we identified with.
I cant even imagine any other kids back in the 1960’s wanting to listen to some old geezer from our parents day.[end quote]
I’m not sure exactly who this “we” is that you keep referring to, but it doesn’t seem to include me. Up until about age 10 (1965), I listened to whatever sounded good to me – I wasn’t yet into pigeonholing music. After that, I focused more on contemporary music, but never totally lost interest in older music, and the more I learned, the more my appreciation for music from “before my time” increased.
I disagree.
I myself mostly played rock and roll, or country, and none of my kids accepted it, nor did any of their playmates, nor anybody else in our family or anybody we knew.
They young kids called rock and roll: “repeat music” because every rock and roll song repeats the same words, same phrase, over and over.
Its not very hard for kids to see what you are doing after they reach the age of 5.
All the kids we knew, knew, it was “my” music, and not theirs. “Geezer music”.
Have you seen recent photos of those old balding rolling stones, Beatles, Beach Boys lately?
Pretty Woman Lyrics
My kids will grow up loving the Beatles…if they know what’s good for them. 
I’ve never known anyone who disliked the Beatles for being old. Not everyone is a huge fan or anything, but almost everyone I know has at least one album or a few mp3s. It’s just so hard to avoid the Beatles.
As for “repeat music,” yeah a lot of it was that way, but not all greatness is about lyrics. Someone on some interview was mocking Phil Spector by reciting some banal lyric and he pointed out that you can’t just recite the lyric to break it apart–it’s about the song beat, the sound.
And of course there were some really great lyricists at the time. My parents loved Bob Dylan, and I’ve known many, many people who still think he’s great.
Actually, there was a generation gap in music tastes during the 1920s with the rise of jazz. The era’s older voices of authority considered jazz to be the music of drinking and decadence–a sure sign of society’s moral and cultural rot. (In fact, Henry Ford supposedly had his company spies go into the homes of workers to check for the presence of alcohol and jazz records. If either one were found, the worker would be canned.) Of course, the condemnation of jazz by their elders just made the music even more irresistible to young people.
One of my earlier ‘I just embarassed the hell out of my parents’ memories is loudly singing “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road” at my grandmother’s house.
I feel no shame in this, it was a good song. But to this day, they remember that. It’s sort of the reverse of those ‘naked baby pictures’.
On the other hand, I get violent urges whenever I hear anything from Peter, Paul, and Mommy. Both were played about as often.
I also don’t think music is as much the outward sign of rebellion that it was in your generation. It’s just not that a big a deal (among my peers growing up, at least) and a certain amount of eclecticism is desirable in my generation. Add to that that much popular music (hip hop, for instance) mines musical culture and recontextualizes it, so there is a certain amount of coolness in the original source material. If it’s cool for Kanye West to go digging through old records and rap over a Ray Charles sample, listening to records of your parent’s or even grandparent’s generation can’t really be all that “square.” edit: As long as you listen to some relatively recent stuff, too. Ever notice how the answer to “What kind of music do you listen to?” over the last ten or fifteen years seems to always be some variant of “Everything, but [country/rap/metal]” or simply “A little bit of everything.” I think Generations X & Y take more pride into having a diverse set of interests. Although this may be my skewed perspective.
This.
The generation gap is exemplified beautifully in the 1946 biopic about the songwriter Jerome Kern, Till The Clouds Roll By.. Many of his greatest songs were written in the 1920s and there’s a scene in the movie where a crowd of teenagers drive up in a jalopy and ask him for directions. The year is now 1938 and Kern is in his late middle-age.
They talk and the kids ask Kern what he does. He replies he’s a songwriter and mentions some of his classic songs. They look blank for a minute, then one of them sneers, ‘That’s old stuff.’.
They then start bopping about him singing ‘Jeepers, creepers, whereja get those peepers’ (written in 1938 by Harry Warren) while Kern looks pained, exactly as an adult 20 years later would look if kids were dancing around him wailing ‘Tutti Frutti’.
Jesus. It’s posts like these that make me wonder why I spend so much time on this board.
More than I care to count. But as a reminder, if you decide to quote from a song, don’t use more than one verse and link to the rest.
Thanks for that. No, I mean, seriously - thank you.
I suppose what I’m about to say could be construed as a personal attack and I’ll be told to take it to the Pit but, frankly, I think Susanann’s posts in this thread are patronizing to the point of being insulting. I am far from being a music geek but I know a good tune when I hear one, and being told (essentially) that I am “too young” to appreciate Bob Dylan or Bobby Darin is as pathetic as being told that I am “too old” to enjoy Dizzee Rascal or Jack Johnson.
But it’s entirely possible that I’m somehow misconstruing Susanann’s posts in this thread, and I’d appreciate it if she’d stop in again and clarify her comments.
It’s…odd, for sure. I can’t fathom thinking listening to old music is “creepy” just because the singers are now old. I mean, my grandparents still enjoy listening to jazz, like a lot of Ella Fitzgerald. I’m not a huge jazz fan but I got into Ella Fitzgerald/Cole Porter a bit when I saw the movie De-Lovely. It just seems so intellectually and emotionally close minded to dismiss a songwriter or singer as a “geezer” because they’re from another generation. Is listening to classical composers who are all dead creepy?
Naw, you’re not misconstruing anything. She’s taking her own narrow little sliver of experience and extrapolating how nobody could’ve possibly liked or been interested in or been motivated to explore anything different than what she did. She didn’t buy X records? Nobody her age did! Her kids don’t like Y music? Why, that’s a generational truism! Z geezers make her feel oogy? Why, isn’t that true for everyone?!?
And this from a person who can’t even spell the Beatles (“her music”) correctly–about as square a goof as one can imagine.
I’m just glad I’m not the only one.
This was the quote that really blew my mind. Who cares what their recent photos looked like? For that matter, who cares what they looked like back when they were first making music? Does the fact that they’ve aged make albums like “Abbey Road” and “Pet Sounds” any less groundbreaking?
And the post where apparently it’s creepy for young kids to listen to a “geezer” like Michael Jackson.
I do think it has to do with how well the parents are educating their kids as far as music/culture goes. I don’t mean “Educating” in a stuffy sense, i.e. forcefeeding some kinda curriculum down their throats, but simply… listening to good music they enjoy and letting the kids listen in too, without patronizing the children by fobbing them off with Barney or Dora or whatever officially sanctioned “Music for Kiddees!” is popular these days with parents who want to shut up their children in the car.
I’m galled by the sheer condescension involved in assuming children must listen to/watch pap, or must have separate dinners or whatever. My sisters and I grew up in the sixties (my oldest sister) and the seventies (my closest sister & I) and we were exposed to and loved Gershwin, Beethoven, Chopin, Sinatra, Richard Rodgers, the Beatles, you name it. My parents were catholic in their tastes and didn’t sneer at rock or modern pop music just because they were born in the 1920s (I have very fond memories of my parents dancing to Stevie Wonder, actually. 
) We didn’t have some need to rebel by listening only to disco or punk; I mean, sometimes we did, but generally it was all good depending on our mood.
My niece was brought up the same way. She grew up with parents who in additional to modern stuff watched black & white classic films & TV shows, and listened to classical music and the Beatles and Rodgers & Hammerstein. And now this thirteen year old adores I Love Lucy and Katharine Hepburn is her favorite actress. She listens to Jonas Brothers and the High School Musical soundtracks, sure, but she also loves the entire catalog of the Beatles, and knows Carousel backwards and forwards. She also loves playing Chopin on the piano.
In my experience, when parents show respect to their children by treating them not like either miniature adults or infants, but like people who just might enjoy great music and culture, the children respond with curiosity and openmindedness.
I’m feeling a little bad for yojimbo now because the article he linked in his OP really is adorable. Funny how kids can sometimes cut through all the bullshit. Go read!
Heh. Probably what I’d say.
Love it!
I was visiting an old friend the other day. And by old I mean 90. We didn’t talk much – he’s pretty tired and will surely slip away sometime soon – but we put on an old album and listened to it. The record was one of his favorites, a singer named Eddie Arnold, who I gather was big in the Forties and early Fifties. Not my kind of music, but, as a singer and a performer, the guy was definitely good.