619 generational pop propaganda

As a Gen Xer, I’ve been sold a steady diet of Boomer crap since I was born. At this point, I know more about Boomer pop culture than I do Gen X pop culture. All the classics — the classic bands, the classic movies — everything from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s — that’s all Boomer shit. Gen X basically got one decade, the ’90s.

Boomers have The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Monkees, The Kinks, The Who, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jackson Browne, The Eagles, Michael Jackson, Wham!, The Cure, even R.E.M. 

Gen X has Nirvana. And Beyoncé.

The one place that Gen Xers have excelled is making tech billionaires. We have Sergey and Bezos, Musk, and Jack Dorsey — and a bunch of other guys, mostly guys. Boomers have, like, Larry Ellison, some Waltons who inherited stuff, some Mars people who inherited stuff, and I don’t know — is Bloomberg a Boomer? He might be older than a Boomer. 

Millennials are doing all right on the billionaire front, too. At this point they’ve got, you know, Zuckerberg, and I don’t know — that AI guy’s probably a Millennial. Altman? And geez, there’s that Kardashian chick down in L.A., what’s her name — Tyler or Kylie. Oh, and Taylor Swift, sure, probably Millennial.

Boomers owned the airwaves. They grew up with TV — the first generation with TV as kids — they popularized FM radio, even got cable going. Gen Xers killed all that with the Internet.

Millennials came in and fried our brains with phones and social media. I don’t know if “fried our brains” is the right word — too much? — they just figured out a fantastic new way of directly jacking into our brains compared to airwaves, or, you know, maybe they  figured out really how to use the Internet.

Boomers invented rock and roll — although not really; it was invented by people like Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, who were Silent Generation or Greatest Generation. But Boomers certainly expanded on the R&R genre and created all kinds of new niches to explore — you know, hard rock and metal and power ballads and disco and electronic dance music. 

Here’s a question: was the Baby Boomer phenomenon global? Was this pop culture a result of the technology of the times? Has the entire world adopted the anonymous supermarket–highway-exit–cul-de-sac lifestyle just because that was the available technology? 

Certainly, the United States originated a whole bunch of that lifestyle infrastructure in the 20th century, as Boomers were coming of age, and it spread globally through television and film. You know, pop culture was one of the great exports of the United States in the 20th century — a largely unacknowledged triumph of intellectual empire. 

Some of the ideas carried by that pop culture/propaganda have rivaled the power of religion to cross borders and control minds outside of the governmental structure. Religion has a lot longer history, but pop culture has perhaps reached as many minds — and deeply affected as many minds — as religion has over the millenia, simply because there are more people alive right now. Whereas it might have taken a religion a couple thousand years to have two billion followers over time, pop culture is hitting eight billion people inside of days or weeks now. An artist can have a hit song in ears around the globe in a day. A president can generate global headlines in minutes.