First off, the Health Care Bill passed this weekend has the potential to be a great thing for a lot of people. Surely, those most excited about it are not the uninsured, the poor, or the Mom & Pop business owners out there who want what’s best for their employees.
No, instead it is that crowd of AARP designates who are pretty sure they’re going to bankrupt Medicare and Social Security with their endless tummy tucks, breast implants, and full rotator cuff replacements each summer after another strenuous season of Ultimate Frisbee so that they may live to see the century mark. I’m sure they are overjoyed at knowing Botox will be an option well into their 90’s and beyond. I’m not sure why they love the Steve Winwood song so much, given that they’ve never really left the “High Life” to begin with, but I’m sure there were plenty of white zinfandels and Budweiser Selects hoisted after the vote in celebration.
Phew, close one guys, you almost didn’t get what you wanted.
Why any of this? I just finished reading Zach Baron’s short piece on Slate about the Pavement reunion and what statement it makes about the end of the Boomer generation’s iron-clad grasp on cultural relevancy. Once again I find myself cursing that damned generation and those it has produced in its eclipsing, ever-expanding wake.
While Baron provides plenty of examples of the “post boomer” generations’ increasing cache as reflected in modern culture - a Saturday Night Live that peripherally references Black Flag, Pitchfork Media, Vampire Weekend, and Super Bowl commercials - he fails to fully understand one very important fact. The idea of “modern culture” within which Pavement, Arcade Fire, Minor Threat, and all the other references are being placed is built entirely within the framework structure built by the ME ME ME Boomer generation in the first place.
Is the Pavement reunion a benchmark in the march towards an end to the Boomer hegemony? Are you kidding me? Ask The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, KISS, the Rolling Stones, ad infinitum how the “reunion tour” and each year’s subsequent iteration worked out for them financially. In a word: “wonderfully.”
Don’t want to trust those fossils’ word for it? How about the Pixies, Jane’s Addiction, or the forthcoming Soundgarden reunion? If you think you’re excited to see Chris Cornell and Kim Thayil on stage together again, it pales in comparison to the elation the folks at LiveNation or AEG or whomever is bankrolling it must feel.
It’s not an end to hegemony - if anything, it is a validation of the order of succession.
Can the generations - and I sincerely mean that in the plural, as “free love” quickly gave way to “teen pregnancy” on an epidemic scale - who’ve come after these decrepit dinosaurs benefit culturally from a reunited Pavement? How, in any way, could they benefit, unless we are measuring cultural relevancy by how much a ticket costs, how quickly a show sells out, what size the t-shirts come in, and which festivals the kids are conning their parents into paying for this year.
Sadly, that’s probably more accurate than not.
Baron wonders what act or artist will be the impetus to pry the mic stand out of Mick Jagger’s hands, and in case you were losing sleep on this topic as well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: it’s never going to happen. Here in Kansas City, we have one major “classic rock” station - they will never play Pavement, Grizzly Bear, Broken Social Scene, or any of the other pasty neck-beards out of Portland that modern indie kids happen to idolize this year. In thirty years, the station’s rotation will be a steady selection of the same four AC/DC, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Led Zeppelin songs interspersed with the Bread, Mott the Hoople, and ELO that they’re playing today.
Granted, this might sound entirely implausible, but think about it: today’s “kids” have been brought up as a product of their parents’ culture. For every “Summer of Love” kid out there who, at age 16 in 1984, stuck a Husker Du patch on his jacket, there were tens of thousands being re-sold Sgt Pepper’s. Fourth-graders today can buy Hendrix t-shirts at Wal-Mart, while their older brothers and sisters are, en masse, getting stoned to the same Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and Pink Floyd albums their parents listened to.
Even so many “edgy” kids today tend to go no further than the Zappa/Beefheart circle, as it’s enough to shame the “casual” Elton John, Queen, or Beach Boys fan as “uninformed” or “conformist”.
I’ll say it again - the boomer generation, born between 1950 and roughly the late 60’s, have created in their children a generation modeled entirely on the culture of their parents’ generation. References to Brian Wilson, Lennon/McCartney, the Kinks, Black Sabbath, Simon & Garfunkel, and Dylan litter mainstream music writing, film, commercials, and popular radio. Attempts to add any sense of racial or ethnic diversity to the mix are stagnated by the milquetoast presentation of the past forty years - Marvin Gaye sang great love songs, sure, but the societal narratives he more importantly provided are largely lost as his legacy has been communicated down through the years to those with enough leisure time to worry about these sort of things.
Furthermore, we will not be discussing who inducts Animal Collective into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. Guided by Voices can forget it. Rick Rubin, arguably the most allegorically relevant face of shame in this whole mess, will make it in, but will Steve Albini? No. Rappers, techno producers, or anyone born outside of the U.S./British historical empire? OMG lulz wut?
The baseline has shifted so far that today’s generations - born 1980 to date - are unable to free themselves from the yoke of their elders, even in rebellion. They are so framed by an unrelenting, unwavering, self-congratulatory cultural boundary established by their parents (and in some cases, grandparents) that even in opposition, they only extend the reach of that which they fight against.
So what about Pavement? They were arguably the first band to reach the eye of the perfect storm of the early and mid-90’s “counterculture” slacker revolution. The band offered well crafted, yet generally raw and irreverent music on a burgeoning semi-underground label that was largely built on a regional scene they’d help make vital. They became critical darlings and were beneficiaries of a love/hate relationship with the then-largely internet-less “underground” independent music scene. Finally, the band wrapped up their never-forthcoming Behind the Music with a perfectly-timed acrid burnout and breakup that didn’t include the death or suicide of anyone in the band, all while sort-of making an impact that wasn’t initially felt but was instead slowly propagated through ‘zines and a few clued-in writers until the explosion of the internet and the extended reach of overnight tastemakers like Pitchfork was fully realized.
Ask any kid in skinny jeans and greasy hair today which one holds a greater current cultural value to her - Pavement or Nirvana? - and Malkmus & Co. will probably get the nod, if for no other reason than the irony points. Cobain and friends have expired long ago, as have their reverse-coattails comprades in the Pixies and Jane’s Addiction.
So, much like the Pixies before them, I’m not interested in Pavement’s reunion tour nor am I interested in shifting the marker to make them the new “sell-by” date. I’m not interested in participating in the re-sell of a marketing tool perfected by senior citizens with ponytails back to a generation of kids who feel they, just as their parents before them, have a birthright entitlement to participate, regardless of the truth, circumstances or costs involved. That, to me, is what Baron misses - for all attempts at conveying the image of Pavement destroying a luxury suite, the reality is that the Old Guard still own the hotel.
My ultimate point here is this: let’s not start congratulating our own vaunted cultural reference points for deciding to work within the system because they choose to bend rules instead breaking them. Just as baby boomers have been continually patting themselves on the back for the past forty years for all they “accomplished” despite how very little they actually have to show for it - beyond of course a mountain of debt and a brain-dead vapid society - the modern generations are at risk for following their lead in assigning value to the appearance of nonconformity as a substitute for the practical application of it.
Which, sadly, is what made Pavement so great in the first place.
