The Clash formed in May 1976, about 50 years ago. Were Joe Strummer alive today, he would be 73 years old.
Today I checked The Babylon Bee and found an article, dated November 10, titled "Fans Can't Believe How Much Rock Singer Has Aged In The Last 50 Years."
4 comments:
It's the old time-flies-faster-as-you-get-older phenomenon. A good thought experiment for one to perform every few years for the rest of his life is to think of the last sixteen years. Then think of all the history that happened from 1929 to 1945. Sixteen years.
What coherent entity do people mean by the boomer "generation"?
Generation properly refers to human generations in terms of child, parent, grandparent etc.
If boomers are supposed to be the post-war babies, born from 1945 onwards, then a generation used to be counted as 25 years (the approximate average age at which a woman had had about half her children). Nowadays, in the West, the generational span is more than 30 years (among the native populations).
But it seems that the US notion of generations is non-biological, and *much* shorter even than 25 years - to the point of having *nothing* to do with actual human generations.
Indeed, the whole generation thing is dysfunctional... except as a means of generating mutual resentment by encouraging generational self-identification and distinction (like the self/ other distinctions of feminism, racism, sexual identity etc).
("Project Fear, Project Hate" stuff analogous to the "all men are bastards" stories and fictions that permeate the mass media.)
Which is, I guess, exactly why the whole subject of "generations" has been top-down invented, disseminated, and hyped over the post-war period -- until now when it is culturally pervasive and some people seem to "enjoy" discoursing about generations on an everyday basis.
Of course, so-called "generations" are false: there are only individuals. The same way a stream of water coming from the pipe is false: there are only drops of water. And, of course, this has been used by the system to divide the population ("divide and conquer"). And all the other things are also true.
But this is not the point. The point is that people born around the same date have a similar culture and similar attitudes, because of mass media. Most people are sheep and follow the zeitgeist of their era. So "generations" are a useful term to describe these common attitudes without giving a lengthy explanation. In this post, it means some kind of music (pop/rock/folk of the 60s and 70s). As a shorthand, it is very understandable.
In case of the Boomers, a shared trait is to react to the term "Boomer" like a vampire reacts to a cross (this is so Boomer-ish), even if the term is not used in a negative way. Other "generation": Gen X, Millennial don't react this way and, when you say "your generation is garbage", they mostly agree: they don't take it personal. Another trait is self-centeredness and reluctance to leave power to younger people (Biden, Trump and the Clintons would be telling tales to grandchildren in other generations).
And despising traditions. The Boomers are always inventing new things that they think they are so superior to the old ways (which they mostly don't know and despise as something outdated). You can see it in the authorities of the different Christian churches: in their 70s and 80s are fighting for revolution (while young people in Churches are traditional).
Are all Boomers like that? Of course, not! Do all American people speak English or are all women shorter than men? Of course, not. But to think is to generalize and this is a useful generalization. All the posts and the comments of any blog in the world have generalizations because, without generalizations, it is impossible to think.
Bruce, all I mean by Boomer is "born shortly after WWII," and all I say about Boomers in this post is that they're old now. Pretty unobjectionable, I would have thought.
However, since you've brought it up, I do believe the Boomers (and all subsequent generations so far) are importantly different from past generations. As I've noted before, the postwar baby boom marks the precise moment that future scientific geniuses abruptly stopped being born.
https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-reality-of-genius-famine.html
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