30 is not the new 20. 40 is not the new 30. Yall should be so lucky.
OK, forgive me one last post about this whole aging thing and then I will write about it no more. Not until my next birthday.
One of the topics that came up at the Berkeley panel, and that I raised again last week at Duke is this: when generations speak to each other, what are we supposed to say?
At the 2004 National Hip-Hop Political Convention, it was clear that even after all these years and books and screaming matches and Congressional hearings, those of us who came of age in the 80s and 90s still hadn't figured out how to communicate with those of us who came of age in the 60s and 70s. Not barely close.
When I sat in the audience at Cal's Pauley Ballroom last week, I got a weird flashback. Two decades before, I had been a student listening to my heroes in the same room urging us to fight for UC divestment from South Africa and an Ethnic Studies requirement. I was a twenty-something listening to then-late thirty-, forty- and fifty-somethings talking about the unfinished struggles of the 60s and 70s they were hoping to marshal the energies of young folks to continue to fight.
It was a little disconcerting to see my peers up there, in the place of my Baby Boomer heroes, and have a sudden pimp-slap of self-recognition. Ouch.
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Davey D raised a point about the lack of media for people of color in their mid-30s to mid-40s these days. It's a point I've made myself, but didn't realize the full implications of til he broke it down.
I'll explain it like this: you can be a fan of rock, and have a classic rock station if you came of age in the 60s or 70s, an "adult alternative" station if you came of age in the 80s, an "adult alternative contemporary" if you came of age in the 90s, and another if you're 20 right now. There's no similar continuity--never has been--if you're a fan of Black music. There's a station aimed at 20 year olds and a station aimed at 50+ year olds.
I know Davey talks from experience. He literally hit the age ceiling at the end of the 90s at Clear Channel. It's like: time's expired, you're in Logan's Run and you've just hit 30, baby. And just you wait, young'n, for you too will have your Logan's Run moment before too long.
(BTW that's why Jay-Z lied, yall, about 30 being the new 20. But now I understand where it comes from--he, just like all of us, wants to continue the conversation, and he's got something to say that, odds are, most people wouldn't hear if it weren't for all the money around him and that message.)
So where would one even begin to go if you wanted to hear a Chuck D or a Yo-Yo these days? If you wanted to hear a fortysomething and a twentysomething come together and talk like adults, like grown women and men, about what's good and what's next?
Joan answered the question at Duke: most likely, you'd have to go to a college. Tune in a college radio station, take a hip-hop studies course, check out a panel discussion at a university.
Now, in the past, this nostalgia would have come back as kitsch. (Anyone remember "The Last Dragon"? Of course not!) These days, seems like history is forgotten until it comes back as a Wax Poetics article or a musicblog entry. You ever wonder why hip-hop heads had to "rediscover" soul jazz during the 90s and why hip-hop heads have to "rediscover" Large Professor now?
The answer is a lot deeper than you think: It's just the way American culture works. Maybe the generation gap isn't just a development of getting older, maybe it's a product of the way things are set up around here.
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So, back to Davey's point: what if one wanted to have a real intergenerational dialogue these days? Where would you do it?
The answer is that there is nowhere to do it. We gonna entertain the kids over here, and all the adults can gather over there and talk about how mad they are at the kids these days, what the kids don't know about what we've been through, what the kids don't appreciate about what we did, how spoiled are them kids, what is this racket they're listening to anyway.
So instead, the lack of intergenerational discussion pops up in different ways--in all these anti-intellectual conversations amongst young folks about how pompous all this hip-hop-in-the-university stuff is, in--haha--blog discussions about what old folks ought not to wear, in old folks angrily claiming 'hip-hop is dead'. Even ridiculous ways--bloggers saying they're proud never to have read a book about hip-hop, young folks wearing pastel polo shirts with the collars up (still a bad look, fellas), young folks who only buy cassette tapes from the 80s.
I say all this to say that if we were really to get real about changing things, we might recognize that we've been niched, penned, and branded by age. We're like cows sitting in our own filth cursing out the cows on the other side of the fence for their filthiness of their filth.
Damn.
Alright. Back to life, back to reality.
