The Children Are Our Future -or- Rock and Roll is a Boomer Psyops And Survivor (the show)Completely Sucks
"hey hey my my. rock and roll will never die" - a guy who will soon die
hola amigos. I know it’s been a while since I rapped at you but the world’s been turning faster than my prickle pear ass can keep up with lately and I’m lucky to get both legs in my pants before I leave the house these days. As always, your presence here beyond the thunderdome is beyond appreciated. I’ll be playing a few shows on the east coast doin my unparalleled acoustic thang along with the mighty No Trigger, so tune in for that or forever regret everything you’ve ever failed to do.
4-12 Rochester The Bug Jar
4-13 Garwood the Crossroads
4-14 Philly Kung Fu Necktie
4-15 Lancaster Tellus 360/Launch
Hope to see y’all there. Anyway, on with the show as it were.
About seven or so years ago I went to see a buddy of mine who has a kid about the same age as my son (who was around 7 at the time) and we got to talking about kids, as people tend to do when in the presence of other people trapped in the same curatory existence that is the child rearing emotional labor camp complex.
He asked me if my kid was into bottle flipping. Bottle flipping, you may remember, was big about 7 years ago and involved taking a half full plastic water bottle and flipping it so it landed upright on its base.
Of course my kid was into bottle flipping. Shit was almost, but not quite, as popular as the flossing dance move that infected so many little league outfields and boring lines in boring stores all across this great nation. All little boys around my son’s age were into bottle flipping and flossing. Quite amusing. Anyway…
My friend said that his kid was a big bottle flipper and then opined that it is a very stupid lame waste of time. I don't totally disagree with this initial assessment as a kind of knee jerk reaction, but upon thinking about it for just one tiny little smidgeon of a second, I kinda caught myself and instead said something to the effect of “I dunno man. It’s like a buck for hours of entertainment and no one’s getting hurt or anything and besides, right around when you and I were little boys, slightly older kids were taking their parents’ albums, putting them on their parents’ record players and moving the record back and forth under the needle because the sound was kind of cool, destroying both the record and the record player in the process and not only does that seem WAY stupider than bottle flipping, but some of those dudes are billionaires now. So who knows?”
I’m not saying bottle flipping is gonna usher in any sort of cultural revolution or anything, I’m just saying the things that ARE going to usher anything of note into the public consciousness are going to come in forms that I as an old dude will not recognize for what it is when I first see it. And that’s fine. It’s the way it’s supposed to be.
My other friend is a high school teacher and recently he lamented to me that there’s no punk rockers in his school, no revolutionary spirit, no insurgence at all, and armed with the remnants of the thoughts I had first had about bottle flipping over half a decade ago, I said “you’re not supposed to be able to see it, dude. The shit that’s going on is probably not even something you’d see as insurgence or even ever interact with meaningfully in any way, but of course it exists.”
No, of course the kids these days aren’t into punk rock. That’s not insurgent to them. That’s what old people do. The idea of them not being able to easily point Reagan out as a figurehead of late stage capitalism is irrelevant. These kids were born after 9-11 and their foundational world is nothing like the one that we cling to even as it evaporates out from under us. They have never known life without Tik Tok (in that they will be surprised one day to learn that it didn’t exist when they were born). We just don’t know. We don’t know so much that any map we think we have is a map of tectonic plates that haven’t just moved since the map we used to use, they’ve disintegrated and new ideas of landmass have replaced them that don’t even follow our previously understood principles of plate tectonics at all.
It’s like when you think about what an alien would look like. It’s impossible. There is no reason they have to ‘breathe’ ‘air’ or have organs or dicks or consume the way we do. They could live on a planet that’s an atmosphere of liquid mercury and that does whatever they need to keep them alive. I was just tempted to write “that’s what they breathe” but that’s a pretty earthist assumption, innit (I’m definitely not trying to be galactically woke or anything, and I suppose there’s a metaphor for our culture in this kind of line of thought somewhere, but I’m nowhere near interested in figuring it out today)?
You can’t think of a new primary color (go ahead and try!) or conceptualize an alien or…you know what? One time I was in Japan and I went to buy a green tea from a cooler in a 7-11 and I reached in and the plastic bottle was hot. It was hot tea in bottles in a heater. If I can’t even navigate the drink aisle in a 7-11 in another bustling metropolis in my own time to find a cold drink, how the fuck am I gonna be able to conceptualize anything that’s vastly more theoretical than that in every possible sort of meaningful way, hmmmmm?
The answer is there’s just no fucking chance I ever could and I’m fine with that. Insurgence is the lifeblood of any semi interesting young person and I’m certainly not arrogant enough to think that somehow I was involved in the last insurgent generation in humanity. It’s a shitty old man thing to think (and to be clear, I’m not