Sometimes I fart around on music blogs or MySpace, just to hear what people are listening to. I always go in optimistic – maybe I’ll find something new to love. I do like some of what I hear; most of it I can’t stand. But is that really any different from how I felt about new music five years ago? Ten? Twenty? I wonder whether the ratio of stuff I like to stuff I think is shit has changed at all.

Do you read the Lefsetz Letter? I enjoy it; Bob Lefsetz writes some galvanizing stuff, even if the dude contradicts himself like crazy and has never, ever offered a solution for any of the socioeconomic problems he claims are destroying the musical universe. I like his bluntness; I like when he goes all RAH-RAH about artist empowerment, as hokey as that can be; and I love when he really gets into a song and parses it, section by section, from where he was the first time he heard the intro to what tragedy the chorus got him through.

What Lefsetz doesn’t seem to appreciate sometimes, though, is that even if he doesn’t enjoy a style of music, even if he thinks it’s vapid or crummy, there are people who derive just as much meaning, pleasure, and catharsis from it as he got from the records he listened to in college. I don’t care to listen to Breaking Benjamin or The Devil Wears Prada or Fleet Foxes… they aren’t saying anything I haven’t heard before. But to people coming of age right now, these are comforting or invigorating or nourishing or sympathetic voices.

Gen Xers like me think that our music was the last great music; we were too shrewd to fall for “sell-outs”; we stomped all the crap dead, killed all the idols and embraced only the best, the incorruptible. But none of that is true at all. We loved Poison. We loved Warrant. We loved the New Kids On The Block. These assholes still have careers… thanks to Generation X.

There was shitty, stupid, pointless music in the ’90s. In the ’80s. In the ’70s. In the ’60s. And people of every decade – smart people and stupid people alike – bought the fuck out of it, let their lives be shaped by it.

I used to feel like my generation got the shaft. We were dismissed as “slackers” and told that we’d be the first Americans to experience a lower standard of living than their parents… that we should pray for the Gulf War to last forever so we’d have something to do when we got out of college. Then we recognized the potential in a new technology, the Internet, and cultivated it into something world-changing. I saw Gen Xers as no-nonsense heroes, rising above the petty criticisms of those who could never understand us.

But in reality, no generation is more laudable than another. WWII’s so-called “Greatest Generation” was the most destructive in human history; they murdered more people than had ever been killed by man; redrew the map in ways that create war and turmoil to this day; did horrible things to our environment; were sexist and racist; and invented weapons that still threaten human existence. They may be the worst generation of all.

The Baby Boomers squandered a cultural revolution, turned their backs on their own message and went corporate. Then they managed to derail a second revolution by being too intellectually lazy to appreciate what the Internet actually was. They thought of it as this abstract thing which could be harnessed simply by invoking its name – the way characters in the comic books they grew up reading might be powered by gamma radiation or cosmic rays. So with no viable understanding, the Boomers who ran the newspapers and the magazines and the record labels raced blindly to integrate, to annex the Internet… changing it from a communications tool to an entertainment service, rendering all of their product valueless, crushing entire industries, and doing incalculable damage to our culture. Now they complain that we are becoming a socialist country. Of course we are… that’s what happens when you destroy capitalism by making everything free.

Millennials are unwitting victims of the Baby Boomers’ mistakes. They grew up just in time to understand content as free, no matter how much it costs to create, and will never accept having to pay that tab. They’ve been given access to a virtual Library of Alexandria, except most of it is junk – where previous generations got their information from trained journalists and experts, processed through armies of fact-checkers and made readable by editors and proofreaders, Gen Y’s worldview is shaped mostly by uninformed opinions. Years of watching edited, scripted television shows which are sold to them as “reality” and reinforce the idea that they might be selected for fame and fortune at any moment have engendered a deficiency of perspective so severe that many Millennials would rather run themselves out of the workforce than accept the possibility that they may only be qualified for entry-level jobs.

And then there’s my generation. Once defined by our righteous rage, Gen X has grown punchy and dull. The babies we were aborting ten years ago, we now keep, if only because everybody else is. And we smother them in rock t-shirts and G.I. Joe t-shirts and Transformers t-shirts, pretending it’s because we still appreciate irony while secretly, desperately hoping they will like all the things we liked and grow up to be our pals. And when something pisses us off, we vent on a Web site read only by others who share the same opinion. Sometimes we get so passionate about a tragedy or injustice, we do something that we were probably gonna do anyway, like join a Facebook group or grow a mustache, to “raise awareness” about it. We are out of juice, which is extra weak when you’re the generation that was all about being the one with the juice.

[I understand that I've been generalizing; that's what happens when you get demographic. How about this: if any of the above gives you weird uncomfortable feelings, let me know and I will write you a special note to keep in your pocket that says it does not apply to you.]

There is something I do in my songs which I only came to notice in the past year or two: I always keep it ambiguous as to which side I am personally taking. For example, if I write a song about a character who’s a dick, I will usually write it from his perspective (some of you probably feel like I wrote this entire post from the perspective of a person who is a dick, ha ha). I’ll try to make you understand why he is the way he is, maybe even agree with him for a second before you catch yourself. What I’m still trying to figure out is whether that’s because I believe everyone is wrong, or because I don’t believe anyone is wrong.

We are all so excellent, and so disappointing.

Okay, that’s enough!

Hmm… maybe that should be my new signoff. Okay, that’s enough!

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