The other day my kids got into an argument. This isn’t unusual in and of itself: they mostly get along great, but she’s eight and he’s three. There’s bound to be conflict.
What did surprise me was what they were arguing about: my daughter wouldn’t let my son play “Party” by Bad Bunny. I know this because my son came out of their room and said, morosely, “I want to play ‘Party’ by Bad Bunny.”
This was baffling because I have no idea how he knows who Bad Bunny is.1 I am only vaguely aware of who Bad Bunny is. And despite being pretty sure he played it by accident (see footnote), I briefly reeled from experiencing that much-dreaded milestone of becoming An Old: I don’t get my kids’ taste in music.
The music you love growing up takes on such personal significance, to the point that it becomes wrapped up in your identity. You hear a song that expresses something you’ve never been able to put into words, and suddenly your whole weird, awkward existence feel valid. Your parents dismiss it as vapid or vulgar or just noise and it hurts, because you identify with it so much; but it’s also a badge of honor. After all, your parents are old, their tastes and opinions ossified; you are young and open-minded and eclectic, and that’s the way you’ll be forever.
Then one day you’re 38 and you feel like every album title is all lower case or ALL CAPS, every new artist’s name is just three words squished together, and every song on the Top 40 station is pouty rap-singing over interchangeable beats, and none of it appeals or makes sense to you. At first glance, at least: there’s always something to discover, something new to love. But first you have to get over your initial resistance, born of the old lie that if something isn’t what you know, so it must be bad. That’s a defense against deeper, more difficult fears: that the music/art/culture that you identify with isn’t cool or relevant anymore. That you aren’t relevant anymore.2
Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women (2016) — which I wrote about for this week’s Catholic Movie Club column at America Magazine, up tomorrow — hums with that sort of fear, as a single mother and her teenage son navigate the rapidly-shifting world of 1979. Dorothea (Annette Bening) was born in 1924, grew up during the Depression and came into her own during World War II. She loves Casablanca; “As Time Goes By” plays several times to signal her taste in music. She’s an independent woman — certainly by the standards of her generation — and still sees herself as countercultural, but as the film goes on she’s forced to reckon with how dated her brand of countercultural has become.
When she finds her son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) and artist lodger Abbie (Greta Gerwig) listening to the Raincoats’ “Fairytale in the Supermarket,” Dorothea tries to connect to it but quickly gives up. “Can’t things just be pretty?” she asks. Abbie’s explanation of punk music (“it’s really interesting what happens when your passion is bigger than the tools you have to deal with it”) just leaves her more adrift. The Raincoats might as well be beaming in from another galaxy; they’re of a moment and attitude that’s completely alien.
If I’m honest, my own “kids these days” period started long before now. Back in 2018 I went on a streak of like three consecutive retreats where students used Post Malone’s “Feeling Whitney” before their talks, and I had a potent grumpy-old-man How do you listen to this? reaction. More than that: How do you find this so meaningful? To me it was musically dull, lyrically shallow, and delivered in a showy sad-sack manner that made me grind my teeth. But I also wasn’t new to working with teenagers and remembered well how interlocked their interests and identity are, so I dutifully played the song and kept my opinions to myself.
But I knew how I reacted, and knowing that made me feel old. I’d disliked new music before (you’re never too young/old to be a hater!), but this reaction wasn’t “This sucks” it was “I don’t get it.” Since then there have been more and more examples of stuff I just don’t get and that I have to conclude simply isn’t for me. I’m not averse to “new music” generally, although I have a harder time these days identifying why something doesn’t work for me compared to similar stuff. For instance, I enjoy Taylor Swift3 and Olivia Rodrigo, but remain largely unmoved by Sabrina Carpenter and Lana Del Rey. I also have to admit that the new stuff I love usually fits comfortably next to stuff I already like. Do I love 100 gecs’ “Hollywood Baby” because I’m cool enough to like 100 gecs, or because it sounds like it could have come out in 2003? In “20th Century Women,” Dorothea tries to understand Jamie through his music, first attempting to listen to Black Flag and then more successfully to the Talking Heads (“The Big Country”). It’s a sign of openness but, for all of their idiosyncrasies, the Talking Heads are melodic in a way that Dorothea can recognize. As we age, are we only able to appreciate the new as long as it reminds us of something old?
I don’t think that’s necessarily true, but I do think our comfort zones get harder to escape. As I get older, I’m more at ease with liking what I like and not needing to justify or apologize for that (something else about being younger: your relationship with art is so fraught). There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s when nostalgia becomes an excuse not to grow that we’re on the wrong track.
I mentioned Dorothea’s generationally-relative countercultural nature before, and I think that’s essential. You grow up seeing yourself as part of the counterculture, which means being part of something true, of seeing through the bullshit. So when you get older, and a younger generation suddenly has a new idea of what that means (or, God forbid, finds your definition lacking) the only possible explanation is that they’re dumb and naive and will eventually mature into seeing things your way.
But the truth is that every generation takes a hammer to what happened before, on their way to finding themselves. That can make anyone defensive (remember the hurricane of wounded thinkpieces in response to “OK Boomer”? Or those really embarrassing TikTok videos responding to Zoomers making fun of millennials having side parts?), but I think there’s more grace in embracing some degree of cultural obsolescence.
That doesn’t mean being the dinosaurs placidly watching the meteor streak across the sky, but instead realizing that the things you like don’t have to be centered or elevated in popular culture in order for them to have worth. It doesn’t change what it means to you. Just as importantly, you don’t have to “get” something for it to be good. You’re perfectly entitled to think it sucks, but the answer isn’t (and never will be) that culture should reset itself to when you were 17. Most of that stuff sucked, too; the only reason it means so much to you is that it was yours (as I’ve written about before).
Dorothea never becomes a punk fan, and she doesn’t have to. Instead she makes the greater leap of accepting the passage of time and giving Jamie the freedom to make his own path. Someday my kids will listen to music I don’t know or understand on purpose. Maybe it’ll just sound like noise to me. Maybe I’ll hate it. But if nothing else, I hope I can be happy that they’ve found music that means something to them, that helps them feel less alone as they navigate the twists and turns of growing up.
And then I’ll go listen to my old man music.
I still don’t, in fact. He said he hadn’t heard it at school, so at the moment my best guess is that he asked Alexa to either play a party song or a bunny song and that was the first result. Honestly, if my kids were going to stumble across an explicit song this was a best case scenario, since it’s entirely in Spanish.
A friend and I were recently joking at a party (where the playlist was largely 80s music) that the local oldies station isn’t an oldies station anymore, because they’re now playing music from when we were in high school/college. That music can’t be old, because if the music is old, then I’m… oh, no.
To be fair: a millennial artist whose primary collaborators are another millennial and a younger Gen Xer. So technically old people music, despite having mass appeal (see also: Beyonce).