Am I So Out of Touch?
No, it's the children who are wrong
“The Boy Who Knew Too Much,” episode 20 in season 5 of The Simpsons, premiered on the Fox television network on May 5, 1994—a shade under three decades from today. It contains one scene with a now-renewed cultural relevance:
Trying to track down a truant Bart Simpson, Principal Skinner heads to the natural places—the Springfield Natural History Museum and the 4-H Club. Both are deserted, because even in the 1990s nobody was that lame.1 Surprised not to find his quarry, Skinner asks “Am I so out of touch?” before deciding “No, it’s the children who are wrong.”
Principal Skinner’s last line became a meme on October 29, 2013, when an image of his lines (albeit slightly edited) was posted to Reddit and went viral. (This means that the meme itself is now more than a decade old.)
Skinner’s certainty that the young are wrong for not sharing his preferences is an increasingly relatable one. Indeed, a surprising amount of Simpsons humor reads more comprehensibly in one’s middle age. There is, for instance, Grandpa Simpson’s monologue:
I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!
That monologue was delivered in “Homerpalooza”, episode 24 of season 7, which originally aired on May 19, 1996. Its central plot concerns Homer’s discovery that classic rock is no longer cool. He seeks to become cool by going to Lollapalooza where he meets Peter Frampton and the Smashing Pumpkins. Lollapalooza’s original incarnation died the following year; it now lives on in corporate zombie form.
One of the interesting parts of living in this century is the constant switching between being coddled by narrowly targeted marketing and being assaulted by the wildness of the actually new. In supermarkets, I have heard background music move from being the Beatles to the Eagles and now to the Smashing Pumpkins. It is nice to have one’s market power recognized in sonic form; it is relaxing to hear “Iris” as I shop for low-sugar oatmeal. Given the subsequent death of the monoculture, it is likely that music post 2005 or so will only slowly supplant this soundtrack, if it ever does. I will be carried to my grave on this auditory cushion, with the occasional addition of four-quadrant acts like Bruno Mars.
On the other hand, when I venture out of my narrow Spotify habits to learn what the yutes are listening to, I am constantly informed just how not with it I am. The new artist Laufey, for instance, has 1.2 million YouTube subscribers—the new metric of popularity, one more reliable than easily gamed iTunes or Billboard sales statistics—and yet I had never heard of her before the algorithm suggested I should. On Spotify, she has 14,218,815 monthly listeners. Norah Jones has 10,205,168. (For that matter, the Rolling Stones—the Stones—have 29,356,482, or 2.06 Laufeys.) The artist beabadoobee has 18,506,982 monthly listeners, 3 million Insta followers, and 1.16 million YouTubers; I know of her only because she collaborated with Laufey.
From there, the algorithm has led me to Stephen Sanchez, who is a self-styled throwback to the era of 1950s crooners. God help me, he has 28,327,336 listeners per month, or so close to the Stones as to be equivalent. What even is going on?
“The thing about youth culture is: I don’t understand it,” said Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation, a fifteen-year-old low-rated sitcom. All that is solid dissolves into air, Marx and Engels wrote, but they lived at a time when fads and fashions moved rather more slowly, and they didn’t have Spotify to make them feel old.
Being an academic means that you get older and the students stay the same age (that is an ironic reference to a 42-year-old movie).2 That has benefits. Art Blakey once remarked that “I’m going to stay with the youngsters—it keeps the mind active.” It also has psychic costs: eventually, your references are no longer theirs—and then, crushingly, your references are their parents’. Or worse.
I was a 4-H club member for nine years in the 1990s.
Edit: 31 years old. I got Dazed and Confused confused with Fast Times.
And yet … since the legislators of our fine state have decreed that diversity in the classroom is of utmost importance, perhaps we can embrace our age (and I realise mine is a bit north of yours), and share what things from days of yore are really worth their time: call it chronodiversity. I don’t know the movies they watch except from posters, but I can share that in the early 70s there were *really good* American movies they should check out. That there is no album quite like Hejira. And to do this without doubting they have cool things too, but I just don’t know them :)