If truce is to be had between any two generations at odds, it surely favors the Boomers and the Millennials.
The Boomers stood no chance, in their day; they were musically serviced by the Silents, and brilliantly so – but the music that preceded the epoch of rock ‘n’ roll was largely walled off by the war that set them apart, and the lack of a middle-class bridge that could culturally connect them to it. Cole Porter. George and Ira Gershwin. Johnny Mercer.
Thanks to the Silents, however – with names like Lennon and McCartney and Townshend and Page and Clapton and Barrett and King and Wilson and Gilmour – the Boomers have a rich heritage that they can at least offer up. We were on the scene as what we now call Classic Rock unfolded; subsequent generations can embrace it or not, but at least it’s there.
Rolling Stone writers Kenny Herzog, David Marchese, Dan Reilly and Kory Grow took note of this in 2019:
“Some albums transcend their eras, finding their way into the cultural canon and continually being rediscovered by subsequent generations of listeners. And some don’t,” they wrote. “For whatever reason, be it dated production, a social context that doesn’t translate, or any number of far more ineffable causes, the following albums were beloved by millions of Baby Boomers and yet, unlike, say, the inarguably canonical Dark Side of the Moons and London Callings of the world, seemed not to resonate particularly strongly beyond their initial audience. Check back again in a few years, and this list, hopefully, will look entirely different.”
They then proceeded to showcase 40 legendary, game-changing albums from the Boomer era that are worthy of scrutiny beyond their time. A sampling is presented below (analysis and commentary mine):
Tracy Chapman (Tracy Chapman)
Tracy Chapman came out of nowhere, at the most unlikely moment. A singer-songwriter from Cleveland, she made her debut while MTV was still a go-to, ruled by louder and louder hair metalists. Her ultra-smooth tech-folk stood out in high sore-thumb profile alongside Motley Crue and Whitesnake, but her themes – homelessness, inequality, social justice – were almost anachronistic in the empty-headed late Eighties... and surely resonant with the sociopolitical perspectives of the current generation.
Brothers in Arms (Dire Straits)
Part of the draw of the endless stylistic bifurcations rampant in the era of digital hybridization, and to be a band that doesn’t sound like any other band. Dire Straits, from “Sultans of Swing” in the late Seventies through “Walk of Life” in the mid-Eighties, was more that to the Boomers than any other band; nobody sounded like Dire Straits, with its irony-laden lyrics and copy-protected guitar tones and kitchen-table vocals – all courtesy of band leader Mark Knopfler, one of the greatest guitarists and writers of his generation. The sheer uniqueness of Dire Straits makes them an obvious valentine to the Millennials, and this album was deceptively soulful, filled with the longings of an outsider – and that’s before we get to “Money for Nothing”, the song that had the balls to make fun of MTV at its garish peak.
Private Dancer (Tina Turner)
In an era when many years typically pass between albums for even the most prolific bands, it might be hard to relate to the rise and fall of artists in the Seventies and Eighties, when far faster turnaround was expected between albums. The “comeback” doesn’t seem to be a thing anymore; social media keeps artists and music alive through the dry spells.
But Tina Turner’s 1984 comeback triumph can be appreciated by Millennials for other reasons. Its Girl Power is undeniable, in tracks like “Better Be Good to Me” and the #1 hit “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” Ya gotta love an album that covers the Beatles’ “Help!”, and she brings in top-shelf colleagues like Mark Knopfler and Jeff Beck to add variety and class. If Millennials need a frame of reference within which to appreciate her, they can conceptualize this album as a masterpiece of mash-up, which Millennials live for: there’s new wave rock, there’s R&B, there’s soul. And if that doesn’t do it, they can just think of her as the template for Lady Gaga.
Breakfast in America (Supertramp)
Art rock lives in the Millennial era, in the work of Coheed and Cambria, Muse, and to some degree Panic! at the Disco. Radiohead laid some track for it in the Nineties, even if the Millennials hearing it didn’t fold it into their hearts. And even the most grudging respect Millennials dispense to its most universal antecedents, Pink Floyd and Queen, might help open the door to this 1979 masterpiece, which can be found on almost every Boomer’s vinyl shelf.
It’s an album you have to listen to front to back, filled with wry humor, irony, a socially critical eyebrow and irresistible hooks. Its Millennial themes were ironically just as much Boomer themes, from the “don’t tell me how to live” of “The Logical Song” to the rootlessness of “Goodbye Stranger” and “Take the Long Way Home”’s exploration of alienation and invisibility. It’s cool to have an album that clarifies that Boomer teenagers felt just like Millennial teenagers, more than either might guess.
Plus, their lead singer sounds just like Geddy Lee. That can’t hurt.
Rickie Lee Jones (Rickie Lee Jones)
The last thing Boomers expected in 1979 was an accessible Beat poet on a bar stool, but that’s what Rickie Lee turned out to be. A tune as cool and ear-wormy as “Chuck E.’s in Love” snuck all that in through the back door, but pretty soon we understood that this lady was as retro as it was possible to be in the late Seventies, and she was prisoner to no style in particular. Those are, straight up, all traits that Millennials can get behind.
The Cars (The Cars)
Guys who are un-cool as all fuck making music that’s cool as all fuck. Once again, you just can’t get any more Millennial. "Just What I Needed”, “My Best Friend’s Girl”, “Good Times Roll”, “All Mixed Up” - these are tunes that all fall into the Dad Music That I Guess I Don’t Mind Hearing on the Radio category. The Millennial who listens to it front to back might find themselves liking their dad a little better.
Alice’s Restaurant (Arlo Guthrie)
I heard this masterpiece in 1974 in shop class (itself an almost impenetrable barrier in relatable context), when our shop teacher Dusty brought it in and made us listen to it. In high school, I taped it off a friend.
I heard Arlo Guthrie perform it live in 1993 and it was just as hilarious, just as ironic all those years later. The loping, endless-loop ragtime guitar and Guthrie’s backporch delivery of his Thanksgiving Day adventure, arrested by a redneck cop for littering and facing the Army draft in the widening jaws of Vietnam, are certainly dated – but as anti-war protest, it has no equal. And to a generation with nothing but Rage Against the Machine to turn to as political voice (see page ***), it surely has some appeal as what would feel like a new approach to speaking out in uncertain and disturbing times, 50 years on.
Night Moves (Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band)
We gotcher Dad Music right here. Seger even feels like Dad Music to Dads.
But we’ll turn it up when it comes on the radio, all the same. Why? Because Seger’s stuff, like Springsteen’s, pays homage to the rock ‘n’ roll of his youth (“Rock and Roll Never Forgets”). The most timeless albums, whatever generation they appear in, share this trait.
Seger’s nostalgia is both a bug and a feature in many of his albums, giving listeners a reason to embrace or reject it, depending not so much on taste as on personal gestalt. It’s who am I really? music (“Mainstreet”), which isn’t proprietary to Millennials, and you take or leave it depending on your answer to that question. Seger’s lyrics are all about feeling disconnected and out of place and reaching for things that can’t be clearly seen. Hard not to listen closely.
Fly Like an Eagle (Steve Miller Band)
Boomers love Steve Miller because he never does the same song twice. In the Seventies, SMB sounded like a different band with every Top 10 radio track: “The Joker”, “Swingtown”, “Jungle Love”, “Jet Airliner”, “Abracadabra”? The same band did all those songs?
Millennials love that their best bands can muster that same broad reach (again, Panic! at the Disco). What makes SMB so awesome is that they could even do it on the same album. Check it out here: “Take the Money and Run”. The title track. “Rock’n Me”.
Between the Lines (Janis Ian)
This out-of-the-blue Grammy champion hit in 1975, setting a high bar for female pop singers of substance (of which there are far too few in any generation). When we ask ourselves why a generation turns to Taylor Swift for answers, Janis Ian provides an explanation: if you can express your insecurity and isolation in relatable terms, as Ian does so brilliantly in “At Seventeen”, you’re going to have millions of fans who zoom in on what you’re saying and how you’re saying it. Taylor Swift didn’t do it nearly as well, and still became the voice of a generation; all the more reason to hear it done by a true master.
Journey to the Center of the Earth (Rick Wakeman)
They say prog died in 1978, slain by punk, but that’s bullshit. Epic music, spun up by Yes and ELP and Genesis and Floyd from the late Sixties to the edge of MTV, had its day, but it soldiered on, kept alive by bands like Dream Theater and Opeth and Iron Maiden, into the new century.
Rick Wakeman’s bombastic Journey is a good reminder of the reasons why. It was one of many epic pieces, alongside The Six Wives of Henry VIII and The Myths and Legends of King Arthur, and pulled off some brilliant stylistic fusion – classical meets jazz meets rock – that Millennials love. Tool owes a huge debt to Wakeman, and, well, most Millennials love Tool; so this album might be a worthy investment, despite its dated tech.
The Concert for Bangladesh (George Harrison, et al)
The Millennials grew up in a period when Live Aid had become passé, and charitable efforts by filthy-rich rock gods aroused more cynicism than sympathy. But Beatle George Harrison undertook to raise famine relief money for refugees in what was then East Pakistan (which he did, to the tune of a then-huge sum of $12 million), it was not just an untested model; it was unheard of.
But he was a Beatle. And Beatles move the Earth. So he gathered together his pal Bob Dylan and his co-husband Eric Clapton and Ringo and Leon Russell and Ravi Shankar and a bunch of others and he put on a pair of concerts that changed the world, paving the way for Live Aid and its many cousins. And we got new versions of “My Sweet Lord” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Something” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “Here Comes the Sun” and “Blowin’ in the Wind”.
That’s a memory lane thing, I know, but it also serves as a ground-breaking exemplar of What Happens When We All Work Together. The Millennial generation is justifiably snarked off that we live in a world that doesn’t work together; this album provides a blueprint.
American Woman (The Guess Who)
If any Boomer album should resonate with Millennials, it’s this 1970 gem from Canada. In a time when the rest of the world had every reason to be pissed at the United States, from Vietnam to Richard Nixon, they blasted out the intense and utterly listenable “American Woman”, this album’s title track – a scathing metaphor that went to #1. They followed it with “No Sugar Tonight” and “No Time”, both of which should be likewise Millennial-resonant, focusing on disconnection and disillusion.
Can work like this find an audience in the 21st century? Certainly some of it is stylistically inaccessible by now – Bob Seger’s stuff is probably in that bucket – and the activism of Harrison et al must seem passé to the cynical modern sensibility. But the iconoclasty of Supertramp and The Cars, Wakeman’s unapologetic bombast, Rickie Lee’s retro synthesis? Can’t they find a sympathetic ear? Do they offer something of lasting value, two generations on?
And can we throw in Blonde on Blonde? The Joshua Tree? The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust?
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