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| Not the image I saw originally, but this will do |
But it also reminded me of how I arbitrarily look at things.
As a rule of thumb, I define "old" as anything fifty years and older. I think it still makes sense to use that dividing line. When I was in school in the 1990's, that put World War II squarely in the "old" and it certainly helped that photography was principally in black&white and that the music from that era was no longer being played on the radio (Big Band and Sinatra for the sake of examples). There was something other-worldly about the era.
Being 2012, that makes 1962 the dividing line for "old". It's a strange thing to grasp. Soon "old" will consist of color television and photographs. It already encompasses my parents and their siblings. It's a little strange because the radio will play some music still from that era, but basically just the one station in my area, CBS-FM. Otherwise, the beginnings of rock&roll and doo-wop are all but extinct in the wild. It probably does not help my "image" that I listen to music from that era and rather enjoy it. I've tried encroaching into the music of my grandparents, but it is very difficult. The 1940s and early 1950s are a completely different kind of music...I feel the "wall".
Thought like that make me wonder, if I am ever blessed to have the children I've been wanting since turning 25 (I'm almost 34 now, so feel free to imagine what that emptiness must feel like, especially when still lacking a suitable "candidate" to produce said children with). I wonder if fifty years will be their wall when it comes to music? If I had a child next year, fifty years after the first Beatles' album, would they appreciate the latter half of the Oldies era and have no love at all for what came before? Would Doo-Wop, Buddy Holly, and Elvis sound to them like what Bing Crosby, The Andrews Sisters, and Vaughn Monroe sound like to me today? Enjoy those links...feel your world turn to a perceived simpler, other-worldly black&white time :-)
I also wonder if I'm a fluke. I didn't honestly start listening to the music of my generation earnestly until almost ten years after it had come out. I never felt part of my group so my parents' music perhaps had an undue influence over me. I say this because my Mom and Dad did not have any especial love for what would have been their parents' music. I remember my Mom specifically complaining about it and that music was less than twenty years old when they were born. If that's the case, would then the music of the 1980s sound irredeemably old to any children I might have? Would I be lucky if they could tolerate Nirvana, Green Day, and Weezer at all? Fun thoughts...
And while I use 50 as an arbitrary dividing line, I am not actually stating that a person who is fifty years old is old. They would be old from my perspective or if simply viewed as objects, but I would not consider them old from their perspective because they would not have fifty years of experience to draw upon. You would be old from your own perspective when you could say you are honestly aware of fifty years of your life.
As stated previously, I'm almost 34 years old and while I know logically I have experienced every day on the calendar since my birth, I have no real memory of my life existing fairly continuously until I became a teenager. It may or may not be a coincidence that this birth of personal history occurred around the same time I started keeping a journal, however irregularly, but it may also be tied simply to puberty and the inherent desire of adolescence to break free from the dependencies of childhood. I remember very little of my childhood and really very little of anything before high school. I don't know if that's normal or whether my description of my memory being like that of a sieve should not be taken as the mild joke I have always intended it to be.
But what I'm saying is, and this comes around to the image macro heading off this entry, is that experientially, I only feel like I have about twenty years of history. Yes, I have memories prior to 1993, plenty of them in fact, but it was in 1993 that I started coming into my own. 1993 was my "annus mirabilis". Things I started in that year are things I continue doing to this day. The only major event that occurred prior to that year was me falling in love for the first time with The First One in 1992. It was that event from which was the seeds of my coded alphabet, journal, made-up worlds, and language would grow along with a host of other things since abandoned like attempts at poetry and programming in BASIC.
My point being is that I feel like I began existing during that 1992-3 period. It was around then I started creating my own memories rather than ones tied to events under the more-or-less direct control of others. Perhaps those with difficult lives came into their own sooner and those who were coddled would come even later?
It feels like it ties into the idea that our musical tastes are defined during our early teenage years. If I remember correctly, between the ages of 12-16 form the core of what we consider "good" music (or at least what you will consider "your" music). I remember being dismissive of what should have been "my" music at that age. I recall Nirvana and Green Day, but was not really into them at the time nor the whole grunge movement, but my Dad and Brother liked them so I was at least exposed. Weezer was all about the "Buddy Holly" song at the time. I remember absolutely hating the rest of their Blue Album while today I think the album is fucking amazing especially its closing number, "Only in Dreams" which felt interminable back in 1994. My parents' music became the rough core of my musical sensibilities as did the 1980s. The large collection of albums I have from the 1970s and 1980s attests to this.
We define adulthood as beginning at 21 which means twenty years are now behind us. I've been an adult (legally at least) for the past thirteen years and only recently have begun to feel like an adult experience-wise. Twenty years also forms another useful dividing line. Twenty years is roughly a generation so I guess you could say that twenty years forms your generation gap: people younger than twenty years whether having been born twenty years after you or twenty years after you came into your own are difficult, if not impossible to relate to. They feel different. They are reminders that your time here on Earth is limited. In a sense, those twenty years younger than you feel like your children after a fashion, or at least like your responsibility in the sense that I should be offering myself up as a good example to them; using my experience to aid rather than exploit them.
One hundred years seems to mark the Living History dividing line and realistically, it would be eighty years experience-wise because few people live past 100 and if you do make it to the century mark, you probably don't have good memories beyond 80 years.
The century line was the first one I became aware of when the new millennium dawned. Suddenly, 100 years ago was no longer the 1800s. Being a 20th century man myself, the notion that the 1900s could feel so truly old remains foreign to me to this day. Growing up, being a hundred years old meant you were for sure born in the 1800s. Now it means 1912...still comfortably before my grandparents were born, but after those great-grandparents whom I did meet. Still prior to World War I and still under the Gold Standard. Still before the switch to small-sized currency and under the era of silent films. For now, one hundred years ago is still a completely different experience. Women couldn't vote, racism was codified into law, horses still outnumbered automobiles, electricity and indoor plumbing were still not commonplace, people were born in homes rather than hospitals, among so many other seemingly other-worldly things. In the late 2020s and early 2030s, I wonder if all those born in the 21st century will regard anything happening in the year 19xx as "old"? If I survive to the 2050s, I wonder how I will feel knowing the experiences of my parents would now seem other-worldly to the younger generations alive then?
"Only in Dreams" by Weezer
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