Idolator

Christ almighty, what is this, "parade your hoary cultural/critical cliches around the Internet with shamefully unashamed candor" day? In this Onion A.V. Club blog post, Nathan Rabin willfully flops around in a generation gap that he at least recognizes, but that wise people refuse to wallow in, as he watches some old Tom Synder interview with John Lydon and asks, where have they gone, those "ostensibly edgy" and "dangerous acts" of his youth:

This made me feel old. I couldn't help but think about how the ostensibly edgy or dangerous acts that followed all struck me as gimmicky and fake, not unlike the way my dad and Tom Snyder saw Lydon. Prodigy just seemed like Lydon vocals + pummeling electronic beats. 50 Cent just seems like a mumbly 2Pac wannabe (boy he devolved into lazy, complacent self-caricature pretty quickly, didn't he?) Marilyn Manson = David Bowie + Alice Cooper. I can't recall the last time I listened to an Eminem album for non-work reasons.

So here's my question for you, dear reader. Do we revere people like NWA or The Sex Pistols in no small part because history has codified them as important, relevant, seminal artists? How big a role does nostalgia and hindsight play in determining what we hold dear to our hearts and what we dismiss as empty shock? Will future generations revere 50 Cent the way we admire Notorious B.I.G or 2Pac? Will our children marvel that we don't consider Fallout Boy major artists? Will we look like Snyder-like Neanderthals to our kids? Who do you consider Lydon's legitimate heirs in antagonizing parents and liberating kids? Can't we all just not get along?

Well Nate, there are a few possibilities here. One is that "edgy" and "dangerous" are pretty pisspoor criteria for "relevance" (assuming you mean "cultural relevance" here, not "relevant to me and hopefully to you if I can explain what I get out of it") for anybody old enough to have an after-school job, let alone someone who gets paid to assess the merits of pop culture, and that's not even getting into why the idea of "relevance" is a bunch of dead-end jive to begin with, especially in a time of fractured consensus, merciless niche marketing, etc etc. (C'mon man, these are hardly new ideas I'm even lobbing around here, this is straight first-year subjectivity, and a good argument for some sort of Maury Povich-style rock-critic boot camp to instill basic life skills.)

Another is that, yes, as anyone with even a minor grasp of how post-WWII pop culture (that's 62 fucking years to draw from now, just FYI, and just to keep things within the last century or so) has worked should know that "relevance" is, and always will be, subject to constant, now almost instantaneous (thanks Internet) revisionism, thanks to all kinds of unforseeable extra-musical elements (shifting mores, political climate, aesthetic turnarounds, blah blah), which makes sitting around and worrying about/trying to guess the future "relevance" of a band a waste of time on the level taking bets on the weather patterns during hurricane season. (Exploring their impact now is whole 'nother bag, and an important part of cultural criticism.)

Third is that, from an early age, kids should be shamed out of wielding music for its shock value against adults pre-assumed to be squares because of because they differ on something as essentially trivial what (musically) annoys them, so they don't end up aging bloggers wondering where all the heroes have gone, those emotionally-stunted grown folks who once made teenagers feel better by having the courage to say dumb/offensive shit in public.

Revisiting The Generation Gap [A.V. Club]