Popular Music Abandons Everyone Over Forty

Those damn kids today and their strange and frightening music raise an important question for me:  When did I become my dad?

Back in the eighties – when popular music reached its pinnacle of achievement - I would be home from college, in my room, cranking cool tunes and my father would get home from work, peer in, scrunch up his face and ask how I could listen to that infernal racket.  The answer, of course, was that I had (and still have, dammit) really awesome taste in music.

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I actually pitied my Dad for being unable to appreciate the Midwestern-inflected post-punk glory of The Replacements, or the sonic frenzy of their Minneapolis brothers-in-noise Husker Du, or the soaring, roaring guitar heroics of The Clash.  I don’t know what music he actually liked.  There were some LPs lying around the house – kids, you can ask your parents what those are – but they were things like the Kingston Trio and the Sound of Music soundtrack.  This last one was a particular sore point for me since my mom got the idea to name me Kurt, which is the German equivalent of Melvin, from the little Von Trapp twerp who sang “Fa.” (more…)