A Timeless Wavelength

Jellyfish – That Is Why

This semester I’m taking a course on the philosophical problem of vagueness — the idea that many of the entities we refer to in everyday language lack sharp definitions or boundaries.  There is no definite point at which “red” becomes “orange” or “short” becomes “tall,” yet most of the time we have no trouble applying these terms.  This is problematic for the methodology of analytic philosophy, which thrives on precise definitions.

One area where the problem of vague boundaries is particularly thorny is in the pop-sociological practice of assigning people to “generations” based on their birth years.  Intuitively, people of certain age ranges have a lot in common based on shared life experiences:  those who were between the ages of, say, seventeen to twenty-five at the bombing of Pearl Harbor were affected by the event in radically different ways from those who were in their late fifties, or those who wouldn’t be born for another ten years.  Those who were teenagers in 1964 enjoyed music and movies quite foreign to the teenagers of 1998.  Yet drawing generational boundaries is notoriously difficult to do.  The popular media like to refer to “the Greatest Generation,” “the Lost Generation,” “the Baby Boomers,” “Generation X,” and all sorts of other crazy categories, with extremely imprecise and often conflicting dates demarcating them.

Neil Howe and William Strauss attempted a robust theory of generations in their 1991 book Generations:  The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069. They posited a cycle in which four generational “archetypes” are repeated over and over again (though we apparently skipped a generation around the time of the Civil War).  The whole thing is very Jungian, and more than a little reminiscent of astrology:  give someone a description of a generation with the dates and identifying cultural references edited out, and probably everyone will think it applies to them.

Joshua Glenn has proposed an alternate scheme for dividing up the generations, and I find it more realistic, and far more entertaining, than Strauss and Howe’s.  (I do have some gripes:  Born in 1976, I should fit squarely within the “Net Generation,” yet I identify far more with the slightly older “PC Generation.”  I certainly would like to think I’m more similar to Chuck Klosterman than to Perez Hilton.)  Of particular interest to me is the fact that he posits ten-year generations, and takes issue with the notion that “decades” as popularly construed should always be divided by calendar years ending in zero.  Instead, he goes for the 3-4 boundary:  the “Sixties” were 1964-1973, the “Seventies” from 1974-1983, and so forth.

This makes a lot of sense to me:  The music of the early 1960s was a lot more like what we’d call “Fifties music” than the psychedelia and protest music that would come later in the decade.  There’s an old saying that “most of the Sixties happened in the Seventies,” meaning that things like widespread protests against the Vietnam war, the Kent State shootings, and Watergate didn’t happen until after 1970.  It also explains why, when people are supposed to spend their lives nostalgic for the culture of their teens and young adult years, I’ve always felt like the 1990s were the most depressing and culturally barren era in living memory.  It turns out the decade where I really feel at home is the Eighties:  not the 1980s, but the period from 1984-1993.  (I might even be tempted to shave a couple of years off of this, since it seems like things started going downhill the first time someone in the media uttered the phrase “grunge rock.”)

The Eighties (at least the pre-grunge part of them) are something of a lost decade:  When people say “’80s music,” they generally mean early 1980′s stuff like Devo or Bananarama, or Michael Jackson and Madonna.  When they say “the early 90s,” they mean slackers, grunge, goatees, flannel, and really bad movies.  It’s easy to forget that the tail end of the 1980s and the pre-”Smells Like Teen Spirit” 1990s were one of the most creative periods in popular music.  It’s when indie- and college-rock mainstays like Sonic Youth, The Pixies, and Dinosaur Jr. released some of their most memorable works, and N.W.A. and Public Enemy were forcing critics to take rap music seriously.  Even mainstream music was more fun:  the much-ridiculed “hair metal” bands had more genuine enthusiasm and musicianship than the flannel-clad slackers who replaced them, and without any of the pretentious hipster irony.  (Uncomfortable truth:  Alice In Chains were a hair-metal band, boys and girls.  They just had the extremely good fortune to be a hair-metal band from Seattle at just the right time to survive a grunge rebranding when all the other hair bands were dying off.  They were like the Archaeopteryx of hair-metal dinosaurs.)

So for the next few days I’d like to examine the music of the Eighties (as opposed to the 1980s) and revisit some forgotten gems of this neglected decade.  I’ll start with a song that was an MTV staple for a while in 1990 or so, but few people I talk to seem to remember it:  “That Is Why,” by Jellyfish.  They were a Supertramp-esque band formed from the ashes of Beatnik Beach, and their keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr. later became one half of The Moog Cookbook.  They were also one of the few bands whose drummer was the lead vocalist, and to my knowledge the only such band whose drummer-vocalist looks like a hippie version of Sawyer from Lost. Enjoy.

1. HD4004 says:

   August 20, 2009 at 11:33 am

   Interesting blog, but it’s missing an important part of the equation: Generation Jones (born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and Generation X). Google Generation Jones, and you’ll see it’s gotten a ton of media attention, and many top commentators from many top publications and networks (Washington Post, Time magazine, NBC, Newsweek, ABC, etc.) now specifically use this term. In fact, the Associated Press’ annual Trend Report forecast the Rise of Generation Jones as the #1 trend of 2009. Here’s a page with a good overview of recent media interest in GenJones: http://generationjones.com/2009latest.html

   It is important to distinguish between the post-WWII demographic boom in births vs. the cultural generations born during that era. Generations are a function of the common formative experiences of its members, not the fertility rates of its parents. Many experts now believe it breaks down more or less this way:

   DEMOGRAPHIC boom in babies: 1946-1964
   Baby Boom GENERATION: 1942-1953
   Generation Jones: 1954-1965
   Generation X: 1966-1978

   Here is an op-ed about GenJones as the new generation of leadership in USA TODAY:
   http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20090127/column27_st.art.htm
2. cholling says:

   August 20, 2009 at 3:08 pm

   As I stated in the blog entry, I didn’t come up with this generation scheme; it’s the product of Joshua Glenn, who addresses alternate proposed generations such as “Generation Jones” on his own blog here.

   I will say, however, that I am inclined to reject any proposed generation that sounds like the name of an ill-conceived musical collaboration between Billy Idol and Mike Edwards.