Don't You Forget About Me

Okay, millennials, I have something to confess to you.

Baby Boomers (born from 4,000BC to 1964) have been playing a little joke on you.

We will make a cultural reference from our youth just to watch the blank stares you give us.

For example, on WSB radio's The Von Haessler Doctrine, the host, Eric Von Haessler will repeat a common Boomer Cultural reference like Mikey from the Life cereal commercial.  Eric's producer, who is two years older than my son, will have no clue who Mikey is and may not have heard of Life cereal.


Boomers do this all the time. We'll talk about what a lady killer Warren Beatty was and a Millennial will ask you who Warren Beatty was.

I first noticed this several years when watching a TV show with some friends.  Sheryl Crow was introduced and she sang a song called "Steve McQueen".  My friend's teenage daughter asked "Who's Steve McQueen?'

I couldn't believe it. But thinking back on it, Steve McQueen had been dead for well over twenty years by then, so there was no real reason for her to know about Steve McQueen.  I didn't know anything the stars from my parents' youth.  I had heard of Jack Benny and Bob Hope. But I would bet you most of the Class of 1977 had never heard of Fred Allen and still haven't.

But the problem is and what we (boomers) are trying to prevent what Kyle Smith (Kyle is a millennial name if I've ever heard one) calls "The Great Forgetting".

He describes a MIT professor playing a song in class, asking students to name the artist and the song if possible.  One student, now mind you this is MIT, said "Coldplay".   It was John Lennon and the song was "Imagine".  Smith says, "That’s as close as you can get to iconic, when it comes to a work of popular art. Culturally speaking, it’s just about dead. John Lennon has been gone for 38 years. His work is disappearing from our collective memory".  

The professor, Cesar Hildago, is studying how long "famous" people endure after they die. His estimate is five to thirty years.   Help me if you can I'm feeling down.

Smith goes on to say, "Even very intelligent young people who are highly attuned to popular culture have more or less shrugged off everyone who was famous before they were born. If you can be as famous as John Lennon was and be forgotten in 30 years, fame is even more evanescent than we all thought."

I've experienced this myself with the famous Beatles debates I've had with various millennials over the years.  I will hear a millennial say, "The Beatles are overrated" and I have to argue because it is so stupid.

I know music is all about taste and if someone doesn't like The Beatles, that's okay, everybody has an opinion. But as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "You are entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitled to your own set of facts."  You cannot deny the impact The Beatles had in the short period of time they were together.

Smith says, "These days, in a cultural sense, the only two pre-1960 singers who still linger in the memory are Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley." Like it or not, Bing Crosby barely makes a blip when it is not Christmas and he was one of the most popular singers and actors of his time.

It is not just about music either.  You hear people talk about "Back To The Future" and "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" but rarely about "E.T", the biggest box office hit of the '80s.  "Rain Man" swept the Academy Awards in 1989, but if you go up to a millenal and say "It is time for Wopner", they will look at you like you have two heads.


The problem is we are losing a lot when we forget the past. We lose that Bing Crosby was an incredible singer and performer. We lose "Help", "Penny Lane" and "Hey Jude".

But we, and I'm speaking for The Boomers now, are worried that you Millennials will forget about us.  We just wanted y'all to enjoy what we enjoyed. We should have known you wouldn't. We did the same thing to our parents and our parents' friends.