Stabbing for Goodness

Appreciation for the Music of Youth

Redondo Beach / Los Angeles / California

Hotel lobby music - the new batch is as tepid as the last. The fire-table sitting area in my hotel’s driveway wants so badly to be pleasant, and it is, in the most generic way. Polished plastic pleasantries, orderly and vacant. The music is flimsy, and shiny smooth, but is abrasive to me just the same. Silence would be better. It is made to appeal to everyone, so it connects with no one. It exists merely to fill a hole.

But my morning coffee does come with a very pleasant LA view just the same, even if it is set to the least congruous soundtrack possible. Any other would be better. I put in my AirPods and try to imagine its opposite. Something less breakable. Black Flag, Damaged. That fixes it! LA punk rock for the LA beach scene. It is easily as abrasive, but at least it’s angry. At least it’s anything.

The skaters are just now waking up and rolling into the beachside parking lot. It's like watching every LA skate movie I’ve ever seen play out in live action. It’s another generation, and they are surely listening to different music, but it’s the same. I’m watching their future recollections play out in real time. All body, no brain. Reckless because they have yet to be wrecked.

My current soundtrack used to be the music of youth. It has me thinking about the purpose of young people’s music in general. (As opposed to the lobby music, which had me thinking about drilling my eardrums out.) It has been a recurring subject amongst my coworkers, and I am clearly in the minority position on it. The majority position, in summary, is: “popular music today sucks.” I counter that it mostly always has, except to the generation that matters.

The floundering nature of youth explains the desperation of teens towards coolness. It is a wildly imperfect world they are building, but it is theirs. Stabbing around with peak strength at every unpleasant thing, because they must. They eventually hit at some nugget of familial good in the process. Something durable. They are, without trying, building a primeval tribe, with its own language, music, and rudimentary gestures. In the process problems are being unwound and good is being uncovered. Only the little bit of good that a teen mind is prepared to absorb, but the most formative kind of good. Their parents are often blind to all but the unpleasantries that require the stabbing.

The music of youth is a critical part of the unpleasantries. It is all only energy, the raw bottled energy of youth and all its flapping. Talent is the side show, an exceptional bonus when it appears. The music itself is captured emotion toward everything that matters, but only to them. If it were relevant to everyone, it would cease to matter.

The parents (as represented here by my coworkers) don't like the music and have their reasons. But the reasons are mostly as misguided as the lyrics of the songs they don’t like. The unpleasantries of our own generation’s worst musical choices are still nostalgically pleasant to us, but the next generation’s appear the path to hell. We can explain the strengths in our own generation's bad taste but can’t even imagine where to start to look for them in the next’s. Our ignorance leads us to think that there are none. We are then surprised when we eventually hear some words come out of our own mouth that sound strangely familiar. “That’s not even music, it all sounds the same.”

But proclaiming it helps no one. One generation's music has never worked for the next one. It must be your own soundtrack, or none. It is for their own most formative years, not someone else’s. Obviously. Silence would be better. And since we are no longer equipped to be reinserted into that stage of life, we are hardly in a position to be overly critical about which music is to go along with it.

On one hand we agree that the kids have a difficult world to maneuver, but also don’t miss an opportunity to remind them how much harder it was for us. We perceive our own generation as having been more difficult because we don’t really understand what we are comparing it to.

We see that they are the most watched, protected and tracked of any human generation, but are surprised that they want untrackable, disappearing messaging apps. Their potential teen missteps are on permanent record. Both the problems and the solutions are things that adults barely understand. They themselves will be the ones to solve the problems and they will choose the soundtrack to do it by.

In college I took a music appreciation class (older jazz specifically) and appreciation actually happened. If I put this small effort into appreciating music before my time, it seems disingenuous to give up so easily on music after my time. It can’t possibly be true that every generation’s music had something worth appreciating, right up until this one.

The more likely explanation is that it has never been easy for a young person to write songs that will last for decades. Most of them don’t. All of our examples of how good it used to be are only the survivors. The clunkers have always outnumbered survivors at least 10 to 1. You’ve got to mine a lot of rock to get a little gold.

It has also never been easy for any teenager to get straight to the heart of what is good. Trial and error occurs, right before our eyes. And the errors are so easy for us to spot, having made most of them all ourselves. We let our toddlers order the stacking rings wrong, but teenagers! That’s different! The stabbing years are long and difficult, and there is no prescribed end. They continue until there is the one hit upon something good that lasts, the thing that makes it look like it had been a required part of the process all along.

Regarding the lobby music, I’ll hold my cynical ground that it objectively sucks. It is not fair to call anything bad art, but it is art only in the same way that tracing is. Tell me I’m wrong.

But as for the kid’s music, I don’t hate it. Hating every new thing is a misuse of my limited emotional capability. Time is all that is needed to weed out what stands good in the end. In the meantime, just listen.

I don’t hate it. I love the purpose of it. It is music to grow up to. Music for stabbing about to. When they hit at what is good, they will hold on to it, and that will be what lasts. When they are old, they will remember the days when they were unknowingly in search of something good. They will remember, when they hear that certain song, how hard it was to find. They will remember all their flapping, and will go a bit easier on their own kids

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