The Generation Game

... is the title of my long-awaited study of the life and work of Bruce Forsyth. 

Only kidding - it's actually the title of an essay about the concept of the Generation. Which is something that's long been part of my parlance, as it is for so many professional and civilian pontificators about youth culture and popular music. But when I started to think about it, its solidity as a concept began to wobble. Quickly it came to seem as tenuous as it is evidently tenacious. So in this essay, with a little bit of help from Jim Morrison, I poke away at the notion of the Generation - along with related consensus artifacts of "calendrical mysticism" like the Decade, the Era, and the Zeitgeist - in an attempt to see if there's anything there or whether it's just "a bunch of bullshit". 

The piece was written at the invitation of Vincent Normand as a contribution to the research project The Raving Age. Stories and Figures of Youth, under the auspices of ECAL, the University of Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland.  Lots to check out here, including an essay about rave as the last European youth culture, another about world-building and the end of the world, and a meditation titled "Younger Than Yesterday" by Agnès Gayraud.