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. 

I enjoyed writing about Tinashe and Rae Sremmurd for Pitchfork's 200 Best Songs of the 2010s.

I enjoyed writing about Future, Vampire Weekend, and David Bowie for Pitchfork's 200 Best Albums of the 2010s.

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Moving rapidly in our joint anti-entropy campaign Carl Neville aka The Impostume launches a collective blog along the lines of the earlier decades-blogs:  A Place in the Sun is for mulling over the Noughties, now that it has receded enough in the rear-view mirror to take on the shape of an era. Here's his inaugural announcement. Anyone can join and contribute.

Despite the convention, numeric decades rarely (perhaps never?) correspond to distinct cultural periods . Usually it takes a while for a "decade" to get going, to take on its feel, and that vibe may endure for less than ten years or more than ten years. They certainly don't end punctually with the numeric switch. Some historians talk of a Long Sixties that ended in 1973, with the oil crisis. Someone I recently interviewed (for a looking back at the 2010s article, as it happens!) argued that there was an inflection point in 2007, with various forms of technology and online / social media developments taking off, launching us into the present era in which currently languish. Or perhaps into an era whose relative blitheness ended with 2016 and Trump / Brexit epistemic traumashock.

Culture-time and chronological-time don't necessarily match up, then. And then there's personal-time, in the sense of an individual's life arc, which issomething else altogether - it might be completely out of synch with the times.  There are people who participate intensely in a decade-vibe, get right in the thick of the action. Other do so in a partial way - they join in weakly, sporadically, intermittently. Others still are actively at odds with the geist. Either out of laggardly inertia, or through a concerted stand against, they effectively inhabit a different (usually earlier) epoch than the one they happen to have been plopped into.
 
But all this is stuff to delve into at the collective blog. I wonder if it will turn out that we were living through different Noughties, or whether there'll be a fair amount of consensus owing to the self-selecting nature of the blog. Perhaps we'll discover there wasn't even a Noughties as such to have lived through together.

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While I'm think-linking, a thought from blogger pal Aaron at Airport Through The Trees

"It may be foolish to be foolish, but, somehow, even more so, to not be."

Words to live by!