Tara, to clarify, it seems to me you're shouldering that "boomer"
mantle/stigma in vain, if I'm reading you right. Amerians born after
1960 are not really baby-boom material, for myriad reasons
social-and-economic chronology. For instance, if Watergate is one of
the first news events you were able to follow (or even remember), that
distinguishes you fairly obviously in cultural experience from anyone
old enough to have had class interrupted by the announcement of
Kennedy's assassination - we Watergate-era children never had quite
the same cultural innocence to lose.
Which has a lot to do, I'd reckon, with the eventual coming of punk,
as well as with the interest in country as some sort of purer heritage
from the antediluvian age - I don't think it's just coincidence that
alt-country adores pre-seventies country (Hank, Buck, Cash, Jones,
etc.) and is squeamish about almost everything thereafter. There's a
generational sense that any mainstream culture made in our lifetimes
must be by nature corrupt, stained by original sin. That a band as big
as the Beatles could be seen as great artists and countercultural
heroes by broad consensus is a basically alien concept to everyone too
young to have participated, methinks. [With the possible
counter-example of Star Wars, but that's total escapism. Nobody claims
Star Wars galvanized the youth of America, tho in fact it did cause a
huge shake-up in HOllywood and thus in the culture at large.]
I'll shut up now ... carl w.
