Legitimation Generation
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Album:Released 1985-1995 / Unreleased
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Back when Kronos Quartet released their cover - if you can call it that, given the context - of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze," I was excited. Raised on classical music, in a household where my father didn't want me to play rock on his turntable because the beat would "hurt the needle," I welcomed the opportunity to declare, "If it's good enough for a world-famous string quartet, it should be good enough for you." Subsequently, however, I went on to do a lot of thinking, informed by the sort of cultural theory - the work of Pierre Bourdieu, for example - that scholars in the humanities and social sciences consume, that made me rethink my initial thoughts on the matter. At first I railed at the idea that rock music needed to be legitimated in that manner. Then I began to realize that this legitimation was largely bound to the aging of the Baby Boomer generation, which, as my friend Steven - "Masoo" here on MOG - has ably pointed out, is the generation that has consistently wanted to have its widening wealth and waistlines without losing the aura of youth culture, claiming rock for its own long into middle age and now even retirement.From this perspective, the Kronos Quartet cover of "Purple Haze" shouldn't be regarded as a means of legitimating classic rock by dressing it in the garb of classical music, but of reducing all culture to the common denominator of the Baby Boomer mindset, in which everything goes, provided that its routed through the circuit of collective narcissism. Now that I'm middle-aged myself, I'm trying to figure out, as a member of "Generation X," what sorts of practices I might be engaged in that achieve an analogous effect. I doubt whether I will be able to forestall my participation in them and am not even sure whether it would make sense to try. But I'm still a believer in the value of self-awareness for its own sake - perhaps that's where the imprimatur of my generation leaves the most inky blotches - and would therefore like to know what I'm doing to make myself feel like culture centers on people like me.
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