Generation Nerd?

[Number23]

Okay, maybe I'm getting grumpy. Or maybe I'm getting old. (Nah, that can't be it. :) )

But is it just me or does it seem like teen/pre-teen culture right now is straight up CORNY?? I always thought that when I got to be this age, I'd be turning my back on teen culture because it was too raunchy or something. I'm turning away now because it's boring and sucks!

I mean, c'mon -- Justin Bieber?? :wtf:

Taylor Swift?? Those damn Twilight books/movies?? Glee???? I have watched "Glee" twice because I keep hearing how wonderful it's supposed to be and to be honest, if it wasn't for Sue Sylvester and her dim-witted "Cheerios", I'd never watch that show again. She is BY FAR the best character with the best lines in that show, but I also love her in Two and a Half men.

I grew up listening to NWA, Public Enemy, Queen Latifah etc and watching "The Breakfast Club", "Do the Right Thing", "School Daze", "Coming to America" and other movies that I love to this day. Even "Ferris Bueller" is like Citizen Kane compared to some of the stuff that's out now.

Is all of this some backlash against something (urban culture which has dominated for the last 40 years, maybe??) or are kids today really just turning into nerds??

[RoyGBiv]

1. Two things ...

First, your memory is narrowing so that you're remembering just what was important to you and filtering out a lot of other stuff. At the same time NWA and Public Enemy were popular, Tiffany was letting malls full of screaming girls know that she at one time thought she was alone and Debbie Gibson apparently had a sleeping problem because of things happening only in her dreams. That was what was mass marketed and "popular" in the same way that Justin kid is.

I'm having the same experience. I allow myself to be drawn into argument with gamers about how shallow their games of choice are today. WE had Zork, games that required a little bit of intellect to play.

My friends from the 60s and 70s and I recently got into a discussion about this, them complaining about the culture from both my generation and today's. "We didn't have this silly crap. Our music was good and meant something."

Two Words: The Monkees

Anyway ...

Second, modern youth culture seems to be lacking the protest element, which is what NWA and Pubic Enemy were all about. Even _Breakfast Club_, in its own suburbanite, white bread way, was a protest on some level. _School Daze_ and _Do the Right Thing_ definitely were. I see it almost nowhere today, certainly not in music that manages to get to the radio nor movies that hit the screen, but I will admit that the problem here may be me. I may just not be looking in the right places and may have tuned out.

Too much Justin Bieber can cause that.

OnEdit: Sue Sylvester - MAJOR crush

[Number23]

2. Oh my God!!! TIFFANY!!!

Roy, you horrible man!! How could you mention that abomination??!! ((Running around screaming))

I had completely forgotten about her and now you've reminded me! That horrible rendition of "I think we're Alone Now" is playing in my head

I'll never be able to sleep again!!

[Raineyb]

11. You just reminded me of New Kids on the Block.

Now I have an ear worm that won't go away. (Okay that and it played on an 80's station I was tuned in to.)

[Number23]

13. ugggh...

Was there ever a group that sucked more than New Kids on the Block?? And the fact that they were a big ol' (white) rip off of New Edition (which was a big ol' rip off of the Jackson 5) just made me hate them even more.

Not that it was hard to hate anyone that made music like that. They were worse to me than Milli Vannilli (another really sucky 80s group that I'm suddenly remembering).

[Raineyb]

14. Don't get me started on Milli Vannilli.

:grr:

They had that song "Blame it on the Rain" and let's just say my name is easily inserted into that song. I hated it!

You'd think people would have figured out something was wrong when they accepted that award and could barely be understood because of their accents but when they "sang" you could understand them perfectly.

I always loved me some New Edition. Someone did a remake of one of their songs a couple of years back. I was horrified.

[Number23]

16. For you, Rainey!

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl6z6_new-edition-candy-girl_music

It's hard to believe they were ever that young. Or unattractive... :scared:

[Number23]

3. *groan* Oh God... DEBBIE GIBSON!!

((huddled in a corner shivering and crying))

[RoyGBiv]

4. There, there ...

It's okay. They can't hurt you anymore.

Here's a humble offering to drive away the demons, begging for you forgiveness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhSAv2ukNco

[Number23]

5. Okay...

I'm still woozy and shaky, but after recovering from my violent case of Tiffany-induced vapors, I will concede that you have some excellent points, Roy. (I had to play "Electric Relaxation" by A Tribe Called Quest twice to get that damn Tiffany song out of my head!)

I'm only remembering what I want to remember from my youth. And you're right -- every generation has had really sucky, white bread, overly sanitized music and movies. For every "New Jack City" during the late 80s/90s, there was a "Howard the Duck."

And maybe it is the lack of "revolution" in today's kids that's the problem today. Seems like the only things kids today are "revolting" against is reality judging by the success of those damn Twilight movies. My husband and I watched the first Twilight movie about three weeks ago. I knew I would be underwhelmed but I was surprised at how THOROUGHLY underwhelmed I was. The only interesting thing about the whole movie was the fact that it appears that this vampire boy fell in love with our heroine based solely on how she smelled. That made me scratch my head big time. Oh, and I thought the inclusion of Native American characters was really cool. Other than that, I thought the movie was as dull as dishwater.

Makes you wonder how the worm will turn though, doesn't it?? God only knows what my two angels (aged 3 and a few weeks) will be listening to/watching by the time they're teenagers. I'm not looking forward to finding out. :scared:

[RoyGBiv]

6. Twilight is just horrible ...

If we work on the theory that movies tend to be worse than the books on which they are based, then Twilight the movie would have to improve some to meet a high enough standard to be compared favorably to _Howard the Duck_. I admit I haven't seen the movies. I won't. I read, eventually, two of the books. I was going to stop at one because it was so atrocious, but I remembered how I didn't much like the first Harry Potter book and that Rowling had improved (and continued to improve) with the next installments. If anything, Meyer got worse. Those books are an insult to those who write in the English language.

I'll paraphrase Stephen King: As a result of my accident, I have a lot of pain that won't go away. I read the Harry Potter series, and for many blissful days and weeks while enjoying these characters and the detailed world in which they lived, the pain went away. When I read Meyer's books, it came back, worse than before, as though my body was punishing me for what my mind was consuming.

If I may wax philosophical for a moment, I think we can take both sets of books and develop at least the outline of a narrative of what is driving youth culture today, or if not driving it, then that which attracts them. The Potter books proved the conventional wisdom flatly wrong. Kids will devour literature if it speaks to them and entertains them. Books are not dead. Indeed, kids who grew up on the books aren't much liking the movies, or at least not liking them as much as the books because they are so much shallower than the books. Oddly enough, similar things can be said about Twilight, which became popular in part because of Potter. The story was similar in several details, and those who market popular culture made sure to tie the two worlds together, at least abstractly, to force an appeal on youth. Even though the *writing* was crap, kids ate it up, in part because it was connected to the vastly pleasurable experience they had with Potter. And the reason for this is simpler than it seems. Whatever you think about the literary quality of either, they both had a common thread running through them that appeals strongly to youth everywhere, perhaps especially modern generations so detached from the world in which they live by technology, broken families, leaders who lie to them, and icons who prove to be worthless. That thread is the theme of both books, shed of all the trappings of fiction: a search for belonging and love.

(My biggest irritation with Meyer is that she took what good have been a really good story and destroyed it with her angsty barely grade school level of writing ability.)

My hope is that when the current generation rebels, they rebel against the sterile lives our broader culture has presented them. I see glimmers of it occasionally in my daughter, who is rebelling right now against all conventions.

[Number23]

7. How old is your daughter?

I find the concept of childhood rebellion really interesting mainly because no matter how the adult is, the child will find a way to rebel. Like the kid on Growing Pains who rebelled against his hippie parents by becoming a money-grubbing Republican or Winona Ryder's character in "Mermaids" who rebelled against her promiscuous mom (a drop dead GORGEOUS Cher) by wearing a cross and announcing she wanted to become a nun.

I agree that there is a common theme between Twilight and Harry Potter, and I absolutely agree that Rowling got better as the books progressed -- well, until book 6 which was the worst of the series imo. But she gloriously made up for it in Book 7, the final one, which was great. The "escape from broken families and technology" angle you mentioned is exactly right -- at Hogwart's they don't even appear to have electricity.

Having read none of the Twilight books (and after seeing that movie having no intention of reading any of them) I wouldn't know too much about the author but I haven't heard the greatest things about her. I take heart that the under-20s in my family are almost as enthralled with Tolkien and Greek/Roman/Egyptian mythology as I was at that age. Now THAT stuff is the Mother of all Escapism. Holy crap -- I was reading that stuff as a teenager. Maybe I'm the very nerd I was railing against in this OP! :wow:

[RoyGBiv]

8. I think we're all nerds ...

...those of us who bother to ask questions and actually seek answers, but then I was raised on the idea that I'm a nerd/geek, and it's a term I embraced early in my life. With regard to your OP, I agree with your observation but would put a different title to it. I just don't know what that title is, something along the lines of "shallow" or "lacking a cultural identity at all." Generic. Most teens I know in the neighborhood bore me, but again, maybe that's just me.

My daughter is actually 20, so she's moving out of that childhood/teen rebellion stage and into the 20-something quest for an identity, but her rebellious stage has been fascinating to witness. I've approached it less like a father than an egg-head intellectual working an experiment, which may not say anything good about me, but there it is. Her mother and I separated when she was barely a year old (we were high school sweethearts who thought we knew it all and figured out quickly we didn't), but we shared parenting duties throughout my daughter's life. She lived with her mom but was with me frequently and for extended periods.

I got lucky when she hit her rebellious stage. Perhaps it was predictable given the circumstances, but she changed from almost a clone of her mom to being almost a clone of me. Her mom and I are a lot alike in fundamentals, e.g. we're both "intellectuals" of a variety, both liberal in our political views, but drastically different on the outside, e.g. her mom's a math person, and I'm a humanities person. Her mom never reads anything she doesn't have to. I have over 1200 books just in my house, and we won't talk about the storage shed. The culmination of my daughter's rebellion occurred her sophomore year of college. She has abilities at math that clearly could eclipse those of her mother, who has a PhD, but she has the temperament of someone who likes to study words and language and people. She was a math major with an English minor her freshman year and changed to English major with a religious studies minor ... and is fully aware that she's not going to get rich this way and doesn't care, quite unlike her mother, who is very money driven.

And that's just one aspect of it, of course. I could write an essay on her different modes of dress. She's been everything from cowgirl to goth to grunge to prom queen. With respect to music, I can't keep up. I was just happy when she was 13 and I gave her a Clash album that she liked it and stopped listening to that crap twang she listened to because all her friends did. (I mean, it's Oklahoma. Redneck has to enter into it at some point.)

Where she is now is so completely different than where either her mother or I are or have been it would be difficult for outsiders to see how we were the ones who raised her unless they knew us well. But we both had a hand in shaping where she went, always with the understanding she would choose her own path even if it had nothing to do with us, and she's done that. She's unconventional in ways I never thought about being and lives her life in a way that I think would drive me nuts. She's basically got a miniature commune going for living space, yet works two part-time jobs and goes to school full time. She got her mom's workaholic ethic with some of my "laid back hippie-ish" traits and turned it all into a bizarre combination of the two.

I may be getting off the point and am sorry if I've hijacked this. My brain works in tangents, and your OP led me down several of them. And, I'm very proud of my daughter, so I tend to go on ...

I do have to comment briefly on Book 6. That whole middle section was too long. I think the problem was that Book 6 was really just a bridge from Book 5 to Book 7 and did not stand as well on its own as all the others did. Put another way, Book 6-7 are really one massive book, imo ...

[Number23]

9. You have every right to be proud of your daughter. She sounds amazing

My husband was a high ranking Army officer, so of course he tends to be very cut to the chase. But he has a lovely "human" side to him that I love and hope to see in our girls. Twice, he has almost been run down in traffic saving cats that were trying to cross busy roads.

I tend to be almost overly logical. I've had more than one person in my life tell me that I am "too hard" on people and have very high expectations. But I have no doubt that it's because that's the way that I was brought up.

My entire family is from the South. My grandparents grew up in Jim Crow Georgia/Florida. My grandfather lived in a town where black kids could only go to school three months of the year, the rest of the time they had to pick cotton. He was 36 years old when he graduated from all-black Morehouse College, but dammit he graduated. My grandmother's life was a bit more pristine -- going to heavily segregated schools, living in segregated Macon, GA and going to all-black Spelman College, where she and my grandfather met (Spelman, an all-girls school, is right across the street from Morehouse, an all-boys school, and there are more Morehouse/Spelman pairings than you can shake a stick at).

The work ethic of these two people is and always has been simply amazing. And they had five daughters and raised them to have that same work ethic (doesn't mean that it was always absorbed but that was the way that they were raised) and all of us grandchildren have been raised that way as well. I have taken it to heart and will raise my children this way as well.

You haven't hijacked this thread at all. I pray that when my children are grown, I will be every bit as in awe of them as you appear to be with your own daughter. It's lovely to see.

[Raineyb]

10. I have no clue who that dude is.

And he doesn't look all that interesting. I'll take your list in a heartbeat.

[Number23]

12. Girl...

that boy, his name is Justin Bieber, came to Sydney a few weeks ago to perform a concert.

Do you know that the police had to SHUT IT DOWN because so many dumb@ss... errr... FANS of his came from all over Australia and were blocking roads? Folks couldn't get to work! His fans camped out the night before and the morning of his concert, girls ('cause let's be real -- 99.9997% of his fans are teenaged girls) were being sent to the hospital for exhaustion and being trampled underfoot.

I finally listened to his ONE song after all of that fuss. Shut it off after about 12 seconds. Every bit as bad and boring as I thought it would be.

[Raineyb]

15. THAT is Justin Bieber? I had heard that there was a ruckus at a local

mall because his manager had tweeted that he would be there. I had no clue who he was. Can't say I'm impressed. I don't really listen to the radio these days I have an Ipod and a tape adapter. No need to listen to anything that's interrupted by commercials nor is there any need to listen to crap.