I remember the first time I played a song within earshot of my parents with a specific view to shocking them – it was a videotape of the Jesus and Mary Chain playing Never Understand on The Old Grey Whistle Test. In opting to not merely play the record, I was clearly hoping the visual element would elicit the maximum amount of outrage. Perhaps I hoped to carve out the sort of generation gap moment I had read so many of my favourite pop stars describe when they talked about Bowie doing Starman on Top Of The Pops.
As the Jesus and Mary Chain shuffled on in their leathers and checked shirts, peering sullenly behind homemade haircuts – and then-drummer Bobby Gillespie bashed out a perfectly primitive beat on his single floor tom – I remember both of my parents peering up in unison, my dad from his newspaper and my mother from her crochet. They stared for what seemed like twice the duration of the song before saying … not much at all. My dad tutted and shook his head; my mother gazed across at me and asked me if there was something wrong with the sound. It wasn’t quite the confrontational line in the sand I’d hoped for, but it was enough to be getting on with.
Thirty years later, the first inkling I had that our generation gap might not play out in quite the same way was when my oldest daughter, Dora, handed me her wishlist of Christmas presents. Right at the top, was Psychocandy, the Jesus and Mary Chain album from which Never Understand was taken. Had I done the equivalent thing when I was 15, I would have been playing Bill Haley & His Comets to my parents. The same year Dora discovered the Mary Chain, her sister Eavie – 11 at the time – discovered ELO. At their comeback gig in Hyde Park that summer, she sat on my shoulders and experienced the same vertiginous rush that I’d experienced hearing Don’t Bring Me Down at her age.
That was also the summer she became obsessed with Marvin Gaye and the Beatles. In the space of a week, we watched every instalment of the Anthology DVDs – and when she couldn’t sleep, I read her an old Mojo cover story on the recording of What’s Going On. She especially liked the bit where, disillusioned with his progress as a successful recording artist, Gaye decided to try to become an American footballer with the Detroit Lions.
Sometimes I wonder what it would take to create a musical trend so radically different from its predecessors that it poses the same sort of threat to the old order that rock’n’roll, punk and acid house seemed to momentarily hold in their ascent. And if that’s no longer possible, then why?
I think you can probably put it down to a cluster of interlocking reasons. First of all, my generation is keen not to repeat the mistakes of previous generations. We’ve become too aware of a cycle that stretches way back to the advent of rock’n’roll; we don’t want to be the figure of ridicule on the sofa berating our offspring for listening to something that doesn’t fulfil our criteria of “real music”.
And that cuts both ways. Just as we’ve become skilled at seeing things from our kids’ point of view, so our kids are comfortable cherrypicking the best of what’s gone before them. After all, it’s never been easier.
Technology has played a key part in that process. Streaming has turned the entirety of music history into a vast jukebox – and, as with jukeboxes, all that matters is the song and the way it affects you. Dora and her friends listen to Justin Bieber just as readily as they might listen to Pharrell, The Velvet Underground, Ray BLK, Angel Olsen, TLC, Beirut, Fleetwood Mac and Joanna Newsom – but they’re not trying to make a point. Eclectic isn’t something they aspire to; it’s their default.
The snobbish orthodoxies of my upbringing – that pop was frivolous, meaningless and childish, while rock was serious, meaningful and grown-up – are incomprehensible to them. When Dora heard one BBC Radio 6 Music DJ stress what a “great POP record” All Saints’ Pure Shores was, she asked me: “Why can’t he just say that it was a great record?” She’d picked up on the implication that going for a mainstream pop sound was somehow an impediment to excellence or something that you outgrow.
It seems strange to them that you would choose to be into just one style or era of music – ditto for fashion and films. I think it’s probably a symptom of the on-demand way everyone consumes culture these days.
Alabama Shakes are one of Dora’s most recent obsessions, their two albums on almost constant rotation for the past few months. Now, if a band like Alabama Shakes had come along when I was 15, I would have most probably heard of them through the music press. I would have seen a picture of them and read the accompanying piece – and if they seemed interesting enough to me, I might have listened out for them on the radio or possibly even taken a blind punt and bought their album without listening to it.
For better or worse, that’s a process Dora has bypassed in its entirety, to the degree that when she ran Spotify through the car stereo to play their first album as we drove to school, and I muttered something about how Brittany Howard was one of my favourite female American singers of the past few years, she was shocked. She’d never seen a picture of the band, so assumed that the throaty, soulful vocals on songs like Hold On and Don’t Wanna Fight belonged to a man.
That’s not to say that any sort of generational divide has been obliterated when it comes to music – rather that it manifests itself in more unexpected ways. When my kids hear adults sniping at Ed Sheeran’s lack of edge, they see it as a symptom of how edgeless those adults are. True, no sane person would try to mount a defence of Galway Girl, but it seems pretty cool to my kids that Sheeran got to No 1 with Shape Of You – a song that sounds absolutely at home among Ghetts, Lethal Bizzle and all the other grime releases on the current 1Xtra playlist.
And because they like this stuff, I wind up listening to it too. The week Stormzy’s Gang Signs & Prayer came out, it was all we played, but one thing they didn’t want me doing was singing along, or deploying the vernacular of radio station DJs like A.Dot and Charlie Sloth. No kid needs to hear that from their dad. All they ask is that I stop short of trading in the corduroy, cardigans and Clarks for Boy Better Know threads and Yeezy Boost 350 V2s. And quite right too. No one wants to see that.
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