Leggo My Stuff

I can remember the exact moment I rejected my generation. It occurred in General Music class, which was where they shunted all the people who didn’t play an instrument. (I did play electric guitar, but it was not considered band- or orchestra-acceptable. Which made it not-an-instrument as far as the school was concerned.) I walked into the auditorium with “The Beatles” sparkling in silver pen on my binder, and most of the rest of the non-instrument-playing class jeered me for liking what was deemed Parental Music. (It didn’t seem to matter that my own parents’ knowledge of the Beatles didn’t go very far past “they were a band.”)

At the end of class, the teacher let somebody put a favorite tape in the tape recorder so we could all listen to it. Being steeped in the Beatles and oblivious about what was on the radio, I had never heard it before. It was “I’m So Excited” by the Pointer Sisters. Everyone else seemed to know it; some of them sang along.

We're so excited the electric guitar is not considered an instrument.

I walked out of my first general music class (still being taunted as we exited the auditorium) feeling horrified. Then I sat in my next class feeling pissed off. That’s it, I thought. I don’t understand my generation. They had just dissed the Beatles in favor of a pop song that rhymed the line “I’m so excited” with “And I just can’t hide it.”*

When you realize you don’t fit in with your cohort, you can react in one of two ways. You can go native and throw aside the things you like that aren’t cool, and you can be assimilated, Borg-like. Or you can go all Daria and decide you don’t want what the popular crowd is pushing on you, and you’re just not going to take it. So you reject them in turn. I chose the latter.

A mere three years after this watershed moment in my adolescence, the 1960s made a comeback. This happened because the Baby Boomers in charge of pop culture were hitting middle age and feeling nostalgic; because it was sort of time for a new retro thing anyway, what with the 50s craze of the 70s having worn off; and because the compact disc was ascendant, and the works of the Beatles were being translated to digital with great fanfare, starting with Sergeant Pepper on June 1, 1987, the twentieth anniversary of its original Summer of Love release.

"It’s perfect!” “No, it isn’t.” “Oh, we’ll fix it next time.”

But the craze extended beyond the Boomers. The same kids who’d harassed me over my sparkly binder pen were now declaring their love for the Fab Four. Suddenly the Lads were good enough for them. Yet I’d been loyal the whole time, and nobody was acknowledging this. These mulleted, rubber-bracelet-wearing, Valley Girl-talking preppies were roaming in my domain, listening to my music and pretending it was theirs? Who the hell were they?

But really, who the hell am I?

Gosh, those Beatles sure are top drawer! Thank God we thought of it!

Who am I to decide whether their Beatles experience is legitimate? How do I know their experience was any less profound the first time they heard “Within You, Without You”? Just because I got there before them doesn’t make me any better. And just because I was angry about being trashed, and having my favorites trashed, didn’t give me the right to trash in turn. Because it wasn’t just that select group of non-instrument players. It was everybody, the whole student body, suddenly into my stuff. But it was never my stuff. I was just feeling resentful and bruised. Some of them could have had transcendent experiences while tripping and hearing “Because” at a party; or they could have received some Greatest Hits mishmash via the one-cent CD club** and fallen in love with the boys at the opening chime of “A Hard Day’s Night”; or they could have heard “Julia” on the radio after the funeral of a loved one and forever after associated its lilting acoustic ache with that person, and that became their song. How can I possibly know?

Like, omigod! I totally just heard "Piggies" for the first time!

We tend to think that those who follow trends are superficial cowards. And those of us who dare to buck them are deep and brave. Once the trendy folks take our alternative thing and make it their trend, we despise them. We must let the world know that we are authentic, and they are certainly not.

And as soon as we do that, we’re the exclusionary jerks. You can’t like that thing. It’s mine. How dare you desecrate it by dragging it into your cold, trend-loving, puny little world!

I speak from the viewpoint of another Star Wars resurgence—there have been several in my lifetime. But I was there at Ground Zero.

Okay, not quite. I wasn’t allowed to see it in the theater in 1977 because I was five, which apparently was considered too young even for a PG movie, according to the Parental Guidance rating system determined by my parents. Luckily we moved out of the country, and it came to Caracas a year later. (Watching the film for the first time in a Venezuelan movie theater with Spanish subtitles only enhanced the experience.) It was, in fact, the cornerstone of my childhood, thanks to the books, the figures, the playsets, the t-shirts, the jammies, and the trading cards that came with desiccated chewing gum. I loved Star Wars so much, I continued to love it well after it became a trilogy, and the trilogy was committed to videotape. Its universe lived on only in novels and comics and, to my squealing early adulthood delight, the D6 roleplaying game.

I mean, look at these 70s nerds in their class picture.

Anyway, by the time I was rolling up my first character and becoming acquainted with the Heir to the Empire novels, Star Wars was at pretty much an all-time nadir in terms of public popularity. Sure, everybody would rent it once in a while, and those of us with poor social skills had the trilogy memorized waaay too well. But Star Wars was so yesteryear that I commented on it in my high-school graduation speech. I said I was feeling old. I did not say this from the vantage point of somebody who had grown up with an elderly person’s disease (entirely) but because I had discovered that little kids—now known as the Millennials—didn’t know who Darth Vader was. Seriously. I asked a bunch of them.

And God, do I miss those times. To me, the grunge era was the best time to love Star Wars. Why? Because all these popular kids weren’t in the way, getting their hair gel and wine coolers all over my stuff.

Starring C’baoth and other unpronounceably named characters!

And those Millennials? Yeah, they found out who Darth Vader was. It took another decade, but they wound up stepping into my sacred territory. Yeah, you, you—you Kids Today. The hell do you know? You dare to wear a Star Wars t-shirt and start referring to the sacred original by its episode number? You weren’t even alive in the glorious, feather-haired days when Star Wars was brand-new, and nobody had ever seen anything like the riot of space opera that was its Cantina aliens and Leia’s danish hair and that big breathing dude all in black and its big explosions and ships and all our toys with tiny weapons that you had to keep from getting vacuumed up and—and—

Wait. Why am I hearing that echoing back at me?

Oh, right! That’s the sound of the children of the 60s jeering at me. You know, those people who were around when the Beatles actually existed. I wasn’t at that particular Ground Zero. I wasn’t even alive. In fact, I was born into a world in which they had just broken up, bitterly and eternally. I didn’t even discover them until a couple of months before John Lennon died. So what the hell do I know, when most of what I do know made itself known to me in the cascade of nostalgia that followed John’s murder? I never knew a world with extant Beatles in it. I have only ever known of ex-Beatles.

Please, sir, can I be the one to surge George, sir?

And yet. It is my right to put their name on my binder because of what I feel when I hear Sergeant Pepper or Revolver or really any of their albums. Because my heart still jumps when I see any film footage of them performing. Because I hear their music from ridiculous distances and respond having sensed a presence I’ve not felt since….

So. Who am I to deny anyone else?

*To be fair, I did wind up enjoying “Neutron Dance” later on. I just didn’t mention that out loud.

**Hah! I’m kidding. There’s no way you’d receive even the worst EMI/Capitol Records train-wreck of a Beatles collection. Everybody knows you get one halfway decent Jimmy Buffett CD and then things like The Very Best of Cecilio and Kapono.