April 29, 2010
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I Like American English, Do You Like American English, Don’t You Like American English Baby
Longtime readers (and by longtime I mean this past weekend) know that I recently saw a Beatles tribute band called American English. The band itself was amazing, coming complete with dress and music from each era of the Beatles. I would imagine it was probably a lot like what it would be like to see a Beatles concert, sans all of the screaming teenagers. As I stood in the middle of the floor with about 40 other people, I looked around at everybody else. Anybody who was old enough to have seen the Beatles in concert would have to be well into their 50s at this point and in many cases probably pushing almost 70. And let me tell you something, most of the people in this crowd were not people in the 50s or 60s. Of course, the Beatles music is classic and timeless, but its still amazing to me how their music defies the generation gap and stretches across the limits of age, race, sex, money and political views.
But getting back to the generational aspect. The Beatles are just as popular with Generation Y as with Generation X. A portion of that can be attributed to Beatles Rock Band, but that has only been out for a year or two, but yet the Beatles were popular with Generation Y before the game came out. It certainly speaks volumes to the open mindedness of this generation. I know when I was growing up and even up to my early 20s, I had no interest in the Beatles. And the same could be true of many of the kids in my generation at the time. The Beatles and music of that era (like the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who, among many others) just wasn’t considered hip at the time as it was our parents music. Oh sure, it wasn’t my parents music, since my parents were born in 1930 and 1934, but it was certainly the music of other kids my age. But this generation overlooks all of that. Not only are they familiar with music of the 1960s and 1970s, but many of the songs that we grew up to like Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer“, Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me“, John Mellencamp’s “Jack And Diane“, and many other songs of that era are still very popular with the younger generation. “Livin’ On A Prayer” seems to be played at just about every sporting event these days and people, even the younger people, go crazy when its played. Every generation gets ragged on by the previous generations for many reasons, especially music and each generation finds fault with the previous generation even with music, but in this case with this generation the music it where they find common ground with the other generations.
