Generation y Not

Punk bands like The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, Television, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, and heaps more pursued the conviction that “if nothing gets challenged, nothing gets changed”. Punk culture of the 80’s was the teenager opposed to the bourgeois – it was the outcasts and the isolated, the vicious and frustrated, the protective of their youth. Each youth generation opposes mediocrity; mediocrity is the explicit opposite of adolescent sentiments. Teenagers like myself are experiencing the affliction of discovering our identities, the pressures of conformity, and the trouble of expectations. A society of mediocrity feels fictitious. If the youth of the 80’s popularized the opposition to the bourgeois, I wonder what the youth of the present is repelling.

Youth will always be defiant of the adulthood they are expected to enter; but there’s a hugely significant difference in the vocalization of that defiance today. The distinction is the identical vocal opportunity of the present. If I’m 16 and my blog has the same readership contingency as anyone’s, then what implication does that have on the 16-year-old musician? The most prevalent bearing of that opportunity is in resources. The 16-year-old musician has the equivalent music production opportunities as his seniors on a fundamental level. This makes debatably the most colossal impact on the beat scene. An immense amount of what’s blogged about on sites akin to PORTALS is sample-based, and in synchronicity with that, teenagers make an apparent portion of the music blogged about. In my mind, that doesn’t seem aberrant in the least bit. To me, it feels conspicuous – but only because I was born into the generation of the accessible.

The idea of youth having the same volume of expression as adults is hastily becoming less and less an exception to the norm. Less and less are we identified as young and held within the connotation that we’re atypical teens. Industries that fetishize youth and use age as a marketing tool are becoming less rampant in the music world – and more so in the blogging community where artists are discovered in the open playing field of the internet. And so if the voice of youth is becoming more and more received, I wonder if the youth of today is repelling mediocrity or if we’re becoming that commonality. This idea of becoming what you’re contrary to is something that bands like Nirvana spoke of. Kurt Cobain said that the mass recognition Nirvana received in the consumerist world was unequivocally what they contested. I wouldn’t say though that the prospect of adolescents and adults being comparable in the music world is carried with such a negative connotation. I’d say that it’s an inevitable fate.

Because of the technology operated sphere my generation was carried into, it would be unfeasible for youth today not to have the inclination to share themselves on the internet. If young artists were not blogged about, it would be obvious that those who steer the music community were deliberately disregarding a group that compensates for a vast portion of music. I think that the larger music sites are just now beginning to honestly ratify young artists. Smaller sites tend to cover younger artists more frequently, likely because they’re less steered by those of the industry. The influx of youth involved in music is immense- no longer solely as the consumer, but furthermore, as the creator. The question now is what qualifies the legitimacy of music?  My response would be that nothing qualifies validity; the validity in music is as unrestricted as its distributor, the internet.

Below are 3 tracks by 3 artists who have been born into a generation parented by the internet:

Honeydrip – “I Know”

Caves – “1993″

XXYYXX – “Never Leave”