OK Go Boomer Computer

Billie Eilish

Pop singer Billie Eilish’s recent admission that she doesn’t know who Van Halen is, has reignited the generational debate that apparently flares every two weeks anymore. Van Halen’s fan base of older Gen-Xers have to admit they’re officially as old as they once thought their parents were. Since Van Halen never much spoke to me, I wouldn’t much care about this faux controversy, if it didn’t come so soon after the now-obsolete “OK Boomer” joke.

When I was 16, I  desperately wanted to be a Baby Boomer. Looking around, I saw the cultural and political power Baby Boomers possessed, the authority they held over my choices, and the simple ubiquity of their presence. When you're a kid, you have two options when faced with authority: you rebel against it, with the moral incoherence for which teenagers are justly famous, or you emulate it. I chose column B.

While still in elementary school, I remember watching PBS documentaries about the cultural milieu in which Boomers grew up, from the images of wealth they witnessed on shows like Leave It To Beaver and Bewitched, to the socially acceptable rebellion they helped create at Woodstock. Based on the exposure I received in childhood, I believed Boomers won the Civil Rights conflict—although Malcolm X and Dr. King were both born in the 1920s.

We didn’t have that. As a member of Generation X, I struggled with communal identity. We didn’t even have a generational handle until about 1993, nearly thirty years after our generation began; we bounced among “Latchkey Kids,” “the Baby Bust,” “the MTV Generation,” and “Generation 13” before Douglas Coupland’s novel gave us a name. If television documentaries gave me a false impression of Boomer unity, media treatment convinced me that my generation barely even existed.

However, we did exist. We test-marketed the claims many Millennials now use to make bank, including the claim that wages were flat while work was up, meaning we faced the likelihood of a chronically impoverished future; the claim that cultural institutions treated us exclusively as consumers, and demonstrated little patience with us as makers; and the claim that the economy was saddling us with debts we’d never be able to repay. History has vindicated us.

So you understand my frustration when, several weeks ago, New York radio host Bob Lonsberry tweeted that “Boomer is the n-word of ageism.” After forty years of constant saturation with the idea that Boomers were cultural innovators, political liberators, and better musicians than every subsequent generation, somebody purporting to be a Boomer spokesperson claimed Boomers are oppressed equally to African Americans. This takes oppression chic to a new level.

Eddie and Alex Van Halen
(don't ask me which is which)

The “OK Boomer” tag, like every other fad in our media-drenched environment, had a remarkably short lifespan. In November, it pushed people born between 1945 and 1965 to heights of spittle-flinging rage; but it’s already getting used ironically by comedians and basic-cable news commentators. Just like “MeToo” and “Black Lives Matter,” overexposure defanged the monster in its cradle. Yet the reaction it generated speaks volumes about its intended audience.

I have one problem about the Billie Eilish controversy, though: approaching fifty years since the Beatles released their final album, their music still appears timeless and relevant. Van Halen doesn’t. Van Halen’s peak album, 1984, is larded with okay songs like “Jump,” and shitty pieces of self-indulgence like “Hot For Teacher.” As the movie Yesterday recently demonstrated, playing the Beatles moves many generations equally. Van Halen sounds very early-1980s.

People slightly older than me feigning distress that a 17-year-old doesn’t know Van Halen, is like demanding a 17-year-old when 1984 was released, 25 years ago, remember Frankie Laine and Perry Como. I sure didn’t when I was 17. In both cases, the Billie Eilish faux-controversy and the “OK Boomer” outrage, we see people old enough to be parents or grandparents demanding they be treated as permanently, eternally young.

Essentially, we have two generations publicly demanding to act like Peter Pan, and it’s embarrassing. Boomers and their first-generation offspring expect history to freeze, their childhoods to be treated as sacrosanct, and post-Millennials to treat them like peers. They want congratulations for the innovations they nurtured, and then, they want all innovation to stop.

And making a teenage pop singer the embodiment of this desire for nothing new to happen, is the height of irony.

When “OK Boomer” began, I thought we were seeing old people refusing to get old. But clearly my generation is refusing to get middle-aged, too. Here’s hoping we can all stop being narcissistic, and appreciate that the world keeps growing and blooming, even when we’re not in the center of it.