The recent deaths of celebrities from the 1980s are making me re-evaluate my life, but in a very particular way: I want to know how long I will be relevant to students. Right now, I can drop references to things in pop culture (well, more precisely, to things in nerd culture), and most students understand the reference. I can name-drop Buffy episodes, or rant about the Star Wars movies (both the ones that happened and the ones that didn't happen), or talk about how I don't watch Dr Who, but of course I know what it is and have seen a few episodes. Somehow everyone loves Dr Who; go figure.
Now, I know that eventually I'll fall behind on my pop culture. I mean, the freshman this year had yet to hit puberty when 9/11 happened; as far as they are concerned, we've had troops in Afghanistan forever, just like I grew up thinking we'd had troops in Germany and Japan forever. How can I keep up? Our school just got rid of phone service in the dorm rooms because only 3 students out of 1400 have voice mail boxes. Everyone has a cell phone these days. Of course I remember the August ritual back in the day of ordering phone service for your dorm room. I can joke about these sorts of "back in the day" moments, but
What is terrifying is not that I cannot keep up with the pop culture of the youth these days. I can try, and Wikipedia, Google, Youtube, and Netflix make it easy to scour the landscape for interesting shows. We plow through TV shows and books at home anyway, and once we have kids, we'll start acquiring the cultural signposts of the next generation. I don't think I'll be an old fuddy-duddy who sprays down kids who need to stay the hell off my lawn.
What shocked me is that world I know, and all of the people in it, will die, and the next generation will never know them as anything but history. It's not that I can't experience the future; it's that my students can never experience the past.
This hit me when MCA died. The Beastie Boys meant something to me; I had fond memories about them that related to my personal history (riding the bus to and from the accelerated learning class the sent the smart kids to, the soundtrack to a number of college parties, and so on), and they were influential in the music industry in a number of ways. So long as they were still releasing albums and playing gigs, they would be discussed, remembered, and evaluated. Even if their heyday was 20 years in the past, like a ghost they could still project their image into the present, and force us to re-tell their story.
For a mainstream public figure like Michael Jackson, for a decade or two there will be opportunities to discuss his legacy, even with him gone. Every time someone does the moonwalk, or does the Thriller dance, or opens a ridiculous ranch, or burns through millions of dollars in studio time to produce a terrible album (too soon?)... There are videos and songs and sordid court cases and single-gloved 80s fashion trends based on the Michael Jackson juggernaut. The young may know know Michael Jackson, but they at least know his caricature, and that is a point of connection.
But for a niche act like the Beastie Boys... Without them on tour to remind the public about their influence, and to trigger a flood of memories from older fans like myself, what do they become? How long until they are effectively gone, until there are no more triggers to make people re-tell the story of the Beastie Boys?
Probably because I haven't lost my parents, I haven't really thought about what it's like to carry the full burden of telling someone's story, of keeping them alive in words and spirit and stories when they are fully gone.
To keep the Beastie Boys alive, I would have to re-tell their story, and try to find some way to make relevant to students a niche group that they have never heard of. The big-picture, broad-stroke personalities like Michael Jackson will be much easier, at least for a while. But the Beastie Boys are already gone. To re-tell their story in a compelling way to the 18-year-olds of 2019 is re-tell my own story, because I cannot hope to untangle what happened to the Beastie Boys in 1985 from what happened to me in 1985. Every gaze backwards is tinged with nostalgia, and the youth of tomorrow won't want to replace their generations' Beastie Boys with my generations' Beastie Boys, any more than I wanted to replace Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D with their 1959 equivalent (a Skiffle group I've never heard of?)
What frightens me, of course, has nothing to do with music. It's that someday I will lose my parents, and then the task of keeping my parents' stories and memories alive will fall to me. I will tell their stories, and almost by definition, it will be irrelevant to my children, who are looking to the future. Every special memory, every family story, every experience with my parents from my past that to me is not a moment, but a moment, will be no easier to explain to my (future) children than explaining the significance of the Beastie Boys to an 18 year old in 2019. There are stories and expressions we have that will not be easy to translate. My parents are both rock stars, and so I assume it will be like talking about Michael Jackson to people born in 1991, which is easier. But even with the King of Pop, there are moments that don't translate, just as there will be bits of my history with my parents that I can never fully explain.
It's not that I can't stay relevant to the next generation; it's that they cannot be relevant to me. For some reason I didn't figure that out until MCA died. I could probably understand what matters to my students, but they can't understand what mattered to me. Because the things I know are just ghosts that I can see but the students cannot, and I would have to tell the stories of all of these ghosts. But then I'd just be telling my own story. And that's what old fuddy-duddies do, which I was trying to avoid in the first place!
