Talkin' 'Bout Our Generations

Two things happened recently that prompted me to write about something I've been pondering for awhile. The first is that, earlier today, I walked into the kitchen while my mother was watching Follow The Fleet, a 1936 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie with songs by Irving Berlin, on television. Just before I walked into the room I heard Ginger Rogers singing a song I did not recognize, and, in complete ignorance of who was singing and who wrote the song, thought to myself, "Oh, man, what is that corn?"

The second thing is that rapper-entrepreneur Shawn Carter (Jay-Z to you, ofay!) and his lovely wife Beyoncé Knowles (but please call her by her first name only) just sired a baby girl, whom they named Blue Ivy Carter. Right after the birth, Mr. Carter recorded a new rap song, "Glory," about his baby daughter . . . with little Blue Ivy's cries added to the recording. Going beyond Stevie Wonder's addition of his baby daughter's sounds on his 1976 hit "Isn't She Lovely," Mr. Carter gave a credit to Blue Ivy on the record. "Glory" was quickly released, and five days after the baby's birth, it would debut at number seventy-four on the Billboard hip-hop and R&B charts, making Miss Carter the youngest person to debut on the Billboard charts.

So what do these two events have to do with each other? Simply this: A pop record that sounds contemporary when it's first released may seem dated many years from then. A song from a thirties Hollywood musical sounded antiquated just two decades later, when Elvis burst upon the scene, and Jay-Z's own record will likely sound passé by the time Blue Ivy is old enough to make her own records, assuming she goes into the family business.

Look at the popular music that existed before rock and roll - solo singers backed by large bands, as well as bandleaders who were stars in their own right. All of this music was considered rather hokey by young people in the mid-1950s, and when rock and roll burst upon the scene, it became, or should have become, apparent that the old pop establishment was headed for decline. Irving Berlin had been American popular music's greatest songwriter for decades; then, in 1956, with Elvis Presley on top of the charts, Berlin was faced with a new form he had no ability to write for.

This is something we rock and roll fans, as we watch our favorite musical form slip into irrelevance and possibly extinction, fail to understand. Popular music is an expression of its generation, and whatever music a generation produces or consumes usually has a hard time surviving its generation. No, rock and roll is not the cultural force it used to be, but given that most of it was a product of Depression children like Elvis, Baby Boomers, and Generation X elders, it's astonishing that it's lasted as long as it has. But rock and roll is also mainly the province of white guys with guitars, and there are a lot fewer of both today as the American population gets more diverse and as popular music and the methods in which it is made become more fragmented - and many young white males prefer hip-hop these days anyway. So it's not surprising that rock and roll has lost most of its audience and most of its relevance to rap, never to regain either.  We act as if we can prevent it from dying out.

And before you rap fans start chanting, "Hip-hop hurray!", let me put you on notice: Your music has an expiration date as well. Sure, rap is in better shape 33 years after the first big-selling rap record, "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang, than rock was in 1988, 33 years after Bill Haley and the Comets topped the charts with "Rock Around the Clock" - but the clock is ticking down to the day hip-hop will be as irrelevant as rock.

Let me, if I may, explain what I now call the "Blue Ivy Rule." The greatest figures in English-language popular music were all born at a time when the musical forms they would go on to work in didn't exist; the music that existed at the time they were toddlers wouldn't survive their own influence on pop. When Frank Sinatra was born in 1915, no one listening to "Alabama Jubilee" or "The Old Grey Mare, She Ain't What She Used to Be" on their Victrolas could have imagined the large, brassy big-band sound that Ol' Blue Eyes would personify. When the big jazz and pop bands of the forties dominated the Hit Parade, no one could have imagined rock and roll - or that four little boys in Liverpool, England would grow up to bring such a music to a global audience. Likewise, in the late sixties and early seventies, when rock and roll seemed destined to rule the earth, the babies that would grow up to create and dominate rap were in their cribs - and had different names from the ones they're known by today. (Jay-Z himself was born in 1969, the year of Woodstock and the release of the Beatles' Abbey Road.)

Right now, even as hip-hop is dominant, there are babies being born that will one day create the music that displaces rap. It's a musical form that has not yet been invented, and which we do not yet recognize. And don't be surprised if Blue Ivy Carter is at the forefront of it.