Progressing through my shift at work, I hear Good Charlotte, Papa Roach and Sum 41 on the alternative station. After about three hours of this, I’m refreshed with the familiar opening riff to Alice in Chains’ “Down in a Hole.”
A younger crewmember, an LSU freshman, sees my excitement at the rare moment of quality music, and asks, “Who is this?” I am floored.
This question sets off a chain reaction in my head, at the end of which I come to realize the music people my age, 21 to 24, grew up listening to is becoming almost invisible in the culture teens are exposed to. It’s not that they only like stuff that’s out now; it’s that they don’t know any better.
I think about a high school kid, going through high school drama and not having albums like “Vs.,” “Nevermind,” “Dirt” and “Pablo Honey.” I wanted to know what that was like, and I found that some first and second-year students feel a void when it comes to serious music.
“Most music now is just an entertainment form,” said Megan Thomas, a studio art sophomore. “I don’t think our generation is spoken for on MTV like it was then. If I want music I can really relate to, I have to dig deeper.”
Thomas is not alone. I found that many younger students feel this way.
“When stuff is going on in my life, I do turn to music,” said Candice Herrington, an interior design freshman. “But I don’t find much in today’s music to help express how I feel. I go to older music, music my cousin listened to when she was in college.”
Herrington said the popular view of music changed between generations.
“I don’t think a lot of people my age think about music that way anymore,” she said.
This became the answer to the question I’ve been asking myself periodically for the last year and a half. After being involved in barely any organizations and not participating in many school-sponsored events, I’ve become a fifth-year, graduating senior having given nothing back to the place that has housed and educated me for four and a half years.
So what can I give back? All I can offer is a tiny bit of knowledge to the people who might not know that time’s musical canon. It’s never too early to begin educating younger people on the music that will become our oldies.
My mom had a tape that she used to play with Jimi, Zeppelin, Janis and The Beatles. I’m now grateful that she made me listen to it on the way to school. I hope to have that same mix CD for my kids, only with songs like “Black,” “Lithium” and “Would?” blended in with the older classics.