Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

by Chuck Klosterman

These Carnival cruise patrons stand on one side of a philosophical chasm; demographically, the chasm can be quantified as the aesthetic abyss between (a) people born just before 1960, and (b) people born just after 1980. And what’s fascinating about this gap is that both sides love the same thing: they both love rock music. This is not a case of the youth embracing a completely new idiom their parents can’t fathom, because the idiom is essentially the same; this is a generation gap over virtuosity. Quite simply, the people on this cruise don’t believe modern bands know how to play, and they’re willing to spend $2,500 to see groups who can. “You hit the nail on the head,” Shipman says when I suggest this hypothesis. “I talk to my students about music all the time, and they’re all used to Britney Spears and Madonna and Janet Jackson and all those rap guys. That’s what they consider normal music. But those people are just talking over a beat and dancing—it has more to do with what they wear. It’s not like someone singing and playing guitar and writing all the material and running around the stage while they play it.1 It seems like kids today are more interested in the culture around music than in the music itself.” There might be some grains of truth in what Shipman says. However, it’s possible that kids are more interested in the culture around music simply because that culture is always more interesting, and it always has been. Or at least it was on this boat.