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Robert Christgau and Danyel Smith

the breakfast table
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from: Robert Christgau

Are the Kids All Right?

Posted Monday, June 21, 1999, at 4:20 PM ET

Dear Danyel,

I must say I am delighted by what you don't read and impressed by what you do. Like me, only more so, you're obviously convinced that it's possible to be serious and engaged without immersing in Current Events in the social-studies sense. One thing that has animated music journalism since the '60s is the suspicion that what people do with their fun is every bit as redolent and meaningful as how they relate to Public Affairs. It might even be posited that most of the endless palavering about Public Affairs that turned the ruling class of Serious Journalists into what everyone now calls "pundits" is in fact trivial self-indulgence--often less meaningful and almost always less enduring than what's on the Billboard charts.

How one defines the "people" who are having fun, of course, will inevitably evolve. The biggest difference between you and me may well not be that you're black and I'm white, enormous though that issue always looms in America, but that I'm 57 and you're, what, around 30? I never read an education story till I had a kid, richly related to youth-culture issues though the subject obviously is. Since, in addition, you're single, and work at a slick magazine with a youth demographic, you can identify pretty fully with an audience--and, as your ad reps want the world to know, a market--with loads of fun time. I've spent decades telling my contemporaries that for any aesthetically attuned person there was no end to popular music. And I know for a fact that many of my fellow oldies listen to music not just to access their 24-year-old selves, which is the cynical formula, but to help themselves feel, as opposed to merely comprehend, how the world is evolving--and to have fun in the process. But I can't deny that Carola and I were the oldest people we saw at the jammed Pavement concert we attended last night. Impinging responsibilities and alternate pleasures take their toll. So do physical infirmities. Irving Plaza is basically a stand-up venue. After 90 minutes of gloriously playful, dissonant, melodic, off-hand, superintelligent, unpretentious, multi-referential music, my hernia was bothering me.

It would probably be too big a question to ask how music makes you feel the world is evolving, although I'd love it if you took a stab at it. A smaller question might be how someone who, like me, takes considerable current-events sustenance from The Nation and the alternaweeklies sees the political potential of the audience/market she services--which I'd define as a biracial fan base with an abiding interest in the African-American culture that has meant so much to this nation and the world. Are these the hedonistic escapists of pundit nightmare? What happens to them as they pass 30? Have their youthful pleasures prepared them for impinging responsibilities and alternate pleasures? Because, let's face it, only a more humane health-care system than any centrist Democrat can make happen will mitigate our physical infirmities.

Your old pal
Bob C

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415
from: Robert Christgau

Are the Kids All Right?

Posted Monday, June 21, 1999, at 4:20 PM ET
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Robert Christgau is a senior editor and chief music critic of the Village Voice. His essay collection, Grown Up All Wrong (click here to buy the book), was published in 1998. Danyel Smith is the editor in chief of Vibe.
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