Sometime in the mid-1980s a pop cultural landmark was reached when Baby Boomer journalists started writing columns complaining about the current state of rock music. This process might have been jump-started by the affront of Madonna to such people as Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe or Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times; but by 1985 or thereabouts, it was altogether commonplace to read lamentations about the music the kids are listening to today in unfavorable comparison with the classic compositions of the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Crosby, Stills etc.
What these middle-aged Boomers didn’t realize, of course, is that they were striking exactly the same note that the Greatest Generation had sounded a quarter-century earlier at the advent of rock music–or, more specifically, in the wake of the British invasion of the mid-1960s. How many times was it expressed, by indignant journalists, that the tuneless, brainless, screeching ‘music’ of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Crosby, Stills, etc. brooked no comparison with Harry James, Woody Herman, Frank Sinatra, or whomever?
