Hi,
I occasionally write essays based on things that happen in my life, sometimes I just write essays because fiction hurts too much to think about and my fingers get bored of sitting around doing nothing.
These essays normally just get passed around a small group of friends and family, but I thought for this one, I'll put it 'out-there' and see if I'm just the miserable old man that so many accuse me of being, or if I'm actually barking up the right tree.
If you choose to read this, I thank you in advance. If you comment on this or wish to argue a difference of opinion, then by all means do so. If I'm doing something wrong, either in writing or in personality, then I need to be made to understand.
The following essay is approx 2000 words.
[FONT="]2010 February 6th – Making a Song and Dance about a Song[/FONT]
[FONT="] [/FONT]
[FONT="] I’m a little out of touch with the world. I often joke that I’m forty years older than I actually am. Some of the people with which I have worked over the years categorised me as a proper grumpy old man. They saw my future consisting of sitting out in my front garden with a loaded shotgun, waving it around occasionally, swearing a lot and perhaps firing a round or two at any ‘bloody kid’ that looked like it was going to kick a ball near my house.[/FONT]
[FONT="] I’m not ruling it out as a possibility, but that isn’t exactly where I’m aiming to end up.[/FONT]
[FONT="] I want to be at peace with the world, but the world isn’t being terribly co-operative. Every day, I read something else in the news that makes me angry, or I hear something on the radio that makes me frustrated, or I get stuck on particular part of a computer game and I have to reduce the difficulty level to get past it which is something I’d rather not talk about.[/FONT]
[FONT="] My point being; there’s always something that’s not right. You look at things happening around you and you think, it shouldn’t be that way. Why can’t we just get along?[/FONT]
[FONT="] The particular bug-bear that’s digging away at me currently is a song called ‘The Youth of Today’. This is a song I first heard about three or four months ago. It was released sometime last year by a young musician called Amy MacDonald.[/FONT]
[FONT="] Amy is a teenager. Not a great start. However, she’s obviously got some talent because she’s now a recorded artist and one that is doing alright from it. And I would like to make it clear, that I am not going to question her talent, but rather the content of her songs, or rather, the content of one of her songs.[/FONT]
[FONT="] A song that ticks all the right boxes for one of those mix-n-match CD’s that you put together and keep in the car for a lazy bit of summertime driving. A song that actually is rather good, easy to listen to, somehow powerful whilst not being brash or obnoxious. Current and with the times, but not cheesy or trashy. A song that sounds like someone thought about it and constructed it carefully with love not just belted another one off the production line to fill three and a half minutes on the album.[/FONT]
[FONT="] ‘The Youth of Today’ is a song that I like. Musically, I think it is excellent. It makes me turn the volume up and savour the chords, melodies and the bassline. Macdonald’s voice, possibly the nicest Scottish singing voice I have ever heard, injects faith back into the Scottish music scene after The Proclaimers slaughtered it. She sings well, her voice is like another instrument in the song, not overdone, not underdone, but balanced perfectly. [/FONT]
[FONT="] But what she says is a problem. Paul Lester wrote on his column for The Guardian, “[/FONT][FONT="]Now, for sheer jejune teenspeak, this is up there with Billie's Because We Want To”. In my words, s[/FONT][FONT="]he perpetuates an arrogance that is the root cause for the distrust and alienation of her generation. [/FONT][FONT="]I [/FONT][FONT="]shall quote sections of her song and then offer my own opinions. [/FONT]
[FONT="]She begins with: Maybe if you were some spearheaded guy, I would listen to what you have to say. But you’re just some incapable figure thinking you’re better than me.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Powerful words, Miss MacDonald. For the sake of this essay, I will pretend I have no idea what is coming next and assume that you’re talking about some daft bugger who wears underpants on his head, has a 2B pencil up each nostril and only says ‘Wooble’. [/FONT]
[FONT="]But you’re not[/FONT][FONT="], she continues, You don’t know a thing about the youth of today, stating your opinion, making it ring in my head all day.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Okay. So she’s better than anyone older than her... That’s what it boils down to so far. She’s saying that today’s youth is superior to everybody else and whenever anyone older tries to offer advice, it goes in one ear and then reverberates around a hollow cavity for anywhere between twelve and twenty-four hours.[/FONT]
[FONT="]You know, Miss MacDonald, you may be onto something there.[/FONT]
[FONT="]And you say, ‘my children weren’t the same. My children’s children, they’re the ones to blame’. And you say, ‘In my day we were better behaved’...[/FONT]
[FONT="]Oh please! Of course people say all this stuff. Has it occurred to young Miss MacDonald that the reason people say this stuff is because it’s true? Sure, there have always been some kids in generations past that caused problems and there will continue to be for as long as humans exist, just as there will always be good kids as there has been also in generations past.[/FONT]
[FONT="]What’s important here is the balance of power between the two forces: Thoughtfulness versus Rebellion. Thoughtfulness always used to outweigh the Rebellion, but over the years, the rebel forces began to overthrow logic and now it’s tipped the other way. There are more tear-aways now than ever before and none of them have any respect. [/FONT]
[FONT="]We are near anarchy. So damn right, Miss MacDonald! Damn right people were better behaved in the past![/FONT]
[FONT="]But it’s not your day no more.[/FONT]
[FONT="]And here lies the foundations to the decline of the world. The youth are tired of having older people around because apparently, these days, kids are born with the genetic knowledge to get by in the world without any of that silly, convoluted nostalgia that we equipped with brains call education and advice.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Oh and by the way Miss MacDonald, that should be ‘not your day anymore.’ This ‘no more’ bollocks is poor grammar. You may have known that had you paid attention in that school you probably thought of as a prison guarded by loads of dusty old has-beens trying to brain wash you to understand a world you felt you were already wise enough to survive in.[/FONT]
[FONT="]She continues:-[/FONT]
[FONT="]We are the youth of today, change your hair in every way and we are the youth of today, we’ll say what we want to say and we are the youth of today, don’t care what you have to say at all.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Oh, for goodness sake![/FONT]
[FONT="]So you think you have the right to go mouthing off to whomever you like, whenever you like and everyone has to give you all the attention you feel you deserve because as you like to keep reminding us, you are the youth of today. And all this time while you’re going around saying everything you want to say, nobody else’s opinion counts for anything?[/FONT]
[FONT="]That’s sounds like a ridiculous and unfair point of view that only a spoilt and narrow-minded child could think would ever pan out.[/FONT]
[FONT="]And maybe if you had a true point of view, I would listen to you. But it’s just your one-sided feelings, they keep getting in my way. [/FONT]
[FONT="]This is very interesting. How do you know if a person’s point of view is true or not since you’ve decided to universally ignore everyone you think is past-it? And perhaps if you stopped spouting off your own one sided feelings, you’d appreciate that experience is often much more valuable than anything you think you may have to offer![/FONT]
[FONT="]And you don’t know a single thing about the youth of today.[/FONT]
[FONT="]And you would appear to know even less about respect, responsibility and tact![/FONT]
[FONT="]The song then covers some old ground before eventually petering out. So to summarise, kids don’t give a shit anymore because they’ve got it all worked out. Any advice from a parent and especially a grandparent is totally surplus and can be disregarded without a care in the world because none of it could ever apply to modern life.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Oh, what a pathetic and ill-fated species humans are if this is an indication of the kind of person allowed to become an influence. [/FONT]
[FONT="]I can remember being fascinated by some of the stories my grandparents could tell me about how things used to be. I can remember feeling a pang of excitement when a story began with “When I was in the war...” because it meant I was going to hear another tale of heroism, luck or bravery that would help me to know them just that little bit more.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Do you want to know the first thing I think when I see the elderly generation of today? Is it that they’re too old to be of any use to anyone? Is it that they walk too slow and wear stupid clothes and that their menial gossip at the bus-stop is worse than day-time television?[/FONT]
[FONT="]No.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The first thing I think is, what stories do they have to tell? With everything they’ve been through, all the years they have lived on this planet, they must have an amazing perspective.[/FONT]
[FONT="]They’ve been through world wars where bombs were being dropped from the skies into towns and cities. Can the youth of today say they’ve ever had to put up with that?[/FONT]
[FONT="]They’ve lived in a world where things went from relative normality to computerised in a few short decades, witnessed technology spring out of nowhere and change the world. The youth of today are born into it and as a result, can’t appreciate it properly.[/FONT]
[FONT="]They’ve lived for decades, scooping up thoughts, feelings, experiences and knowledge. They are much more worldly wise than any youth I’ve ever met.[/FONT]
[FONT="]And yes, they do exchange menial gossip and wear ridiculous outfits, but a person isn’t the sum of the designer logo’s on their clothes and after seven or eight decades of needing to live on Earth, I think they’ve earned the right to settle back and be menial about certain things.[/FONT]
[FONT="]And no matter what happens to them, they are still people. Some of them go a bit loopy; some just end up repeating lots of stuff. On the other end of the scale, there are degenerative medical conditions such as Alzheimer’s that rob them of their coherence. Just because they have trouble communicating, doesn’t mean they are any less worthy of attention.[/FONT]
[FONT="]There are no new ideas anymore. With so much happening in the last couple of hundred years, it really has all been said, all been done and all been thought of. All we are doing now, is working to realise the fiction of years gone and redevelop old ideas into new technologies.[/FONT]
[FONT="]With that in mind, I’d say that the youth of today have far less to offer than those who came before them. Sure, they have to work to make the world as we know it to carry on, but it is the elders of today who helped us get here.[/FONT]
[FONT="]You are the youth of today and you don’t care what anyone has to say.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Your loss![/FONT]
[FONT="]The next time I open up my web-browser and navigate to my newspapers web-site to catch up on the events of this nation and this world, and I see another story about another youngster that went flying off the rails and hurt or killed another innocent bystander, or gone on a destructive rampage and setting fire to things in the name of fun, I shall think about this song.[/FONT]
[FONT="]I shall think about how when the youngster gets caught by the police and warned, he or she will not care what is being said because they don’t care what anyone else has to say.[/FONT]
[FONT="]What will it take to make the youth of today wake up and realise that they are condemning us to a future of misery. A future of ignorance. A future without respect.[/FONT]
[FONT="]It has to stop. And songs like Amy MacDonald’s ‘You of Today’ are the most dangerous propaganda tools I can think of to prevent sense from prevailing. It’s good to listen to, it’s modern but not overdone, it’s young and trendy, it’s musically beautiful and well performed. All of which suggests to the young and susceptible mind that the message inside is also good, relevant and just.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Nothing could be further from the truth.[/FONT]
I occasionally write essays based on things that happen in my life, sometimes I just write essays because fiction hurts too much to think about and my fingers get bored of sitting around doing nothing.
These essays normally just get passed around a small group of friends and family, but I thought for this one, I'll put it 'out-there' and see if I'm just the miserable old man that so many accuse me of being, or if I'm actually barking up the right tree.
If you choose to read this, I thank you in advance. If you comment on this or wish to argue a difference of opinion, then by all means do so. If I'm doing something wrong, either in writing or in personality, then I need to be made to understand.
The following essay is approx 2000 words.
[FONT="]2010 February 6th – Making a Song and Dance about a Song[/FONT]
[FONT="] [/FONT]
[FONT="] I’m a little out of touch with the world. I often joke that I’m forty years older than I actually am. Some of the people with which I have worked over the years categorised me as a proper grumpy old man. They saw my future consisting of sitting out in my front garden with a loaded shotgun, waving it around occasionally, swearing a lot and perhaps firing a round or two at any ‘bloody kid’ that looked like it was going to kick a ball near my house.[/FONT]
[FONT="] I’m not ruling it out as a possibility, but that isn’t exactly where I’m aiming to end up.[/FONT]
[FONT="] I want to be at peace with the world, but the world isn’t being terribly co-operative. Every day, I read something else in the news that makes me angry, or I hear something on the radio that makes me frustrated, or I get stuck on particular part of a computer game and I have to reduce the difficulty level to get past it which is something I’d rather not talk about.[/FONT]
[FONT="] My point being; there’s always something that’s not right. You look at things happening around you and you think, it shouldn’t be that way. Why can’t we just get along?[/FONT]
[FONT="] The particular bug-bear that’s digging away at me currently is a song called ‘The Youth of Today’. This is a song I first heard about three or four months ago. It was released sometime last year by a young musician called Amy MacDonald.[/FONT]
[FONT="] Amy is a teenager. Not a great start. However, she’s obviously got some talent because she’s now a recorded artist and one that is doing alright from it. And I would like to make it clear, that I am not going to question her talent, but rather the content of her songs, or rather, the content of one of her songs.[/FONT]
[FONT="] A song that ticks all the right boxes for one of those mix-n-match CD’s that you put together and keep in the car for a lazy bit of summertime driving. A song that actually is rather good, easy to listen to, somehow powerful whilst not being brash or obnoxious. Current and with the times, but not cheesy or trashy. A song that sounds like someone thought about it and constructed it carefully with love not just belted another one off the production line to fill three and a half minutes on the album.[/FONT]
[FONT="] ‘The Youth of Today’ is a song that I like. Musically, I think it is excellent. It makes me turn the volume up and savour the chords, melodies and the bassline. Macdonald’s voice, possibly the nicest Scottish singing voice I have ever heard, injects faith back into the Scottish music scene after The Proclaimers slaughtered it. She sings well, her voice is like another instrument in the song, not overdone, not underdone, but balanced perfectly. [/FONT]
[FONT="] But what she says is a problem. Paul Lester wrote on his column for The Guardian, “[/FONT][FONT="]Now, for sheer jejune teenspeak, this is up there with Billie's Because We Want To”. In my words, s[/FONT][FONT="]he perpetuates an arrogance that is the root cause for the distrust and alienation of her generation. [/FONT][FONT="]I [/FONT][FONT="]shall quote sections of her song and then offer my own opinions. [/FONT]
[FONT="]She begins with: Maybe if you were some spearheaded guy, I would listen to what you have to say. But you’re just some incapable figure thinking you’re better than me.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Powerful words, Miss MacDonald. For the sake of this essay, I will pretend I have no idea what is coming next and assume that you’re talking about some daft bugger who wears underpants on his head, has a 2B pencil up each nostril and only says ‘Wooble’. [/FONT]
[FONT="]But you’re not[/FONT][FONT="], she continues, You don’t know a thing about the youth of today, stating your opinion, making it ring in my head all day.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Okay. So she’s better than anyone older than her... That’s what it boils down to so far. She’s saying that today’s youth is superior to everybody else and whenever anyone older tries to offer advice, it goes in one ear and then reverberates around a hollow cavity for anywhere between twelve and twenty-four hours.[/FONT]
[FONT="]You know, Miss MacDonald, you may be onto something there.[/FONT]
[FONT="]And you say, ‘my children weren’t the same. My children’s children, they’re the ones to blame’. And you say, ‘In my day we were better behaved’...[/FONT]
[FONT="]Oh please! Of course people say all this stuff. Has it occurred to young Miss MacDonald that the reason people say this stuff is because it’s true? Sure, there have always been some kids in generations past that caused problems and there will continue to be for as long as humans exist, just as there will always be good kids as there has been also in generations past.[/FONT]
[FONT="]What’s important here is the balance of power between the two forces: Thoughtfulness versus Rebellion. Thoughtfulness always used to outweigh the Rebellion, but over the years, the rebel forces began to overthrow logic and now it’s tipped the other way. There are more tear-aways now than ever before and none of them have any respect. [/FONT]
[FONT="]We are near anarchy. So damn right, Miss MacDonald! Damn right people were better behaved in the past![/FONT]
[FONT="]But it’s not your day no more.[/FONT]
[FONT="]And here lies the foundations to the decline of the world. The youth are tired of having older people around because apparently, these days, kids are born with the genetic knowledge to get by in the world without any of that silly, convoluted nostalgia that we equipped with brains call education and advice.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Oh and by the way Miss MacDonald, that should be ‘not your day anymore.’ This ‘no more’ bollocks is poor grammar. You may have known that had you paid attention in that school you probably thought of as a prison guarded by loads of dusty old has-beens trying to brain wash you to understand a world you felt you were already wise enough to survive in.[/FONT]
[FONT="]She continues:-[/FONT]
[FONT="]We are the youth of today, change your hair in every way and we are the youth of today, we’ll say what we want to say and we are the youth of today, don’t care what you have to say at all.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Oh, for goodness sake![/FONT]
[FONT="]So you think you have the right to go mouthing off to whomever you like, whenever you like and everyone has to give you all the attention you feel you deserve because as you like to keep reminding us, you are the youth of today. And all this time while you’re going around saying everything you want to say, nobody else’s opinion counts for anything?[/FONT]
[FONT="]That’s sounds like a ridiculous and unfair point of view that only a spoilt and narrow-minded child could think would ever pan out.[/FONT]
[FONT="]And maybe if you had a true point of view, I would listen to you. But it’s just your one-sided feelings, they keep getting in my way. [/FONT]
[FONT="]This is very interesting. How do you know if a person’s point of view is true or not since you’ve decided to universally ignore everyone you think is past-it? And perhaps if you stopped spouting off your own one sided feelings, you’d appreciate that experience is often much more valuable than anything you think you may have to offer![/FONT]
[FONT="]And you don’t know a single thing about the youth of today.[/FONT]
[FONT="]And you would appear to know even less about respect, responsibility and tact![/FONT]
[FONT="]The song then covers some old ground before eventually petering out. So to summarise, kids don’t give a shit anymore because they’ve got it all worked out. Any advice from a parent and especially a grandparent is totally surplus and can be disregarded without a care in the world because none of it could ever apply to modern life.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Oh, what a pathetic and ill-fated species humans are if this is an indication of the kind of person allowed to become an influence. [/FONT]
[FONT="]I can remember being fascinated by some of the stories my grandparents could tell me about how things used to be. I can remember feeling a pang of excitement when a story began with “When I was in the war...” because it meant I was going to hear another tale of heroism, luck or bravery that would help me to know them just that little bit more.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Do you want to know the first thing I think when I see the elderly generation of today? Is it that they’re too old to be of any use to anyone? Is it that they walk too slow and wear stupid clothes and that their menial gossip at the bus-stop is worse than day-time television?[/FONT]
[FONT="]No.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The first thing I think is, what stories do they have to tell? With everything they’ve been through, all the years they have lived on this planet, they must have an amazing perspective.[/FONT]
[FONT="]They’ve been through world wars where bombs were being dropped from the skies into towns and cities. Can the youth of today say they’ve ever had to put up with that?[/FONT]
[FONT="]They’ve lived in a world where things went from relative normality to computerised in a few short decades, witnessed technology spring out of nowhere and change the world. The youth of today are born into it and as a result, can’t appreciate it properly.[/FONT]
[FONT="]They’ve lived for decades, scooping up thoughts, feelings, experiences and knowledge. They are much more worldly wise than any youth I’ve ever met.[/FONT]
[FONT="]And yes, they do exchange menial gossip and wear ridiculous outfits, but a person isn’t the sum of the designer logo’s on their clothes and after seven or eight decades of needing to live on Earth, I think they’ve earned the right to settle back and be menial about certain things.[/FONT]
[FONT="]And no matter what happens to them, they are still people. Some of them go a bit loopy; some just end up repeating lots of stuff. On the other end of the scale, there are degenerative medical conditions such as Alzheimer’s that rob them of their coherence. Just because they have trouble communicating, doesn’t mean they are any less worthy of attention.[/FONT]
[FONT="]There are no new ideas anymore. With so much happening in the last couple of hundred years, it really has all been said, all been done and all been thought of. All we are doing now, is working to realise the fiction of years gone and redevelop old ideas into new technologies.[/FONT]
[FONT="]With that in mind, I’d say that the youth of today have far less to offer than those who came before them. Sure, they have to work to make the world as we know it to carry on, but it is the elders of today who helped us get here.[/FONT]
[FONT="]You are the youth of today and you don’t care what anyone has to say.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Your loss![/FONT]
[FONT="]The next time I open up my web-browser and navigate to my newspapers web-site to catch up on the events of this nation and this world, and I see another story about another youngster that went flying off the rails and hurt or killed another innocent bystander, or gone on a destructive rampage and setting fire to things in the name of fun, I shall think about this song.[/FONT]
[FONT="]I shall think about how when the youngster gets caught by the police and warned, he or she will not care what is being said because they don’t care what anyone else has to say.[/FONT]
[FONT="]What will it take to make the youth of today wake up and realise that they are condemning us to a future of misery. A future of ignorance. A future without respect.[/FONT]
[FONT="]It has to stop. And songs like Amy MacDonald’s ‘You of Today’ are the most dangerous propaganda tools I can think of to prevent sense from prevailing. It’s good to listen to, it’s modern but not overdone, it’s young and trendy, it’s musically beautiful and well performed. All of which suggests to the young and susceptible mind that the message inside is also good, relevant and just.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Nothing could be further from the truth.[/FONT]