Young Man Blues

Oh well a young man ain't got nothin' in the world these days
I said a young man ain't got nothin' in the world these days

You know in the old days
When a young man was a strong man
All the people they'd step back
When a young man walked by

But you know nowadays
It's the old man,
He's got all the money
And a young man ain't got nothin' in the world these days
I said nothing

Everybody knows that a young man ain't got nothin'.
Everybody!
Everybody knows that a young man ain't got nothin'
He got nothin'
Nothin'

Take it easy on the young man
They ain't got nothin' in the world these days
I said they ain't got nothin'!
They got sweet fuck-all!

On February 14, 1970 the Who took the stage at the University of Leeds Refectory and thrashed out their trademarked brand of bombastic rock and roll. They put the result out as the album Live at Leeds, which consistently appears on lists as the Greatest Live Album of All Time. But this post is really not about the Who. I want to talk about one of the songs they played that evening. An old jazz pianist named Mose Allison wrote “Young Man Blues,” but the Who turned it into an anthem of alienated youth to put on the shelf right next to “My Generation.” The Who’s version positively explodes with aggression, distortion, anger, and generally kicks ass.
A little while ago my father accused me of being cynical. Now, I actually do not want to be cynical. I try my darnedest to not slip into the bottomless abyss of youthful cynicism. But right now I’m going to take a giant leap toward cynicism. Today, every person under 25 should be singing “Young Man Blues.” Because right now, young people do not have much to look forward to, but do have a whole lot to be cynical about. I’ve got the Young Man Blues right now.
The Who performing this song in 1970 is very, very strange coming so soon after the 1960s, the veritable Decade of Youth. Youth movements essentially propelled the counterculture and the hippies, and the youth of America gladly stepped in to help in the civil rights movement. I don’t know the average age of Woodstock attendees, but I bet the number would fall below 30. In fact, didn’t a saying gain popularity that went something like, “Don’t trust anyone under 30?”
The 1960s celebrated youth and young people more than any other time. In 1960 we elected the youngest president ever. Four years later, four twenty-something boys from Liverpool took the world by storm. College students at campuses all around the country started putting on black turtlenecks and occupying administrative buildings. Millions of young people said “fuck off” to their parents’ values and got into Volkswagen buses on the road to Woodstock. Yes, a huge dark specter in the shape of Vietnam hung over the heads of many of the nation’s young men, but at least they had rock and roll to console them. It must have been a brilliant time to be a young person in America.
And now nearly forty years after the 60s ended (or rather, died), the Youth Revolution has died. And who killed it? The murderers unmasked turn out to be the very people who grew up in the 60s with so much idealism, so much positivism, and so many dreams. In the 70s they disappeared into a disco fueled haze of Me-centricity. In the 80s they must have had a collective acid flashback that led them to, for some inconceivable reason, elect Ronald Reagan. Their dreams no longer turned on peace and love, but rather on gigantic piles of money in an unregulated economy.
And now my generation has to deal with all the crap that the Baby Boomers hath wrought: the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; a healthcare system in turmoil; technologies that while pretending to bring us together have really pushed us apart; a media explosion that came at the expense of the search for truth; an attitude of instant consumerism; and the biggest of them all, an environmental catastrophe whose existence many Boomers persistently deny. Where did everything go wrong? Where did the promise of the 60s go?
Generally speaking, parents of all species try to make the world better for their offspring. The evolutionary will to survive not only impacts the individual, but the species in general and the direct line of descent. Parents who have offspring want their offspring to survive, and have an evolutionary incentive to do so. If just one offspring can survive, the species has a chance to change and grow and evolve in a positive way. I don’t know if the last few generations suddenly lost that instinct or if their intentions just panned out much differently than they planned. Could the previous generations really have wanted My Generation to have to go through another Great Depression? Another World War? Another energy crisis? How could my parents have done so many things that make my future so uncertain?
In a few years, all those people will be dead and gone, but my generation will still struggle with a world of terrorism and environmental crisis and will still be paying for the huge economic mistakes. The Baby Boomers said they wanted fun, and boy did they have their fun, but now my classmates and I have to pick up the broken pieces. Today and in the next decades the youth of today will pay like never before for the mistakes of the previous generations. In 1964, the youth of the world, or at least America, could look at the world and say, “Wow, the future looks good.” In 2009, I cannot look at the world and see that the future looks good. Instead, I say, “Wow. The future looks frightening.” Right now I can’t imagine why anyone would want to have a baby—why anyone would want to bring a child into a world that seems on an unalterable course of completely wrong trajectory?
I recently read an article on the dismal job outlook for recent college grads. For the last thirty years or so, the world has said to its children: “You can have anything. And you do have everything. The world can belong to you.” But now we have to face the harsh reality that these promises have turned out empty. Coming from an environment where we have never known such things as hunger, I predict that my generation will not cope very well with the deepening depression.
At least one ray of hope remains. The so-called Greatest Generation lived through depression and war and all kinds of upheaval and developments and still won’t go away. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: desperate times bring out the best in people. I hope that the desperate times ahead will bring out the best in my generation. And I know that the Baby Boomers will stubbornly stick around into their 80s, so maybe they can help us and we can solve all the world’s problems together.