Were Baby Boomers really in touch with Great Generation culture?

No.

What does that question even mean?

Hell no.

I certainly was.

I don't understabd why we are still hearing the same 70s classic rock songs that they played when I was a kid in the 80s. Shouldn't classic rock be from the 90s at least? As this thread points out, boomers weren't listening to old 78s or wire recordings....

No! Boomers hated everything that reminded them of their parents. They never wanted to become them.

I was, r5.

Nobody ever thinks their parents are cool.

I listened to my parents’ and relatives’ stories, watched old movies and had some interest in the “good old days”. I didn’t know everything about the time, actually very little, but did know something.

Nostalgia was big in the '70s...

Classic rock music was from around 1955 to 1975, more or less. Any rock after that isn't "classic" rock.

OP , it's the Greatest Generation, btw

[quote]Any rock after that isn't "classic" rock.

And only occasionally "rock" for that matter.

A lot of Boomers act like those fancy Joan Crawford Bette Davis actresses are from their generation when They're totally not.

GenX here. I think you would need someone from the greatest or silent or whatever generation to answer that with perspective.

But I do remember them being able to discuss things like books and music that occurred before their birth. I don’t remember hearing “I’m young” as an excuse for ignorance of the classics if that is your question.

I hear you about the death of rock, R11 and R13, but chronologically speaking the Eagles are to me what King Oliver would have been to boomers (in our respective youths). The Eagles are still herez but we sure as hell aren't hearing Dixieland on the FM dial.

I may not be making myself entirely clear. I'm just saying that the stuff on classic rock radio is alarmingly ancient and overplayed. Past generations were not subjected to such stale programming.

I'm Generation Jones (1960) but I feel aligned with the Boomers as far as pop culture. We loved Marx Brothers movies, Little Rascals, Fractured Flickers, Abbott & Costello, old comedy and novelty songs played on the Dr. Demento Show, etc. Basically recorded comedy that was produced years before we were born. We appreciated it. But for popular music, we greatly preferred the current music on the radio, not our parents' music. We also watched a lot of TV.

I thought Boomer's like this music.

I think I get what you are saying R17. I think it is because when the classic rock stations came about as a rejection of disco those rock albums became the definition of classic rock.

So rather than classic rolling forward as time progressed it became a static description of music released at that time. “Classic” 80s and 90s just became eighties and nineties. And what probably would qualify as classic “rock” became grunge.

That having been said, I do remember hearing Van Halen on my classic rock station some years ago and thinking “wait, that was from when I was in high school. “

We're probably going to be calling what's considered "Classic Rock," "Classic Rock" forever, at this point.

Boomer here. We had to be more tuned in to our parents' culture because there were far fewer options for entertainment. Most of us grew up in one-TV households, so we all watched the same thing. (And there were only three or four channels available anyway.) When we were younger, our parents had to take us to the movies (no home entertainment options). Parents controlled the music, too. Things started to change gradually with the advent of the transistor radio and then 8-tracks and cassettes.

Yep. We did listen more to the stories our parents told, partly because there was less to distract us, but also because WWII was a fascinating thing to hear about first-hand. It was so different from the comfortable culture into which we were born, generation wars notwithstanding. My father could talk about the Depression as well, though he was only a kid during it. Possibly the later you were born the better, because the early boomers were very caught up in challenging anything old. Even so, most of them got a good dose of their parents' music and TV before they got to their mid-teens.

The other thing was that education was a lot more wideranging then. Schools weren't fixated on fitting you for jobs, or trying to get you into schools for the gifted when you weren't. They wanted you to understand your context in the world: to get the flow of history and how it informed the present, to grasp geography in terms of your being part of a fascinating world, to understand literature in order to boost your imagination, not to teach you only what was "relevant to you". Science during the space race was in the context of our place in the cosmos. Nowadays kids are brought up to believe that everything that's worth knowing is about them.

Not saying boomers haven't been selfish pricks at all stages, but broadly speaking they're better informed selfish pricks.

Get a load of Dead Poets Society over here @ R23

I’m kidding. Your points are valid. Better informed might bring some heat. But who could question that education delivered in the past had many advantages over what is allowed now.

But I would wager that there are some things of significance that have escaped your omniscient view. Just like me. I loathe the ignorance on display today. But I have to reason that just like me, there are things that my son understands better than his dad.

Of course, they think they understand better about everything.

I'd honestly love to know what those things of significance are, R24, because I despair. I need to be given a reason to think there are things they understand better. (Don't say tech, because that will really get me going - not my experience of them at all.)

As R23 said. Boomers, Xers and generations before them were more aware of the world around them and what had gone before them. Millennials and Zoomers are being raised in a bubble.

The Boomers were the first ones to start being raised as narcissists (although it got much worse with the succeeding generations). So they still think the 60s defined modern history and the mediocre Beatles were brilliant gods.

If I knew R23, it would defeat my point. It was based on me getting things that my folks didn’t.

And I agree with you. Tech ain’t it. In fact, the z’s seem to rebel against tech to a point.

R27 The Beatles were never mediocre.