I was trawling through Baby Boomer sites the other day (yes, having a look at the competition) and I noticed that most of them concentrated heavily upon music. This brought two thoughts to mind almost simultaneously:

1. The Baby Boomer generation spends a lot of time listening to music and is almost defined by the music of the sixties and seventies.

2. Is that really all we are – just an explosion of music?

After some weighty pondering (it’s what I do), I decided that there is some truth in the charge but it is not the whole truth. Yes, music was and remains very important to us. If any generation is going to insist that we had the best music, it’s the Boomers (and we’re right, of course). Music was our battle cry, our rallying point and our standard. It makes perfect sense that Boomer sites will look back to those songs and tunes, stirring our nostalgia and memories.

Yet that is not the full story. If music was our outward expression, what were we expressing? The answer has to be that we were reaching for something beyond the world our parents had built, that we wanted more than the material goods and chattels that seemed to be their driving motivation. Perhaps more than any generation before or since, we tried all sorts of ways to live differently, nothing was sacrosant and everything subject to scrutiny.

Of course, the energy and desire for change faded eventually and we wandered back into the great machine called society, retaining only our dreams of what might have been. But in those few years we had changed the world and made it possible for it to be as it is now.

Many of us look at what we have wrought and wonder where it all went wrong. Somewhere along the line things became less than we had hoped and much has changed for the worse, not the better. So we look back to our youth as a golden age and the music is the most direct expression of what we were striving for.

But that music is only the product of our generation. The real explosion happened in our thinking, as we threw everything out and started again from scratch. And that willingness to see things from another angle still pervades the attitude of the Boomers; we have not forgotten and are still striving for a better world, even if our efforts are less noticeable now.

At least, that’s the way I see it…

I was reading a lament about modern sitcoms and the author mentioned The Brady Bunch, that iconic family sitcom of the 70s. It reminded me of a conversation I had a few days ago with some friends.

We grew up with The Brady Bunch, a blended family that managed to blend within only two episodes, and rarely if ever, had the usual problems of blended families. In fact, the natural mother of the boys and the natural father of the girls (we assumed deceased) were never mentioned except for one brief scene in the first episode. The only rivalries were between the genders, and were soon resolved – always in under 30 minutes. Of course, there was always the sibling rivalry between Jan and Marcia as Jan struggled against her perceived invisibility in the shadow of her older sister, leading to the well-known cry: “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia”.

The show was hokey, unrealistic and didn’t really try very hard to be otherwise as we watched the boys play football on the astroturf back lawn. So why is it so addictive?

The brilliance of 1995’s The Brady Bunch Movie was in placing this square 70s family in the 90s without changing a thing about them. The cast was brilliant in their portrayals of the characters and those of us who watched the original series were those who laughed the most.

It is easy now as adults to disdain the simplistic plots and innocent fun but have you ever accidentally come across the show while channel surfing? Have you noticed that you can’t seem to go any further? It’s like an obsession. For some reason you are transfixed and must watch the entire episode. I was remarking on this phenomenon to some friends, aged 50 and 55 and they both related having the same experience.

I wonder if it is a universal experience for those of our generation? We never seem to get over The Bradys. What about you?

For those who never get enough Brady Bunch, here’s a few links:

The Brady Bunch Theme Song

The Bradys sing on Amateur Night

The Brady Bunch Episode Guide

So much happens on the internet these days that often we can get left behind. I am still trying to figure out what is so great about MySpace, for instance, but everyone seems to be using it. These things become the preserve of the young because people our age have not the time or inclination to keep up with all that’s happening.

Being so resistant to the new means that sometimes we miss out on really useful and interesting things, however. And YouTube is one of these – a library of videos on the net that can be viewed and added to by anyone. Naturally, the young discovered it first and there are lots of very silly and pointless videos included as a result. But, as demonstrated by a 94-year-old veteran, Les Loken, YouTube can be used for worthwhile purposes too.

Les has been recording his memories of World War II and other times, then putting the resulting video on YouTube. These are fascinating records of a time that is distant even to those of our age group. But they also point the way to another advantage of YouTube: it’s a nostalgia machine!

Think back to those glorious days of the 1960s and the music that filled our ears; and it’s probably on YouTube. There are videos of the most surprising things, bands long forgotten (or so we thought), videos of groups made before videos were invented. It is a treasure trove of memories for us.

Just to give a few examples, here are some clips of music from the sixties, arbitrarily selected as they sprang to mind:

Beach Boys

Kinks

Beatles

Give it a try – just go to YouTube, in the search bar enter the name of a group you want to hear and see what comes up!