I am, just about, a member of Generation X. With each passing year (and each successive Douglas Coupland novel) the evidence that we are the most soulless generation ever to tread Earth’s tortured crust amasses relentlessly. Our one achievement appears to have been to have raised anomie to an art form.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you a snippet of a recent dinner party conversation:
P: So, putting aside the things you’d be obliged to say, like the day you got married or the birth of your children, when would you say you were happiest in the last 10 years.
Guest: First time I flew business class.
Amongst other conversational revelations were:
(1) Our guest had had huge fun at a Prince concert during which she had been sat in a corporate box. The box had a glass window. Since this would have an unfortunate tendency to prevent you hearing anything, the music was pumped into the box via a speaker system. This arrangement allowed the corporate solicitors and their guets them to drink wine and chat in comfort. Rock and Roll!
(2) U2, the sell-out f*&^ers, now have a “celebrity mosh pit” so that the rich, famous and/or glamorous can leap about to their hearts’ content whilst Joe Punter sits behind them beyond a barrier.
I weep bitter salty tears.
My boss often goes in a similar box at Stamford Bridge (the Galleria?). They’re behind glass and have the sound pumped in too. It’s hardly the Shed is it.
I’ve stopped doing ‘big’ gigs (with the exception of MUSE at the NEC last year). I’m sticking to small venues. I’d like to know why people are sneering at my trainers from now on.
BTW, you win some kind of award for the use of anomie in perfect context. I have a small bag of vegetarian jellybeans I could offer as a prize?
🙂
The Prince story is pure sacrilege. And U2…well, just plain pathetic.
Alas, we are old, my friend. Today this, tomorrow we taste the dust. Heh.
Surely your dinner guest was being facetious? Surely?! Either way, it’s brilliant.
I’m going to a concert Thursday night.
I’m bringing earplugs and ibuprofen…the hardest drug I do these days.
I blame the baby boomers. We X-ers have all known since were about 15 that the boomers got the sixties, they got the grammar schools, they got free higher education AND grants, they are about to use up all the pensions and then they’ll bankrupt the NHS. We were only ever going to get whatever’s left, when they’re finished with it, so why bother?
ps perhaps you should also find other guests.
Now I feel strangely depressed! Disgruntled Commuter makes a very good point too – we were screwed from the outset huh?
A celebrity mosh pit?!?! Good grief.
I thought the dinner guest was kidding. Yowza!
Oh moobs, the tears you cry, they pain me thusly.
And now I have to re-read Gen X and ooo Microserfs and (double ooo) Girlfriend in a Coma. Those books got me through uni and made me believe in believing in something.
Does this show that there are people out there who actually don’t know how to have fun? Maybe they don’t recognise their own happiness any more…..
Um… I have a soul….
OGC – joooiiiin usssssss joooooiiiiiinnnnn usssss
A “celebrity mosh pit?” That is so sad. I am so glad that I was able to experience the real thing in my youth before general admission put you up in the nosebleed section at concerts!
likely more self-absorbed than anything. when i go to concerts, i want to see what’s going on. that’s the part of a concert you love/hate-waiting in a horribly long line for a bathroom stall; buying two beers at time to drink while spilling half of it on you in the crowd.
that’s a true concert experience.