Baby Busters

The Younger Siblings You Don’t Know at All

There’s a common conceit among Baby Boomers that the Baby Boomer experience was all the same. All peace love sex drugs rock and roll. Pot and protests. The Beatles and fusion jazz. Honestly, that’s only one part of the boom. For those of us at the end — what is sometimes called the Baby Bust, Generation Jones, or something else that doesn’t make sense — our Baby Boom was not the Baby Boom of our older siblings. Our Baby Boom is better characterized by the phrase Fuck Art Let’s Dance or Money Talks, People Mumble or one of the other sayings from Stiff Records. If you don’t know us, we were the Punks, the New Wavers, the New Romantics, the Rockabilly Kids. We are your pain in the ass younger siblings and our experience is the fabulous nighttime to your open-air rock festival daytime.

The year that changed it all was 1976. The Bicentennial Year — and the year that the Boomers who weren’t part of the Summer of Love got their recording contracts or wrote their seminal songs. It was the year the Ramones’ first record was released, when the Sex Pistols toured the U.S., and kids rejected the Bay City Rollers — the band that the pundits of pop music had anointed as the heirs to the Beatles. They fizzled out in less than a year, to be replaced by The Talking Heads, Joy Division (who took their name from the Nazi version of “comfort women”), The Clash, Patti Smith, the Cramps, Blondie, Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, Run DMC.

Ian Curtis, the intense, tortured lead singer of Joy Division has been dead for 35 years. If you ask the Boomers about him, you’d think that he’d never existed. To those of us in the Baby Bust, Curtis was our first tragedy. A kid like us who committed suicide because life — a wife, a popular band, a kid, and ever-crippling poorly treated epilepsy — became too much to bear. Curtis was like a lot of us, full of passion and pain, with our own poorly treated or under-treated health and psychological issues. A result of the recession that had crippled our parents’ earning potential.

We weren’t fighting a war with a foreign power. We were fighting a war within ourselves and with a world where opportunities were quickly diminishing.

No wonder so many of us voted for Ronald Reagan — and so many of us felt betrayed when he began dismantling the world that our parents and siblings knew so well. We had only tasted that world. So we had to create our own.

Our music was also a curious admixture of homegrown and foreign imports — like a car cobbled together from the remnants of a V.W. Beetle, a Cooper Mini and a Mustang. Small, slightly uncomfortable, and damned fast. With the engine in the back. Just because.

We were also the kids who went to college because we could, not because we wanted to avoid The War. With the end of the The Draft in 1973 and the addition of new financial aid programs, kids from different economic strata were now able to attend college. Because we wanted to. And study subjects other than government and foreign policy. We didn’t need to be politically active like our older sibs, so we pursued art and poetry, computer science and mathematics.

We would lend our support to the Rave culture and techno-boom that the Gen Xers were starting to build in the early 90s.

That was until AIDS came along. Then we were there with Larry Kramer, protesting the government neglect of this new plague, as well as watching many of our family, friends and colleagues succumb to the deadliest scourge since the Influenza of 1918. We lost a lot in those years — a lot of art and music especially.

Silence = Death. Never Forget.

Yet even with our numbers diminished, we could still create to change culture. A new world came into existence with our help — the Internet — and while we now get laughed at a bit as we are so many Moms and Dads, we were there first, the innovators. And we’re also the latecomers who make social media hum along with an Everyman tune.

We get a lot of short-shrift, us Baby Busters, but the fact of the matter is we came of age as the world was changing. Music changed, politics changed (the Cold War ended on our watch, too), attitudes about gender and sexuality changed. Roles of women changed as we were the first generation to be affected by Title IX policies. Our older siblings started the ball rolling, but after the war, they were home raising their kids, and we were the kids in the clubs and the colleges, the kids who would pave the way for our cynical Gen-X siblings and our Millennial nieces and nephews.

We’re a smaller number than all you senior Baby Boomers, and our culture is somewhat different. But our quiet, and not so quiet, post-Vietnam, Post-Cold War contributions have gone a long way to shaping the the cultural life of America today. We grew up to be the people our parents warned us about. And are damned proud of it.

Tish Grier is a writer and blogger now living in Easthampton, MA. She grew up in Central New Jersey, where many strange, disturbing and wonderful things happened.

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