thoughts on becoming a stiff

i am sitting, waiting for my monday class to start, when a student comes up to me and sits down. she tells me "she will cry if she loses her cell phone." this same girl lost a sister last year. later, she eyes my cd player, and exclaims " it's been a long time since i've seen a disc man." she wonders out loud why i don't get an ipod, since they are so much "better." then, she laughs when i tell her i have to put my player on a flat surface to make sure it doesn't skip. it is an esa, a cheap make made by circuit city which cost me 12 bucks. "you should buy another one" she states, seemingly after giving up on me purchasing an ipod.
she is not a bad girl. she has a winning personality, a nice laugh, good vibes, and is fairly intelligent. she is simply a product of capitalist, consumer, culture. she has inculcated the idea that you should possess the new thing, and that the new thing is automatically better than that which came before it. this is a basic, foundational assumption that most people take for granted in our society. all i could do was smile, tell her she was young, and that when you get a little older, you find something you like and you stick with it. if something works for you, and you are comfortable with it, i stress, there is no need to change.
how can i speak of the intangibles? at this moment, i listen to coleman hawkins. his album "at ease," a beautiful collection of smokey ballads, is playing. as i play the disc, his smiling face looks out at me. on the back of the disc, i learn the album was recorded on january 29th, 1960, in englewood cliffs, new jersey, home to the great engineer rudy van gelder. i learn the tasty touch at the piano belongs to tommy flanagan. i can touch the disc, read the liner notes. i need to be gentle with the disc, to protect it to make sure it doesn't scratch. how to explain that i have hundreds of cd's, and with my father, thousands of albums, an even older, more obsolete item that would surely strike her as beyond weird. how to i put into words that i feel close to my collection, that it is a part of me, that i have spent hundreds of hours looking through record stores with my father, and thousands of hours listening? what would this mean to her? she would only find me lost, trapped in a previous generation, an oddity.
later that day, another girl has a cell phone in class that starts playing music. the singer informs us the girl he is speaking of can "shake it like a cyclone." i wonder out loud "like a cyclone?" this sets another girl off into an imitation of a clueless adult who doesn't understand the younger generation. "these hip hoppers today, and their music," she intones with mock seriousness. it is a funny moment, and i smile. and then, it hits me. i have become the adult, the stick figure adult who doesn't get it. the stiff. i don't mind this. it has to happen, for the young have their own music and style, and much of it will always seem like gibberish to me. i get nothing out of the commercial offerings the young think of as "their culture." i prefer buddy tate. but the young themselves i like. i don't need to like 50 cent to like them. they are not the music they listen to. they are people with dreams, hopes, thoughts, disparate personalities, creativity. they deserve love. they may find me corny, but to them, i am corny. the natural tendency is to resist the tag, but i embrace it. we can get along, and still listen to different music. i just wish they could get hip to the good stuff. but, where are they going to find it? if you are blind, it is not your fault if you can not see.
at work, a co-worker raves about the dancing of someone named chris brown. "you should have seen him. he glided across the stage on one foot!" as if this were new. i felt like screaming at this fool, punished by our culture to know nothing of the past, that this was not new. i yelled in my head, "have you heard of jackie wilson, mr. excitement? he always glided on one foot across a stage. once, he jumped off a flight of stairs and landed in a split! my dad saw him toss his microphone across the stage, do a split, regain his feet, and then catch the mic as it came back at him. do you know his name? this man could sing blues, opera, standards, r and b, even jolson songs for christ sake! if he was white, his birthday would probably be a national holiday."
you saw chris brown on one foot, huh? fuck you.