Carousel corner.(popular music)(Brief Article)

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is nine he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passion for procrastination and weird clothes. (Bill Cosby, Turn That Crap Down!)

Part 3 of a Series

It's said that Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach's audiences rolled their eyes at his father's "outdated" and "old-fashioned" music, and that J.S. Bach's generation was simply horrified at the mangling C.P.E. gave his daddy's heritage. Some things never change.

Let's get one thing straight: whatever teens like, their parents hate. No, really ... they do. They may say that they "understand," but they're lying. They don't. My Irish grandmother was horrified at the very thought of Bing Crosby -- never mind that he was Irish, Catholic, and straighter than a pants crease: he sang, you know, "that" music, the stuff black folk were laying down in New Orleans and elsewhere. My folks thought the Beatles were talentless blobs, the Stones barbaric, and got me a Don Ellis album for my thirteenth birthday. Hurl city. My nephew, an otherwise bright lad reared in the wide-open spaces of New Jersey's horse country, enthusiastically embraced Dr. Dre, Public Enemy, and Ice T. He was no more of a homey than the preppies next door: it drove his mother bonkers. ...