Damien Galeone

It’s a mid-afternoon class on Tuesday. After ten minutes, students are trickling in and I am marking off their names on the attendance list while imagining them being eaten by a giant aardvark named Ted who punishes late students in my brain.

And then I make a mistake. I make a joke.

See, I’m a relatively funny chap. People spend an awful lot of time either laughing with or at me, a distinction whose blurred lines I’ve grown increasingly unconcerned with. In class, if there’s a good laugh every 20 minutes or so, it goes a long way to release any tension or stress and the room’s stock of will to live and lack of interest in stabbing me is replenished.

The students in this class are very high level. That means my jokes can be linguistically complex and sophisticated. Phrasal verbs, metaphors, implied subtleties are all on the table. In fact, these students never cease to amaze me with the depth of their knowledge. I made a tramp stamp joke a week ago and saw a roomful of smirks.

The problem is, I sometimes forget that the students are 20-years-old and a lot has changed in the last 30 years. And, you see, the joke I made was about Led Zeppelin. Complicating matters is the fact that I included the word ‘album’. After my joke, 18 heads titled slightly to the right as they tried to understand what I was saying, the way my dog does when I say ‘do you want a hotdog?’ She knows it’s something she should know, but she just can’t pin it together.

Like the students. Album is a word they are familiar with. It’s used in an online context too, but less so for music. A music album to them is a mixed-up collocation, like if I told you I had bought a nosebrush instead of a tooth brush. Somewhere in the haze built of TikTok and watching other people play video games, they can imagine the concept, but they just can’t nail it down.

I explain that an album was a cohesive work of musical art. They say they know this, for they are not stupid. I relent a little. But I point out that with almost all the music in the world available at their fingertip, they surely can’t understand the joy of buying one album at a time. To this, they squint and scoff, but after that, they lean forward in a muted interest.

“One at a time, you say?”

“Yeah.”

I go on to explain that all these albums they have I had to buy one at a time. The White Album. Wildflowers. Born to Run. They counter with something called ‘curating a vibe’ on Spotify. They basically sequester all of their emotional needs into one playlist. Titles include: Monday Sad, Side Quest (a side quest is now anything that isn’t evidently a main quest, such as going to the pharmacy for band aids, but I don’t think you carry a sword), Bumping (I didn’t ask), Travelling Home.

I tell them that we had the same thing when I was young, but it was called Mixed Tapes.

They roll their eyes. I roll my eyes. The whole thing is like a rave, but with no drugs. I double down and take aim at streaming sites.

“We used to go to a video store called Blockbuster to get a movie.”

Girl in front row: “Sorry, a movie?”

“Maybe two. For the weekend.”

She says: “Pbbt.” Her phone is out and she makes a show of scrolling through her Netflix options to show me how limited the archaic times were. Her point may have been more successful had she not gotten caught up and started shuffling things into her bank.

“Yes,” I say, after telling her to put away her phone. “But we had to choose and then watch those movies. You have thousands of choices now and you still can’t sit through a whole movie.”

“That’s cause of TikTok,” says a boy in the middle row. A boy, I should footnote, who will not spend 10 seconds without being entertained by the short content on his phone. “I can’t watch anything that’s longer…than…” his attention was stolen by his phone. I will see him again at the exam.  

I’d love to act superior, but I’m no better off. I have to schedule reading time and put my phone on top of the fridge in order to force myself to read without technological interruption. Also, they are far more fluent than I in the burgeoning form of modern English. They know slang I don’t. After classes this semester I have had to look up phrases such as rizz, bet, soft launch, main character energy, zaddy, and NPC energy.

I have had to make sense of the draw to watch videos in which characters unbox something. Like, someone unboxes a pair of shoes they bought. And other people watch these videos while eating a bowl of cereal. They’re not even opening something interesting like a zombie or a flesh-eating plague.

I know this is how it goes for every single generation. It is the oldest story in the history book. The older generation can’t figure out the draw of that jazz music, the obsession with the talkies, why women want to wear flappers or how they can be allowed to smoke in public, they can’t for the life of them understand what people like about a bunch of men with long hair and high-pitched voices singing about stairways to heaven, they can’t see how people find Conan O’Brien funnier than Johnny Carson, how anyone on earth can like Elvis more than Sinatra. The younger generations have never been able to figure out why you’d watch black-and-white when you have color, why you would listen to doowop over rock, why you’d drink booze instead of smoke weed, the insistence on walking instead of using a motorized scooter, and wax nostalgic about renting two movies at a store rather than rejoicing at the 10,000 movie choices on your own TV.

And like every clash of every generation, both sides are convinced of their correctitude.

Anyway. I’m right and they’re wrong. So there.