Honest, clear-eyed, capitalist youth

It was unmistakable - a guitar riff both familiar and yet so old it felt like it was coming from another lifetime. “Hey mum,” called my 14-year-old daughter from her semi-permanent position in front of the computer, “Have you ever heard of Jimi Hendrix?”

“Jimi Hendrix! I remember him when he was still alive.”

I only just remember, mind you, I was 12-years-old when he died.

“He is soooo cool,” she said.

This is exactly what I would have said about him 30 years ago, with the same intonation. I boogied up to her at the computer and she gave me the now-familiar scornful look - the one that says how embarrassing it is to have a mother who thinks she can dance.

Despite this, or rather because of it, my surprise about my children as they reach their teens (I also have a 17-year-old daughter) is not how much their generation differs from mine at the same age, but how little.

When I was 14, I played music my parents loathed - Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, The Doors and, of course, Hendrix. It was loud, intrusive, sexy, aggressive music - music they constantly demanded I turn down. My parents, for their part, played music I also loathed - the soft, slick, smooth music of Jose Feliciano, Herb Albert and The Tijuana Brass, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee.

These days, kids like so much of what my generation regard as our music. Current performers take that music, much of it 30 or 40-years-old, and sample it or do endless cover versions of it. Of the newer stuff, I’m not mad about hip hop and dance music - it seems deeply repetitive to me. I do, however, very much like Eminem. Not that there is much new about him. He’s a lyric poet, a storyteller - just the latest take on an ancient tradition. No, it isn’t the content of youth culture that has changed very much. What has changed is the method of delivery.

My kids and their friends don’t watch TV nearly as much as we did, despite having vastly more channels to choose from. I can still remember the intense excitement that greeted the beginning of Channel Ten. Neither do they listen much to the radio. We carried trannies with us everywhere, listening to the stations considered to be cool - 2SM and Double J - as it was then. My kids don’t even buy albums anymore - vinyl or CD. They download onto their computers and iPods, but the music they download remains frighteningly familiar. They don’t even listen to the radio while driving - they plug in their iPod instead.

This generation love technology and intuitively understand it in a way I never will, but I am not sure that it has actually liberated them. Sometimes, to my ageing eyes, they seem enslaved by it. Mobile phones, for example, haven’t given teenagers more freedom, they’ve given parents more control.

Our movements were much more mysterious and much easier to disguise from our parents than our children’s are to us. My daughters regularly get into trouble for not being constantly contactable. We insist on being able to ring them anywhere, any time - largely to soothe our own anxiety. Of course they can lie about where they are - though technology has already produced something to overcome even that - but at least we know they are still alive. Our parents had to have much more faith, not just in us but in society at large, and they did. Oddly enough, our increased control seems only to have served to make us more anxious. There is no doubt that we are a much more anxious and interfering generation of parents than our own parents ever were.

This obsession with technology, with constantly keeping up with gadgets and gizmos that continually change and improve, has also enslaved young people in another way. To keep up, they need money - much more money than we ever did. This generation wouldn’t dream of “dropping-out” to Nimbin or Byron the way we did, with no means of support but the dole, a surfboard and a few dope plants. Of course, my generation did eventually return to the city - disillusioned with communes and free love. We rejected society, or pretended we did. It was uncool to have money and uncool to want it. My children and their friends are the opposite. It is once again fashionable to be rich.

A few years ago I took my youngest and a few of her friends to one of those big outdoor rock concerts, my first such event for many a long year. I was utterly shocked by what I saw. Rock concerts have become so commercialised, so mainstream. Coke was there, Pepsi was there, Girlfriend magazine was there searching for a supermodel, and Hyundai were giving away a Getz. Everywhere we turned, commercial samples, stickers and other advertising paraphernalia were thrust into our hands. Back in the 1970s - at the old Hordern Pavilion, when I went to rock concerts - the only thing being sold apart from illegal substances was Spartacus, the socialist newspaper.

As a generation, we thought we were changing things. Boys grew their hair long and shocked their parents - particularly their fathers - to the core. Girls wore their skirts short and took off their bras (we never burnt them, just left them moldering in drawers) and demanded the right to be taken seriously - shocking our parents, particularly our fathers, to the core. You could tell the difference between the old and the young at a glance in those days, even if, sometimes, it was hard to tell the difference between the boys and the girls.

We took drugs, swore and turned our music up loud. We slept around, took the pill and lived in sin. We demonstrated for peace and our rights, and against apartheid. We wanted to be thought of as radical and some of us really were. We wore Che Guevara T-shirts and read the Little Red School Book. We thought the establishment was on its last legs. But we overestimated ourselves and underestimated our enemy.

We hadn’t reckoned with the chameleon that is capitalism. Like the AIDs virus, capitalism fooled us. It changed its shape - fitting our new aspirations just as well as it had fit our old ones. It embraced rock culture, drug culture (capitalism doesn’t have to be legal), women’s lib, multi-culturalism and the sexual revolution.

In fact, perhaps we shouldn’t judge our kids harshly for being in thrall to capitalism. Perhaps they’re just more honest and clear-eyed than we were. There was always a fair dollop of hypocrisy in hippie culture.

Most of my generation wanted to change the world only because it was fashionable  (most of us didn’t even know who Che Guevara was). And fashions, as we all know, change. But there is one thing that never changes. Kids have always seemed determined to be contrary, at least to their parents.