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Comment by dctoedt | Hacker News Reader

In class, when I mention Seinfeld, or for that matter, Friends, to illustrate a point, many of my students (law students, mostly in their early- to mid-20s) barely know what I'm talking about. You can imagine how my pop-culture references from the '60s and '70s sail right over their heads. (When that happens, I use the occasion to joke about my old-fart status.)

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I was listening to the 1980s radio station when I realized that 1980s music right now is older than 1950s "oldies" music was when I was a kid - and when I was a kid that stuff seemed ancient - relics of the days of black-and-white television and a segregated South. What seems like yesterday to an older person happened before a younger person was even born.

Also if you were young in the 80s you had to ingest maybe two decades of limited great music in addition to the current one.

Someone growing up now has like five decades to learn from plus the vast vast music released today.

You’d have to have extremely narrow taste for that to be true. It was not uncommon at all for people to be into blues and jazz which goes back further and then of course you can go all the way back to Bach. We had jazz band in high school and punk and metal bands at the local all ages places on the weekends.

Yeah, picture a radio station in 1963 playing "hits from the 20s, 30s, and today".

That happened, was called the folk movement. Was pretty huge at the time. Young cool kids in the 60s revered old blues men and pulled them back into music from obscurity. See Newport Folk festival, for example. Dylan modeling himself after Woodie Guthrie, etc.

The version of this heard was that if Marty from Back To The Future happened today he would go back to the 90's.

The 90's.

How much of the Beatles do they recognize?

> How much of the Beatles do they recognize?

Generally speaking, many of my students appear to know (vaguely) who the Beatles were, but that seems to be about it.

Conversely, I know teenagers that know every line from Seinfeld and every Beatles song. They are iconic and referenced often on TikTok.

Yep my 13 year old will often pop her head round the door wondering about how dad is listening to a song she's heard sampled on TikTok or some crazy video. Apparently, there's a bunch of The Smiths songs living multiple lives in the new world of the TikTok / short-attention span / ADHDNet.

On a script-related note, I spent a bunch of time back in the day reading through these:

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~kjell-e/tekla/red-dwarf/scripts.h...

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