Day 14- the death of culture by mix tape

Out to dinner with other PWKAC (parents with kids at camp) tonight. Fun and best part was not having to come home and clean up stale pizza and pay the babysitter! Good food too- farm to table- french influences and local and organics. Yumm. Coq au Vin for me. Only disappointment was the chocolate cake being sold out. Had to *settle* for a peach crepe. Had an interesting conversation about eighties music and was able to crystalize a thought that has run around in my head for years. I had always tried to parse out why I loved eighties music so much, and how most of my peers did too, and even a lot of kids and younger folks today. There is still a distinctive genre called "eighties music." Not as much with "nineties music"- though grunge and rap were two dominant themes.
And that's what struck me. The Eighties were the last time we had a general culturally accepted top 40. The last time there was a mainstream music scene that really was mainstream- everyone knew who sang to the man in the mirror, what Jenny's number was, and who wished they had Jesse's girl. It was the beginnings of a fracturalization in youth culture that has only become more pronounced, despite the irony of how we have become more multi-cultural and global. I had a different post lauding John Hughes' ability to identify this fracturalization- but he also usually had the characters overcoming the niches and cliques to unify a community- everyone loves Ferris, wants their sixteenth birthday to be special, and hates being with vindictive teachers for detention. But he did point out the different groupings that high schoolers in particular were forming. The larger the town/city/high school, the more pronounced the divisions. And now, while we see regionalism and the unique character of towns all over the country get swept away but the unifying force of francised restaurants and big box stores (where can you go and not find a Wal mart and McDonalds?) somehow this desire to divide and subdivide into tribes of every possible ilk is stronger than ever.
I remarked that it was a trend that seemed to happen with the advent of the internet, and one of my dining companions very deftly noted that it was also the advent of portable music. When you could choose what you wanted to hear and when, and not be reliant on some D.J. playing it for you, that was when you could declare you only like neo-goth punk grunge with a ska influence, or electronica-emo-Christian-rap? (DC talk anyone?) And you didn't have to listen to, like or even know who the "mainstream" artists were.
Now, the biggest challenge in this from my perspective (besides the fact that it has raised a generation of people who are comfortable being at complete odds with others opinions and see no need for common ground) is when it comes to times like, say church, where we have kids from lots of different groups or 'splinter cells' coming together and trying to find commonality. As someone who works with youth, where do you start? To try and learn all the musical tastes means you have to be familiar with everything from Justin Beiber to Vampire Weekend to Lady GaGa to maybe even Bach...well you get the idea. Gone are the days when you could start a conversation that everyone was likely to have a stake in... "so, what do you think of the new Madonna album?" So, that's the challenge. I'm not sure I have a solution. I think youth groups eventually begin to have an identity of their own. But when you're just starting with a group that doesn't know each other- finding the common ground without music is definitely a challenge.