the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

As with most musicians that I like I don’t slavishly follow all of their catalogue, and Bob Dylan is no exception, but some of his 1960s work resonates with me as much today as it did when I first heard it as an impressionable teenager. The times they are a changing is a potent set of lyrics, as valid today as it was back in 1965 when it first hit my ears.

I won’t quote them here, they are copyright, but they are freely available on the web if you want to look. They effectively describe the generation gap, from a younger persons perspective, and reinforce the French saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Time do change. The world today is as alien to the one that I grew up in as the one of my youth was to my parents. That’s life, we evolve, as does the world around us. As a schoolboy I knew people who had been alive both when we first achieved powered flight, and when we landed people onto the moon just 66 years later. At the same time I marvelled at science fiction where people carried personal communicators (now I wish that they didn’t a lot of the time).

Two World Wars, plus a Cold War, drove much change in the twentieth century, with technology and medicine perhaps at the forefront, one so that we could kill and maim and the other for treating the survivors. In more recent decades, the consumer demand for new fripperies has kept the race for technical advance going.

Returning to my music allusion, I have seen vinyl come, go (and now come back), eight tracks, cassettes and CDs following in succession, and on to streaming (via those personal communicators). The Berkshire Belle and I have been early adopters of much technology having had to be at the forefront of some things in our jobs, until we retired a few years back. We are, maybe, slowing down a bit now, and often mutter darkly about not being able to find a ten year old to explain how something works, but we still enjoy our electronic toys.

The problem, for us, is that the content has left us behind. We both love books and are avid readers, but struggle to find new material that we can enjoy. We watch more oldies on TV that we do new stuff, and it seems that, in both written and visual media, there is a need to new action every few seconds. All subtlety has gone. And as for music! I know I sound like my Dad did when my sisters and I listened to the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds et al back in the Sixties, but there it is again, that generation gap.

It’s OK though. I know it is how the world works. The times will always be a’changing, and, whilst they do, we will also see the various cycles that show that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Another old adage is that we all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. We keep on making the same mistakes.

I am glad that I grew up through the years that I have had. I would not want to be twenty again but, if I was, it would all be different because I would not have known any of the life that I have. I can cherish my experiences, and I hope that those who are coming through now will get to cherish theirs.

We all have to live our own lives, and each generation will find the world different to that of their parents. It is both what they want and what they need, just as I, as a teenager, wanted to move on from the world of my parents. And, on that note, I’ll finish this off and go and find my iPod.