(lessons learned from “The Crown”, my parents, and life as a millennial)

In today’s world of social action and hypersensitivity (righteous and otherwise) to championing the forgotten and underrepresented, we are still neglecting our perhaps most undervalued group - anyone who isn’t between the ages of 15 and 29. If you’re a typical 20-year-old American, chances are the movie trailers you see, the music you hear, and the books you see on the shelves are targeted precisely towards you. They dress up in your clothes, nod to your beats, deal with your insecurities, and celebrate your victories. Other than when catching a glimpse of C-Span when flipping through the channels (if you even do that anymore), you probably don’t encounter any production in your day-to-day that doesn’t jive with your understanding of the world. If you’re a 65-year-old new grandmother, however, good luck turning on Netflix, going to the movies, or tuning into the radio to find something that represents or understands you even in the slightest. In America, artistically and culturally, those middle-aged and above are a true silent majority.

Our culture and its popular expression is driven almost entirely by the tastes, stylings, and moral allowances of teens and twenty-somethings. This can be seen in design, film, literature, and nowhere more readily than in popular music charts. The American Top 40 and the Billboard Hot 100 are perpetually full of music selections that are not what’s playing on the typical middle American 50 year old’s phone - or stereo. Yes, both the Top 40 and the Hot 100 are calculated as the “week’s most popular songs across all genres, ranked by radio airplay measured by Nielsen Music… and streaming activity data provided by online music sources” (billboard.com), but these numbers, while accurate in pure gross value, do not represent the true tastes of the American people*. Artists like Kendrick Lamar, Halsey, and Post Malone have consistently charted in the top 10 in recent weeks. While they are charting massive amounts of purchases online and streams on services like Spotify and Apple Music, most of these are coming only from the millenial and generation Z listeners. Spotify, which is the most popular streaming service worldwide, reports that 62% of its users are between the ages of 13 and 29 (Spotify, Statista). Alt-rapper, Post Malone, given Spotify and the Billboard Hot 100’s information, should be the biggest household name in America here in the first season of 2018. When I polled my parents, pastor, next-door neighbor, and landlord, however, none of them had even heard of the artist, let alone listened to him regularly.

So why is it that we have allowed one small bracket of our population - one that in traditional Western culture and many contemporary Eastern cultures has little cultural or ideological weight - control all of our popular experience? Why is it that one of Netflix’s flagship shows, “The End of the F***ing World”, is unabashedly one that would offend the sensibilities of perhaps the majority of Americans? As conscious citizens, and especially as Christians, it is a question we need to seriously ask ourselves.

Christ in the book of Mark warns us against “rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition” (Mark 7:9-13). He asserts that “whoever reviles father or mother must surely die”. Let’s consider carefully: are we reviling our elders by sidelining them? Valuing and steeping in the tradition of our elders and those who have come before is something that Scripture has recommended through all time. In the Old Testament, Exodus 20:12 famously commands us to “honor your father and mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you”, and in the New Testament, in the time of Saint Paul, he wrote to remind the Ephesians, “... obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother’; this is the first commandment with a promise, ‘that it would go well with you and that you may live long in the land” (Ephesians 6:1-3). Are we, by focusing our artistic energies on the young, disrespecting or forgetting our parents? Will it go worse for us as a society abecause of this? Is it already?

Ultimately, our cultural decisions betray our now commonplace secularism. As a culture we have eschewed and forgotten tradition, we have ceased to respect our elders, we choose to teach our children to constantly challenge and redesign norms (even the good ones), and we have decided that the Mosaic “honor thy father and mother” is something only those not yet “woke” would ever do. When is the last time you’ve seen a fatherly character on TV that isn’t lazy, stupid, dishonest, afraid of change, or humorously intolerant? In a world where we no longer believe or even think about any value in aging, or any value after death, why not cling to youth?

Ironically, I was moved by this realization while binging Netflix’s “The Crown” - the popular original series following a young Queen Elizabeth as she took and secured the throne of England beginning in the 1940s. This is a TV show that presents a different type of character to us - ones that seem to be swimming against this tide. The Crown (in season one) discusses constantly the balance that a successful Queen needs to strike between reasonable pursuit of progress and growth with the time-tested traditions of old. The Netflix original is skillfully written, beautifully filmed, and brilliantly acted. By dramatizing discussions between Elizabeth, her family members, and government leaders, the show consistently highlights the fact that monarchy after monarchy in Europe had fallen due to an acceptance of populism and youthful values which had not yet withstood the storms of time. The English crown (paralleled often in the show with the Anglican Church) has withstood the tumult of the 20th century due to Elizabeth’s pointed choice to entertain and value the experiences, tastes, and recommendations of the generations who have come before her. She chooses to value those who have survived the fall of empire, two world wars, a depression, and countless other trials against the recommendations of her youthful peers. Elizabeth, very humanly, is not always a champion of the old, however. She is the first to televise a coronation, for example, and initially supports the marriage of her younger sister to a divorced man, against the tradition of the Church of England. In a sea of postmodern ideas floating in our libraries though, The Crown truly feels from another era. The challenges and thoughts it has sparked in my mind are well worth the effort and time.

The silent cultural majority - our parents, our grandparents, our leaders, teachers, and neighbors have a great deal of knowledge, and a great deal to offer. In my own right, like Elizabeth in The Crown, I am very interested in learning from the musical tastes of someone who fought in the Vietnam War, marched with Martin Luther King, or was working at a coffee shop in Seattle the day grunge rock was first ripped out of a guitar. For us as a culture to sideline the opinions and tastes of such a large and valuable group is a disservice not only to them, but to us all.

*Here is some interesting data comparing the spotify listening habits of 64 year-olds compared with 13 year-olds in the US. Keep in mind, the data set is only those who listen to Spotify.