Rock Of Ages

Let's all get up And dance to a song That was a hit before Your mother was born

--THE BEATLES Remember when that song was about your mother? You do? Too bad. In that case, now it's about you. The very thought is enough to send a chill down the spines of most baby boomers, who already have plenty of reasons to wonder if they haven't started looking as old as Paul McCartney. (And remember, he was the Cute Beatle.) At one time it probably seemed that rock music was entirely yours, a thing that you could imagine grew out of your own fevered brain. Now a good slice of it apparently belongs to somebody else, somebody who likes gangsta rap and tinny kid pop and fight songs from WWF Smackdown! It doesn't help that this week the Grammy for album of the year may go to Eminem, the white rapper who wants to rape his mother, or at least he says he does on the album that may get the Grammy. Hey, you're probably old enough to be his mother. For that matter, so is Elton John, who is taking the risk of performing a duet with him at the Grammys.

To make things worse, pop music is otherwise going through one of those moments when the general run of things is so toddling--Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys--that skinny white boys who talk a little tough, meaning Eminem, get to seem like a big deal. So if you happen to be a parent in, say, your 40s or 50s, nobody would blame you if you just turned away from pop music altogether. And if you happen to be a teenager, of course, you might not mind if they did. But the funny thing is, at the same time that the hard edge of pop gets harder and the soft edge gets softer, it's plain that rock has also become one of those things, like pets and baseball, that lets parents and kids find a shared passion. It may be that Eminem doesn't provide much opportunity for parent-child bonding, unless you're trying to explain why the incest taboo is not just some stupid rule that Mom invented to be mean. But a lot of baby boomers have figured out that it's a short trip from the Pink Floyd they once loved to the Radiohead their kids love now. And a lot of their kids have likewise found their way back to the music of their parents.

This explains Emily Curtin, 22, who now plays guitar in a New York City rock band. When she was in her late teens in Worcester, Mass., Emily used to collaborate with her twin younger brothers to make rock-music-compilation tapes--they called them Kids' Pix--for her parents. The idea was to educate the folks, who already understood the rock music of their own warmly remembered youth, about newer stuff. "They listened to the tapes all the time," she says. "My mom got into the Magnetic Fields. Dad got into My Bloody Valentine."

In Marshfield, Wis., John Spellman and his wife Jeanne are fiftysomethings who reawoke to rock music as the older ones among their four kids discovered the Beatles, the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd. "Now we spend time talking about things like how the Dead are not really a rock band," says John. "How they come out of a tradition of classic American blues, from Appalachia and the South." In return, he has picked up from his kids a taste for the Dave Matthews Band and U2, a group he finds "inspirational." Spellman's children even introduced him to music from his youth that he had missed the first time it came along. Through them he discovered Bob Marley, the reggae star whose supreme moment was in the 1970s.

Even if guitar-band rock is a niche market now, supplanted by hip-hop as the reigning format of pop music, it still qualifies as the lingua franca of pop culture. Roughly a half-century after Elvis recorded Heartbreak Hotel, nearly everybody under 70 has some emotional attachment to electrified music with a beat. As a consequence, pop music is no longer mostly a way that one generation defines itself against its elders. The baby boomers' own parents grew up with Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney and Nat "King" Cole. Rock was such an unmistakable break with that creamy tradition that teenagers of the 1960s and '70s understood it right away as music to fight Mom and Dad to, especially since their parents usually hated the stuff. Now kids have to accept that most of their own music is not so different from what their parents had, parents who grew up on Lou Reed, to say nothing of Iggy Pop, a guy who was gouging his skin with broken glass when Marilyn Manson was still sticking thumbtacks in his tricycle tires.

But that also makes it easier for them to comprehend the music their parents used to love. This helps explain the watershed success of the Beatles 1 album, which topped Billboard's album charts for eight weeks and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. You don't score numbers like that just from the middle-aged Beatlemaniacs still shaking their imaginary moptops. It requires massive sales to the teenagers and twentysomethings who buy most records. The phenomenon of that album followed the success of Santana's Supernatural, which paired a survivor of the '60s with up-to-the-minute acts like Lauryn Hill, Everlast and Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20. And before Santana, there was Aerosmith and Eric Clapton, Neil Young and Tina Turner, Sting and Cher, David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen. All of them sustained long careers by adding younger fans to the ones who remember them from before they got reading glasses.