The My Generation of your generation?

And what made Smells like Teen Spirit so great and widely popular at the time was the rawness of the sound and the emotion that it brought out, especially after a decade of absolute shit in the mainstream. The words were obviously quite unintelligible at first. And the lyrics, I believe, are what makes a song an anthem. I tend to subscribe to the theory that if a song sounds good, it doesn't matter what is being said. RHCP is a great example. But with an anthem the lyrics matter.

 

Smells like fail.

 

Any number of Guns 'N' Roses songs off Appetitie For Destruction were the defining songs of my teen years.

EDIT: Most of the music in the 80s did suck, but Guns 'N' Roses burst onto the music scene with as much, if not more, fanfare as Nirvana did a few years later.

 

I'm sure that there are plenty of obscure artists that have songs in which the words encapsulate a generation, but hardly anyone has heard of them, so they can't be anthems. Something has to be as ubiquitous as the Star-Spangled Banner itself to count. It can't be the song of a generation if it's not played to death in that generation.

 

I guess it's the played to death part I don't like. I don't want someone rolling their eyes at the mention of my generation's My Generation. Though, I'm sure people did that in the late 70s when The Who and Led Zeppelin were mentioned. And then 10 years after that people appreciate it again.

 

Dools is right, and that's why Smells Like Teen Spirit has to be the anthem of my generation.

There are good and bad sides to that, but that's the song it has to be.

As the consumption of media and popular culture become more and more fragmented, future generations might not even have an anthem. There are probably good and bad points to that as well.

 

"Born in the USA" might be a good guess for my mid-80s crew. It was the big single off of one of the biggest albums, and the fact that it was widely misunderstood and adopted by the Reaganites as a Cold War anthem pretty much sums up the stupidity of the time.

 

Now that is some reasoning I can get behind.

 

That's a pretty silly post, but I digress. Growing up in the mid- to late-80s, I'll still take "Welcome to the Jungle" as the anthemic song of that era. Of course, I was a little more plugged in (no pun intended) to music in '87 than I was in '84.

 

Silly to say that the song was appropriated by the Right? Or to say that the Right completely misunderstood the nature of the lyrics?

Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
'Til you spend half your life just covering up

[chorus:]
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

I got in a little hometown jam
And so they put a rifle in my hands
Sent me off to Vietnam
To go and kill the yellow man

[chorus]

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says "Son if it was up to me"
I go down to see the V.A. man
He said "Son don't you understand"

[chorus]

I had a buddy at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone
He had a little girl in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years down the road
Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go

I'm a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I'm a cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

 

Silly to say that the "times" were stupid because the other side of the political spectrum was in charge. That was the larger point of bringing up the Right's misappropriation of the song. I'm familiar with the song, but maybe you could post a picture of some naval ships to advance the discussion further.

 

Pallister's self-righteous indignation never fails to amuse me.