The kids are alright (and, boomers, so are you)
My YouTube algorithm knew I would like the Williams Twins long before I ever clicked on their videos. Installments for the “First Time Hearing” series have been popping up on my YouTube landing page for months unprompted. Still, I ignored them because whenever I’m surfing YouTube, I’m usually looking for something very specific.
It was only when I saw “Phil Collins” trending on Twitter that I finally paid attention. Fearing the worst — but then being quickly assured that Mr. Collins wasn’t dead, but merely undergoing “discovery” by a new generation of fans — I clicked on the video link.
What unfurled over the course of the seven-minute video was totally unexpected — a freewheeling meeting-of-the-minds between 22-year-old Gary, Ind., twins Tim and Fred Williams and baby boomer America that didn’t involve defensive crouches over conflicting musical tastes.
Here’s the setup. Tim and Fred Williams, who are Black and immersed enough in Black youth culture to have a pinup of Tupac on the wall as a backdrop without having Afrocentric names themselves, react to classic songs they’ve “never heard before” in real time.
In the video that went viral after it had been posted by at least one person everyone knows, Tim and Fred listen to Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” and react enthusiastically to the schmaltzy, but deeply ingratiating song that still causes grown men who were young in the 1980s to weep over still unprocessed romantic trauma.
Tim and Fred aren’t critics, musicologists or hip-hop DJs who have developed a sophisticated listening aesthetic after decades of surveying the deep reservoirs of rock, pop and soul.
They’re two Gen Z explorers who have decided to embark on an adventure of total musical open-mindedness that has already brought them into crossgenerational conversation with millions of people who are dying to be in intimate, “bedroom hanging out” dialogue with two young Black men just like them — the very cohort many white Americans have been taught to fear most unreservedly over the past three decades. Here, finally, is an excuse and an opportunity to “talk” about something other than race with two Black men whose names are easy to spell and pronounce.
But as it is with all things American, it’s more complicated than that. No matter how much we want to make the current national crush on these two Black Midwesterners an all-too-rare example of post-racial bonhomie, they are really a reminder of the stringent and arbitrary racial dividing lines running through popular music of all genres.
Instead of marveling at Tim and Fred’s “first time hearing” reactions to Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” or Frank Sinatra or Nina Simone or Jimi Hendrix, we should be asking how two such musically curious young men entered their early 20s without having encountered the width and breadth of so much great American music.
Though radio is almost a dead medium in an age of instantaneous digital downloads, we have to ask ourselves why we tolerated the unconscionable segregation of the airwaves for as long as we did. Why was carving audiences into distinct demographics more profitable than allowing a melange of genres to boil together? Was it corporate shortsightedness or cultural discomfort with “race-mixing”?
While there was never truly a golden age of racial egalitarianism across the dial, I vividly remember listening to David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Sly & the Family Stone, the Rolling Stones and early Funkadelic back-to-back on at least one Philly station. It made a big impact on me and explains why I felt I had so many options when I walked into a record store (remember them?) as a self-aware music consumer in the early-tomid ’70s.
With the advent of FM radio, I made cassettes of long playing albums usually broadcast after midnight, which is why I have such fond memories of listening to Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, The Who, Alice Cooper and Bruce Springsteen along with James Brown, the Jacksons, Earth, Wind & Fire and Stevie Wonder in my mid-teens.
Still, I noticed the almost exclusive patina of whiteness that defined FM radio almost immediately after its introduction. The loud and raucous DJs of the ’60s who once dominated AM radio were nowhere to be found on FM. Instead, we had to endure sedate, whiny dudes who sounded like they were working on their dissertations on the air.
By the time I was 22, I had seen Dizzy Gillespie, Joni Mitchell and many of the greatest musicians of that era in live performance. It was common. Concert tickets were cheap once upon a time. You could even see jazz icons like Bill Evans or McCoy Tyner at clubs in Center City if you wanted to.
At 22, I could never have the reaction to music that Tim and Fred Williams are having today given my early exposure to music of all genres. I think their “innocence” accounts for much of their appeal. Watching them react to music our generation takes for granted is a way for many boomers to overcome the tyranny of knowing too much and allowing themselves to become jaded.
And let’s face it. It’s also generational vanity writ large. If you can convince Tim and Fred Williams to like one of your favorite songs — something your own children won’t concede is good under pain of death — then you’ve achieved something culturally monumental.
Instead of a condescending “OK, boomer,” the conversation becomes “Yo, boomers. This is really slammin’. Thanks for suggesting this. We weren’t prepared for how good it sounds.” After that bit of affirmation, you’re ready to cut your own children out of the will and write these dudes in.
My favorite video by far is their collective reaction to Steely Dan’s 1972 classic “Do It Again” because I’m sure I had the same reaction the first time I heard it in the ’70s. Tim and Fred remind me of what it was like jamming in the air-guitar privacy of my West Philly bedroom.
Still, all this joyful novelty is going to wear off as soon as folks realize that even boomers aren’t obligated to like every song they hear, so why are these guys expected not to have the same right of discernment?
I suspect that for every video of them getting ecstatic about a boomer favorite, there are 10 they don’t air because they effectively say: “What is this [expletive]?” They’re only human. There’s a solo video of Tim Williams listening to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and you can see him struggling to get through it. He is not digging it, yet he is unfailingly polite and says nice things. Even though he’s insincere, awkward and tentative in his reaction, he clearly understands the emotional limitations of his audience. That’s why they’re never going to diss even the dullest boomer anthem. They have too good a thing going.