10 song lyrics that defined a generation
All pieces of rock and roll history tend to be slightly flexible. Although many people have tried their best to put their best foot forward, every lyric is going to reflect what their generation was thinking, whether that was the folk revolution in the 1960s or the rise of MTV. Whereas most people tend to look at music as a communal experience, artists like Bob Dylan managed to hit the nail on the head much better than anyone else.
Granted, it’s not that easy trying to put an entire musical movement in the span of just a few lines of lyrics. It just comes from being in the right place at the right time and looking through the greatest songs of every subsequent decade, it’s always about making something that looks to stand with the people of your generation rather than wagging the finger at their behaviour.
While not all of them have aged the greatest, they do a lot more to tell the story of a musical movement than any documentary ever could. Although most could go into more detail about all of them, anyone who has ever survived those generations can look at these lines of text and either tell you about that time or even the feeling in their gut when they were living in it.
So, when looking at these lines, don’t think of them as strictly about looking at a piece of ancient history. It’s about seeing a picture in one aspect, but the more you dig underneath the surface, you can learn about what makes people tick other than just the stigma that they have been pinned with.
The Silent Generation
‘My Way’ – Frank Sinatra
“I’ve seen it all, and I did it my way“.
The greatest lyrics of all time don’t always need to come out when the generation were teenagers. Sometimes, it takes a longer time before people start to realise the problems they dealt with as younger people and how they came out on the other side even stronger. And while The Silent Generation is known as the grandparents of the world these days, the sounds of Sinatra do a better job of summing up that mentality than anyone.
Since ‘Ol Blue Eyes’ wasn’t known to mince his words, this tale of him looking back on his life and living with none too many regrets really says a lot more about how many people saw themselves in that context. Most people may have tried their best to do what they could, but as most of them go into their twilight years now, it’s about appreciating the good times while they lasted and realising that the good can outweigh the bad no matter how painful it was to make it through.
The Baby Boomers
‘Johnny B Goode’ – Chuck Berry
“Who never ever learned to read or write so well/but he could play the guitar just like a-ringing a bell”.
For 1950s kids, you tended to fall on just one side of the fence when it came to rock and roll. Either it was the kind of party music that kept people up to the early hours of the morning, or it was a stain upon the buttocks of music that deserved to be stomped out. No matter how much the parents may have shouted about their issues with the likes of Chuck Berry, no one better encapsulated what it was like to be a kid with nothing better to do than play guitar on ‘Johnny B Goode’.
Although Berry never tried to be the greatest wordsmith of his generation or anything, his songs were always short stories that anyone could appreciate. While this rough-and-tumble kid might not have been anyone’s first choice for the voice of the people, the sight of a man playing the guitar and not wanting to stay in school said a lot more about rock and rollers than many people realised. By the start of the 1960s, every kid felt like that, and this supposed musical trend wasn’t about to lose steam.
‘Like A Rolling Stone’ – Bob Dylan
“How does it feel to be on your own with no direction home?”
But with every generation, there comes a moment when things seem to be going off the rails. Although Bob Dylan wasn’t the first person to write about serious topics in his songs, he was the first to point the finger at government officials through the power of rock and roll. This was the kind of sound that had the power to change the world, but as Dylan would find out, no man should have that much power.
After having the ear of the people, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was a cold look at what happens when the revolution does succeed. Now that Dylan has reached the top of the mountain, him asking his audience how it feels to be all alone marks the moment where the cultural revolution realised that they could never go back to the way things were. Things had changed, and after leading the rebellion, Dylan was going back on his promise and began rebelling against the movement that lay at his feet.
‘The End’ – The Doors
“Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain and all the children are insane”.
For a band that seemed like nothing but stoned hippies, The Doors were always more than just raw psychedelia. Jim Morrison always thought of himself as a poet before being a singer, and when he opened his mouth, the audience would get some of the most surreal images that the 1960s had ever spat out. In between his proclamations of being ‘The Lizard King’, though, Morrison uttered the most haunting comment on The Flower Generation in the middle of ‘The End’.
The entire 11-minute exercise already feels like slam poetry set to music in the back half, but as he starts rambling off free-verse style, Morrison talking about being lost in a Roman wilderness of pain is among the most profound comments on the artists that founded Woodstock. While Morrison could very well have been considered one of those insane children, that was beside the point. It was about the Baby Boomers realising just how far they had fallen and how their utopian dream might be over.
Generation X
‘Fast Car’ – Tracy Chapman
“I had a feeling I could be someone”.
Not everyone born into Generation X came through unscathed. It was fun to look on in amazement as MTV turned everything around, but there were just as many people just as unsure of their place in their lives as their parents were in the late 1960s. Amid all of the photogenic starlets, though, there were still singer-songwriters, and Tracy Chapman got to the essence of what every down-on-their-luck kid thinks about on ‘Fast Car’.
Despite Chapman singing about the problems she faces living with an alcoholic father and working in the market as a checkout girl to make ends meet, it’s the end of the chorus that cuts the deepest as she talks about wanting to be someone. The sound of that phrase might explode, but since the rest of the song is incredibly slow and sombre, there’s no telling whether those dreams are going to be realised or just left by the wayside.
‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ – Nirvana
“Here we are now entertain us”.
At the same time, much of Gen X wasn’t just looking to their parents for guidance; they were angry. Considering how close they were to enacting real change, Kurt Cobain saw his parents as a classic example of trying to create a utopia and failing spectacularly. Now, all he wanted was to be entertained, and in just one line, Cobain managed to put into words what so many people were feeling.
Even though it was hard to get the gist of what Nirvana was saying at the best of times, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was the kind of single-line poetry that sounded like nonsense but meant the world to everyone listening to it. Combined with the elaborate music video and Cobain being the ringleader of a riot in a gym, “Here we are now, entertain us” wasn’t just a suggestion. It was a command.
Millennial Generation
‘Hey Ya’ – OutKast
“If say that nothing is forever, then what makes love the exception”.
As the age of irony started to fade, the millennial generation was already thrown for a bit of a loop. Gen X already covered a lot of ground regarding existential angst, but now that Kurt Cobain was long gone, many wondered what they were doing anymore. And since everything started shifting online, the emotional lines started to get a little blurred when Andre 3000 came out with the darkest party jam ever conceived.
OutKast isn’t the kind of hip-hop group one would expect to make philosophical statements, but ‘Hey Ya’ is one of the deepest tunes to come out of the 2000s, as ‘Three Stacks’ talks about how modern love is dead and how most people don’t even want to listen to the lyrics of songs anymore. It’s definitely got a sinister bent to it, but maybe these songs need to exist for people to see just how far they’ve come.
‘Numb’ – Linkin Park
“Tired of being what you want me to be”.
When gunge collapsed in on itself, it’s not like those angry teenagers disappeared overnight. Every phase of life is going to have teenagers, and if they couldn’t get the likes of Kurt Cobain, they were going to have to settle for Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit in the back half of the decade. But after nu-metal came and went, Linkin Park took all of those tropes and made the most cathartic set of lyrics for the post-millennium kids.
Since all these kids could see was their parents expecting too much of them, ‘Numb’ is the cry of anger that almost anyone can relate to. Every kid was bound to have a different experience, but the thought of not wanting to live up to what other people thought of you was everything fans could have asked for. Because no matter how hard parents try to teach their kids to become great, that kind of persona only comes when those kids walk out of their elders’ shadows.
Gen Z
‘Alright’ – Kendrick Lamar
“But if God got us, then we gon’ be alright”.
Anyone still looking to rock stars to become the voices of their generation by the 2010s was really fighting a losing battle. As much as some fans didn’t want to admit it, rock had turned into a passe generation on the charts, and people were turning to rappers to hear what was going on at ground level. While the greatest rappers of all time, like Public Enemy and Tupac, paved the way for Kendrick Lamar, his protest anthem ended up going beyond anything he could have imagined on ‘Alright’.
While the song works brilliantly within the context of To Pimp A Butterfly, tying this into the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement in the late 2010s gave a voice to people that had felt like they had the odds stacked against them their entire lives. Lamar doesn’t claim to have the answers by any stretch, but as long as God is on his side, he knows that things will work themselves out in the end. And since the Anxiety Generation was just starting up, these words of hope were something we needed now more than ever.
‘This is America’ – Childish Gambino
“This is America, don’t catch you slipping up”.
Although we’ve reached the not-too-distant past, that doesn’t mean that all of the problems are solved. If anything, the world can seem on fire from day to day, and no matter how anyone tries to put it out, it’s not going to matter unless someone puts a mirror up to society. Donald Glover may not even be the same person that he was when making ‘This is America’ back in 2018, but the minute that people heard him, they started to realise just how desperate things were in the modern age.
Outside of being one of the catchiest songs of the decade, the subtle vignettes where Glover talks about needing to carry a firearm at all times and not being able to slip up was a firm statement about how black men are viewed in the eyes of not only society but more specifically when being targeted by police officers. In that respect, ‘This is America’ is practically the inverse of ‘Alright’. Lamar was talking about how things can work themselves out if you have enough, but Glover knows that the only way to protect himself is to prepare to resort to violence before it arrives.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.