GenX: At the Analogue/Digital Crossroads, Above All in Music

A college reunion took me back in time to slot a missing piece of my youthful configuration into place

Oh, is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel? Or just twenty thousand people standing in a field?(Image: Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

We are the Janus Generation, looking back to the past and ahead to the future. We came of age amid tech we would describe as analogue, our kids as archaeological.

We phoned up our teenage sweethearts by slowly rotating the countersprung plastic disc of a lone device sitting on the hallway table. Or for greater privacy, snuck out to feed coins into a hooded or boxed totem of communication, our voices rudimentarily digitised and sent slithering to their destination along copper cables.

A decade later, we were playing Snake on pixelated pocket screens, and sending the frst txt msgs. We bestride the technological divide like colossi, the right and left hemispheres of our brains differentiated not by ‘creative’ and ‘logical’, but ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’. We are the Frankensteinian cyborgs of human progress, the missing letter between Lucy and M3GAN. We know the forces that shaped us, the double helix coiled within us.

Or so I thought.

Until a college reunion invite, The Stone Roses, and Spotify intervened to slot the final — and probably most important — piece of the jigsaw…