THE BABY BOOM WAS A BUST.

• Date: 01 November 2019
• Author: Noah, Timothy

It may be difficult today for anyone under thirty to appreciate how thoroughly the Baby Boom, the generation born between 1946 and 1964, owned American pop culture through the early aughts. No other age cohort mattered.

Boomers started calling the shots from the crib, when pediatrician Benjamin Spock published The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946). The book sold half a million copies in its first six months. Eight years later, toy stores were selling 5,000 coonskin caps a day to Boomer kids inspired by a Disney TV series about Davy Crockett. By 1958, Boomers had those same toy stores selling about ninety million Hula Hoops. Around the same time, Boomers started reorienting popular music permanently away from the orchestra-backed show tunes beloved by their parents and grandparents and toward guitar-backed rock and roll that their parents couldn't stand. In 1969, 400,000 rock fans--more than half the population of San Francisco--showed up at Woodstock.

If you worked at a newsmagazine anytime between 1975 and 2005--I worked at two--these facts are engraved on your cranium. More than any other precinct of the news media, newsmagazines were relentlessly trend-minded, and I very much doubt that a single cover decision was made in those years that didn't take into account whether it would appeal to Boomers. These people were our lords and masters.

I say "these people" because the Boomers who set the cultural pace were the oldest ones, the cutoff birth date being somewhere around 1952. Younger Boomers like me, who reached adolescence in the 1970s, didn't figure. If you were too young to attend Woodstock without your mother, or to sweat out the Vietnam draft lottery, or to wear a "Free Huey!" button--well, you were unsanctified, and the Boomer vanguard let you...