I am Boomer, hear me whine

One of the central ways we Baby Boomers continue to inflict ourselves on the world is by endlessly celebrating the music of our formative years

Baby Boomers shall inherit the earth

When I heard Helen Reddy had died, I felt a personal loss, the way you do when something of your youth is gone. For one of the central ways we Baby Boomers continue to inflict ourselves on the world is by endlessly celebrating the music of our formative years.

I Am Woman was a wonderful anthem of that time, and not just for women. Its beauty lay in part in its universalism. Its power was to be found not only in its feminist self-assertion but in its combination of strength and kindness. This was especially evident in its aspiration: “as I lay my lovin’ arms across the land”.

Similarly the song, in which the alternating assertiveness and tenderness of the words are echoed perfectly in the melody, aspired not to winner-take-all triumph but to solidarity and regard “until I make my brother understand”. Not bash the white, hetero-normative, sexist, misogynist, male, uber-villain over the head with ideology but the gentle “until I make my brother understand”.

I was born right in the middle of the baby boom and when I Am Woman was a hit in the early 1970s, one of my chief emotions was pride in Reddy as an Australian making such a big mark internationally.

We Baby Boomers are fantastically self-­valourising. In truth, we were the most affluent, pampered, coddled and indulged generation in history. Our parents having gone through World War II and our grandparents the Depression, all our elders were determined to make the world safe for us. And nice.

Naturally we thus made a generational project of complaining about our good fortune and celebrating the faux heroism of adolescent rebellions. For all that, there was a gentleness to much of our self-regarding music, which came from recognising in part the appeal of the very things we were allegedly rejecting.

Early boomer classics often even had a touch of religiosity, as they at first went down the traditional path not of rejecting all religious belief and practice but rather of pointing out where belief was dishonoured by the conduct of society’s elders, or associating belief with the sentiments of the young. So John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High, a lovely hymn to Colorado, concerned a 27-year-old experiencing some kind of crisis and said of its hero that after he left the past behind, “you might say he was born again”.

James Taylor, in Fire and Rain, experiencing the loss of a friend, asks Jesus to look down on him: “you’ve got to help me make a stand”.

The Boomers’ rebellions were only interesting because of the strength of the old culture they were reacting to and against. But in the end, it was less the message than the music that the Boomers responded to. This, too, was the era of great live concerts.

Growing up in Sydney, in my late teens and early 20s I went to a lot of concerts at the old Hordern Pavilion. The most consummate stage presence I ever encountered was Billy Joel, who began his captivating performance with a series of parodies of other musicians — Bob Dylan, Elton John. His piano itself seemed to dance across the stage.

Surprisingly, one of the best live performers I saw was Lou Reed. Johnny O’Keefe, though I saw him at a noisy hotel at Coogee, was an infinitely better performer than musician. He was pretty much irresistible on stage.

And we’ve kept the same music going for the past 50 years. I am boomer: hear my music roar!