WIth Gen Z soaking up a lot of press right now (while not knowing what the antiquated term “press” even refers to), it’s easy to forget that millennial jokes still resonate with people, which I think is even a pretty millennial way to put it. This is a look back at my millennial bluegrass column of some years back with a couple of bonus additions, including the all-important avocado reference that was missing in the original edition:
We love to make fun of millennials; you know, with their selfies of their own wedding proposals, their own baptisms, and their own gas station fill-ups; their inability to perform labor-intensive tasks like coal mining or voting, etc. But of course the reason Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers do this is to try to distract millennials long enough that they’ll forget that it’s the older generations who saddled them with massive debt (both student and government), bottled water, the health insurance industry, and the Pickin’ On Duran Duran album. We’ve generally wrecked a lot of stuff that was handed to us by the more competent generations before us, and then passed on the resulting ruins to millennials as is, and then we act condescending and self-righteous when they seem self-absorbed and technology-dependent.
You know what, though? I’m going to make some millennial jokes anyway, because hey, they’re an easy target, and I have a deadline every Wednesday morning. And besides, I was encouraged by a millennial, one Ashby Frank of Darrell Brothers fame and Ashby Frank fame.
Ashby was thinking what the world needed was millennial adaptations of bluegrass standards. He threw out “One Way Uber” and “Little Tiny House on the Hill” to get me started. Then he had a more important text come in and that was the end of the conversation, but I really appreciated the idea.
A few millennial bluegrass future hits:
- “Snapchat From My Darling”
- “You Don’t Know My Password”
- “Roving Gamer”
- “Bile ‘Em Quinoa Down”
- “Will the Text Thread Be Unbroken”
- “Hot Kombucha Cold Kombucha”
- “Bury Me Beneath the Starbucks”
- “Raised By the Light Rail Line”
- “I’m a Man of Constant Netflix”
- “EV Wheel”
- “When You Stream Nothing At All”
- “Every Time You Text Goodbye”
- “I’m Lost But I’ll Google Maps the Way”
- “Selfie on Top of the World”
- “Bike Lane of Sorrow”
- “More Whole Foods Than One”
- “Avocado Travel On” (I tried to work “toast” into this somehow, without success)
- “That Purple Haired Sister of Mine”
- “Me and My Ukulele”
- “Chai Gone Cold”
- “Hashtag 45”
- “Grandfather’s TikTok” (maybe that’s more of a Gen Z song—we need a whole new column for those)
And last but not least, that Reno & Smiley chestnut:
- “Emojis”
To be fair, I was originally going to include some baby boomer parody bluegrass song titles here, too, but then the week this column was first published, three of the Bluegrass Today top five songs had “train” in the title. I figured my work had already been done for me.
