MAGAZINE

Before the meme: The generation that invented youth

They grew up with a transistor radio under the pillow and the television in the middle of the living room. Before becoming the target of a meme, boomers invented youth culture, late-night radio and summer hits. A tender portrait of a generation passing memories on.

They were born amid the joyful din of the postwar years, between 1946 and 1964, when cradles filled faster than classrooms. They are called boomers, children of the baby boom, and they were the first generation to grow up with a screen in the living room and a radio within reach. Before them, childhood listened to their parents’ gramophone; with them, it began broadcasting. This simple shift — image and sound entering the home — changed forever what it meant to be young.

Television arrived as a piece of furniture and became the heart of the home. In the United States, it took over living rooms in the 1950s; in Europe, the coronation of Elizabeth II on June 2, 1953, brought one of the first major shared live broadcasts to millions of households. In the evening, people drew their armchairs closer, dimmed the lights and shared a single program — often on the only channel available. For baby-boom children, those evenings in front of the cathode-ray screen were the campfire of modern times: the same story told, at the same moment, to an entire country.

Then music escaped the living room. In late 1954, the Regency TR-1, the first commercially available transistor receiver, fit in the hand; in 1957, the Sony TR-63 slipped into a shirt pocket. For the first time, a teenager had a radio of their own — and therefore music of their own. Under the pillow, they tuned in to Radio Luxembourg; in France, «Salut les copains» brought young people together on Europe n° 1 from 1959; in 1964, Radio Caroline broadcast from a boat off the coast of England. Elvis’s rock, late-night radio, summer hits: youth culture had been born.

This generation also invented the global event experienced live. On February 9, 1964, about 73 million Americans watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan — a record at the time. On July 20, 1969, hundreds of millions of television viewers held their breath as the first steps on the Moon were broadcast around the world. A few weeks later, in August 1969, Woodstock provided the soundtrack to a decade. Watching together, at the same moment, something bigger than oneself: boomers learned how to do it first, and never forgot.

And yet the word used to describe them has become a barb. In November 2019, young New Zealand MP Chlöe Swarbrick delivers her now-famous «OK boomer» in the middle of Parliament, and the expression, already viral on TikTok, goes around the world. The caricature takes hold: the boomer is resistant to change, nostalgic and preachy. The irony is delicious: this is precisely the generation that invented rupture — rock, protest, the conquest of the airwaves. Those mocked as out of touch were the first moderns.

Today, they are often the ones passing memories on. In many families, a boomer scans the slides, digitizes the cassettes and Super 8 films, and reconstructs the family tree online. They are also the ones who find the station of their youth on the internet, now streaming, and play it for their grandchildren. Having seen every medium born, from vinyl to digital, they know better than anyone that memory survives only if it is carried from one format to another. Their nostalgia is the work of an archivist, patient and generous.

Because nostalgia, contrary to its reputation, is not retreat: it is a bridge. Vinyl is returning to teenagers’ bedrooms, grandchildren ask for stories of late-night radio, and now all it takes is an online directory to find, wherever you live, the station or channel from when you were twenty. Between the one who tells and the one who discovers, the radio has never stopped crackling. Boomers turned on the world’s television; now it is up to us not to switch it off — and above all, to watch it together.

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