A funny thing happened to me a couple of months ago.

I was in the car with one of my children.

She's 10 years old.

And she started out of the blue, not off the radio or anything, singing a song that I did not know she knew.

My dog. I did not know she knew. My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard and their life, this is better than yours.

Damn right.

My daughter was not born when this song, Milkshake by Kaleas, was first released in 2003 and became an inescapable top 10 hit.

But of course, I was.

So I started to sing along.

And when I started to sing, my daughter looked at me in true surprise. She could not believe that I knew this song. The song that as far as she was concerned,

was a new song for young people, not an old song for old people like her mother.

Turns out she knew milkshake because it had been used in a gap at, being danced to by the

girl group Katzai. The commercial spikes streams of the song and kicked off a viral

dance challenge that had reached fifth graders across the world. I've thought about this moment

frequently since it happened. I listened to a lot of my parents' music as a kid, and I liked a

lot of it. But I don't think I once mistook their music for my music, for contemporary music,

for music, for young people. And that's because for much of the 20th century,

every generation's music was very obviously different than what came before.

In 1947, the kids and adults alike were listening to this.

When I go to sleep, I never count sheep, I count all the charms about Linda.

But by 1967, when those kids had grown up, their kids were listening to this.

Good sense, innocence, grip of that kind.

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