{"id":17954,"date":"2019-08-07T09:00:26","date_gmt":"2019-08-07T16:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=17954"},"modified":"2019-08-02T10:27:10","modified_gmt":"2019-08-02T17:27:10","slug":"new-play-explores-music-technology-and-pop-culture-of-generation-x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2019\/08\/07\/new-play-explores-music-technology-and-pop-culture-of-generation-x\/","title":{"rendered":"New play explores music, technology, and pop culture of generation X"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In 2015, BOOM<\/em>\u2014a one-man show written and performed by Rick Miller about the legacy of the baby boom\u2014came to the Belfry Theatre. Miller, a musician and devoted music fanatic, initially used BOOM <\/em>to explore the early evolution of rock and roll, but it quickly evolved into something more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was about music at first, and when I started diving into it, I realized you can\u2019t talk about the history of rock and roll without bringing in the technology of the time, the politics of the time, and even the culture, you know, styles\u2014the trends and the fads of the time,\u201d says Miller. \u201cSo, I realized this was getting to be a broader topic overall, and then my dad started sending me these stories\u2014kinda like little pieces of an autobiography of his life when he grew up in the war, during World War II. And they were such fabulous stories that I had never heard before that were so different from your typical baby-boomer story from the TV shows that I\u2019d seen that I thought, well, why don\u2019t I try more of a personal documentary but still bring in all of the historical, technological, political, cultural events as well? And that\u2019s how BOOM<\/em> came about.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
BOOM-X<\/em> dives deep into the sights and sounds of generation X (photo by Irina Litvinenko).<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This summer, Miller is back to continue the narrative with the second part of what will be a trilogy, BOOM-X<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI always knew I wasn\u2019t going to stop at the baby boomers,\u201d he says. \u201cI wanted to talk about today, but to do that I had to break it down into three sections.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BOOM-X<\/em> focuses on Miller\u2019s own generation: generation X. On this journey, Miller will perform a total of 100 voices to represent the evolution of gen-X. Several factors\u2014what music he could get rights to (grunge in particular proved challenging), what would work with his own voice, how to create a show that would appeal to multiple generations\u2014went into the decision-making process when creating the catalogue of music for the show. Miller was also careful to not let his own nostalgia get in the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI realized there\u2019s a certain sweet spot when we\u2019re 14 years old, or 15, and we have a real emotional attachment to the music and culture of that time. That\u2019s sort of where we figure ourselves out,\u201d says Miller. \u201cFor me that was the mid-\u201980s. I realized how hard it was to be more objective of the era when everything you live is by nature subjective, and I realized the music I liked, the one-hit wonders… were not necessarily [liked] by all gen-Xers\u2014partly because it\u2019s subjective, but also partly because that gen-X era is characterized by this complete lack of cohesion and really deep polarization between politics and cultural extremes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miller says that there\u2019s nothing that unifies gen-X (\u201cThat\u2019s why it\u2019s called \u2018X,\u2019\u201d he says), using punk and disco as examples of this polarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey both came about the same time, both crashed and burned at the same time, and you were not one and the other, right?\u201d he says. \u201cYou were one or the other, or neither. And politically it was kind of the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The play will take music lovers from the early \u201970s to the mid \u201990s, from the battle of communism versus capitalism through the Cold War to the political divides Miller believes we are seeing today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou couldn\u2019t be Liberal and Conservative, you couldn\u2019t be Democrat and Republican,\u201d Miller says. \u201cThere was no middle ground at all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miller explores the grey areas within that black-and-white mentality of gen-X in the play. He should know all about that sort of tension: he grew up in Quebec at a time when it wasn\u2019t clear if the province would separate from the rest of Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve grown up very much a Canadian, but, you know, wondering what that means,\u201d he says, \u201cand constantly reinventing myself because I figure identities are not solid. They\u2019re\u2014like today\u2014they\u2019re constantly changing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BOOM-X<\/em>
Various times, until Sunday, August 18
Various prices (student discount available), The Belfry Theatre
belfry.bc.ca<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2015, BOOM\u2014a one-man show written and performed by Rick Miller about the legacy of the baby boom\u2014came to the Belfry Theatre. Miller, a musician and devoted music fanatic, initially used BOOM to explore the early evolution of rock and roll, but it quickly evolved into something more. \u201cIt was about music at first, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17955,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,234],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-august-7-2019"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17954"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17956,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17954\/revisions\/17956"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}