Hi, you're old. Love, The Internet

Last.fm

While I truly believe this tweet that Justin Bieber is bigger than Kurt Cobain as evidenced by his number of Twitter followers is the work of a not particularly clever troll, I had to cringe at the thought of a preteen calling out a long-dead icon from her parents' generation. At the risk of sounding like a bitter, aging member of Generation X, "Really? I mean, come on. Are we actually that old?"

I'm a hypocrite. I'll acknowledge -- and write lengthy posts about -- music fandom being the domain of elitists who like to impose their own standards on just about everyone with the gall to call themselves a music fan, but I like having a canon. I feel a little unmoored without one.

As for the tweet, I've been trying to come up with an embarrassing anecdote from my inchoate music listening days where proclaimed the Monkees greater than the Beatles (although Mike Nesmith remains one of the world's greatest unheralded songwriters), or insisted Green Day invented punk, and.. I can't. Maybe it's just a case of selective memory, or the luck of growing up in an era where my embarrassing pop culture transgressions were kept locked away in diary somewhere, but growing up in a family of music fans. I didn't dare. I'll also add I was pretty lucky to have been exposed to a variety of music and was given some pretty good "history lessons." But I still listened to top forty pap.

Actual embarrassing pre-teen journal

I can pinpoint when exactly I went from being an average preteen whose musical acumen began and ended with what was playing on the radio to realizing there was something else out there: this, that elusive, mortifying diary entry with cool, scary Robert Smith sharing a page with The New Kids On The Block, and the NKOTB of my mom's generation, The Monkees. I'm not sure if I even knew The Cure's music yet -- I probably saw his picture in a magazine and thought, "Cool. Definitely not mom-approved." I laugh at this now, but it made perfect sense then. Who says you can't listen to goth and pop? No one. (And I'm sorry, but the Cure was pretty damn poppy even if their lyrics were a just bit too funeral.)

So I'm not too worried about seventh-graders who think Bieber is greater than Cobain. Assuming this isn't a troll, but a living, breathing kid who decided to take to her Twitter and call out some some old farts and their old fart music, maybe someone will hand her a punk mixtape, or she'll discover a the vast jazz collection at her local library, or broaden her musical horizons some other way. Or not, and that's probably okay too. (Just stay off my lawn!)