If the "geezer" watched traditional "geezer" media, they would have seen K&P on Charlie Rose in the past few months.
And that, I think, is the key to why the geezers usually win on "MTG" -- If you're, say, 50ish, and you're on Facebook, or watch Daily Show, Fallon, Letterman, and the like... you pick up pop culture whether you want to or not. You don't have to listen to Wild 94.9 all day to know who Robin Thicke is.
BUT (and here's my own inner geezer coming out), today's kids seem oblivious to stuff from before they were born, their heads are in their phones all day. Whereas when I was a kid, I knew who Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman and Clark Gable were.
Well, I'm not on Facepage, and I don't watch any of the network talk shows. But I do know who Robin Thicke is -- he's
the one that made a very popular titty video with some gorgeous supermodels a couple of years ago, right?
I try to remember that our [geezer] memories are history for the kids. We lived it; at best they read about it. And while I
also knew about those people as a young'n, I'm not sure how deep my contemporaries' knowledge of recent cultural history
really was. If your perception is accurate, there are several contributing factors:
media diversification: We're a generation past having only the big three networks, and The Bruce's 57 channels is now 500.
Despite the bloviations of some pundits, there is no mainstream media anymore.
pull not push: We're no longer beholden to what articles an editor decides to print, or which segments a producer choses
to air. We can go on the Inter-tubes and pull down whatever we want to read or watch whenever we want it. The usual
media curators are side-stepped; people mostly consume what their friends share with them.
school cuts: I had some kind of music classes regularly throughout elementary school, and was fortunate enough that my
parents could afford to buy me an instrument so I could play in the band. I have no particular aptitude for creating music, but
the experience was an important part of my education. (The same with art classes.) Music and the arts are early casualties
when budget cuts are made.
youth culture: as it has for decades, the media tend to focus on cultural issues skewed toward the young, as they are
viewed as being more impressionable vis-a-vis having their buying habits changed, and are thus a more desirable
audience to attract advertisers.
There are also the individual circumstances of how much one's parents exposed you to various cultural elements, and
one's own disposition toward learning about recent contemporary history.
