Since the first signs of life appeared on dear 'ol Mother Earth, there have always been new generations taking over where the old ones leave off. That's one of the few things in life we can be sure of. The new become the old. We all get our "15 minutes of fame", as Andy Warhol once predicted, but 15 minutes pass awfully fast when you're having fun, and far from all of us leave visible marks in the historical landscape.

Each generation have provided in the development of our collective base of knowledge - through finding new ways of living, making new inventions and introducing new beliefs. The best ideas have often been effectively spread by wars and other nice "marketing events".

Each generation have also had their own music, specific for their time. As with everything else, music is handed over from one generation to another - constantly evolving over time.

Music often tells us a lot about a specific time and place, sometimes more than anything else, since it speaks directly to our emotions.

Through time and space we have an endless continuum of generations, connecting our past, present and future. Historically, there used to be about three generations hanging around within the same period of time: The Old-timers, The Prime-timers and The Youngsters.

Small differences have always occurred within specific generations - they do consist of individuals after all. The patterns had been almost the same for thousands and thousands of years. Then, exactly 1 968 years after some nasty fellas nailed a guy to some pieces of wood somewhere in the outback's of the Middle East, something very odd happened. A totally new generation emerged within its own generation!

The generation of '68 - the ones who managed to tune in, turn on and drop out so fast no one even had a chance to see where they came from in the first place. They were the first ones, and apparently the older generation at the time didn't like what they saw, because soon enough the first and the last of their motto's were highly unpopular - and the middle one was strictly forbidden by law.

Since then, development of new generations within existing generations has increased rapidly.

The hippie-generation listened to bands like Greatful Dead and The Rolling Stones. They were the interpreters of their time and, a long with a whole bunch of other bands, they gave voice to the new generation. Nowadays, Keith Richards is (per definition) an Old-timer, considered to be a non-stoppable Good-timer since he refuses to give up his life as an immortal Prime-timer. Although he should have been outdated a long time ago, he's still influencing Youngsters in their way of approaching music, though they think they're inventing something brand new, or at least miles apart from what the old dinosaurs in the Stones did. He, among a few others, has somehow managed to live for more than 10 generations. That was impossible just a generation ago!

Each year more and more generations pop up. After the hippie-generation, we've had the punk-generation, the disco-generation, the break-dance-generation, the hip hop-generation etc. At one point it got so hard coming up with new names, they simply decided to name them by the alphabet - Generation X, Generation Y and so on. (I've never understood why they didn't start with A? Now they'll run out of letters pretty soon.) I guess it's just a matter of time before we'll see names like Generation G3+L*10e-4. Within the computer business, they say a new generation appears every 18th month. This high rate development is reflected all throughout society today, and often it has a severe impact on our daily lives. It causes setbacks no one ever could dream of. Generations seem to collide. For instance, if you're a 19-year-old boy, dating a 17-year-old girl, you should be ashamed of yourself! She's at least 2 generations younger than you are! Even in the eyes of my open-minded generation that's considered being way out of line!

The development is going so fast, it's starting to threaten the laws of physics. If it speeds up just a little bit more, we'll (according to Einstein) reach the point where time starts going backwards, and the latest, hottest band entering the jam band scene will find themselves being an important influence to Glenn Miller's Big Band. Just imagine the side effects this will have on the evolution of modern music!

Even one-hit-wonders will manage to survive the entire estimated lifetime of (at least) one generation. It'll be most annoying having to listen to that song for such a long time… especially since one-hit-wonders stay one-hit-wonders for very obvious reasons.

Since the modern, western, industrialized world began to take shape, it has become more and more difficult for different generations to understand each other. When thinking about the tendencies presented above, it stands clear that we - at the starting point of the "communicative information society" - are going nowhere but straight towards a massive communicational breakdown - and not even the fastest Internet-connection in the world can change that! Imagine trying to get anything done at work or in school with up to 20 generations in the same room! Hello! A wise choice of career would be "trans-generational coordinator" or something similar to that.

From a biological point of view, we're up for a disaster as well. It's no secret that the risk of genetic mutations increases dramatically when the evolutionary process gets out of hand. As the average lifetime of a generation gets shorter, and new generations emerge faster, there'll be no room for a controlled natural selection. A lot of tilted genes will slip through the safety net. We can already see signs of this within the jam band scene. Take the Ominous Seapods for instance. Here we have a band apparently consisting of a bunch of freaks instead of humans. (Rumor says some of them even are about to grow extra heads, turning themselves into Zaphod Beeblebrox look-alikes. Next time you go to a show, be sure to bring a towel and a copy of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", because you'll never know where you'll end up!)

But isn't this the beauty of it all - the high rate development and the fact that we haven't got a slightest clue about where we're going to end up? In the end it grants us the opportunity to chose from an, at every chosen point expanding, smorgasbord of options (good as well as bad ones). Even genetic mutations are essential for life as we know it. Who knows, without them we could still have been tiny vegetables with nothing better to do than wait for the next rain-season, and that would have been a major drag, now wouldn't it!