Statler and Waldorf are hotels!? Complexity of Culture.

My sister and I play a little game.  One of us will text the other a couple of lines from a song and the other will respond with the following lines.  This morning my sister texted a few lines from the Muppet Show Theme, which of course got the song in my head.  I started thinking of the two curmudgeon characters who are named Statler and Waldorf who chant “why do we always come here, I guess we’ll never know, it’s like a kind of torture to have to watch the show.”  But this got me to thinking about culture and context.  I was in elementary school and living in New Mexico when the Muppet Show was in its prime.  It wasn’t until I was an adult that I discovered the two were named after prominent New York hotels (Statler Hilton and Waldorf-Astoria).  In my mind the annoying but lovable puppets came first. 

Pop Culture and Timelines

The other day my husband asked me, “did you know that there is a country singer that is singing Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car?’”  I did.  I had heard it recently and it caused to me question my own knowledge about the origins of the song for a moment.  Because I’ve had experiences of hearing the cover of a song for the first time, and then learning later that the song has much older origins.  I’ve thought about this before as well.  A few years ago, I discovered that my kids liked a Marty Robbins’ song, “Big Iron.” Because they had heard it on the video game FallOut.  I pulled up the song on Spotify and we enjoyed it.  It is a family connection touch point.  I knew the song from growing and listening to the album when my parents played it.  (My sister knows it too, it will come up in our text game sometimes)  It was one of the common things my parents had when they met, they both owned a copy of Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs album. 

I don’t really know what my parents’ initial point of contact with the song was.  Mine was part of the mundane background of my childhood.  And my kids’ was in the video game.  So, we all have different memories tied to the song.  My Dad has a very eclectic musical taste and every Saturday he would play the folk music show on the local PBS radio station.  So, my sister and I, due to this exposure and our own types of neurodivergence, have these vast internal databases of obscure song lyrics.  My sister’s partner has accused her of making up songs when she pulls up one of these gems. 

Culture is shared and unique, so is neurotype.

And here’s the point.  Or part of it…  My sister and her partner actually met in middle school and then reconnected much later.  So, he comes from roughly the same cultural experiences that we do—except he doesn’t.   His cultural experiences from his family of origin (FOO which is a fancy term therapists use to talk about the family a person grew up in) are very different from our FOO experiences.  This is a part of brain differences that sometimes get sidelined.  Brain structures are created by a combination of genetic predispositions and developmental experiences.  And every experience we have changes our brains at least a tiny bit, even though our brains tend to have a fairly strong genetic blueprint.   The way our brains have developed is called our neurotype.  Even people who get classified as “neurotypical” (meaning they fall into the majority portion of a bell curve) have individual brains.  They just tend to be more like each other.  Neurotypical and neurodivergent describe categories of neurotype, and while some neurotypes are very similar to each other (neurotypical) and some have greater differences (neurodivergent) each brain is unique.

But I’m talking about culture rather than the nature/nurture issue.  The word culture, in its broadest sense means shared values, meanings and experiences.  I have noticed there is a great deal of diversity within broader categories of culture.  When I look at the cultural influences on myself, I grew up in the United States which has a certain set of cultural influences.  But I grew up in the Southwest region of the US, which has a set of cultural influences that are modified from those of the greater US.  New Mexico has its own set of cultural flavors (which the state is very proud of! Green chiles must be roasted.)  I grew up in the central portion of the state, in a semi-rural area that is close to a large urban center.  I went to high School in Albuquerque but lived in the East Mountains, giving me the designation as a “mountain kid.”  In general, and at that time, the East Mountains attracted a slightly more bohemian and artistic population and tended to be slightly more neurodivergent than the population of the city.  I also had access to more rural experiences such as horses and 4H.  And then there is my FOO: with my father a native who grew up in Albuquerque and my mother who grew up in Michigan, (and their own FOO influences).  So that is my biological and developmental cultural pedigree.  Even growing up in the same family at roughly the same time, my sister and I are different from each other. 

Cultural Timelines and generations, we need to learn from each other.

And then there is my generational pedigree.  The US I grew up in was the US of the 1970s, 80s and 90s.  The cultural milieu was one of recovery and backlash from the cultural upheaval of the 60s and the economic upheaval of the 70s.  And everything I encountered, especially in pop-culture was time stamped.  Tracy Chapman released “Fast Car” in 1988.  Country Singer, Luke Combs, released his cover in 2023.  In an article in Today, Combs is quoted talking about his own memories with his father attached to the song.  The article also goes into the controversy about the cover and whether racial and intersectional identity conversations are appropriate for this situation.  The openings and the shutdowns of conversations about race, gender and sexual orientation identity are part of the current cultural environment.  These topics seems normal to Gen Z and sometimes shocking to us Gen Xers.  I have some quite interesting conversations with my Gen Z kids.

And there is a lot of talk out there about how different the Millennials and Gen Z are from previous generations.  But all generations have their differences based on the shared cultural experiences they have had.  This is not to say that we can’t learn from each other, but to point out that we need to learn from each other.   And to not get stuck in our opinions like good old Statler and Waldorf.