XPLisset Archives: Lost Tapes
Every Generation Kills Its Parents
This is a Lost Tape. I dropped it a little over a month ago when I had about 3 subscribers and it got a total of thirteen views. I didn’t even have a proper thumbnail. The timing may have been off. The point wasn’t.
Texas is showing you the play right now. When power wants you quiet, it does not argue. It turns the volume down. It redraws the map until your voice sounds like static. Gerrymandering isn’t debate. It’s erasure. Same move the industry pulled on Michael. Keep the silhouette. Kill the sound.
I wrote “Every Generation Kills It’s Parents” after hours and hours of driving and realizing the radio had memory loss. No “Human Nature.” No “Billie Jean.” Just silence where a whole era used to live. That feeling matches this political moment. They keep the pageantry. They erase the witnesses. If they can ghost the King of Pop, they can ghost your district.
Read this with Texas in your ear. Hear how erasure works in culture, then watch how it works in law. It’s the same algorithm with different packaging.
If this hits you making you feel some kinda way, pull up. Share it with one friend who knows a Michael line by heart. If you want this work to keep cutting through the noise, become a paid subscriber and keep the lights on:
Now roll the tape.
The Day Michael Disappeared
I drive for a living.
And you learn things on the road you can’t get from a podcast or a phone screen. Patterns. Absences.
That’s how I noticed it.
A week went by. Then another. I was in and out of different cities, flipping through R&B, urban AC, old school playlists. You know what I didn’t hear?
Not once?
Michael.
No “Human Nature.” No “Don’t Stop.” No “Billie Jean.”
The King of Pop was gone from the airwaves like a body they buried without a funeral.
It messed me up more than I expected.
Because when I was coming up, Michael was ambient. He was everywhere. He was in grocery stores, graduation cookouts, white weddings, Black funerals.
He wasn’t just played. He was present. A kind of sonic citizenship. An ancestral echo with a glittery glove.
But now?
Silence.
And sure, the industry still runs on his blueprint. Neo. Usher. Chris Brown. K-pop.
They moonwalk through borrowed moves and borrowed melodies, all cut from MJ’s cloth.
But the cloth don’t talk.
They borrowed the rhythm but not the soul.
They inherited the flash but not the fire.
If they can forget Michael, what chance do the rest of us have?
The Slow Death of Memory
Time doesn’t announce itself. It creeps.
At first, it’s just a vibe shift. Your friends stop calling as much. You go back to your old neighborhood and the street feels… quieter. Not dangerous. Just emptied. The block you used to run barefoot with your cousins now feels like it’s waiting for a reboot.
Then you catch yourself.
The music you used to blast? Gone.
Your childhood friend’s number? Doesn’t work.
Your parents, the ones who used to lift you like you were light as air, now ask you to carry the groceries. Or open a jar.
And then it hits you: time isn’t just passing it’s moving furniture in your life.
It’s not cruel. But it ain’t kind either. It edits.
First your toys.
Then your friends.
Then your rhythms.
And one day you realize that it’s not just people disappearing. It’s witnesses to your story.
There’s no one left who remembers that summer, that inside joke, that mixtape.
And when the witnesses go, the story starts to feel like a dream you’re not sure you had.
That’s when I started to think… maybe this isn’t just aging.
Maybe this is pattern.
And that’s when I found a book entitled The Fourth Turning.
Ronnie Laws’ “Every Generation” The Movie We Keep Remaking
The first time I really listened to “Every Generation,” I thought it was just smooth jazz for grown folks. Something you sip brown liquor to while the kids are asleep. Sax, synth, groove to make it all clean nostalgia.
But one day I wasn’t just vibing. I was hearing.
“Every generation of our lives reflects a movie scene often more than twice…”
That line stopped me cold.
Because that ain’t just poetry. That’s a curse.
We’re not just repeating history. We’re trapped in reruns. The sets change. The actors get younger. But the plot? The plot never dies.
Ronnie wasn’t serenading us. He was warning us.
“Child is born to live within the master plan…”
We’re born into systems we didn’t design. Systems consisting of economic scripts, racial scripts, family scripts. We’re cast in roles we didn’t audition for.
“Boy grows up, leaves his home to be a man…”
Rite of passage? Or induction into a world that already expects your failure? Already priced in your burnout?
“Time will make us change, nothing stays the same.
A fool gets stung, hides his heart and plays the game…”
That’s grown-man wisdom wrapped in melody. That’s survival under capitalism, patriarchy, racial gaslight.
And every generation thinks they’re the one who will break the cycle.
Start fresh.
Be free.
But Ronnie’s refrain is relentless:
“Every generation of our lives reflects a movie scene often more than twice…”
We’re not new. We’re just next.
He gave us the trailer, and we clapped to the beat never realizing we were clapping for our own sequel.
Enter Neil Howe — The 80-Year American Death Spiral
I used to think time was just linear.
You grow up, grow old, maybe even a little fat, and try not to grow bitter.
But then I read The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe and it hit me:
We’re not aging. We’re orbiting.
According to Howe’s framework, American history moves in 80 year cycles, like seasons. Four “Turnings.” Four phases of national mood. Each shaped by and shaping a different generation.
The final season is always the most violent.
It’s called the Fourth Turning—the winter.
A time of unraveling, chaos, and institutional collapse.
And every time it hits, the country doesn’t just evolve. It breaks.
The Cycles They Tracked:
1780s – The American Revolution
→ Killed the monarchy. Built a republic.1860s – The Civil War
→ Killed the idea of compromise. Tore the nation in two.1940s – The Great Depression & WWII
→ Killed laissez-faire. Birthed the New Deal order.2020s – ???
→ We don’t even have a name for this one yet.
But you can feel it. Every day.
When I first read this book I could just barely wrap my head around it.
Couldn’t imagine another real uprising. A moment like the 1960s that would shake the country’s institutions to the ground.
But I see it now.
And the scariest part? It’s already begun.
When I First Read the Book… (2001)
I first read The Fourth Turning back in 2001.
Back then, it felt like theory.
Not prophecy. Not prediction. Just… an intriguing rhythm to history.
A pattern of collapses and rebirths that shaped the nation every 80 to 100 years.
The authors, William Strauss and Neil Howe made this wild claim:
That by the 2020s, America would enter a moment of profound crisis.
Institutions would crumble. Trust would evaporate.
And something would have to be rebuilt from the ashes.
But in 2001?
We’d just watched Bush steal an election and then cry unity at Ground Zero.
The culture was all red, white, and blue ribbon stickers.
People were rallying behind war, not questioning power.
And honestly? I couldn’t imagine this country facing another mass movement that would shake the pillars of power like the 1960s did.
It felt too soft. Too sedated. Too suburban and screen-addicted for real revolt.
But I kept the idea tucked away.
And by 2017, I knew it had already started.
That year, I got into a conversation with my father. He was a military man.
He looked at the rising tensions and said:
“You’d have to be crazy to go up against the U.S. military.”
And I told him, without blinking:
“This war won’t be fought with guns. It’ll be fought in court.”
I said, “We’re already in a civil war. The battlefield just moved.”
Not Gettysburg.
Not Selma.
But D.C. circuit courts. Grand juries. Constitutional brinksmanship.
People thought I was reaching.
But look at us now.
This isn’t prelude. This is the conflict.
And just like Howe predicted….it came for us in the Fourth.
Every Generation Kills Its Parents
Every Fourth Turning is framed as crisis. Collapse. Confrontation.
But under all that?
It’s a funeral.
Not for people, at least not at first. But for values. For worldviews. For the myths that raised the generation now being pushed aside.
Every Fourth Turning involves a kind of generational patricide aka a necessary betrayal of the beliefs that used to keep the world spinning.
Let’s run the tape:
🏛️
1780s – The American Revolution
The children of the colonies kill the King—literally and symbolically.
They reject monarchy, divine right, inherited power.
The Founding Fathers weren’t just starting a nation.
They were killing their father’s God.
⚔️
1860s – The Civil War
The sons of the Union tear it apart.
Lincoln didn’t preserve the Founders’ compromise—he burned it to build a new birth of freedom.
The Constitution wasn’t literal scripture anymore. It was an inspiration to a better Republic.
🌎
1940s – WWII and the New Deal
The Greatest Generation ditches individualism, isolationism, and bootstraps for central planning, global engagement, and massive government.
They kill the Roaring Twenties dream.
They choose order over freedom and won.
🌀
2020s – The Algorithmic Collapse
And now it’s us.
We’re not just burying our parents, no, we’re erasing their myths.
The Silent Generation built the postwar consensus.
The Boomers inherited it, expanded it, broke it, worshipped it.
And now?
Nobody believes in any of it.
Not the Dream.
Not the Market.
Not the Church.
Not the Constitution.
Not the algorithm.
We are killing the gods they gave us.
“Every generation of our lives reflects a movie scene… often more than twice.”
But this time?
We’re done watching reruns.
The Counter-Revolution Always Comes
Here’s the part they don’t put in history books until 50 years too late:
Every revolution gets a counter.
The moment something new is born, there’s already something old sharpening its knives.
It’s not just backlash. It’s choreography. It’s ritual.
Every generation kills its parents.
But the parents don’t stay dead.
They come back—not as people, but as policies, platforms, and nostalgia.
Wearing flags. Quoting scripture. Selling “greatness.”
Let’s trace the loop.
🇺🇸
After the American Revolution…
You get the U.S. Constitution.
Yes, it unified a fractured country but it also re-centralized power into the hands of elite white men.
The same class who’d just spent a decade preaching liberty from tyranny.
The revolution said “All men are created equal.”
The counter said, “Sure—but not you.”
⚖️
After the Civil War…
Emancipation gave way to the Great Compromise of 1877—pulling federal troops out of the South.
Reconstruction collapsed overnight.
Then came Plessy v. Ferguson.
Then came Jim Crow.
The war killed slavery.
The counter built a cage next to its grave.
🎖️
After World War II…
The GI Generation built a new world order with massive government, suburban peace, white picket fences.
But by the 1960s, their children, the Boomers, rebelled.
Civil Rights. Anti-war. Feminism. Black Power. Stonewall.
They lit the match.
And then came the 1980s…the counter.
Disco smothered protest.
Wall Street replaced Woodstock.
And Ronald Reagan said,
“It’s morning in America.”
But that sunrise? Hell, it was just the spotlight shifting away from the unfinished revolution.
🌀
And today…
MAGA isn’t the revolution.
It’s the counter.
It’s the past, screaming from the back row,
“Make me great again.”
It’s the last gasp of the Boomer dream trying to put the lid back on history.
Anti-woke. Anti-trans. Anti-Black.
Anti-anything that smells like the future.
They’re not building something.
They’re trying to resurrect something that never existed.
But here’s what history tells us:
The counter-revolution always comes. But it never wins.
It delays. Distracts. Destroys.
But it never survives the fire.
The Ghost in the Algorithm
What messes with me the most isn’t that Michael Jackson died.
It’s that the world acts like he never existed.
The greatest performer of the 20th century. He was the man who moonwalked across race, genre, language, and geography is now absent.
Not rare. Not occasional.
Absent.
I drive hours a day, flipping stations like a DJ in exile.
And for weeks, sometimes months I didn’t get to hear no “Human Nature.”
No “Rock With You.”
No “PYT.”
Nothing.
The man who was the culture has been reduced to a TikTok soundbite or a punchline about surgeries and scandals.
And yet… his fingerprints are everywhere.
Every other R&B singer out here doing MJ cosplay.
Neo. Chris Brown. Justin Timberlake. The Weeknd. Hell, even K-pop.
They all move like him. Sing like him. Pose like him.
But somehow, the algorithm skips the source.
They borrowed the rhythm.
They hijacked the silhouette.
But they buried the soul.
This ain’t just about Michael.
This is about the pattern.
This country has mastered the art of remixing Black genius while erasing Black memory.
We create the melody and then they commodify it.
We make the blueprint and they white-label the brand.
And the algorithm? It don’t care.
It doesn’t remember who started the song.
It just plays what’s most palatable.
Michael is gone from the radio, but his shadow is on every stage.
They kept the glove. They killed the man.
That’s the ghost I hear when I drive.
Not silence, no, erasure.
We’re In the Fog, Not the Finale
Let’s be clear:
January 6th wasn’t the revolution.
It was a tantrum.
A failed dress rehearsal for a future these people know they don’t belong in.
They didn’t storm the Capitol to build something.
They stormed it because they can feel the empire slipping.
That wasn’t courage. It was panic in cosplay.
MAGA is not the next phase of history.
It’s the counter to the next phase.
The reaction.
The backlash.
The desperate attempt to rewind a culture that’s already hit delete.
They’re not rising. They’re retreating into the myth.
Clinging to a dream that never loved us.
Trying to resurrect 1957 while the world is coding in 3D and speaking in algorithm.
But don’t get it twisted. This fog we’re in?
It’s not the end. It’s the space between tracks.
It’s the moment between collapse and creation.
It’s when the old story’s volume fades, but the new story hasn’t dropped yet.
And if you listen closely, the silence is full of tension.
Like a stage before the curtain rises.
Like a crowd holding its breath.
What’s coming next won’t be disco. Won’t be Reagan. Won’t be MAGA 2.0.
It’ll be something we don’t have language for yet.
A restructuring. Not a return.
A redefinition and not a remix.
“The Movie Scene, Often More Than Twice”
“Every generation of our lives reflects a movie scene… often more than twice.”
That line has been echoing in my head since the first time I really heard it.
Ronnie Laws wasn’t giving us background music.
He was preaching.
He was warning us.
And we didn’t listen.
We were too busy vibing.
Two-stepping at weddings.
Swaying at brunch.
Nodding through holiday cookouts.
The melody was smooth—but the message was brutal:
You’ve been here before.
You’ve seen this act.
You’ve heard this lie.
You’ve watched this country change just enough to make you think it won’t snap back.
But it always does.
We keep filming the same scene with different cameras.
We keep telling ourselves this time is different, when really it’s just remastered.
We bury the last generation’s dream and call it progress.
Then someone comes along and digs it up like it’s buried treasure.
And yet—here’s the thing that keeps me going:
Maybe this time we stop the cycle.
Maybe this time we write a whole new script.
Maybe this time we don’t just remix the soundtrack—we change the rhythm.
Because if you’ve lived long enough to recognize the rerun,
then you’ve lived long enough to help break the loop.
Give it a name.
Call it what it is.
Write it down.
Speak it out loud.
Before the next scene starts filming.