We’ve Got the Beat—in Our Genes

We’ve Got the Beat—in Our Genes

Back when I was a mohawked teenager, my mother was horrified by the music that moved me. Dutiful flower child that she had been, merely mentioning The Dead Kennedys would cause her to weep. She had raised me on The Beatles; Peter, Paul and Mary; Bob Dylan; the soundtrack from Hair—and I repaid this education in free love by idolizing a band whose name made a sneering joke of one of her generation’s defining cultural ruptures. Nothing could have …