The NYT published a series of articles about Gen X, the Jan Brady of generations, today:
The first article, which I kind of feel is full of shit, but I get where it's coming from, especially this bit:
The bolded & underlined bit is one of the best observations in the article, because it's so true. We grew up in the shadow of the Boomers and their culture was basically our culture. Their music and nostalgia was so pervasive that even '80s TV shows featuring teenagers always had them dancing or having a big romantic moment set to a '60s song. The Wonder Years was Boomer nostalgia fuel. Oldies stations were prominent. Everything referenced Viet Nam, and Woodstock was apparently the most earth-shaking cultural event since the Sermon on the Mount. Boomer domination was so complete growing up that I'm nostalgic for another generation's nostalgia.
There's a great article about the recently-departed John Singleton, as well as snippets of prominent pop culture and events from back in the day:
And finally, because no one's ever written about it before, the music of the early-90s. This guy pretty much sums up why it appealed to me, especially in the wake of hair bands:
It's an article that dials-into why that particular brand of music and the style associated with it appealed so much to people who grew up working class: everyone looked like people we knew:
Oh yeah, and there's a quiz for the lamestains born after us to determine whether they're gnarly like us, or bogus Millennials. Because everyone likes an online quiz that doesn't reveal anything about yourself or the world around you, but it's fun, so whatever.
Like many things considered "cool," Gen X is pretty exclusive. You had to be born between 1965 and 1980 to get in to this gloomy, goofy club of forgotten middle children, and only about 65 million of us were. (Both boomers, at 75 million, and millennials, at 83 million, far outnumber us.)
The first article, which I kind of feel is full of shit, but I get where it's coming from, especially this bit:
We were never slackers
There it is, the Big Bang, the Generation X cliché from which all others were born. But where did "slacker" come from? The answer, in one sense, is obvious: from the 1991 film of the same name by Richard Linklater (also a boomer).
We preferred "Dazed and Confused," Mr. Linklater's celluloid Slurpee from 1993, because that was about high school students in 1976 — yes, boomers! — and for years we bought the lie that older people's culture mattered more than our own, just because there were more of them. Rootless cosmopolitans, we were told to look to the past for significance, so we did — to the Sinatra Rat Pack ("Swingers," 1996), to Kennedy-era Madison Avenue ("Mad Men," created by Matthew Weiner, b. 1965), to the male blow dryer era ("That '70s Show").
The bolded & underlined bit is one of the best observations in the article, because it's so true. We grew up in the shadow of the Boomers and their culture was basically our culture. Their music and nostalgia was so pervasive that even '80s TV shows featuring teenagers always had them dancing or having a big romantic moment set to a '60s song. The Wonder Years was Boomer nostalgia fuel. Oldies stations were prominent. Everything referenced Viet Nam, and Woodstock was apparently the most earth-shaking cultural event since the Sermon on the Mount. Boomer domination was so complete growing up that I'm nostalgic for another generation's nostalgia.
There's a great article about the recently-departed John Singleton, as well as snippets of prominent pop culture and events from back in the day:
We all remember sitting in front of a TV wheeled in by the AV department in 1986, the whole class looking on in rapt anticipation for the 73 seconds of flight before the Challenger exploded. Thanks to Ben Lerner's novel "10:04," we now know most of us couldn't possibly have watched it live. The broadcast network footage was only shown after the fact. (CNN, then in comparatively few households and schools, was the sole network to carry the launch and explosion live.)
But almost any Gen X-er can still describe the shape of that cloud from memory because it was replayed so many times: the large white almost cumulonimbus center mass, with the two streamers from the solid rocket boosters flaming off into the sky, the seven passengers no more.
Millennials, who came of age with the Sept. 11 attacks and the Great Recession, are anxious, which may explain the current CBD craze. Generation X, who came of age eating microwaved burritos and watching "Gomer Pyle" reruns while Mom and Dad were at the office, were depressed.
Enter Eli Lilly's magical green-and-white pill, which was introduced in 1986, but became almost as defining to the gloomy 1990s as that other pill — "the pill" — was to the sexually liberated 1960s. Elizabeth Wurtzel and loads of other 20-somethings became citizens of Prozac Nation.
And finally, because no one's ever written about it before, the music of the early-90s. This guy pretty much sums up why it appealed to me, especially in the wake of hair bands:
More than its fresh sound — a fusing of metal with punk — more than articulating a generation's disillusionment with capitalist culture, the appeal of grunge, for me, was this: It reflected and ennobled the blue-collar world I knew...
The male rock stars who immediately preceded these grunge heroes were glamorous creatures in zebra-print spandex, like Bret Michaels, the Poison frontman. Mr. Michaels was actually another blue-collar boy (from central Pennsylvania, no less), but he had ditched the heartland for West Hollywood, and now he had his hair professionally peroxided.
The ugly cardigans and ratty Army jackets of grunge were a costume, too, of course, but it could be gotten cheaply at a thrift store. The dour face came even cheaper — free with adolescence.
It was strange indeed to ultimately see upper-income suburban kids and runway models dressed like lumberjacks and truckers, as seen on the latter in the Perry Ellis Spring 1993 collection and the December '92 pages of Vogue. It was the first (and only) time my relatives and neighbors were objects of class envy.
It's an article that dials-into why that particular brand of music and the style associated with it appealed so much to people who grew up working class: everyone looked like people we knew:
As someone growing up in a community hollowed out by dying industry, I'd been in those apartments; I knew those guys. And seeing recognizable versions of them on MTV made my friends and me feel proud.
Here were people I could relate to, and I wonder if some of that same sense of your own life suddenly writ large suffused kids in south Los Angeles when, also in 1992, Dr. Dre's album "The Chronic" gave shout-outs to South Central and the Slauson Swap Meet. Those songs also emerged from an economically depressed area and put it on the cultural map.
Oh yeah, and there's a quiz for the lamestains born after us to determine whether they're gnarly like us, or bogus Millennials. Because everyone likes an online quiz that doesn't reveal anything about yourself or the world around you, but it's fun, so whatever.