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New York Times Publishes Homage to The Coolest Generation
- Thread starter Rad Bandolar
- Start date
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Late Xer checking in (I often count as a stupid "xennial").
Anyway, my Prototypical Gen X moment: Under the Bridge, November Rain, Nuthin but a G thang, and Smells Like Teen Spirit could all be seen on the same day on MTV, in between episodes of The Real World featuring Pedro and Puck.
Anyway, my Prototypical Gen X moment: Under the Bridge, November Rain, Nuthin but a G thang, and Smells Like Teen Spirit could all be seen on the same day on MTV, in between episodes of The Real World featuring Pedro and Puck.
We gave you the internet so you could lift the world through connected enlightenment and instead you rediscovered all the stupidity past generations had already buried in a pit of shame starting with libertarianism and ending with destroying the US with voting in Donald Trump because Pepe.
Harsh but fair.
(Boomers gave us the internet, X gave us Facebook if you count Zuck as one although maybe he's more of a Xennial, 1984)
The people who made Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are all Xers.
Lowtax of SomethingAwful was X, but moot of 4chan was a millennial (1988).
Most of the worst content producers out there are probably millennials though.
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Zuckerberg isn't an X'er. He was born in the '80s. Shit, the mid-'80s. He was born smack dab in the middle of the Reagan Era. He was born after Return of the Jedi. That motherfucker was 4 when Straight Outta Compton came out. By the time he was old enough to realize he may never possess human emotions, Run DMC was a nostalgia act.
Not everybody gets to be in the cool kids club, especially not creepy Commander Data there.
Twitter was founded by core X'ers though, so...yeah.
Lies.
Anyways, born in '81 but I've always felt like an X'er.
We didn't need the internet, we needed guidance in this crappy world you guys failed to take for yourselves because you were too cool for school to stand up to boomers. What we got was a shitty older brother who gave us bath salts to deal with our parents' crumbling marriage.
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Probably the early '80s.
The funny thing is that when consumer sales companies decided they needed a way to identify and commodify twentysomethings in the early '90s, and this whole X thing got off the ground, they targeted people born roughly between '64-'74. The reasoning was simple: these new consumers were Definitely Not Boomers, and they also happened to be people in their early 20s entering the workforce and ready to buy shit, so a market demographic dressed-up as a New Generation was born.
As these things often go, the window for this demographic grew to encompass everyone else born in the '70s, as people who were Definitely Not Boomers kept entering their 20s, but the problem remained: there weren't that many of them compared to the Boomers. A lot of people lost a lot of sleep trying to figure out how to get these disaffected fuckers to buy shit. But the problem was about to solve itself.
You could see the flip happen in real time during the '90s. Looking back, I put the flip when the Spice Girls came out. But wherever you place the marker, there was a point sometime in '95-'96 when the overall vibe changed from a focus on stripped-down authenticity, diminished expectations, and pragmatism to bright, bombastic, larger-than-life spectacle. People started buying shit.
Some sharp people quickly figured out that wasting time on a bunch of dour fuckers wasn't really ever going to pay off, because there just wasn't that many of them. But get this -- there's suddenly a whole bunch of teenagers who have no memory of the '70s malaise. They have hazy, but favorable memories of the Reagan Era. They were too young to be affected by the Black Friday recession. There's tens of millions of them and they're going to keep coming and growing for the foreseeable future. With a great economy, they're super easy to market to and they're more than willing to buy shit and live large. And so
The weird thing with Millennials is that the demo window kept growing way past any reasonable date. A "generation" is really just marketing shorthand for "people in their 20s" (and maybe teenagers). It's become so ridiculous that just about everyone's a Millennial or a Boomer at this point. It was a fucking great brand, and people have a really hard time letting go of such a successful campaign, which is why I think there really hasn't been a focus on getting a good label and supposed "identity" for the current crop of young shits running around. How do you follow-up one of the most successful marketing labels of all time? Gen Z? Sounds kind of lame.
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I'm 35 and an older millennial. My oldest sibling is late Gen X, my middle sibling is the earliest millennial, just after gen X. Had some older cousins who were Gen X.
I grew up exposed mostly to gen x stuff because my older siblings controlled the TV, controlled what movies we watched and music we listened to, but that was all late-stage gen X transitioning to millennial... Pearl Jam, grunge, Clueless, Beverly Hills, Adventures in Baby Sitting, Labrynthe, fraggle rock, Real World. The mall was still a big concept when I was a kid because when I was ~6 it was going with my mom to pick my sister up from the mall, where she'd be hanging outside the Gap and wherever else.
Nothing against Gen X'ers. I think you can all be described by the most famous of you. So, all of ya'll are somewhere between Pete Buttigieg and Elon Musk.
I grew up exposed mostly to gen x stuff because my older siblings controlled the TV, controlled what movies we watched and music we listened to, but that was all late-stage gen X transitioning to millennial... Pearl Jam, grunge, Clueless, Beverly Hills, Adventures in Baby Sitting, Labrynthe, fraggle rock, Real World. The mall was still a big concept when I was a kid because when I was ~6 it was going with my mom to pick my sister up from the mall, where she'd be hanging outside the Gap and wherever else.
Nothing against Gen X'ers. I think you can all be described by the most famous of you. So, all of ya'll are somewhere between Pete Buttigieg and Elon Musk.
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Beto O'Rourke and I have a lot in common, except for the whole running for President thing. When I heard someone from the scene was running for President, and wasn't a techno-anarchist/libertarian, I was legit shocked.
And just like an X'er, he made a quick splash before quickly fading away.
agreed. fuck Zuck. He's a millenial and probably even a generation Z'er.
That article was totally right about the TV in 70s. We watched reruns of 50s and 60s shit and liked it because we had like 3 channels and nothing else on. 70s rock was awesome though. So were 80s movies.
It was definitely a simpler time. But raising teenagers now, they are so much better informed than we were. My 18 YO is much smarter about the world than I was. I was a clueless fuck well into my 20s.
It was definitely a simpler time. But raising teenagers now, they are so much better informed than we were. My 18 YO is much smarter about the world than I was. I was a clueless fuck well into my 20s.
I can't hear you over the sound of my house, my job, and my dope 90s hip hop.
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