I’ve been thinking about generations more lately, inspired both by Jeff Lester talking about how Generation X is only ever going to have one U.S. President it produced — Barack Obama, because everyone that followed was from the Boomer generation, and once they’re gone, the next wave will likely be Millennials — and reading a piece about Millennials and their lack of cultural footprint in the grand scheme of things.
I remember reading Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Copeland when I was in my first year of art school. At the time, even back then, it felt as if I was catching up on some big cultural touchstone that wasn’t about me and mine, but instead a historical document about That Which Had Come Before. That was back in 1993, when the book was just two years old, but the fact remains: Generation X, as a concept, felt like something that was for people older than me.
I’ve struggled with that in the years since. I get that I’m officially Generation X — I was born in 1974, and according to the internet, Generation X encompasses people born between 1965 and 1980 — but I’ve always secretly believed that I was part of some secret mid-generation that came of age in the mid-1990s and belongs between Gen X and Millennials. Is this because I’m British and Britpop ruined my cultural sensibilities to that heavy a degree? Potentially; Copeland’s Generation X feels such a particularly American book that the entire name feels like it belongs to Americans who listened to Nirvana and Pavement and not gangly, awkward British folk who liked Pulp and Blur and owned a Northern Uproar single or two. (A depressing aside: if there was that secret mid-generation for British folk my age, we’d almost certainly be called the Oasis Generation or something like that. Insert a heavy sigh here.)
I feel as if, despite talk of Gen X and Boomers, it wasn’t until Millennials started having a cultural voice that the idea of generational shift became mainstream — all of which makes it more ironic to see the argument that Millennials are the first generation to lack a cultural identity that’s unique to them, or to create music or literature or art that is wholly original and not a remix of what came before. The piece I was reading about this argued that American Millennials’ most memorable aesthetic should be described as “Lumberjackcore,” which feels at once fitting — the mustaches! The obsession with authenticity as an attainable concept that can be adopted! — and the most cruel put-down.
Generation X, by contrast, gave the world techno and raves and… is that it? Perhaps when you look at everything in this manner, it’s the finest perspective to have to fight off the common wisdom: everyone might think the Boomers were squares who ruined it for everyone else, but they were the hippies and the punks. You don’t get hip-hop if it wasn’t for the Boomers, either. Food for thought, perhaps.