From Wikipedia, everyone's favourite online encyclopedia:
Generation X is a term used to group people born after the post-World War II increase in birth rates (the Baby Boom), from roughly 1965 to 1980. While 1965 remains a commonly recognized first birth year for Generation X, other proposed ranges include: the late 1950s and 1960s, 1968 to 1979, 1964 to 1980, or 1961 to 1981.
Generation Y, sometimes referred to as "Millennials" or "Net Generation" is the group of people born anywhere between the second half of the 1970's and anywhere from the mid 1990s to around the year 2000, depending on the source.
I was born on November 7th, 1979. When I think of Generation X in active context, I think of the 1990's from about 1992-1997, when I was 12-17 years old and enjoyed the popularity of grunge music and alternative pop. When I think of Generation Y's beginnings, I think of the rise in popularity of boy bands, young female pop singers and rap metal. I think of the generational split in terms of the dramatic change in popular music, brought about by the death of Kurt Cobain.
Now. What am I? I've often defined myself as having been born at the tail end of Generation X. I've always felt as though I WANTED to be a part but was never ACTUALLY a part of the generation that now runs or is about to run things in North America. When I was 14, I watched men and women in their 20's on my television set with envy and a sense of personal identification. As a teenager I armed myself with a drive to CHANGE the way the world was, keeping myself forever open to the new, in spite of the fact that I really had no idea how the world had been working, nor what was wrong with the way it was working.
The more I look back at the 90's in retrospect, the more I think I understand. Bill Clinton was elected the American president in 1992 after 12 years of a Republican White House. America was coming out of a war and the youth had trouble understanding exactly what they were inheriting out of the capitalist consumer focus of the 80's. I remember it most in the music. Without knowing anything about politics or money, I tapped into the unabashed purity of chord changes and screams from shaggy-haired singers. For a few years I felt in perfect sync with the voices and attitudes I saw in Much Music interviews.
But Gen X grew up just before I did, leaving me to flounder in my late teens and early twenties in the swill of modern pop. I was so incredibly bitter about the change. How DARE these new bands and singers and attitudes replace what had been such a perfect expression of soul-spoken angst and a willingness to establish a better order of things? After a while I understood. It's all marketing. It's always been about what sells. I was sold the identity I adopted as a young Gen X-er riding the tip of the whipcrack, and I told myself it was a lucky coincidence that the Kool-Aid I drank was laced with honesty and sincerity.
I was too young to help define Generation X, and I canceled out my association with Generation Y by despising its contributions to popular culture. I guess the conclusion here is that even defining generations themselves is up to marketing firms. They're demographics. But dammit, I've always wanted to be a part of one. I've wanted to make decisions that would change the world for the better. I've wanted to shoulder the responsibility of a society. I've wanted to turn to others and point out the mistakes of our predecessors so that they wouldn't be repeated.
Maybe the problem is that "predecessors" have turned into last year's leader instead of last generation's. My old man is right. Things move quickly these days, maybe too quickly. They slip through your grasp, and no one can quite explain who they are as a result. I know I can't.
2 comments:
Steve and I used to talk about this quite a bit.
The way I see it is that Generation X and Generation Y are two (siiiiiiigh, here we go) overarching metanarratives that don't really apply to us, where us is anyone who doesn't truly identify with X or Y. X is often associated with certain 'moments' or (if I may get Derridian) 'events' in time that I personally feel that I was too young to acknowledge and/or appreciate, and Y seems to lay claim to some kind of affinity of an echo of these 'events'-- for example the 1980s 'chic' we saw very recently, which has cross-bred with formerly ironclad hip-hop culture and turned into some kind of mutant splinter-culture that I dare not explore further.
I agree that Generation Y's contribution(s) to popular culture are tepid at best, and I too refuse to associate myself with this Generation Y business; it seems cheap and disposable. Dollar store disco balls and vice do/don't as a means for defining oneself. But I think there's more to it than that.
With the advent of internet technologies allowing many people to connect, share ideas, cross-pollinate, 'research' other ideas, whathaveyou, we are experiencing some kind of neo-tribalism-- where your class/caste/culture isn't really related to where you are, but who you are with... like a collective emergence. The mythos of X are what the mythological 'Y' aspires to recreate, only through the kaleidoscope of selective memory.
The 'Y' generation is really a false label arbitrarily applied to what follows that which was seen as a unified cultural instant, whether or not it actually happened is almost beside the point. Generation X, whatever that was, was seen as a 'modernized' recreation of "The Sixties", which, again, was a lot more complicated than people think.
Really X and Y are both myths that people chase to define something. I personally don't really subscribe to the idea that people can be easily broken into categories by age, even though I'm guilty of throwing the term 'kinderhipster' around referring to anyone dressing 'like a hipster' in between the ages of 15-19, in my own false attempt to put a divide between "US" and "THEM"; but who are we? What makes the "US" so different from the "THEM"?
I could argue in circles for hours about this... it's kind of a Zen koan, and this is part of the reason I associate so closely with Lyotard's ideas about postmodernity and postmodernism. His declaration about cultural ideas are very liberating, where you don't HAVE to have a unified idea... the pastiche/collage/mosaic/whatever you want to call it doesn't have an arche or telos, and it doesn't have to. Everything is atellic and evolving, and it moves fast, yes, but look at yourself and look at how much (or how little) you changed in parallel motion. Nothing is truly static.
Did I go off topic?
WotD: chant (yes, really, no clever definition today)
The advent of Internet technologies also accomplishes two things with regard to applying post Gen-X identity: people have the potential to exist as hyper-individualized and anonymous simultaneously, and they have the potential to claim authority while heretofore having no credit to claim it. I think that creates a system of what seems to be new ideas constantly generating yet are in reality the same ideas running full circle over and over. Infinite irony. Endless satire, in which what is being satirized may only be the most base and ridiculous things imaginable to human society.
It's a matter of opinion, of course, but think about all the things that are funny and entertaining to modern audiences that are not really especially funny or entertaining. Paris Hilton. Reality television. The American president. The enjoyment of these entertaining forms, what makes them entertaining, is the culture's hunger to mock them, and they can't mock them unless they are presented purely to the culture through old structures: the sitcom, the photo op, the press conference. These things are satirized through a still relatively new structure: the Internet. It completely collapses the myths that we formerly regarded as vital to the culture's identification. And you know what? That's postmodernism's fault.
You could argue about it being positive or negative, but I don't think it's particularly positive. People constantly mistake the hollow authority they assume online for one with substance, all the while believing they are making change instead of fueling the Internet's wasted potential. The other guy in an online forum isn't the mind a person should be changing. Paris Hilton is not what a person should be changing minds about. Paris Hilton should not be on the mind.
To your point: rather than recreate the mythos of X, Y wears the X mythos like a comic mask, dragging it down to the level of farce. The problem for the last ten years is that there's been nothing behind the mask. That's what infuriates me about the so-called Gen-Y. At least Gen-X took it upon themselves to decentralize everything they were being spoonfed by popular culture, even if that ethos was commercialized in turn. All Gen-Y does is play in the rubble, not giving a shit about building new cities.
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