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Actually, Gen X Did Sell Out, Invent All Things Millennial, and Cause Actually, Gen X Did Sell Out, Invent All Things Millennial, and Cau... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/style/gen-x-millenials.html Actually, Gen X Did Sell Out, Invent All Things Millennial, and Cause Everything Else That’s Great and Awful Gen X set the precedent for today’s social justice warriors and capitalist super- soldiers. Enjoy, and also, sorry! By Alex Williams May 14, 2019 What is an X? An empty set, a place-holder, a nothing that fills a void until an actual something comes along. For the members of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, that was never us. “They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own,” wrote Time magazine in a 1990 cover story called “20-something” that marked our debut, as a class, on the national stage. “They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial. They hate yuppies, hippies and druggies. They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders.” Leave aside the fact that struggling 20-somethings of any era tend to sneer at luxury goods. At that point, the oldest members of Generation X were 25. No one really knew what we were. But someone apparently knew what we weren’t: dreamers, revolutionaries, world-changers, like the baby boomers before us. To the extent that we were defined, we were defined in the negative — the first generation in American history to be written off before it had a chance to begin. 1 of 22 6/7/19, 6:51 AM Actually, Gen X Did Sell Out, Invent All Things Millennial, and Cau... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/style/gen-x-millenials.html Now it’s been a quarter century since the clichés ossified. Here is another negative to chew on: What if everything we decided about Generation X turned out to be wrong? This generation is even smaller than it might appear There is one thing people do get right about America’s Generation X: There aren’t that many of us — roughly 65 million, according to recent data from the Census Bureau. Sandwiched between the change-the-world boomers (around 75 million) and the we-won’t-wait-for-change millennials (approximately 83 million), we were doomed to suffer a shared case of middle-child syndrome, an eight-figure-strong army of Jan Bradys. And our generation may be smaller than that. Only 41 percent of the people born during those years even consider themselves part of Generation X, according to one MetLife study. Most people I know who ever copped to X-ness were born in the later ’60s or early ’70s, a window of maybe eight years. (My wife was born in 1979 and has no idea who Fonzie is. Case closed.) Read more about the tech, music, style, books, rules, films and pills that scream Gen X. Our generation also showed a disturbing tendency to lose its leading lights due to untimely death. Boomers never got over losing Jimi, Janis, and Jim during a ten- month span of 1970 and 1971, but consider the Generation X icons who were snuffed out at an early age: Tupac Shakur, Jeff Buckley, Brandon Lee, Elliott Smith, Biggie Smalls, River Phoenix, Shannon Hoon, Aaliyah and a certain beloved flannel-clad rocker from Aberdeen, Wash., who has gotten enough ink in Generation X articles. It wasn’t just that our numbers were small. Our cultural moment was a blip. 2 of 22 6/7/19, 6:51 AM Actually, Gen X Did Sell Out, Invent All Things Millennial, and Cau... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/style/gen-x-millenials.html Boomers owned several decades of mass entertainment, and it was truly mass — from “Howdy Doody” in the 1950s to “The Big Chill” in the 1980s, with about 82 percent of the rock ’n’ roll that’s worth listening to between them. We don’t even have exclusive rights to our own name. Generation X was the title of 1964 book about mod-era British teenagers, a punk band from the 1970s featuring Billy Idol and satirical novel usually mistaken as a sociological treatise by Douglas Coupland — all boomers. The artifacts that branded Generation X as irony-obsessed iconoclasts scarfing antidepressants under a permanent Seattle-gray sky — think “Hunger Strike,” by Temple of the Dog, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s “Prozac Nation,” maybe “The Ben Stiller Show” doing a “Lassie” parody with Charles Manson as the dog — were niche to begin with, and were booted from the stage after maybe four years of the early ’90s. 3 of 22 6/7/19, 6:51 AM Actually, Gen X Did Sell Out, Invent All Things Millennial, and Cau... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/style/gen-x-millenials.html Elizabeth Wurtzel with her Prozac locket in 1991. Catherine McGann/Getty Images Grunge was on life support the moment the news media decided to call it “grunge” (to folks in the scene, it was still punk). It was given last rites in 1992, when Marc Jacobs unveiled his then-risible (now visionary?) “grunge” line that got him fired from Perry Ellis. And grunge was cremated, its ashes flushed down the Pike Place Market Starbucks toilet, that same year when the Styles section of this newspaper allowed itself to be hoaxed by a former Sub Pop records employee on its “Lexicon of Grunge,” serving up bogus mosh-pit lingo like “big bag of blotation” (drunk), “lamestain” (uncool person) and “swingin’ on the flippity flop” (hanging out). Oops! So it’s easy to decide that Gen X is culturally irrelevant — if you’re comfortable 4 of 22 6/7/19, 6:51 AM Actually, Gen X Did Sell Out, Invent All Things Millennial, and Cau... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/style/gen-x-millenials.html with the dangerous prospect of making sweeping conclusions about the identity, values and culture of millions of individuals from every imaginable background. Did the working-class class trans kid living in Tulsa, Okla., the Marine recruit from the South Bronx, the heiress in Rhode Island, and the surfing phenom in Huntington Beach, Calif., all groove on “Mystery Science Theater 3000” in 1992? Would it matter if they did? But to cede irrelevance, even after 25 years of reflection, would be to let the winners — the boomers, or maybe the millennials — write our history for us. Like bell bottoms, aviator shades and Birkenstocks, we have been wearing the clichés imposed by other generations since Zima was cool (Zima was never cool). And now, as our AARP cards begin to arrive in the mail, maybe, just maybe, it’s time to turn those clichés on our heads one by one? 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). “Slacker” featured a bunch of 20-something nonactors wandering around Austin, Tex., before a 16-millimeter-film camera muttering daffy inanities like “we’ve been on Mars since 1962” until the film’s $23,000 budget ran out. Martian colonies, apparently, were what you talked about when you were young, the economy was lousy and you could still freely traverse Austin without running aground on banh mi food trucks and émigrés from Brooklyn. “Slacker” was, by all counts, a seminal film, although I don’t remember any of my Gen X friends getting through more than 30 minutes of it. 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 5 of 22 6/7/19, 6:51 AM Actually, Gen X Did Sell Out, Invent All Things Millennial, and Cau... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/style/gen-x-millenials.html 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”). What we did not find significant was the “slacker” label. “The slacker tag never really applied to me, or anyone I knew,” said Sarah Vowell (b. 1969), an author and contributor to “This American Life” who spent her 20s juggling graduate studies with a teaching gig at an art school and multiple deadlines per week as a freelance journalist. “Even though my friends and I all looked like extras from ‘Reality Bites,’” she said, “our Puritan work ethic was probably more 1690s than 1990s.” Central to the slacker myth was coming-of-age during the early ’90s recession, which, according to ’90s surveys of our generation, apparently doomed us to failure for life. And yes, the recession was real. People lost jobs (including George Herbert Walker Bush, in the 1992 Presidential election). People looked for jobs and did not find them. But the recession that supposedly served as cement shoes for a generation was, in historical terms, relatively short and mild. It lasted just eight months, with unemployment bottoming out at 7.8 percent, compared to the 1980s recession that lasted 16 months with a peak unemployment rate of 10.8 percent, and the Great Recession starting in 2007, which lasted 18 months with unemployment around 10 percent.
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