It needs to be said that things are not alright. I’ve always felt like a Generation X guy growing up amongst millennials. There are some traits that Generation X have that aren’t going to play out well. Gen X people are more avoidant, less motivated, less social, more prone to depression, self destruction. Less taken care of, received less attention, bore the brunt of the culture wars the most.
Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix were Generation X icons, as were Jeff Buckley, Tupac and the Notorious BIG. Every generation has young people who die untimely deaths, but not many generations have people who have died young loom so large in the imagination. Velvet Underground, Nick Drake, Big Star and Tim Buckley were all baby boomers, but Generation X were the first generation to have made them famous.
There was this embrace amongst generation X-ers of being the forgotten hero. Generation X are the easter egg generation, the Vincent Van Goghs, the ones who burned briefly and brightly, and who were underappreciated by the world.
People don’t usually flourish when they’re older, but the number of generation X people who are hell bent on self-destruction in their middle age is alarming. Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington, Scott Weiland, Mark Lanegan look terrible or they’re dead.
One most interesting thing about Generation X and the millennials is that Generation Xers are straight shooters. That makes us quite different from the millennials. Most of Harvey Weinstein’s victims were generation X-ers. They had this view of feminism which was somewhat different from today’s cancel culture. It was more like a “fuck you” kind of feminism. It was stoic, in that it was more like an individual fighting the system. It was “grin and bear it”, avoidant, more emphasis on self defence, rather than thinking about raising an army to fight the system. Whereas the millennials and the gen-Zs are more wont to talk about destroying their oppressors through cancellation, which is good, and also misusing that power, which is no good.
Generation X is so suspicious of power that they’re not going to …. Google is the most Generation X of the big tech companies. They were the ones who said “we’re not evil”, and nobody really know if that’s true. They lucked out by getting the largest revenue stream of all, although we don’t know if they’re actually going to be competitive if it gets wrested away from them. They’re also the least openly competitive. They’re not ambitious about anything else other than changing the world. Google was the one who invented the cloud, who contributed most to the early research in artificial intelligence, and who who wanted to coddle their engineers the most.
Facebook may be the townsquare and newspaper of tech, Amazon may be the shopping mall, Microsoft may be the office, but Google is the library. Google in a way was content to become some kind of infrastructure, the way that Gen X sometimes sees itself.
Gen X were the first generation to make indie music big, and arguably were the best at it. They were the ones who created a DIY ethos and brought the start-up mentality. But then the baton was passed to the millennials, and it was the millennials who took it to the next level, to build the unicorns. The hustling, the marketing, the venture capital investing and the selling out was millennial stuff. Generation X was more concerned about building and inventing. (And to be fair, the millennials were also pretty good inventors).
I don’t consider myself an out and out gen X, but I’m more similar to that generation than the boomers or the millennials. It’s a millennial world we live in now. Yes, fame is a horrible thing and we’ve treated our stars badly. What we did to Britney, to Lindsay Lohan, to Amy Winehouse is unconscionable. But these stars didn’t have an uncomfortable relationship with fame. They actively courted it. The alternative rockers were supposed to be ambivalent about it. They weren’t supposed to put their self destructive tendencies front and centre.
Heroin chic was supposed to be gen X. That is nothing if not stoic. Celebrating death and self-destruction was the domain of Generation X. Of course it was a performance, even though the self-awareness also extended to knowing that it’s a thin line between performance and reality. Gen X was highly philosophical. Nihilistic. Perfectly willing to rebel and change the world, and paradoxically at the same time inherently mistrustful of any form of social engineering.
When they were holding centerstage in pop culture in the 90s, I thought, this was such a strange time. America was on a downward trend. The biggest, most powerful country in the world was navel gazing, self-critiquing, completely harsh on itself. Urging itself to do better. Somehow it made the US so much more likeable. I liked that they questioned the toxic masculinity and put it front and centre. But did they give up this sense of having agency, and being in charge, and I think they lost something vital. They lost the historic opportunity to control the narrative.
The end of the cold war was a turning point in US cultural history. Maybe I was weaned on that cultural war between Nirvana and Guns n Roses. I was on the Nirvana side, the side which was leftist, feminist, anti-racism, big tent, inclusive. And rejecting the macho shit of Guns n Roses. But in a way, maybe it wasn’t good that I was encouraged to be lazy when I was young.
There was something utopian about the 90s. I always believed that it was a mini version of the 60s – highly countercultural. Everybody knew they were at an inflection point in history, and there was a lot of excited discussion about how things were going to go. The cold war was ending, and there was some hope that some new, more liberal order was opening up.
By the late 90s, though, the picture had become clearer. That’s why there’s a good argument that the mid-90s were such a pivotal time in US cultural history. The rise of the internet. The beginning of Fox News. Newt Gingrich winning Congress. The rise of a more nativist culture – ever noticed that after the Cold War ended, British acts stopped being able to make it big in America? Grunge had a big impact on the UK, but nothing in the UK – trip hop, Madchester, or Brit Pop – ever made it big in the US. The Chicago Bulls ruled. Country music was on the up. Gangsta rap won and Daisy soul rap lost.
The mood of the country, around the time of Bill Clinton’s re-election, had shifted. They thought they had elected the first Democrat president in more than 10 years, and finally put Reagan to the sword. Actually what happened was that Clinton was a centrist, and a pleaser who just bent his principles a little too easily. You could call him a Reagan lite, but he was the one who ushered in the era of neo liberalism and globalism.
That interregnum was lost. The brief interregnum was basically Generation X. And nobody was very sure, anyway, how Generation X was going to run the world. In any event, it never did. Generation X never ruled anything. They did what they were best at – holding things together while the world around them fell apart.
So the question is this – how am I, with my Generation X make-up, going to run the world. Brin and Page managed to change the world, but beyond that, they’ve exhibited a startling lack of ambition. What they did differently was to change the rules of the workplace, and Google was a great social experiment, but there are many signs that it is regressing to the mean, and is certainly not the utopia that people hoped it would be.
But while we are living in a world that was influenced by the X-ers – after all they were the vanguard of the revolution when the internet swept over the world. They introduced detachment and irony into the world, they shaped internet memes. But it’s the go-getter, entrepreneurial, spritely millennials who rule. The ones who level up.
X-ers are the ones who tell truth to power. They started the green movement – at least they helped to make it go big in the last 80s. They shone a spotlight on police brutality and the ugly reality of ghetto life. Millennials were marketers. They were the ones who made the influencer movement take off. Britney and Paris were born to be influencers. There was nothing they couldn’t market. X-ers invented greenwashing. Maybe a lot of corporations were lying about how green they were, but they forced a conversation to take place around the issue. Generation X created the rule that there had to be an origin story, but the millennials took that rule and ran with it. There was an absurd amount of political awareness amongst the Gen X bands. REM and Sonic Youth were full of slogans. U2 was a garish billboard of political causes. But the Millennials were much less political, and the emphasis was solely on the packaging. Gen X-ers spoke of alienation and depression. Millennials speak of wellness and fitness.
The internet had also gone through its era of utopianism, and not too long ago, it was a startup culture. Who knew that the day would come when it would be almost utterly dominated by 4 or 5 behemoths? How did the utopian visions of a new age devolve so quickly into some kind of dystopia?
No matter how revolutionary Generation X was, there was this attachment to the past. There was this reverence for the wisdom of the ancients. Generation X in a way was one of the first pop culture generations to go retro. It’s true that millennials are pretty heavy on retro too, but their retro feels a bit more performative. Generation X still retain a bit of the pre-internet age, and remember some of the things that they had in their childhood, whereas the Millennials reach into the curated past for anything … the jazz age, vinyl – even if those things didn’t exist in their lifetime. (Remember, the millennials were born around the time when vinyl started getting supplanted by cassettes and CDs, so it’s actually a new thing for them to come into contact with.)
And as the last generation to have some connection to the pre-internet age, Generation X was one of the last people to remember when things were semi-permanent. The 80s and 90s in America was a time when things stayed the way they were. Factories started to be closed, but there was still some sense that it could call come back. People were not evicted out of their homes by predatory lenders. It was still possible to have a job for life. Institutions were not dead. You didn’t live your whole life in a cloud, where you could get locked out of fairly easily. Relationships were less transactional and transient. There was some sense that something that was sacred, something inviolable, and that’s why people were so concerned about “selling out”. Values mattered.
Generation X is thought of this generation who changed the world, who started all this disruption, but I think part of it was they thought that the world was corrupt and mercenary and wouldn’t stand for that. “Not selling out” was a mantra for turning away from the corrupt world. It was a sense that there was still something spiritual and inviolable about you that had to be defended no matter what. I don’t really think they were for changing constantly for the sake of change. They wanted to solve problems and remake the world, rather than grab a quick buck and leave. Although when people reach a certain age, they might think differently.
Maybe I just missed the early days of the internet, where the competition wasn’t so brutal, before we knew that it was a winner takes all society. Before they came and destroyed the world.
Music Composition 