Gen X Is a Mess?!?
Gen X Is a Mess?!?
June 18, 2019, 12:03 am
Filed under: age, Gen X | Tags: Blister in the Sun, Gen X, Generation X, Keegan Michael Key, Kids in America, Stephen Colbert, The New York Times, The Violent Femmes
Well, well, my fellow Gen X-ers. We have arrived. Again. The New York Times put out a style section spread on us and I tried not to pay attention to it because I was done, my Gen X siblings, I was done with weaving together the threads of all the Gen X articles I’d read and considered and so on. It came out a month ago but apparently I can’t leave it alone.
I read the New York Times piece. Sort of. What I actually did was scroll through it and skim the little paragraphs next to the pictures under the text obscuring “graffiti.” And I did click through to read one of the essays and some bits of others. This whole piece was easy to gloss over because there was really nothing there. It’s weird. Let me tell you. I have read so many articles about Gen X. Like, so MANY and this series in the New York Times was the most meaningless I’ve encountered. I’m including BuzzFeed listicles in that assessment. What I’m trying to say is that there was more depth in an “Are You a Gen X-er?” quiz than in the New York Times style section.
It feels like it was written by visitors from another planet who did some research on what was popular in America in the 80s and 90s and then called it “This Gen X mess.”
Listen — we can call ourselves and our stuff a mess if we want to but no one else is permitted to dismiss us this way. Also — where was this mess to which the headline referred? I did not see it explained anywhere. Is it because walkmen came out when we were kids? That seems to be the sort of thing the New York Times wanted to talk about. Walkmen. Strings around necks. A book called The Rules which gets its own essay — but which is a book no one I know actually read. Also featured: a musician “style icon” of Gen X-itude that neither I, nor my Gen X musician boyfriend ever heard of.
What version of Gen X is this?
Was there an alternate universe Gen X where all these things were important to us that I just missed?
Even the essay by a guy who seems to have been there is weirdly disconnected to my experience of Gen X-ery. And, like I said, due to my having written an 8 part series on Gen X, I have read a lot of diversity of Gen X experience. His essay felt as if it were written in an alternate universe wherein Alex P Keaton was not a fictional comedy character from TV’s Family Ties but a real life hero and the dominant cultural icon. It’s like his fan club president wrote this essay and is trying hard to convince the rest of us that Gen X had it so good, has it so good and is spending all our plentiful money on luxury goods.
That’s just not the Gen X I see. Or saw. Or ever saw. Unless it’s an Alex P. Keaton fantasy sequence on an alternate world Family Ties.
A Gen X friend of mine has a day job at the New York Times and told me that many of his cultural references and jokes fall flat due to his colleagues all being younger than him. It seems as if this might be true on the writing staff as well, if this Style section is any indication.
Gen X is not a mess. We may have once enjoyed a messy aesthetic on occasion. The stuff we really liked is not seemingly on the New York Times radar, actually, because the New York Times just went with what was selling well in the 80s and 90s. But Gen X wasn’t really buying, as far as I know.
I keep thinking of Keegan Michael Key on the Stephen Colbert show talking about how someone’s response to the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun” gives them away as someone in their 40s. Like, literally. Across cliques and subgroups, I would wager that most of Gen X will lose their mind on the dance floor for “Blister in the Sun.” “ Blister in the Sun,” my friends. Which did not even CHART. The song never charted. The album charted eventually but only ten years after it was released! I mean, we loved it but we didn’t buy it.
Maybe I’m just remembering the indie parts but I keep thinking of a line from ani difranco’s song that goes,
“Generally my generation wouldn’t be caught dead working for the man and generally I agree with them. Trouble is you got to have yourself an alternate plan.”
I feel this sums up the Gen X-ers I know fairly accurately. It’s not Gen X that’s a mess. It’s the system, man. The system is a mess. We’ve been saying it for years now. We’re fine. If you want to understand us, the (former) Kids in America, maybe ask us what we think is a mess. We’ll tell you.
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on June 18, 2019.
