I Love Gen X. I Need Gen X.
Difficult times encourage self-evaluation. And if a piece like this one is any indication, I’d guess now is a moment when even America’s most affably ambivalent and apathetic clan, Generation X, looks darkly back and grudgingly considers its legacy and position in the catalog of American generations. Because we all get names now and we are all assigned teams for the years we are born. And I guess teams have to compete? If I seem leery about what is likely a manufactured and exploitative paradigm, that’s because I learned from the best. Generation X, you worked to reject shallow trappings of affirmation. Maybe you can’t ask for the validation you need at a moment of existential crisis (and let a Millennial tell you all about THAT). So if the case is that you need some love, don’t let there be any doubt. We have it here for you.
As one of the earliest Millennials I lived through all of the 90’s. The pop culture of that decade left footprints all over the memories of my early, impressionable mind. I remember a plastic bath toy of Flounder from The Little Mermaid in what must have been 1989, when that movie was released. I remember the perfect black Batmobile which came with the Happy Meal in ’92 for Batman Returns. That same year, Aladdin was one of my first experiences in a theater. So was the Super Mario Bros Movie. The Simpsons was the strange new thing on the television in my house. Beavis and Butthead was the strange new thing on television in the homes of some classmates (I didn’t have cable). Tupac was standing at his trial and had respectful words for the judge and the community. Courtney Love was reading Kurt’s suicide letter. That would have been ’95. Bill Clinton seemed to be getting impeached forever. And then Fight Club. And then, right on time for whatever our Y2K future would hold, The Matrix in ’99, rolling credits over a track by Rage Against the Machine.
It was an iconic stretch of years.
And because of the type of person that I am, I experienced it most powerfully through music. It was easy to trade music and collect it and build my own realm with it. As a pre-teen all the ‘good’ books I read were abridged classics, but anything I listened to was the most contemporary stuff I could find. And radio was lush. We were Californians. Of course, everyone I know diligently bought Dookie and Nevermind. Of course we bought All Eyes on Me and The Chronic. And we loved it, but we were only imitating our older brothers and sisters. We couldn’t be shirtless at Lallopolooza or slam dancing in the dark at Redding. We were waiting our turn. The culture was thrilling but we knew it didn’t belong to us. I became a teenager just as the 90’s ended. The petulant, inclusive, cynical, and brash intellectual model I’d spent ten years witnessing defined young adulthood to me. I felt I knew all the plays to make. When my turn came I was eager that it should be just as fun, and as snarling, and as characteristic.
Instead, I’m not sure I got a turn. Business gathered up swaths of the culture in the 2000s and began to iron it flat. Trends that were sold to the young often overshadowed what the young created for themselves. The whole ecosystem of youth changed just as I was entering it and became strange to me. I scoffed reflexively at how obviously I was being marketed to instead of invested in, how cynical the attempt was to engineer me and my peers. But that did stop it from happening. In many curious ways society was failing me and failing me, until finally in 2008 when it failed everybody. And that was painful and that was chaos. But even that didn’t reset the landscape. The youngest Millennials never had a chance to know the difference. But I did.
Specific fragments stay with me. These are empirical things. Anyone might make a more definitive list of the 90’s most significant bits. But these touchstones to me stay freighted with meaning, maybe because I was so young and because I haven’t seen their example since:
Kurt Cobain as the most famous man on Earth — A figure that would be at the top of any list about the decade, he rises into the pantheon of rock icons not just for his phenomenal music but also because he reclaimed rock and roll from hair metal. That powerful, anthem-driven, theatrically macho style of music out of Los Angeles had seemed like the obvious next act in rock. Until Nirvana and its peers took a bat to it. I won’t make this all about music history. But the most compelling icons of rock have always been misfits. They cannot be high school quarterbacks or privileged and popular strivers. They aren’t conventionally masculine. Rock stars are a subversion of that. They are most valuable when they present a successful, magnetic alternative to that.
Kurt was a skinny, drug-using, empathetic, and solitary soul from a broken home in a small lumber town in Washington State. Even when his music was coming out of everyone’s stereos, when it was the soundtrack for frat parties, he was clear about his affiliations. He turned down a request to play Axl Rose’s birthday. He wore Daniel Johnston t-shirts for interviews. He asked Shonen Knife to open for him on tour. When the whole world had its arms open to him he wouldn’t pretend to be anything but the outsider he’d always been. That the most famous man alive didn’t hesitate to present himself with long unwashed hair, thrift store jeans, and a tag-less cardigan with a shameless cigarette burn in the pocket is just one of the many ways his persona will help me prioritize my values until the day I die.
The multitudes of Tupac Shakur — There is a story that the streetwear designer Karl Kani tells about meeting Tupac. Kani wants to feature the rapper in an ad campaign for his brand but he is nervous to ask and he wants to know what the fee might be. The question surprises Tupac as much as the rapper’s answer surprises Kani. He says, “You’re black. I’m not gonna charge you.”
Tupac knew his success meant power to shape not just his genre but also the community it sprang from. And he was obvious about his dedication to the responsibility of that power, as well as the weight he felt about the example he showed. He made himself an advocate and an activist. Sometimes he embraced the role. Sometimes he shunned it. He was a poet. He was impulsive but also thoughtful. He was hard but also curious. He was a flagrant participant in the rough life he often warned against. Tupac gave the impression of having many faces but wearing no masks. He was believable in every iteration he made of himself, genuine in all his contradictions. Which makes him one of the most human figures in American music.
Rancid sings ‘Radio’ — Punk music was alive and strong in the Bay Area in the 90’s and Rancid was my favorite. With their song ‘Radio’, they channeled the spirit of great rock refuge anthems like Bowie’s ‘Rock and Roll with Me’ for an audience whose bleakness had a more suburban flavor, singing, “When I got the music I got a place to go.” It was true.
Fiona Apple at the VMAs — Fiona went to the stage a little carelessly to accept her Video Music Award for Best New Artist. Then with the statuette in hand she casually rips the whole live production, announcing all the pageantry as bullshit. She was heckled for it. She was spoiling someone’s idea of fun. But witness a truly empowered woman wielding the influence she’s won. She knew the service she was doing. The message is still a critical one, and what a prescient platform for it. Her cavalier speech was one of the stone-cold coolest things I’d ever seen.
Is that enough flattery? Have I embarrassed myself? It had a big effect on me. But obviously the world has moved on, as it does. Sometime soon I’ll lose my claim too (it happens so fast now) and have to write pieces from outside the spirit of the time. Then I’ll know how it feels to wonder if all my values have become relics. They haven’t. They carry forward. History may go underground until it is dug up. But it stays potent. It’s not lost. The best of it even stays unannounced in all the foundations of the present.
