GenX to GenY to GenAI: How You Can Understand Everything Great and Complicated about GenX and Everything Terrible and Obvious about Millennials by Studying the Story of U2 and Apple

We all know that civilization as we know it effectively ended on September 9, 2014.

That was the day the last iota of systemic thinking was officially bred out of our collective gene pool. The beginning of the misguided years. The dawn of the “if I look like it, I am it” era.

It was from this newly formed primordial ooze that strange life forms began to emerge — shallow, vapid creatures that would eventually evolve into things like influencers and content creators.

That date was, of course, the day Apple and U2 combined to foist Songs of Innocence upon us all.

The move was such a colossally misguided misstep that it took us years, if not decades, to fully understand just how wrong it was, and what was so wrong about it. That two titanic institutions — Apple and U2 — once so famed for their innovations and reimaginations could sink so low in such an obvious and awful way still staggers the mind of anyone who considers it.

If you want to understand everything that was great and complicated about Gen X and everything that was terrible and obvious about Millennials, you really need look no further than the stories of Apple and U2.

Each institution has a kind of before-and-after binary at the heart of its ruined empire narrative, and each has a representative offering that can be utilized to capture the entirety of cultural dejections their trajectories have delimited.

For Apple, it’s two commercials, 40 years apart. The difference goes a little something like this:

1984 Apple ad

Context:
People are genuinely worried about the specter of tech-enabled totalitarianism.

Ad story:
Tech-enabled totalitarianism (bad) is destroyed by a new product (good) that represents creativity and innovation.

Result:
Legendary ad.

2024 Apple ad

Context:
People are genuinely worried about the specter of tech-enabled totalitarianism.

Ad story:
Beloved objects that represent creativity and innovation (good) are destroyed by tech-enabled totalitarianism, leaving behind a new product (bad) that is neither creative nor innovative.

Result:
Oblivious misstep.

The U2 story is a little different. It’s far less about the two sides of the binary, and far more about the inflection point that divides them.

That’s not to say we couldn’t do an easy compare-and-contrast between the U2 of 1984 (The Unforgettable Fire) and the U2 of 2024 (Songs of Surrender), but doing so wouldn’t tell us anything anywhere near as revelatory as diving into Achtung Baby can do.

If Songs of Innocence is the end (and it is), then Achtung Baby is the beginning of the end.

It’s tempting to take the simple road and simply note that Achtung Baby was the first missile fired in a war between style and substance that style finally and definitively won.

Think about it.

Larry Mullen Jr. had literally developed one of the most recognizable drum sounds in rock and roll history. Organic, real, powerful, distinct. Right up there with Charlie Watts, John Bonham, Keith Moon, Mitch Mitchell, Neil Peart, and Ringo Starr. His hi-hat work on Sunday Bloody Sunday alone stands as possibly the most famously recognizable drum intro ever.

And the band traded it all away to sound like a Yamaha RY30.

As to The Edge, this was one of the most recognizable and innovative guitar sounds to have emerged in decades. Created almost entirely from the interactions between a guitarist, his guitar, his amp, and a delay pedal. That’s about it. But on Achtung Baby, for the first time, The Edge stopped drawing on himself, his technique, and his rig to get his sounds. Instead, he began relying on the studio. With the result that this brilliant and brilliantly recognizable sound almost instantly devolved into something that any chucklehead with a Zoom 9030 could dial up with a few button pokes and a couple spins of a little plastic gray dial.

And then there’s Bono. Bono, Bono, Bono. On Achtung Baby, he sounds better than anything he’d ever done prior. His voice truly became something magnificent. But at the same time, his lyrics were never more insipid and cliche-addled. You can go through the whole album to experience and understand this, or you can just listen to “One.” Which sounds amazing, but is, in fact, utter tripe.

(Note: I’m leaving Adam Clayton out of this, because he’s the one thing that never changes about U2. He just does what he does.)

And so there you have it. An album purportedly considered a masterpiece, that was in fact the first clear step to the era of aesthetic shellacking that the band were about to — inadvertently or otherwise — usher in.

Faith in rock and roll begins — but is not limited to — the teenage years. The first Gen Xers hit 16 in 1981, the year U2 released October, and the year just before The Edge wrote the guitar line to “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”

Between 1980 and 1987 (the years during which Gen X began to go to college), U2 released Boy, October, War, The Unforgettable Fire, and The Joshua Tree.

I should pause at this point to point out that I am neither a U2 fanboy nor a hater. I am, in this instance, merely a chronicler, and I think any teller of 80s tales will likely concede that these five albums together comprise a veritable pentateuch of ambitious rock and roll. Earnest, yearning, and spiritually aching, yes. Self-righteous, self-important, and self-serious, also yes. But give me overly serious over anything else, any day. I’d always rather someone believe too much than not enough.

The standard argument goes that the only way to top — read: deal with — the success of The Joshua Tree was to take the path of excess and irony. In other words, if you were a rock star, you had to laugh at yourself. And get well paid while doing it.

To which I say, bollocks. All that money, all that success, all that fame? U2 literally could have done anything they wanted to. But they just had to be everywhere, all the time, didn’t they? Not just on your turntable, but in your ears, on the go. And on your TV. In your movies and advertisements. On the cinema screen.

They may not have known it, but the band was surgically prefiguring the social-media-induced vapidity and dopamine-driven hollowing out of the aughts.

The earliest Millennials hit their sixteens around about 1997. That was the year U2 released Pop. No more need be said about that.

Any sage Gen X observer could feel the tension in the air. On the charts, it was war, with the Brits leading a charge with Ok Computer, The Fat of the Land, When I Was Born for the 7th Time, Trailer Park, Dig Your Own Hole, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, Urban Hymns, and more. On the other side, you had The Lonesome Crowded West, Third Eye Blind, Dude Ranch, So Much For The Afterglow, Fush Yu Mang, The Colour and the Shape, and more.

By the time those same Millennials hit their 30’s, it was roughly 2011. Which starts to get us perilously close to the year that began this whole long story.

Between those years, we endured the rise of the boybands (Backstreet Boys, NSYNC) and the pop tarts (Brittney Spears, Christina Aguilera), the rise of rap rock (Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park) and the death of rap (Jay-Z, Lil’ Wayne), and the new birth of really bad rock (Staind, 3 Doors Down). And then came emo (The Killers, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy) and whatever the hell awfulness the Black-Eyed Peas were. In other words, it was just a shamelessly brutal toppling of quality.

2011 was also the year that Pitchfork relocated to Brooklyn. If you know, you know, and I don’t need to tell you any more about that.

But if you want to keep reading, I can tell you that among the albums Pitchfork highlighted as “Best Albums of the Decade (So Far)” were Arcade Fire’s Reflektor, House of Balloons from The Weeknd, Haim’s Days Are Gone, Flockaveli from Wocka Flocka Flame, Vampire Weekend’s Contra, Nothing Was the Same from Drake, Robyn’s Body Talk, Yeezus from Kanye West, and a whole lot more. In other words, a parade of overweening mediocrity.

Which brings us to the end.

September 9, 2014. The day when a gang of late-stage boomers who’d ruled over the transition from Gen X to Millennials (fun fact: Bono and Tim Cook were both born in 1960) ruined … everything.

Wired Magazine ran a story about it. The headline was Apple’s Devious U2 Album Giveaway Is Even Worse Than Spam. Salon’s headline was How U2 became the most hated band in America. Apple shortly thereafter released a tool making it possible to delete the album. And Bono apologized:

“We had this beautiful idea, we got carried away with ourselves, artists are prone to that kind of thing. Drop of megalomania, touch of generosity, dash of self-promotion and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years mightn’t be here. There’s a lot of noise out there, I guess we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it.”

And here we are today. Daniel Ek runs Spotify. A millennial.

And so, in conclusion, we turn to Generative AI — another delightful “innovation” brought to the fore by Millennials (e.g., Sam Altman, born 1985. Pure Millennial).

Let’s ask good old GenAI (via a simple Google search and a perusal of what their “AI Overview” serves us) about Gen Xers today:

Generation X (Gen X) people are often described as independent, resourceful, and good at balancing work and life. They are also known for being entrepreneurial, productive, and technologically adept

Gen Xers are self-sufficient and individualistic, and they’ve been used to taking care of themselves since before adulthood. They’re also motivated by freedom and unimpressed by authority.

Gen Xers are focused on carving their own path at their own pace, and they don’t pay much attention to rank and hierarchy.

Gen Xers were the first generation to grow up with personal computers and have adapted well to the transition from analog to digital technology. However, they’re less dependent on smartphones than younger generations.

And how about Millennials?

Millennials are confident with technology, value meaningful motivation, and challenge the status quo. They also tend to be decisive, confident, and solution-oriented.

Millennials tend to exercise more and drink less than previous generations.

Millennials want to be successful in their careers while also maintaining control over their non-work commitments.

Millennials like to be in control and creative, and they look for customized experiences that meet their needs.

Thank you.

This has been a journey from GenX to GenY to GenAI. Whatever. Nevermind.