Gen X is indescribably lame

I'm 48. I'm Gen X and I'm allowed to say that finally, begrudgingly, we are indescribably lame. We whine. We clutch our pearls. We moan.

I'm not speaking about the cultural output, which at its peak was and is some of the best American art ever made. That's not what I mean. I mean the people. Us. Me.

I'm not happy to be the one to say it. I want to circle the wagons, even if (maybe especially if) generational politics is a trap blah blah blah.

This observation is sparked by two minor things designed for me to forget. One, a teacher friend brought up South Park in a high school class and the kids were stunned he knew about it. It's a 30 year old show, peak Gen X culture of the debased variety (South Park sucks, fyi). Why wouldn't my friend know? But in the course of the conversation, it quickly became apparent that these high schoolers' parents didn't watch South Park and often forbade them from watching it. Bringing it up was verboten in their houses. Hidden, secret, tantalizing.

Two, a member of my graduating high school class is running for judge in my old hometown on the GOP ticket. There he was in Facebook photos, at a barely attended event, next to stands selling gaudy revanchist gear and red hats. Which is fine as it goes, someone has to run, but I knew him as a thoughtful, considerate guy, a philosophy major turned defense lawyer. It felt very strange. And 30 years does a lot to people. They change. But it was all so lame.

And then I realized something: I'd forgotten. Beneath all the TikTok videos about drinking from hoses and latchkey kids, there would be others which stamped out memories: no, the music was good. So were the movies. Grunge wasn't my thing as a kid or young man, but its initial flowering was hopeful in and despite its cynicism. New Jack Swing ripped. Those industrial artists were inventive and good. Gangsta rap was a gut punch to America. On and on. And there's all those videos, on every platform, with grey haired, grizzled people talking about how awesome those years were and how central they, the median 55 year old, were to the zeitgeist.

What was stamped out was the memory that most people didn't actually listen to that stuff. You revisit the Billboard Top 100 lists and it's just lame prefab ballads sprinkled only rarely with the good stuff.

I forgot.

Automne Zingg posted a video on her Instagram which stuck with me. It's about being a weirdo subculture kid on the outs with everyone else. But the bit that really stuck with me was how the aesthetics, sounds, and fashion were a signal for finding other weirdo subculture kids, but that it also, as the 90s wore on, made you a little paranoid. Do you really get this?

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C7ezFG1ORx9/?hl=en

"Really" is a loadbearing word. And a Gen X word. Who are you/we/I really? And when Nirvana got big, as she says, the jocks were finally nice to you. But also not that nice. And not that big. No matter how big it all got, it just didn't get that big. It was ephemeral, like every cultural moment, even if it didn't feel like it at the time. And certainly even if Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails became big enough deals for people to pose but still be lame, Fifteen and Skinny Puppy weren't.

So memory lies. I'd forgotten just how manifestly unpopular I was in middle and high school, right up until I sort of wasn't, but by then I'd lost interest in being popular. I wanted to hang out with my fellow losers and skateboard or go to punk shows. And then I left town when I was old enough.

None of that hurts anymore. In any event, there's something unseemly about going on about the psychic wounds of high school your entire life. But also, the facts: all of those people were lame at the time and they're lame now.

Which doesn't mean that there aren't things worth bringing foreward. I wouldn't be as interested in nostalgia as a mode of thinking through culture and history as I am if I didn't believe that. But the insistence by lame Gen Xers that all of the cool, weird, expansive stuff from the time was stuff they were present for and participated in overwhelmed how deeply lame they actually were. They didn't actually listen to cool music or watch weird movies. I didn't hang out with them for a reason and it wasn't just that they were mean. It's that hanging out with them was boring.

To the extent that they were ever interested in the good stuff, it was, per Mark Fisher's commentary, a manifestation of Kurt Cobain's worst fears, that it was all top down, old fashioned Adornoist culture industry directives. Nirvana was cool because MTV said they were cool, and look, there's a half off sale on flannel shirts at JCPenney. None of which diminishes how good the movies and music and (sometimes) television were, but also people didn't actually watch or listen. Not really, even if one out of every fifty instances the numbers might indicate they did.

In her video essay, Automne asks whether all those people ever thought about whether they were wrong.

They didn't.

Bill Burr played Riyadh.