The Millennial Song
A debate kicked off on Bluesky today about what the official song of the Millennial generation is. I don't link to posts as a rule because it's been my experience that even a meager amount of added attention can make social media intolerable, but the initial post mentioned songs like Kids by Sleigh Bells (a certified banger).
Luckily, this is something I've indulged in with Gen X versions of The Song and very briefly alluded to here. A discussion kicked off on my brother's porch several years ago when one of us, I think it was me, said that we don't remember what people actually listened to when we were younger because the lionization that comes with sorting good from bad in art tends to obscure what was popular. So we went through the Billboard 100 charts from about 1988-2002, or roughly what you think of as Gen X's peak cultural relevancy, cued them up on Spotify, and tried to make sense of the unrecognizable schlock which we'd collectively memory holed.
So what is The Millennial Song, because The Gen X Song is not Smells Like Teen Spirit? Some grounds for discussion:
1) For the purposes of argument, generational politics are very real, very important, and have dire stakes, particularly when figuring out who the coolest people are.
2a) My thesis is that for a song to count as The Song for a given generation, said generation had to be young enough to still drive tastes and go out to clubs/shows but have enough financial pull to be catered to and/or start to fill the ranks of the creators/producers. I peg this between the ages of 25 and 27. An added benefit of this age is that this means the oldest members of the cohort are in their early 30s, so they haven't aged into irrelevance.
2b) I reserve the right to tweak this. So, for instance, I set 1991 as peak Gen X relevance, not because the median age was 25 but because everyone marks Nevermind's 1991 release as a matter of seismic importance which eclipses every following year. For Boomers, I'm setting 1973 as peak because the cluster of people born between 1946 and 1948 carry outsized influence (Clinton, Bush, and Trump all born in '46, '47 the biggest birth rate year in the 1940s, '48 because my dad was born in '48). I picked 2013 for Millennials because it's when those born in the middle year of Millennial birth years (1988) turned 25.
3) I think The Song has to be written by a member of the generation in question. I got pushback online because this would mean The Beatles arent Boomer music. In this deathly serious discussion, I have set the rules with the power of expertise and a big brain so no, the Beatles aren't Boomer music.
3) None of the above matters because any year you care to choose has pabulum at the top of the music charts. In online discussion, 2008 was posited to me as an equal cultural marker (Great Recession start, Obama election) as Nevermind. I'm happy to grant that, even if Millennials weren't really making most of the music at the time, because the charts still mostly sucked.
4) Why the charts? Certainly before streaming there was a bit of skin in the game you had to invest to head down to the store and buy stuff. But also it indirectly measures airplay and cultural saturation. Someone brought up White Stripes' Seven Nation Army, because it plays in stadiums constantly, which is a well-taken point, but that would also mean Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll Part II would be the Boomer song and the Jock Jams version of 2 Unlimited's Get Ready For This would be the Gen X song, which are things I can't accept.
5) Some of this is tongue in cheek, some of it is deadly serious. Which is which?
Let's go to the charts. Let's start with the Gen X song. 1991's top 100 songs are a wasteland:
Bryan Adams is a Boomer (1959) so that can't be the Gen X song. Notably missing are Nirvana, whoa re also missing from the top tier of singles for 1992. Color Me Badd were not Boomers, so the Gen X song is probably I Wanna Sex You Up. "But Ian, 1991 is too early, the median Xer was born in 1972 so you need them to be 25, too."
Okay, let's do 1997, then. It's not much better:
Again, it can't be Elton John. Too old. Jewel? I hope it's not Diddy or R. Kelly. Let's go with Return of the Mack.
For Boomers in 1973, the pickings are better but only just:
An ok Jim Croce song, the (very good) Let's Get It On which had to be catnip for the free love generation, a perfect Roberta Flack song, a good but overplayed Carly Simon song, and a whole lot of garbage (Tony Orlando, Wings, Elton John, Vicki Lawrence, terrible Kris Kristofferson song). Let's go with the Roberta Flack song, which doubles as a nostalgic tribute to a song about stuff the Boomers weren't at the center of which was then sampled in a Gen X song.
What is the 2013 list? Well, have I got something to show you:
The top five consists of two (2) Macklemore songs, Robin Thicke's mercifully temporary contribution to the culture, an Imagine Dragons song, and a song from a Vine (RIP) meme. It doesn't actually get better from there: Bruno Mars, some stomp clap hey, and Katy Perry.
Like I said, though, I hear the objection that if I need to normalize for age I also need to normalize for cultural events which supposedly shake everything to its foundations. So 2008:
Again, not precisely what we think of when we think of Important Critical Song Which Lasts Forever. BUT... but, when I linked this screenshot people nodded and said yeah Low tracks. Flo Rida isn't a Millennial but T Pain is, which I'll allow. High art? Well what even is art anyway? The rest of the list is as dire as every other year one could pick, but also way better than the Gen X lists running through the 90s, which are the sort of combination of terrible and totally forgotten that could make for a Twilight Zone episode. A man revisits the music of his youth, only to find he remembers nothing even as he knows he lived through it. It's me, I am that man, I did that.
So I am declaring Low to be The Millennial Song.
Except I'm not. The point isn't to pick the song. The song isn't even particularly interesting. What's interesting is that what we think people listen to happens to be the stuff which, only ever in retrospect, is critically acclaimed as important. The retrospection might be short (again see Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit), but it's only rarely what people listen to en masse. And I think for a song to be a generation's Song, people have to actually listen to it en masse. It has to chart, even if we recognize as charts and airplay as subject to mutilation by market forces. Hell, forget even if: the mutilation is the entire point precisely because everything we do is only realized via market mediation.
You could do worse on night than to get with friends and pick a year's top 100, any year at all, and see just what you remember, what holds up, what of the top 10 or so you could pin down as important and insightful enough to be The Song. It's a lot weirder than you anticipate.
Gonna listen to Low.
