Talkin' 'Bout Their Generation

Like most people of my generation, I have a proverbial “Where I Was When I Learned Kurt Cobain Died” moment – I was inside a car, with my brother driving, hearing the news over at NU 107. I remember my sister sounding shocked. I wasn’t at all. At that point, Kurt Cobain was already a train-wreck, a year removed from what was then an underwhelming “In Utero” album that was shredded to pieces by Pearl Jam’s phenomenal “Vs”. I felt neither shock nor sadness. I didn’t feel anything. What I was shocked by was the consensus that Kurt Cobain was “the voice of our generation”, that Nirvana’s songs were apparently about alienation and stuff. I had no idea. I just thought “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Territorial Pissings” really really rocked.

All the post-mortem tributes and eulogies at the time seem to bleed into one unintelligible cacophony in hindsight. Yet, there is one thing that I still remember to this day, and it was Carlos Santana, being interviewed by MTV News, and essentially wondering aloud why Kurt Cobain killed himself. He didn’t live in poverty, he said. He didn’t know what it felt like to live in a house without running water (I’m paraphrasing from memory here; even Youtube doesn’t have this clip anymore) or to live in starvation. I remember this so well because it stood out in the middle of the ongoing canonization. Decades later, I would find out (thanks to the internet) that Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes had even less flattering things to say about Kurt Cobain's death and to the millions of Gen-Xers mourning his death at the time:

“What's all this nonsense about how terrible life is? I'd love to relieve the pain you're going through by switching my age for yours. What would all these young people be doing if they had real problems like a Depression, World War II or Vietnam? If (Cobain) applied the same brain to his music that he applied to his drug-infested life, it's reasonable to think that his music may not have made much sense either.”

I cannot help but remember these things lately, in the face of all this millennial hate. I first came across this in The New Republic piece entitled “Generation Whine” and then could no longer ignore it when The New York Times came out with a similar critique on millennials entitled “How To Live Without Irony”. Hating on hipsters and millennials has now reached a fever pitch. One of the great things about growing old is that you get to witness history literally repeat itself.

Ah, young people, when will you ever earn the respect of your elders? Generational dissing started in the 1950s and it’s been happening in every decade since. But this phenomenon has become increasingly fascinating with every generation. The concept of “teenagers” as a distinct, consumerist demographic was born in the 1950s, so the old people complaining about them then were complaining about something that was actually new. Since then, elders have had to invent new stuff to complain about. Which brings us to today.

Laura Bennett (“Generation Whine”) and Christy Wampole (“How To Live Without Irony”) are both Gen-Xers and to read their articles is to read a generation on payback mode. Both writers paint millennials as shallow people with shallow non-problems. Sound familiar? Oh, it gets better. Both articles give us a lesson in 90s revisionist history.

Bennett writes:

“It is striking that 'FUCK! I’m In My Twenties' and 'Thought Catalog' feel so likeminded—there’s a sameness to their voices and a narrowness to their perspectives that transcends standard youthful narcissism. After all, the “me-ism” of Coupland’s Gen X slackers at least contained a kind of critique of the society that had shaped their ennui.”

Wampole provides more detail as to how her generation was somehow “better”:

“Born in 1977, at the tail end of Generation X, I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly by two architectural crumblings — of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 — now seems relatively irony-free. The grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude, with a combative stance against authority, which the punk movement had also embraced. In my perhaps over-nostalgic memory, feminism reached an unprecedented peak, environmentalist concerns gained widespread attention, questions of race were more openly addressed: all of these stirrings contained within them the same electricity and euphoria touching generations that witness a centennial or millennial changeover.”

It was cringingly embarrassing reading fellow Gen-Xers mythologize the 90s as a time of great meaningfulness. This is what Bennett and Wampole did, despite all of their disclaimers that “we were slackers then too” because they’re also quick to point out that they “at least contained a kind of critique of the society that had shaped their ennui”, as if the TV show “Girls” isn’t providing the most relevant social commentary on 21st century middle class America or that Thought Catalog isn’t a running collective diary of economic realities pervading young people’s lives for the first time, which is basically what the 90s movie “Kicking and Screaming” was about, but since it was made in the 90s (and had lead characters that have penises) it must have been “shaped” by a “critique of society” or else why would The New Republic and New York Times even bother publishing these pieces? Wampole would rather remind you of the “feminism that reached an unprecedented peak” in the 90s, rather than acknowledge the fact that a TV show like “Girls”, which is written, directed, and produced by a woman in her 20s wouldn’t have gotten made in an era where “My So-Called Life” couldn’t even stay in the air for more than one season. Or how about the “questions of race that were more openly discussed” in the 90s? Who cares that millennials unilaterally voted for an African-American President (twice)?

All these criticisms by our generation of this current generation’s supposed dearth of authenticity and relevance smacks of bitterness and envy. I should know – I’ve been guilty of it a number of times in this blog. Ours were the last youth culture in the history of mankind to not have the internet. We were bored and aimless and chose to blame everything on authority and “The Man” because those were the only things left to complain about. The wars of Andy Rooney’s generation were long gone and so we rebelled against the only oppression that was left – consumerism.

But Kurt Cobain demonstrated what a naïve and dead-end proposition authenticity was in a capitalist society. In fact, our entire generation is one big reminder of how impossible it is to “rebel” against consumerism, which is not to say that millennials have fully embraced it as a result, rather, they have actually found ways to circumvent it.

The internet and the millennials’ relationship with it have actually crippled the old guards of capitalist media (radio, music retail, TV, film, publishing) and marketing. They’re not rebelling against any outside force anymore and they don’t have to because they can dictate culture now instead of having culture dictated unto them. Their concerns now are more internal – how to cope with the inherent mediocrity of modern life and the timeless friction between romanticism and jadedness.

It’s difficult for Gen-Xers to understand this because it’s not an easy thing to accept. Bennett, for one, would rather dismiss blogs like Thought Catalog and social media altogether, while failing to acknowledge that this is the new literature of our times – the convergence of confessional writing with oral tradition. We are so eager to discredit millennials – some of whom are proving to be smarter and more mature than we ever were – that we sweep our own whining, nihilistic past under the generational rug because “kids today” happen to have a venue now where the world can listen to them whine, whereas we never did. So we come up with fantastic fairy tales about our youth where we supposedly used to care for the environment and the plight of third world countries and then we pretend that rich people problems were invented by the current generation.

We keep chiding young people for being too detached and ironic when they’re merely picking up from our own disillusionment. I still remember that car ride in 1994. Not only did I not care about Kurt Cobain’s death, I also had stopped caring about grunge and “Alternative Music”, about Pearl Jam and Soul Asylum’s apparent concern over the youth of America, over Nirvana’s supposed feminism and tired self-hatred. I didn’t see these bands changing the world any time soon; I saw them getting richer, more famous, and more boring. I became more interested in music that was interesting, which at the time was anything that wasn’t overtly serious or “about” anything. In 1994, I was eager to abandon the navel-gazing of American Alternative Music for the beautiful weirdness that was happening at the other side of the Atlantic – the precious surrealism of Björk, the 60s revivalism of Britpop, and the dreamy wordlessness of shoegazer music. I didn’t want music that was “socially relevant”; I just wanted good music.

We can make fun of hipsters all we want but these are the same kids that scour the internet and see themselves in the music we used to enjoy; the defeatism of Pavement, the cheeky irreverence of the Riot Grrrl Movement, and the steel-faced irony of Sonic Youth. While we’re busy finding faults in their lives, they’re busy copying facets of our past (see: Tavi Gevinson and her brilliant Rookie website). They can do this because history lives forever in the internet, and history – with all its idealisms and disillusionments – is all they have left.

The truth is millennials aren’t more spoiled, entitled, self-absorbed, shallow, and ironic than we were. The only difference is that they have the internet now and so all of their self-entitlement, self-absorption, shallowness, and irony are everywhere all the time and no longer confined in cafés, basement rooms, parking lots, and garages. The difference is that we’re older now and so we think we’re wiser, when there is nothing wise about wanting kids to follow the same pipe dreams we’ve abandoned decades ago. The internet allows them to see our failures. But if Gen-X writers like Bennett and Wampole keep revising our history and writing our mythology, then maybe millennials can follow our faux-examples. And maybe they can still do enough for the next generation to disappoint them.

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image credits:

Ashley Tisdale – boudoir-pr.com
Kurt & Frances Bean Cobain – peeepl.com