Are We Ourselves?

[Continued Sophomore section, picking up from end of previous passage.

If those two articles appeared split on the fate of Generation X, Alexander Star’s cover piece of the January 4 and 11, 1993, edition of The New Republic questioned whether a tangible cohort even existed. In “The Twentysomething Myth,” Star noted that behind every story trying to label and pigeonhole his generation, “there lurks the increasingly received -- and inherently dubious -- idea that the generation … has finally crafted a distinct identity of its own.” In an age when “the networks stocked twenty-three of thirty-two new shows with dimly sincere major characters in their teens and 20s,” when Lollapalooza “masqueraded as a second Woodstock over the summer, drawing large crowds that better known artists could not” and everyone “from Taco Bell to the Clinton campaign … tried to devise a twentysomething contraption of its own,” Star believed these huge marketing efforts and hastily developed concepts were chasing shadows and ghosts.

A generation sharing the same sense of irony seems a logical impossibility, Star said, because of its “divisive and unstable” nature where “only a small group can be in on a particular joke at a particular time.” It’s like fashion: Once a look becomes so “in” that everyone sports it, then it’s “out.” Moreover, the divisions in taste are not easily bridged under one umbrella. “Appreciators of world beat and industrial noise don’t necessarily have much in common,” he explained, “and one man’s subculture is another man’s sellout.”

Star saves his sharpest dagger for ripping at the blurry, often conflicting, picture pundits have cobbled together out of generalizations on his generation:

Today, a generic youth culture has been assembled from above precisely because it doesn’t exist down below. How can one generalize about a group that is said to be politically disengaged and politically correct, obsessed with surfaces and addicted to irony, scarred by Watergate and Vietnam and unaware of them, technologically savvy and unconditionally ignorant, busy saving the planet and craving electricity and noise, prematurely careerist and proud to be lazy, unwilling to grow up and too grown up already?

Star’s article was both a strange bird and a minority opinion easily obscured in the rush to label, codify and market to an emerging generation. Whether Jenn X favored preppy clothes or thrift-store bargains, preferred Pearl Jam or Paula Abdul, or became a library-bound bookworm or party-hardy sorority girl, the outside world in the early 1990s could be led to believe that her life equated a homogenous, predictable, pre-ordained set of variables.

It’s quite like Jenn X kept too busy to check out all this hype over her generation. Or if she heard it, she likely just shrugged and said: “Whatever.” But she would have noticed that, whenever she flicked on the radio, the playlists for stations they listen to had likely changed drastically in light of the “alternative” music revolution as acts like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden infiltrated the rotations of normally staid formats. Moreover, the so-called “grunge” movement jumped the rails from musical trend to lifestyle choice and fashion movement.

Writing for Internet magazine Salon.com in 2002, Jamie Allen follows the trail of how the sudden success of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” broke down barriers as “alternative became commercial” and the indelible impact on popular culture quickly followed:

Eventually, in the media’s suddenly open eyes, everything youthful was hip again. Coffeehouses -- the daytime hangouts for Seattle's young people -- became the basis for a burgeoning business empire. Flannel shirts and torn jeans found their way onto Manhattan fashion runways. Sitcoms revolved around the use of a goatee. Movies like “Wayne's World” mocked slackers while taking their money. Commercials used the word “dude” far too often.