The Waiting

So I've wrapped up the first draft of my thesis -- you can see it installments below, albeit in reverse chronology -- and the next step is feedback from my three faculty readers. As of this afternoon, the first three chapters (Epilogue, Freshman, Sophomore) have reached my readers. My adviser is the only one to provide feedback so far, although I'll meet with another reader from the history department early next week.

My first draft stands at a whopping 92 pages, and reader feedback has a tendency to ask about adding or elaborating points. My goal is to keep the final main section under 100 pages. We'll see how it goes.

The End Of Everything

[What follows is the end of the Epilogue. Are we at the end of the first draft already? Cool.]

Instead of remaining lifelong apathy cases, as some pundits worried, Xers have made recent gains in the doing and joining levels Putnam measured in Bowling Alone. Putnam found increased school emphasis on service learning and character education had a positive impact on the tail end of the cohort. “Without any doubt the last ten years have seen a substantial increase in volunteering and community service by young people,” Putnam explained in the late 1990s. He cited a 1998 survey of college freshman that found 74 percent reported volunteering their last year of high school, a climb from the 62 percent in 1989. He added that 42 percent said they volunteered at least one hour per week in 1998, well above the 27-percent nadir in 1987. Bagby also argued that Xers became increasingly involved and shrugged off the slacker stereotype. “Xers are volunteering at astronomical rates,” she wrote, pointing to a 1996 survey that “72 percent of college freshmen had volunteered in the past year -- the highest percentage since the study began in the 1960s.”

Instead of looking at the gains Xers made throughout the 1990s, Howe and Strauss moved instead onto their next generation. The title of their 2000 book, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, clearly shows that they expected a brighter future than they predicted for their 13ers. While this is consistent with their predictions from the 1992 Atlantic Monthly article, one cannot avoid the reality that anyone could be more optimistic in the future after the mid-to-late-1990s economic expansion than they would be writing during the early 1990s recession.

The media clamor over Generation X has long since faded, but its distinctively wink-filled media-reflective references and postmodern tendency to recycle pop culture remain. The Ataris, a pop/rock band named for the personal video game system that was overwhelmingly popular in the 1980s, provide one example. On So Long, Astoria, their commercially and critically acclaimed 2003 album, The Ataris make references to such Generation X touchstones as The Simpsons and Say Anything…; in true insider style, the references are so obscure that only fans of the TV show or movie would understand them. In addition, the band's breakout hit from the album was a cover of Don Henley's “Boys of Summer” -- a song that was popular when many Xers were teens in the mid-1980s. The beat goes on.

Societies enjoy looking back, particularly when the view ahead is not so pretty, so it is only a matter of time before all things X return to vogue in a tidal wave of nostalgia and navel-gazing. Since I started this research, VH1 launched its own recent nostalgia train that included series such as I Love The ‘80s and I Love The ‘90s, but these proved overly simplistic, snarky and reductionist. Perhaps such clumsy attempts give us another reason to remember and chronicle accurately the four years of feeding frenzy that represented the heyday of Generation X.

With members of this cohort now between their mid-20s and mid-40s, Gen X’s future remains unwritten; the definitive answer on whether it will become The Greatest Generation or The Lost Generation remains decades away. Given Xers’ growing importance to society, the time is ripe to write about their past and cut through all of the hype, false stereotypes and pop-culture misrepresentations.

Perhaps Coupland, the man who unwittingly gave this generation its unwanted label, should have the last word here. Maybe his most salient contribution to this dialogue should not be his ballyhooed book, but a simple plea from his 1995 article: “Let X = X.” Instead of letting the opinions, generalizations and stereotypes created by others hang on them, as well as hang them in effigy, members of this generation should create their own X. Gaining this perspective could provide a lesson that we should not typecast future generations and box them in through premature and short-sighted observations, since "X" never should have marked the spot for this generation.

The Man Who Sold The World

[More of the draft Epilogue, continued from previous entry.]

As for the grunge phenomenon, it had dissolved within a few years of Cobain’s death. Soundgarden split in 1997, and the last of the “big three” from Seattle, Pearl Jam, had already begun the big slide. Their lackluster third album, 1994’s Vitalogy, fell well short of previous discs in quality and success. Dropping sales continued for follow-ups Yield and No Code. By the time their 1998 release Live On Two Legs could only trot as high as #15 on the Billboard Album Chart, the party was over.

To be fair, Pearl Jam's desire to take on the music industry had some impact on their decline. Although ridiculed by Cobain and company as a sellouts and hypocrites who adopted the grunge look and sound to get on the trend, Pearl Jam tried to buck the system by not making music videos and by challenging TicketMaster's near-monopoly at the box office for rock shows. In the process of trying to stand for something, they forfeited MTV’s easy marketing opportunities and complicated their ticket sales.

One could argue that a subgenre of rock like the Seattle sound only has a limited shelf life. After the success of Nevermind, record companies first emptied the Emerald City of bands and then signed anyone they could find who copied the Seattle sound. The result became overexposure for bands of that genre, both good and bad. The inferior product diluted the subgenre as well: There is a large gap in musical talent and artistic vision between pioneers like Nirvana and Soundgarden and copycat wannabes like Seven Mary Three and Silverchair. When the leaders of a musical movement disappear -- Nirvana shattered by a shotgun blast, Soundgarden to a breakup, Pearl Jam to irrelevance -- and no good acts emerge to pick up the torch, that genre's shelf life is limited.

But musical trend cycles only grew shorter as the '90s continued. The very brief run of the late-1990s swing revival -- loved by young people, loathed by critics -- makes the time grunge sat on top of the world seem lengthy and earth-shattering by comparison.

Hey, Jealousy

[More of the Epilogue]

With Xers finding success in the workplace, it was inevitable some would take issue with their new influence. Writing at the dawn of the 21st century, social historian Bernard Carl Rosen worried some of these members, whom he termed elite Xers, represented a kind of pathology. They could hide a mean streak, “determined to knock the Boomers off their comfortable perches and make it big whatever the cost.” These ambitious animals masked their emotions in subverting their raging individualism to appear “docile and unthreatening” while actually waging a covert, devious war. Continuing his observations in the tone of a wildlife observer, Rosen explained these elite Xers lull “competitors into a false sense of security” to “position unwary opponents for drubbings when circumstances permit.”

Wild Kingdom imagery aside, Rosen saw Generation X in a kind of ascendancy. He perceived a win-at-all-costs ethic in these elite Xers who applauded winners and “have no place for losers,” emphasizing that, more than anything, “Xers want to be winners.” Their youth -- particularly their ability to hustle and keep up with, as well as drive, the emergence of new technology -- gave the Xers a leg up on Boomers like Rosen. For better or worse, he warned ominously, the world since the 1990s has become one where “we cannot escape their influence.” While his tone was not positive, this represented a new twist in the GenX legacy. With GenX no longer an oppressed, aimless group, observers instead posit how perceived negative Xer characteristics make them suspect as they gain influence.

Of the three people one could call the unwitting architects of the Xer media phenomenon -- Coupland, Cobain and Linklater -- the latter proved the one whose influence continues uninterrupted today. From being the man who made Slacker on a tight budget, Linklater has since blossomed into a sought-after director with worldwide hits such as School of Rock and Before Sunrise. Not to be overlooked in his portfolio was his follow-up to Slacker, 1993’s Dazed and Confused, which appears to make subtle points about the stereotypes culled by the media from his earlier film.

Dazed and Confused is set on the last day of school in 1976, yet its characters display attitudes and traits that would make them at home in the early-1990s Austin seen in Slacker. Continuity is a key theme in the film: The soon-to-be high-school seniors repeat the hazing rituals to incoming freshman that they endured, as have generations before them. Characters repeatedly talk about enjoying their time now because their futures are uncertain. The movie’s central player, a popular football star with a conscience nicknamed “Pink,” is among the few to look beyond the rituals, the hedonism and societal expectations. “If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself,” he says at one point. What Linklater achieved, consciously or unconsciously, was a kind of rebuttal to the temporal construct of Slacker: Young people of many generations have wanted to live in the moment, found the future frightening and questioned their participation in a society that fails to give them positive encouragement. Instead of brooding about the unfairness of the future, Linklater himself has worked hard to become one of his generation’s most successful directors.

Working For A Living

[Epilogue continued from previous entry.]

In addition to the thorny question of demographics, even cynics had to notice that young people could once again find jobs by the mid-1990s. Could this have something to do with one of those 1992 articles making an accurate prediction? Remember Laura Zinn’s Business Week article advancing an overlooked theory that Xers could help drive an economic resurgence when “a bulge of 13 million kids who were born between October, 1968, and March, 1971, will start turning 25” in the mid-1990s? This is certainly possible, although at least part of the upturn had to do with opportunities provided by the sudden rise of the Internet, a technology that never even turned up in the foundational works spawning the Generation X stereotypes.

By his 1997 book, Owen saw an improving economy and new technology benefiting his contemporaries. Even if Xers weren’t finding the plum jobs in Corporate America, they could start their own businesses with success:

These young entrepreneurs are finding luck in the growing technology fields, especially on the Net. Just look at the success of the twentysomethings behind the Netscape World Wide Web browser. They became millionaires overnight when they took their company public. Xers taking advantage of this technology work as Web page designers, a job that is becoming to the 1990s what advertising was in the 1980s.

One can find a similar narrative in “Boom Time for Generation X,” a U.S. News & World Report article in October 1997 (which curiously uses yet another birth span, 1963 to 1977, to define its cohort). Instead of Coupland’s underemployed philosophers, the generation demonstrated a solid work ethic and a skill with emerging technology, author Dan Levin found. “Forget the notion of whining about dead-end McJobs,” Levin wrote. “Nearly 80 percent of X-ers are employed full time: 5 percent are unemployed; the remaining 15 percent are either employed part time or nonworking students.” At that time, the average 25-to-34 year old full-time worker with a college degree earned $34,000 a year. Not exactly fast-food money. The notion that Boomers were holding all the jobs seemed gone as well. “Many recent grads have gotten several job offers instead of the several hundred rejection letters they might have received a few years ago,” he wrote.

Yet remember how the 1990 “Proceed With Caution” article insisted this is generation preferred meaningful work to a big paycheck? Not entirely, insisted Levin: Even as jobs became more plentiful, many Xers chose “a job based mainly on whether it pays enough to cover college debt.” Or they were starting their own company, as Owen and the 1995 Forbes piece noted. Levin cited a Babson College study where the largest percentage of business start-ups came from the 25-to-35-year-old set. “As the nation’s economy continues to move from manufacturing to knowledge and information, enterprising X-ers aren’t dropping out, they’re cashing in,” Levin mused.

I'll Be You

[The home stretch! Here we begin the Epilogue portion. Joy!]

“Please don’t forget
Who you really are
Because nothing really matters when we’re gone.”
-- “All You Can Ever Learn is What You Already Know,” The Ataris

The Simpsons, which GenX TV author Rob Owen termed “a Gen X icon,” devoted a whole episode to lampooning Xer stereotypes in May 1996. The “Homerpalooza” episode -- a send-up of the touring rock show Lollapalooza and grunge rock in general -- parodied the generalizations so well that viewers had to wonder if the joke was on Gen Xers or if it satirized observers’ preconceived notions of twentysomethings (or both). At one point, one slacker refers to something as cool, and his friend asks him: “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” The youth replies, with a sigh: “I don't even know any more.”

After 1995, this line -- “I don’t even know any more” -- best explained how media observers found themselves reacting to the receding Generation X hype. The original stereotypes were challenged, many Jenn Xs had graduated into an improving economy offering more than McJobs, and the traditional assumptions had all but played themselves out. Indeed, 10 years later, we could even whether Generation X, as depicted, really existed at all.

Perhaps such a static stereotype based on a sliver of its cohort was bound to collapse under its own weight. Not only was the slacker stereotype a negative one, but it represented an exclusive and homogenous one. Ana Marie Cox, who would later gain fame as the executive editor of the groundbreaking daily Webzine Suck.com and currently as the political blogger who runs Wonkette.com, said in 1994 that her biggest problem with “the whole ‘marketing-ploy-turned-pop-sociology’ phenomenon that is ‘Generation X’” involved its members usually appearing as white males:

[W]hy isn’t the image of a woman going home after college to work a minimum wage job and see cool bands as romantic as … the image of a dude with groovy sideburns doing the same thing. … [P]erhaps the same kinds of questions could be asked about the absence of blacks … [T]hose images are not as romantic because, for blacks and women, you can never really be sure that they *willingly* are doing the slacker thing. [F]or white men, the choice to give up on ‘professional life’ is just an option.

Cox’s criticism represents a salient question. Female Xer icons of the time like Winona Ryder, Liz Phair and Bridget Fonda were “women slackers have crushes on,” but not slackers themselves. Even as commentators wondered about some 80 million members of a lost generation, their dominant image represented a minority of the actual cohort. Moreover, with no American generation more multicultural than the Xers, the predominant white male image represented a shrinking minority -- particularly as Latinos continued to become a larger portion of the population.

Better Days

[Conclusion of the Senior section]

Generation X’s image also gained a boost from an article in Forbes magazine branding it “the most entrepreneurial generation in American history.” Running on May 8, 1995, around the time Jenn X would be studying for her final exams, the article found members of her generation succeeding in the business world. Author Randall Lane introduced readers to a group of seven young professionals sitting around chatting. They may talk and like their generational stereotype, but they also happened to own companies with at least $1 million in revenue:

Catherine Winchester, 32, describes $2 million in financing commitments she’s obtained for her CD-ROM publishing outfit, Wanderlust Interactive. It’s Winchester’s second company; she sold the first one, InterOptica Publishing, to a family group headed by a 22-year-old. Looking a bit harried, Douglass Mellinger, 30, talks about how he’s been juggling the birth of his first child with closing a major deal for his $20 million computer services company, PRT Corp. of America.

The story may only be five years removed from the famed “Proceed With Caution” article in Time, but it’s also light years away in its focus. These are not the helpless, cynical, unemployed youth profiled by Sophronia Scott and David Gross as generational representatives in 1990; these are skilled, confident, affluent young adults remaking the American business world in their image.

Older generations “would do well not to judge those 14 to 34 … by the way they dress or talk or by the music they punish their eardrums with,” Lane wrote. “This is America’s first Computer Generation … beginning to combine technology and human freedom in ways that promise to restore this country to economic leadership.” (This presents an interesting juxtaposition to people like Strauss and Howe, who had already written off the whole generation as failures!)

The article cites an opinion poll from February 1995 that found 54 percent of Americans 18 to 34 either very or extremely interested in launching their own business, well above the #6 percent of people 35 to 64 who responded that way. The article noted that a study by Paul Reynolds, a Marquette University professor of entrepreneurship, found around 1 in 10 Americans aged 25 to 34 were actively engaged in starting their own business, nearly triple the rate of any other group by age.

“Reynolds estimates that about 7 million U.S. adults are currently trying to start a business -- actually drawing up a business plan, applying for a loan or incorporating,” Lane wrote. “Nearly 8 in 10 of these 7 million are aged 18 to 34.”
Instead of sitting in front of the TV in their parents’ basement playing Nintendo, as depicted elsewhere, these were young movers and shakers harnessing technology to launch million-dollar companies. Instead of seeking unchallenging dead-end positions, they created their own opportunities and worked long, demanding schedules if necessary. Lane seemed to realize he was committing media blasphemy at the time. “How does this square with the typical media picture of Generation X-ers?” he asked rhetorically. “It doesn’t.”

Yet certain generational attitudes, as depicted elsewhere, color this move toward self-employment. Dan Levy, a budding software entrepreneur, is hardly a slacker, but he does retain his generation’s famed cynicism and independent streak as explains that he’s “working three, four or five times as hard, but at least I’m in control.” Levy’s definition of control, Lane wrote, is key in defining the attitude of his generation :

It means that if he wins, he gets the credit, not someone higher up the hierarchy. It means if he loses, it’s because he failed, not because the organization failed him. Control, in short, means freedom. … In talking with over two dozen under-35 entrepreneurs, and dozens of youthful entrepreneur wannabes, FORBES was struck by the near unanimity with which they cited control of their destiny as their goal.

Now compare this to what Scott and Gross wrote in their 1990 piece. “Most of all, young people want constant feedback from supervisors. … [P]eople in their 20s crave grades, performance evaluations and reviews,” Gross and Scott observed. Their twentysomethings “reject 70-hour workweeks as yuppie lunacy” and “sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders” of the fast-track set. “Young people increasingly claim they are willing to leave careers in middle gear, without making that final climb to the top,” they later wrote. “The leitmotiv of the new age: second place seems just fine.” For work, Gross and Scott found their subjects “want flexibility, access to decision making and a return to the sacredness of work-free weekends.” (Doesn’t everybody?)

Can both articles be correct? Can they both be wrong? Were the differences in the economic climate -- wretched in 1990, reviving in 1995 -- a factor? Whatever the reason, the conclusion of the Forbes piece, in a month where Jenn X and her friends prepared to receive their degrees, read less a dirge like earlier articles than it marked a celebration of commencement for Generation X:

No opportunities for young people in this country? If you believe that, you just aren’t paying attention. … More than our great factories, more than our fertile plans, more than our accumulated wealth and ivy-covered universities, American youth, with its entrepreneurial bent and its love affair with technology, is the nation’s greatest asset.

Voices Carry

[More of the Senior chapter.]

But even before those stories appeared, the public rehabilitation of Xers’ reputation, and the repudiation of the slacker stereotype, had begun to evolve. A book defending the generation’s situation and a magazine article rebranding GenX’s abilities both emerged in May 1995.

That month, St. Martin’s Press published Geoffrey T. Holtz’s Welcome to the Jungle: The Why Behind Generation X. Up until this point, authors discussing the plight of that generation were Boomers, generally sowing doubt on the generation’s future. Yet the tide was turning as the same publishing house that brought forth Coupland’s book that helped codify generational stereotypes released a book that attempted to smash all the preconceived notions of GenX.

The term Generation X itself was one Holtz abhorred. “[T]his much-hyped, slightly derogatory label seems to be nearly universally dislike among the members of the young generation whom it is supposed to define,” he wrote. Instead, Holtz attempted (unsuccessfully) to give his generation a new label: “the Free.” He saw it as a sign of their emancipation from more constrictive times, his generation’s reputation as “free spirits,” and their freedom from times-defining national traumas like the Great Depression or failure in Vietnam.

The time was right, in Holtz’s estimation, to reclaim the lead in how his generation was defined. With “seventy-five million teenagers and young adults -- nearly one American out of every three” born in the 1960s and 1970s, his Free generation was too large to remain silent. This cohort was “beginning to assume a broader position in the public spotlight, but until now, the media’s depiction of them has been disturbingly consistent” in degrading its intellects, abilities and prospects, he said.

“Contrary to popular belief, we’re not a generation of malcontents, underachievers, and complainers,” Holtz insisted. “Such stereotypes indicate a lack of understanding the forces that have shaped this diverse group.” (Many of these, as argued by Holtz, appear in the prologue section of this thesis.) But he also believed that a change in perception, or at least a willingness to reconsider the stereotypes, was afoot in America:

There are signs, however, that the negative characteristics are starting to soften. President Clinton, notably, the first Boomer to sit in the Oval Office, told UCLA students in the spring of 1994, “Americans of my generation have been bombarded by images of television shows, and even one book, about the so-called Generation X filled with cynics and slackers. Well, what I have seen today is not a generation of slackers, but a generation of seekers.” … Comments like these may indicate that older generations are finally giving us a little “slack,” and even some credit.

Don't Dream It's Over

[Continuing the Senior section of the thesis]

New York Times writer John Marchese, writing in the paper's "Styles" section, also confirmed the generation's death in June 1995. The generation's loudest political machine, the organization named Lead or Leave, had chosen the latter option, closing its Washington headquarters in May. Generation X magazines were no longer licenses to print money, and movies wrapped around this once-overexposed demographic flickered to a near standstill. The latter fact reflected an observation made by author Timothy Shary in Generation Multiplex: Cinematic trends reflected the broader media focus, as films normally centering on teenagers instead focused upon twentysomethings beginning in the early 1990s before returning teens to the spotlight by the mid 1990s. The movie industry returned instead to trying to separate teenagers from their dollars, just as they had for most of the second half of the 20th century.

Marchese believed the trend was diluted as it changed “from a label for an ennui-ridden, underachieving slacker set to include just about everyone.” Earlier that year, Philadelphia magazine had inverted the stereotype when they profiled several successful twentysomethings among its citizenry under the title “Generation X-ceptional.”

“I agree that it’s over,” admitted St. Martin's Press Executive Editor James Fitzgerald, who inked Coupland and published the book that launched a million marketing campaigns. In the Nanosecond Nineties, even the media’s attention span had waned. "Everything gobbles itself up in the media now," he told Marchese. "At least this got four years."

Unsuccessful presidents are voted out of office after four years, but the chances of deposing the Generation X campaign quickly seemed bleak at that time. Ritchie, the author of Marketing to Generation X, predicted the demographic would remain the target of marketers, many mistaken in their assumptions and approaches. "The longer we patronize Generation X with stereotyped portrayals that ignore their economic clout and marketing savvy," she told Marchese, "the higher the price we will pay in long-term market share." Thus a generation known for its love of irony died with a last ironic twist: a warning from a Boomer that, if you try to market to Generation X, you will never successfully market to Generation X.

The End Is The Beginning Is The End

[Here starts the Senior section.]

“Makes me sorry that it had to end that way
Learned my lesson now there’s nothing more to say
Graduation day.”
-- “Graduation Day,” Chris Isaak

To our college student Jenn X, the summer of 1995 represented her opportunity for freedom. Commencement meant the beginning of a new life with the end of college. She could finally move on from the restrictions and the categorization of being “one of those college kids.” Like many college students, she looked forward to slipping out of the cocoon of college and its embryonic state to instead spread her wings and pursue a better life. Her cohort, Generation X, was also ready to slip out of the pigeonholed role as societal whipping boy and scourge of the future.

The world had changed many ways since Jenn X started college. With the old Evil Empire crumbling in 1991 and the Iraq war ending in a walkover, the media grasped a new possible enemy within their ranks. This strange creature listened to “grunge,” spent its time “slacking” and appeared to have no future. But the down economy of 1991 bore little relation to the resurgent pace of 1995, just as many twentysomethings bore no similarity to their media-created doppelgangers. Just as Jenn X had entered college as a teenage girl and emerged a young woman, so had the slackers of 1991 grown out of their grimy shells by 1995.

Like the mad scientist forced to kill his creation, Douglas Coupland -- the author who unwittingly saddled his cohort with the name of Generation X -- led the charge to pull the plug on the gratuitous X-watching. Writing a kind of obituary in the June 1995 edition of Details magazine, he blamed the Boomers for combining a few fictional details and pop-culture snapshots to condemn an entire generation. When they felt "pummeled by the recession and embarrassed by their own compromised 60s values," Baby Boomers "began transferring their collective darkness onto the group threatening to take the spotlight" and labeled his generation as "monsters," Coupland believed.

The barrage of marketers attempting to act young and look cool, while reaching for the younger generation's wallets, added insult to injury. Irony itself -- which Coupland saw as a necessary coping device for young people trying to stay sane in a maddening world -- "was for the first time used as a selling tool. This demographic pornography was probably what young people resented most about the whole X explosion." While previous generations like the beats, hippies and punks were used as marketing tools toward the end of their halcyon days, Xers were "hypermarketed right from the start," to the point where advertiser-generated images drove reality, not vice-versa.

Coupland found the attention and hype somewhere between comical and insulting. Corporations called to offer $10,000 or more for him to lecture on selling to Generation X. He said he distanced himself from the subject by late 1991 "after both political parties had called to purchase advice on X," which showed just how ludicrous the whole debate had become.

"And now I'm here to say X is over," Coupland eulogized (just in time to promote his new novel, Microserfs). He declared "a moratorium on all the noise" now that Kurt Cobain had killed himself, generational totems had become commoditized, and the media used Generation X as a blanket term for anyone from their early teens to late thirties. The whole commotion showed that everyone missed the point, he explained, as "marketers and journalists never understood that X is a term that defines not a chronological age but a way of looking at the world."

He urged readers to wage “war against the forces of dumbness” and to turn down all opportunities to debate generations. Coupland did acknowledge one difference he perceived between his generation and its forerunners: the resistance to hype and packaged nostalgia. “Marketers have known that to pump money out of baby boomers, all they need do is play a Beach Boys song and show a clip from Vietnam,” Coupland wrote. “With X, they naively continue to assume that any generation actively enjoys participating in its own selling out. Wrong. Let X = X.”

All Apologies

[Thus concludes the Junior section.]

But for all the intergenerational or intragenerational battles, real or imagined, for many Xers the most notable struggle was with themselves. It’s a struggle that one of its most notable members, Kurt Cobain, lost when he put a bullet through his head in April 1994.

Even as he overcame humble beginnings to become one of the most famous and musically influential artists of the 1990s, Cobain harbored dark secrets. He had become addicted to heroin, in part to quell a painful stomach malady doctors were unable to alleviate. In what proved an eerily prophetic sentence, Cobain told Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad that he once rationalized heroin as his only salve: “This is the only thing that’s saving me from blowing my head off right now.” But he apparently could not handle the fame, attention and rollercoaster ride and, despite realizing his rock’n’roll dream and being a loving husband and father, Cobain lost his battle with the demons that haunted him most of his dysfunctional life.

In his suicide note, Cobain explained that he just did not feel the joy of creating music any more and that he was tired of faking it. While he enjoyed a wonderful ride with Nirvana, Cobain admitted in his suicide note that “since the age of seven, I’ve become hateful toward all humans in general only because it seems so easy for people to get along and have empathy” as he was “too much of an erratic, moody person and I don’t have the passion any more.” In his final note to the world, one of his generation’s most meteoric overachievers fulfilled a prophetic (and seemingly anti-Boomer) statement he was once scrawled in his journal: “Hope I die before I turn into Pete Townsend.”

“Obituaries and other press accounts centered on the ‘tormented rebel’ and the ‘troubled voice of a generation,’” Azerrad wrote in a hastily added final chapter to Come As You Are. “In death as in life, few if any simply talked about Kurt as if he were a real person.”

Perhaps a part of Cobain’s complicated legacy involves his putting a face on all the very real, but unknown, members of his generation who took their own lives. Cobain’s death, author Geoffrey Holtz believed, served notice that Xers were humans, not merely a marketing demographic, with the high-profile suicide “a heartbreaking illustration of just how much more tension and anxiety have accompanied growing up in recent, turbulent times.”

“By 1988, the rate at which young people were killing themselves was double that of 1970 and triple the 1960 rate,” and became the second-leading cause of death for those aged 15 to 24, Holtz said. “[T]he suicide rates for all other age groups remained steady or declined” while youths increasingly killed themselves, with more young Americans committing suicide “than were killed in our ten-year involvement in Vietnam.” He cited a Center for Disease Control survey that found more than 250,000 high-school students made at least one suicide attempt that required medical attention. Another survey found that one of every three adolescents reported seriously considering suicide, attributed to such factors as depression, family displacement and strife, alienation and peer pressure. Chances are very good, then, that Jenn X, her roommate or one of her best friends had at least considered suicide, if not attempted it.

If Jenn X’s junior year proved a turbulent one, like it did for many college students facing the transition from childhood to the responsibilities of adulthood, she could look forward to a light at the end of the tunnel. If Jenn X stayed on top of her studies, she could begin a new chapter in her life when she graduated college in 1995. The amount of attention her generation received and its overall image were poised to turn a page that year as well.

It's Just A Fantasy

[And here we continue the Junior chapter from where we left off last time.]

That some members of Generation X were finding success remained a thread few journalists seemed to take seriously. Yet it seemed conceivable that upwardly mobile Xers faced tension with the layabout lifestyles of their slacker friends. At least that’s the questionable theory behind Reality Bites, a 1994 movie some observers tout as one of the signature pop-culture remnants of the GenX craze.

On the surface, perhaps it makes sense -- a new spin on a love triangle where pretty, smart young filmmaker Lelaina (Winona Ryder) finds herself torn between her longtime slacker boyfriend Troy (Ethan Hawke) and a new, ambitious suitor named Michael (Ben Stiller) who can advance her career. After a litany of scenes intended to the audience feel attached to these screen representations, Lelaina ultimately chooses the broodingly handsome but mostly cardboard Troy over Michael, the material guy. While the ending hints that Lelaina will also remain focused on her career, the movie’s curious metamessage was that being a slacker can get you … Winona Ryder.

In addition to the unsatisfying ending, some critics panned the attempt to make a definitive GenX movie as an exercise in self-defeat. Since “probably over 75%” of the movie’s demographic was “either oblivious to or resentful of the label” of Generation X, Pretty in Pink author and movie critic Jonathan Bernstein theorizes, “it becomes apparent why movies claiming to speak for the frustrations and aspirations of twentysomethings were greeted with no little suspicion.” Bernstein also saw the movie as too desperate to be liked by its target audience, as it “appeared in its finished incarnation as if it had been assembled by cyberborgs programmed to display Gen-X traits.” He believed that the movie’s “assumption of generational commonalities turned off more than it attracted.”

The words of critic Peter Hanson, author of The Cinema of Generation X, imply that the movie paralleled a misguided media notion -- arrogant, ignorant or naive -- that Generation X represented a homogenous group:

… the idea of Gen Xers drawing strength from generational identity is laughable. People who don’t believe in societal movements or institutions don’t necessarily believe in each other. So saying in 1994 that different segments of Generation X can learn from and love each other, as Reality Bites did, is as wide-eyed as suggesting in 1969 that the hawks and doves of the Vietnam Era could live in peace.

Another Brick In The Wall

[The Junior section, contined.]

Just as Xers like Cobain harbored resentment toward their parents’ generation, Boomers sometimes let their own cynicism influence their reports. A telling example is Generation X Goes to College, where a journalist-turned-educator writing under the pseudonym “Peter Sacks” hammered students he believed felt “entitled to easy success and good grades even though they were often unwilling to work to achieve them.” Does this seem an apt description of Jenn X and many members of her generation who worked one or two jobs to meet rising tuition demands and do their homework into the wee hours of the morning? Or does it seem an oversimplification geared to sell a sensationalist book?

Sacks reported entering academia only to find a raging “culture war” between Boomer teachers like him and GenX students. He reacted with shock to coming to a class and finding a room filled with “young women trying very hard to look like models in fashion magazines with their big hair and lips” and young men in “baseball caps, often worn backwards” while sporting a uniform of “baggy shorts, a team T-shirt and an ample attitude.” As he tried to teach and reach his community-college students, he failed, concluding “this could be a generation in trouble, foreboding possibly scary times for our country” unless the Boomers overhauled the educational system. Typical of Boomer authors writing books charged with the terms of generational warfare, Sacks saw Gen X as a problem and appeared incapable of seeing that the brightest minds of that generation could provide part of the solution.

Instead of changing the system (and thus living up to the Boomer meme of high ideals), Sacks decided to turn his class into a kind of collegiate kindergarten in what he termed “the Sandbox Experiment.” Desperate to counter negative student evaluations and to attain tenure, he mastered such tasks as “hand-holding and spoon-feeding” and won acceptance from his unmotivated charges. As a result of selling out, Sacks saw his student evaluations rise from exasperated to excellent, and he received tenure. Despite his high-minded preaching, Sacks offers an unintended, yet telling, moral that treating Xers like children, and not preparing them for their important future roles, can help a Boomer like him achieve success.

Family Snapshot

[The Junior (chapter) jamboree continues, picking up from the end of the previous passage.]

But others wondered if Boomers had ulterior motives behind running down their successors. Bob Guccione Jr., publisher of Spin magazine, noted that the sudden rash of stories on Generation X treated their subjects as if "explaining a new virus" and giving premature "eulogies for the first generation that was not going to be able to do as well as its parents." Guccione, a self-professed Baby Boomer, believed there was a sinister reason for the dominant image of Xer-as-slacker-youth. Such images were "a deliberate propaganda campaign intended to make young people less desirable to employers, thus preserving jobs and career options for the Boomers and slowing the next generation's succession to power." Today's youngsters were charged in "Kafkaesque" courts of public opinion "with the illogical crime of not being completely adults, and therefore failures," Guccione wrote. His fellow Boomers, Guccione concluded, "were guilty of raping the economy and the environment" and causing the next generation to inherit "a bankrupted American Dream."

Guccione's comments are worth noting because they represent a rare example of a Baby Boomer acknowledging and condemning the generational conflict that many believe underpinned the movement to codify and condemn Generation X. While not fully confirming Guccione’s thesis, Ritchie wondered why her fellow Baby Boomers had gone from being famously open-minded to become one of the "most repressive and reactionary generations" in the country's history. Boomers believed they owned an exclusive franchise on what it meant to be youth in America, and have been reluctant to acknowledge, particularly in any positive way, the younger generation, she found.

While those who proclaim Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain the voice of his generation miss the mark, the troubled musician’s scorn for his parents and their generation seem to reflect his cohort. He was representative of people in his generation “don’t take a damn thing seriously to spite our filthy hippy parents,” he wrote at one point in his journal. But an earlier passage portrays his evident disappointment in not just his own parents but in how they sold out their ideals:

I like to blame my parents[‘] generation for coming so close to social change then giving up after a few successful efforts by the media & government to deface the movement by using the Mansons and other Hippie representations as propaganda examples on how they were nothing but unpatriotic, communist, satanic, inhuman diseases. And in turn the baby boomers became the ultimate, conforming, yuppie hypocrites a generation has ever produced.

While certainly hyperbolic, as well as fanciful in its revisionism, Cobain’s complaint points to the complicated relationship between Xers and their Boomer parents. Most previous generations, one could surmise, believed their parents never knew rebellion. Yet the Boomers are renowned for the rebellion raised by some in their ranks. The charge against them, in the eyes of Cobain and others like him, is that they discarded their revolution for safe lifestyles and steady jobs. The Boomers’ streak of admirable rebel credentials faded under the stain of conformity. Yet Xers are not known for despising their parents as much as feeling spurned or hurt by them. Even Cobain’s relationship with his parents proved both warm and prickly. “I love my parents yet I disagree with merely everything they stand for,” he once confided in his journal. Later, he scrawled to his estranged father: “I don’t need a father-son relationship with a person whom I don’t want to spend a Boring Christmas with. … I love you. I don’t hate you. I don’t want to talk to you.”

Old-Time Rock and Roll

[The start of the Junior chapter begins ... right now!]

“A generation so much dumber than its parents
Came crashing through the window.”
-- “At The Hundredth Meridian,” The Tragically Hip

Any media sensation is bound to produce a backlash, and by the time Jenn X returned to Coupland University as summer 1994 ended, storm clouds loomed on the horizon. Much the way a junior year may bring anxious moments and arguments with parents and classmates, 1994 wrought generational salvos, both between the Boomers and Generation X, and among Xers themselves.

Neil Howe and Bill Strauss, authors of the cover piece in The Atlantic Monthly, made a big and influential splash with the publication of their full-length book, 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? They continued to eschew the predominant Generation X sobriquet in favor of the cohort’s numerical designation. The rest of the narrative followed the expected playbook. Pages upon pages of commentary, including culled quotes that ranged from the People for the American Way on the left to Allan Bloom's cynical Closing of the American Mind on the right, painted a picture of educational and political pundits casting doubt on the future of this generation. Referencing their status as Boomers, Howe and Strauss noted that the younger generation stood at the bulls-eye of the ills of the world, as "the caricatured image of our collective woes, the indelible icon of national decline, doesn't include most of us." Instead of blaming the Boomers for the faults of the world, they noted, the 13er became the stereotyped image of All That Was Wrong In America; kids with blank stares or sunglasses sporting the inevitable "backwards ball cap, and high-top sneakers" came to represent "the future we fear."

Howe and Strauss express some ambivalence on the issue, rebuffing some charges against youngsters while reinforcing others. The nearly 80 million Americans aged 11 to 31, they wrote in 1993, "look shocking on the outside, unknowable on the inside." The generation both exposed to, and scrutinized by, the media more than any of its forebears presented both more negative and positive role models than any other group. Paradoxically, they were viewed as more irresponsible than previous generations were at their age, even though their fractured families forced them to become more responsible at a younger age than their ancestors. They were perceived as slackers, even as their youth movement helped topple the Berlin Wall and crumble communism where decades of weapons production and wars of words failed. Howe and Strauss believed there was a chance that historians may someday look back and record no laudable virtue for the 13th Gen, other than that they were products and promulgators of a slumping society.

In the book's conclusion, they predicted, in boldface: “Over the next fifteen years, the festering quarrel between 13ers and Boomers will grow into America’s next great ‘generation gap.’” They foresaw the remainder of the 1990s and much of the beginning of the next century as a time when “13ers will blast away at Boomer hypocrisy and pomposity -- and get blasted back for their own cynicism.” With the endpoint of this stanza, 2008, on the horizon, it appears this prediction will fall short. The Internet explosion, the resurgent 1990s economy, terrorist attacks, political polarization, the outsourcing of jobs, the resurgent scarcity of jobs, and celebrity worship have all dwarfed any high-profile intergenerational war … no matter how much Howe and Strauss wanted to promote this battle.

They also made a boldfaced prediction that upon reaching middle age, "the 13ers' economic fears will be confirmed: They will become the only generation born this century to suffer a one-generation backstep in living standards." By around 2020, they foresee 13ers "[f]inding their youthful dreams broken on the shoals of marketplace reality." This conclusion did not come as much of a surprise, as Strauss and Howe quoted quite a few pundits and authors opining that Xers would fall short of their parents, the vaunted Boomers (a generation that includes, of course, the book's authors). But it did seem surprising that anyone writing a book in 1993 thought they could definitively assure the certain failure of a generation whose oldest members at the time were only entering their early 30s. By apparently damning their subjects to a dim future, in advance of any actual events, Howe and Strauss appeared to continue their seemingly slanted prophecy of disappointed determinism.

Now We're Getting Somewhere

[Sophomore section, the conclusion.]

As for dropping volunteer activity for young people, one wonders whether they had less free time than earlier decades because they were busy working. “After-school jobs have become a major force in teen life,” a November 1992 Newsweek cover story explained. “More than 5 million kids between 12 and 17 now work … . Teens are twice as likely to work as they were in 1950.” So even as Boomer pundits accused the younger generation of idling, Xers were working harder and longer than their predecessors.

That young people could respond to such awkward campaigns as “Choose or Lose” and “Rock the Vote,” and many grassroots initiatives, encouraged even an eternal cynic like Kurt Cobain. “I know that throughout the eighties, my generation was fucking helpless,” he once observed. “Within the last two years, I’ve noticed a consciousness that’s way more positive, way more intelligent in the younger generation … .”

As the media-savvy Xers became more aware of their importance, they learned how to better use their voices, Bagby noted. Lobbying groups like Lead or Leave, 2030 and Third Millennium formed around issues important to young people -- particulary the future of social security. Stars such as Adam Webrach, who became president of the Sierra Club in 1996 at the tender age of 23, began to emerge. And as news organizations rushed to attract the now-hot generation by featuring twentysomethings, Xer views and sensibilities at last gained a foothold in a media machine Bagby accused of being previously dominated by Boomers.

With Xers emerging as both the focus of media attention and a cultural force, people like Jenn X had more clout than her cohort ever had before. But not everyone was happy about it, so a backlash proved inevitable.

Let's Stay Engaged

[Contined from previous post.]

Xers’ political engagement fell under the microscope with MTV launching its inaugural “Choose or Lose” campaign to convince more young people to vote. While the push of “Choose or Lose” and “Rock the Vote” (a campaign started by record companies to combat potential censorship from Tipper Gore and the Parents’ Music Recording Council that ended up convincing millions of young people to vote for her husband for vice president) brought more young people into politics, the results of the 1992 presidential campaign showed a way to go. Among those 18 to 20, 38.5 percent reported voting, as well as 45.7 percent of those 21 to 24. Among all other age groups, more than 60 percent made it to the polls. Meredith Bagby, author and self-styled defender of her generation, would later lament: “As a result of our low turnout, politicians have no incentive to heed our concerns because we are not the ones electing them.”

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community, a sweeping study of social engagement in the United States, posited that the younger set rolled gutter balls in its levels in political activity, volunteer work and community building. But even as rates of participation among Xers (which, curiously, Putnam frames as those between 1965 and 1980) declined, they were only following a slide begun by the Boomers. “The erosion of American social capital began before any X’er was born, so the X’ers cannot reasonably blamed for these adverse trends,” Putnam noted. If community engagement is a behavior learned from parents (single or otherwise), the inability of the Boomers to provide good role models here cannot be underestimated. The overall national rates of participation dropped because generations born before World War II were dying or becoming too old for engagement, as Boomers and Xers did not take their place.

In the falling engagement figures, some of the biggest drops among young people in the 1970s compared to the 1990s reflect Xers’ disdain for politics. Among the 18-29 set, those signing a petition fell 46 percent, those running for or holding public office dropped 49 percent, and those working for a political party cascaded 64 percent.

But can one blame these tumbling figures, particularly in the political realm, on Xer cynicism toward, and disdain for, the political process in the wake of Watergate and the parade of scandals in the ensuing decades? In Rational Exuberance: The Influence of Generation X on the New American Economy, Meredith Bagby makes such a case. She sees her generation of being more nonpartisan than apolitical. A poll by Louis Harris found 78 percent of Xers disagreeing with the statement “Government can generally be trusted to look after our interests,” which she said was a reverse of the findings in a 1960 Newsweek poll on whether young people trusted government. Xers don’t identify with either party because they find both beholden to special interests while neither appeals to the swelling ranks of young adults who are socially liberal but fiscally conservative, she said. Bagby cited the relatively high backing (23 percent) of Ross Perot among voters 18-24 in 1992, as the Texas billionaire emphasized issues over ideology, and trotted out graphs, humor and a plea to not burden future generations.

Foolin'

[A little more of the section Sophomore.]

But the sudden attention marketers showered onto Generation X received its fair share of criticism, often from its targets. Thomas Frank, co-founder of the irreverent magazine The Baffler, ridiculed corporate attempts to cash in through playing to the apparent nonconformity of Xers. "Corporate America," he wrote in one essay, "is no longer an oppressor but a sponsor of fun, provider of lifestyle accoutrements…" Rule-breaking and being different were the new value-added in Corporate America, but so many companies jumped on the bandwagon that the tactic proved hollow and unintentionally amusing.

Frank pointed to many similar advertising slogans for corporations asking consumers to be different: Both Young & Rubicon and Clash Clear Malt adopted the slogan "Resist the usual," Dodge told us "The rules have changed," Hugo Boss encouraged us to "Innovate not imitate," Special Import beer expressed itself as "Just different from the rest," and Burger King told us that "Sometimes you gotta break the rules" while competitor Arby's observed "This is different. Different is good." Many ads included "screaming guitars, whirling cameras, and started old timers," who drove home the message that rebel consumers can show how different they are merely by purchasing this product. That the advertisers did not realize -- or did not care -- that Xers saw little differential value in buying something millions of other people had, or that so many advertising campaigns tried so hard to be different that they all looked the same, spoke volumes about the strange mania that seized marketers during the heyday of Generation X trendwatching.

Marketers were not the only ones to look silly in rushing after the GenX trend. For the aforementioned New York Times piece, a staffer called Sub Pop Records in Seattle to learn more about these Xers and the grunge subculture. The chat with employee Megan Jasper resulted in the Times passing along its own little “Grunge Speak” dictionary as a sidebar piece. New terms hipping readers included “bound-and-hagged” (remaining home Friday or Saturday night), “lamestain” (someone who is uncool) and “swingin’ on the flippity-flop” (hanging out). But the Grey Lady’s celebration at cracking the grunge code was short-lived. Frank’s Baffler revealed that the terms were a hoax, made up on the spot by the quick-thinking Jasper. In their haste to try to break into a subculture, they were had by one of its cynical, media-savvy members.

Sell Out

[The Sophomore section continues.]

In November 1992, The New York Times joined those probing the emerging “grunge” subculture. In a front-page story in its Sunday Style section, the Grey Lady wondered: “How did a five-letter [sic] word meaning dirt, filth, trash become synonymous with a musical genre, a fashion statement, a pop phenomenon?” Writer Rick Marin noted how quickly “grunge” had arced into mainstream:

It was just over a year ago that MTV began barraging its viewers with the sounds of Seattle “grunge rock” featuring the angst anthems and grinding guitars of bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. By last summer, the glossy magazines began tracking grunge looks, the thread bare flannel shirts, knobby wool sweaters and cracked leatherette coats of the Pacific Northwest’s thrift-shop aesthetic. Hollywood weighed in, too, with a grunge-scene movie, “Singles.” Then two weeks ago -- all in the blink of a flashbulb -- the fashion designer Marc Jacobs, who has never been to Seattle, was hailed as “the guru of grunge.”

Marin described a recent Jacobs fashion show featuring “beautiful women wearing wool ski caps, unlaced combat boots and dirty-looking hair (styled by Oribe) for his spring Perry Ellis collection.” Yet the incorporation of grunge into the fashion world boggled some observers. “To me, the thing about grunge is it’s not anti-fashion, it’s unfashion,” observed James Thomas, the editor-in-chief of Details magazine. “Punk was anti-fashion. It made a statement. Grunge is about not making a statement, which is why it’s crazy for it to become a fashion statement.”
In a society where money equals power, this rush to profit from the tastes and needs of an emerging generation demonstrated most convincingly that a new demographic had arrived. Many of the attempts were founded on assumptions and stereotypes, and proved laughably bad.

Karen Ritchie, author of Marketing to Generation X, found hardly any campaigns aimed at the younger set because her unprepared fellow marketers had remained fixated on Boomer money. Twentysomethings at the time were happy not to be pandered or marketing to, and essentially pleased to be left alone by a world of advertising they did not trust. But the sudden “discovery” of an untapped market brought what Ritchie termed a barrage of articles "slicker and more superficial than a Coke commercial" probing the minds, habits and consumption patterns of Xers.

Ritchie's pleas for paying more attention to the younger generation, while positive, were hardly altruistic. They came down to the oldest motivation in the world: money. By 1995, Xers represented 30 percent of the population of the United States, as opposed to 26 percent for Baby Boomers, but marketers were slow to notice. Generation X comprised 79.4 million individuals, nearly 65 million of whom were adults, who "denied themselves little in the way of personal luxuries," and thus made themselves ripe targets for marketers. She explained, however, that Generation X challenged traditional marketers; this demographic did not hate advertising, but it abhorred hype, as well as "overstatement, self-importance, hypocrisy" and other puffery used to sell products for generations.

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.

Taking Care Of Business

[More of the Sophomore year, more of the same.]

In addition to the heavy-handed pseudointellectualism of the Howe and Strauss piece, the cover story of the December 12, 1992 edition of Business Week, “Move Over, Boomers” (subtitled “The Busters Are Here -- And They’re Angry”) was in large part a breezy reiteration of stereotypes and generalities from the July 1990 Time “Proceed With Caution” piece, with bits of jargon and colorful imagery tossed in for effect. Since Nirvana had broken, they were forced to concede that the new generation was “already starting to set tastes in fashion and popular culture,” but they repeated the expected conventional wisdom that they were “likelier than the previous generation to be unemployed, underemployed, and living at home with Mom and Dad.”

But in a departure from the Howe and Strauss and “Proceed With Caution” pieces, Laura Zinn’s Business Week article emphasized that what they frequently called “baby busters” were a force to make peace or reckon with. “They’re the ones who will vote you into office, buy your products and work in your factories,” she told Boomers. Moreover, a Roper poll revealed that twentysomethings boast an annual $125 billion in spending power, particularly essential to the success of purveyors of fast food, beer, cosmetics, clothes and electronics. And while Xers would not move up the ladder as quickly as some preceding generations, “within this decade, these consumers will be entering their peak earning years,” Zinn wrote, as “soon enough, they’ll be setting up households by the millions, having families, and buying refrigerators, cars, homes -- all the big-ticket items that drive an economy.”

Instead of looking at the Xers as doomed to an interminable purgatory in the current economic climate, as it was possible that Xers could “lead the country out of recession” when “a bulge of 13 million kids who were born between October, 1968, and March, 1971, will start turning 25,” Zinn wrote. The theory paralleled what happened a decade earlier: when an unprecedented number of Americans turned 25 in 1986, it represented the best year for housing and car purchases of the 1980s. On the flip side, the article posited that when the Boomers retired en masse, the lack of competition for quality jobs could mean a better quality of life down the road for the “busters.”

Two Tribes

[The Sophomore section, continued.]

“Two world views, reflecting fundamentally different versions of society and self, are moving into conflict in the America of the 1990s,” warned “The New Generation Gap,” the cover story of the December 1992 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. Its authors, Neil Howe and Bill Strauss, painted a troubling and troubled portrait of the group they called “Thirteeners,” the thirteenth generation to come of age since America declared its independence:

Like warriors on the eve of battle, Thirteeners face their future with a mixture of bravado and fatalism. Squared off competitively against one another, this mélange of scared city kids, suburban slackers, hungry immigrants, desperate grads and shameless hustlers is collectively coming to realize that America rewards only a select set of winners with its and Dream -- and that America cares little about its anonymous losers. … The Thirteener sees no intermediary signposts, no sure, step-by-step path along which society will help him, urge him, congratulate him. Instead, all he sees is an enormous obstacle; with him on one side and everything he wants on the other. And what’s that obstacle? Those damn Boomers.

Howe and Strauss, Boomers themselves, said their generation helped scuttle any hopes for Thirteeners through a pop culture that told youngsters they were unwanted, while polls and attitudes showed an anti-child culture emerging (as Holtz has also mentioned) and the tax revolt gutted education. In addition, the 1980s and 1990s saw the regnant Boomers enact policies of family values, tough love, political correctness and tighter funding. No wonder that Thirteeners reached adulthood with “a tone of physical frenzy and spiritual numbness” and a “pursuit of high-tech guiltless fun” while “avoiding meaning in a cumbersome society that, as they see it, offers them little.”

What most characterizes the article by Howe and Strauss -- as well as their future book, 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? (which we will discuss in the next chapter) -- is an oppressively bleak outlook for the generation that would make a Mad Max film look like a Rogers and Hammerstein musical. “Polls show that Thirteeners believe it will be much harder for them to get ahead than it was for their parents -- and that they are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the long-term fate of their generation and nation,” they wrote. “They sense that they’re the clean-up crew, that their role in history will be sacrificial -- that whatever comeuppance America has to face, they’ll bear more than their share of the burden.” (This likely would come as a surprise to Jenn X and her friends who really believed college represented a better life as opposed to training to be ritually sacrificed.)

Curiously, Howe and Strauss do not see any hope for this generation, although they do see an emerging consensus that society wanted to repair childhood by legislation, education or community partnerships. “It won’t happen in time to save today’s inner-city teen and $7-an-hour twentysomethings but maybe it will in time to save the wanted, Scoutlike kids coming up just behind Bart Simpson,” they conclude. Did they just doom a whole generation?

We Are Finding Who We Are

[Thus begins the "sophomore" section of the thesis.]

“If you could see the you that I see
When I see you seeing me
You’d see yourself so differently.”
-- “Low Self Opinion,” Rollins Band

A funny thing happened to a younger set tabbed to become a generational footnote with such derivative, derisive and subordinate handles as “the post-boomers” and the “baby busters.” By the time Jenn X and her friends returned to Coupland University at the end of the summer of 1992, the world had noticed them and wanted to know more about them. MTV told the emerging generation they should “Choose or Lose” and “Rock the Vote.” A new spin on music and fashion dubbed “the grunge sound” made them cultural forces for the first time. Magazines were jockeying for position to publish cover stories either celebrating their arrival or cursing their existence. The communal plight of what some writers and observers termed “Generation X” had changed immensely from just a year earlier.

Like most college sophomores, Jenn X was likely searching for her identity. She likely wanted to determine it herself but had to resist outside attempts to label or pigeonhole her in some way -- brain, jock, goth, punk, stoner, sorority gal or perhaps a combination of the above. Her own generation found itself caught up in the quest for identity -- one that seemed to increasingly be imposed on them from the outside. One need look no further than the close of 1992, as Jenn X and her friends prepared for final exams, when national magazines covers stories competed in placing the emerging generation under the microscope.

In a brief span between December 1992 and early January 1993, The Atlantic Monthly, Business Week and The New Republic all ran cover stories on the topic. The articles approached their subject in differing ways and drew radically different conclusions in the process.

The Real World

[I've been slacking! I've returned! The conclusion of the freshman section follows.]

When Jenn X and friends entered the summer break after their freshman year, they would notice that it seemed like everyone was talking about their generation after years of barely acknowledging them. Then yet another media phenomena, the premiere of MTV’s landmark reality show The Real World, focused even more attention on their cohort.

Premiering in summer 1992, just ahead of a tidal wave of youth dramas (many on Fox), The Real World followed the lives of seven strangers selected to live together in a swank New York City apartment and interact while surrounded by cameras, microphones and crew. It became an immediate sensation among younger Americans for a number of reasons, according to Rob Owen, author of Gen X TV. In launching what would become a long, and often undistinguished, line of reality TV shows, The Real World represented a live-action soap opera where “the satisfaction level rises a notch because instead of watching characters, viewers get to eavesdrop on the lives of real people,” Owen wrote. The cast was an appealing one (albeit not as shallowly attractive as later seasons) featuring people of a creative bent such as a writer, a rapper, two musicians, a male model and a dancer. Although they bickered and occasionally showed negative sides, cast members generally seemed like people the average viewer would want as a friend (years before NBC calculatingly cooked up a sitcom with six attractive, funny young people in New York City they hoped audiences would want to have as Friends).

In surveying young people about their viewing habits, Owen found a variety of reasons why they tuned into The Real World. “I’ve watched The Real World mainly because I can relate to the people,” 25-year-old Jennifer Stratakis said. “It’s also interesting to see real conflict and to analyze how people relate/react to each other. … I like to study the way these people communicate.” Gregory Weight, a graduate student, admitted he had less charitable reasons for enjoying it. “I feel superior with The Real World because I know I would handle things better than those idiots would,” Weight said. “The show plays to our biggest weakness: Gossip among close friends. I like it just to be a voyeur, basically.” Adds 20-year-old Brandi Murray: “I watch The Real World because it’s nice to know there are people more screwed up than I am.”

Others, instead of feeling superior, just felt annoyed, particularly with later casts who signed up more for their 15 minutes of face time. “Real World just plain sucks. … Who cares about those whiny brats?” complained Chris McCarthy, 30. Added 25-year-old Kevin Wilkinson: “Oh, please don’t let everybody think that this is what all twentysomething people are like!”

But as stereotypes of the younger generation began to form, some people did look at a group of strangers living in an expensive apartment and not having to work to support themselves as just another set of slackers. Neil Howe and Bill Strauss, the Boomer authors of the influential book 13th Gen, sneered at "the hip twentysomethings on MTV's ironically named Real Life [sic], who swim around in a luxurious fishbowl" as a prime example of "the media-created fantasy of unreal youth images."

Mike Suerdieck, a 25-year-old estimator for a construction company, told Owen that Real World images of young people lounging in luxury apartments without working is “far from the reality” and may mislead older viewers. “The vast majority of my generation is paid far less than the older generations made coming out of school, and that’s the lucky ones who did find jobs related to their college degrees,” Suerdieck said. “What is ultimately frustrating is to hear the older generation talking in public, and you can tell they assume that the shows depict real life correctly.”

One unavoidable reality by summer 1992 was how much the social and cultural landscape changed in recognizing an emerging younger generation from a year earlier. The larger question by now was whether the appearance of this cohort, now known as Generation X, would reflect reality or become merely driven by its foundational media images.