Goodbye To You

I'm happy to say the defense went well. In addition to my three readers, the head of the history department and another history professor joined us. The questions were more theoretical in nature, such as: This reads to me like a sociology paper ... can you defend it as a history paper? and What do you think of the validity of using pop culture as a source? My answers rambled, but they seemed to be satisfactory, in terms of appreciating that these papers can be interdisciplinary and consider a wide range of sources.

As to the idea, which I questioned myself throughout the process, of reporting on recent history, I've come to this conclusion: What I have devised here is a snapshot of how a generation was viewed when the media felt like they suddenly discovered a new cohort of 80 million Americans walking the streets. It centers on four years in the lives of a generation suddenly thrust into a spotlight who then rose into prime time by the mid-1990s. This is not a report on a generation as much as it is on how people viewed that generation for a few years. The perceptions have since changed as we've grown up, as we made an impact under the Internet economy and as the old suppositions just stopped making sense.

In the end, I stand by my conclusion:

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 [Douglas] 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.

One of my readers, who also happened to be the toughest questioner, has expressed an interest in helping me approach an academic publisher with which he has a connection. The next step involves translating this into something to pitch as a possible book. I have enjoyed the opportunity to use this space to test my ideas and seek feedback.

This concludes this stage of The X Project. I thank you for reading.

Right Here, Right Now

Down to brass tacks with the thesis. I did have a last-second twist when my third reader strongly suggested I find a copy of American Graffiti, watch it and work it in as a kind of compare/contrast with treatment of the end of high-school years in Ferris Buehler's Day Off. This was Monday. My readers needed a full revised copy by the next day. Finding a copy was a big challenge -- especially with only having one evening to do so, but thanks to a nice manager at Video King, we tracked down a copy for sale ($3.99) at Red's Video. It led to the addition of the following passage:

Compared to end-of-high-school fare like Ferris Buehler's Day Off and Say Anything..., movies of the previous generation on the subject such as American Graffiti strike a more innocent and idyllic tone. In the Boomer nostalgia of American Graffiti, the end of high school involves decisions about college, drag racing and fumbling through the pangs of young love. "We're finally getting out of this turkey town," Steve (Ronny Howard) tells his pal Curt (Richard Dreyfuss). "You can't just stay seventeen forever." Curt replies that he wants to spend this last night before college remembering all the good times. With the 1973 movie set in the Camelot years of the early 1960s, the characters of American Graffiti retain a certain youthful optimism contrasting with the dark days of Watergate and Vietnam. But Ferris Buehler reflects and amplifies the cynicism of its time, and its lead character's dark edge makes him want to hold back the future and drag his friends along into his fight against maturity. By the end of American Graffiti, the main characters have learned some kind of lesson about themselves, their friendships and their desires, while Ferris seems likely to remain in his immature state where he is the center of the universe. One could compare this to the rap against Xers as self-centered and childish.

So now I have my defense in a mere three days. Reviewing notes and what I want to present. A recap of the thesis doesn't make a lot of sense; it just seems redundant. I'm considering discussing the why behind it, the challenges and what I hope such a work can accomplish. I should key on why I find the 1990s so fascinating: It's well encompassed by the lyric from Jesus Jones' "Right Here, Right Now": I saw the decade in/When it seemed the world could change in the blink of an eye. Think of the breathtaking (peaceful) collapse of communism, Nirvana/grunge coming out of nowhere (or at least the Pacific Northwest) to take the world by storm, the later technological upheavels still affecting us today. Hard not to be excited about the decade.

Then, from there, I just hope the rest of the defense will go well.

Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad

The process of receiving feedback from readers continued this week. The good news is that two of my readers have reviewed and responded to all six chapters ... and their notes were fairly minimal and supportive. The not as good news is that I'm still awaiting feedback from my third reader. I need to have a finalized draft in by May 3, so any movement pretty much has to happen in the next week or so.

I also had a fairly successful presentation at Quest with a capsule presentation on my thesis. Slimming down about 100 pages to 12 to 15 minutes isn't easy, particulary because of how much nuance you have to boil out, but it seemed to work OK.

Earlier today, I went through and assembled a bibliography. In all, 45 sources listed over the course of three pages.

Final statistic for now: 16 days to the thesis defense. There is a light in the end of the tunnel.

One Step Closer To Home

I have now completed all six chapters and delivered them (electronically) to my three readers. Two have given me feedback on the first three, with one -- my advisor -- putting her critique in campus mail in my direction. The other reader will give his critique of the last three chapters when we meet Tuesday. The way campus mail works, the question is whether my advisor's critiques will reach me before then. The third reader has been busy and I'm still awaiting feedback.

In other news, I have a day and time for my defense (10 a.m., Tuesday, May 10). Something about "defense" still sounds so violent. I'm hoping it's not.

I'm also trying to finalize my Quest presentation on April 20. How do you take almost 100 pages and boil them down to 12 minutes? And make it interesting? And fill what is a pretty big room in 103 Lanigan? Your guess is as good at this point.

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.