Weekend Lounge ~ X Generation

Wow, that's a throwback in many ways

Welcome to the weekend!

It's been quite a week. Here's hoping the weather stabilizes soon because it's been pretty rough in my neck of the woods. I hope it's been better where you are. If only I could pick one temperature and weather pattern and be able to keep it for a week straight that would be great. It's been a real pain to adjust to.

Before we start, I wanted to remind readers that both the next chapter of Phantom Mission is up for patrons and the next podcast episode is also out. Phantom Mission is on Chapter 9 and we're heading towards the climax at breakneck speed. In the podcast episode I talk about The Pulp Mindset for over an hour. It's close to the fourth anniversary of the book (Wow, it's already been that long) so I wanted to go into it a bit. You can find it all at the Patreon here.

For those who are curious about the podcast specifically, there will be another free episode of it in the near future to give you a better idea of what it's about for those who are still debating on joining. Regardless, if you enjoy talking and hearing about the world of art and entertainment it's a fun project to engage in.

That's all for that. Now, let us get into today's topic!

Part 1

We talk a lot about the art and entertainment of the late 80s and early 90s as sort of a transformative period, an era of uncertainty but hopefulness and experimentation before it melted into generic muck by the time the latter decade ended. For those of us who were born before the end, we experienced firsthand as we were growing this period that was almost instantly erased and paved over once the new millennium hit. However, it only stands to reason that as Gen Y, the last group that connected to that era, got older, we would also begin to forget as we aged ourselves.

And that's why blogs like this exist. We need to keep context, we need to remember what it was like, and we need to not be steamrolled by those who wish to throw out all that came before for the next trend. The only way to make good new art is to build on those who came before, and we can't do that if no one properly remembers what actually did come before.

So let us go all the way back to a period simultaneously the most cherished and most hated, the 1980s, as we begin this story. It's about that maverick generation, the one that faded away from the mainstream without a peep as the 2000s came along. Perhaps you remember them; perhaps you are one of them yourself. Today's subject is the lost Gen X.

You probably generally know who they are, but what you might not know, or remember, is their true legacy as artists. That image has been almost lost to time. Much of that disappearance has been a victim of intentional revisionism and self-mythicization from the cohort, but there is more to it all than you might expect.

The truth is that as Gen X kids were coming of age in the 1980s they were entering the art world and putting their stamp on it. They were going to outdo their Baby Boomer parents and take on the world, leaving their mark on it as they did so. However, that aforementioned stamp is not quite what the mainstream narrative sells it as these days. It wouldn't be as profitable to be honest about what Gen X was or what happened to them.

The video series we are discussing covers today's topic in its own story. The series is called "Gen X Hate Revisited" by a YouTube channel called Cartoon Aesthetics. This series is a three part exploration of that transitional time where Gen X kids, the last fully analog generation, came of age, put their stamp on the world of art, and then slowly faded away into the crowd almost overnight. Specifically, this series covers one artist as he rose to fame with his own creation during this very period and shows just how it all sort of fell away as time passed and the market shifted. In fact, his story contains the perfect encapsulation of that generation's story.

As someone born and labeled as a member of Gen Y (someone who falls in the crack between the fully analog Gen X and the fully digital Millennials), and was the first cohort who grew up on this of sort of material back in the day before witnessing it fading as the 1990s wore on to be replaced by bland corpo slop, I've always been fascinated with what exactly that group of young adults were trying to do. It wasn't as if you could ask them--Gen X were mysterious and cool, and prone to be embellish or talk around their own motives. If anything they truly are the unreliable narrator generation. Though unlike the Boomers, it's definitely a voluntary attitude they grew up with and put out of their own accord. They were the older brother generation.

Gen X weren't their parents, but, despite what the memes might say, they didn't full reject them, either. They weren't staunch traditionalists, but they also did not hate the idea of new approaches to old mediums. What they were doing back in the day had a lot of nuance that has been lost over time. What has been traditionally labeled as "cynical" in regards to this generation of so-called "slackers" might not have been anything like that at all.

At least, it didn't start there.

In the first part of this series linked above you can see the shift in comics, music, and, eventually, animation, as a younger generation filled with vigor and spirit to travel new trails took charge of industries that weren't yet subverted and locked up by washed up cliques. Truly, if you engage in Gen X art up until the early '90s you notice a distinct identity, an originality, that sticks out and puts its own unique stamp on the art world.

Then the growing swamp of pop culture noticed their existence.

The video series does a very good job tracing the changes of that transitional period as well as the attitudes of a lot of the people around at the time before self-awareness and ego took the wheel and sent everything down a path that would culminate in the dead-end known as Cultural Ground Zero. Of course, the series being discussed doesn't go into that mess, it's out of the scope of the subject, but it is fascinating to see some of the mentalities that would eventually lead their industries into the ditch before the 21st century hit.

A comic that perfectly encapsulate the uncertain Gen X era in question is the comic called Hate starring underground favorite character Buddy Bradley. This is a series about the young Gen-Xer in question as he moves away from home to Seattle in the early 1990s in the same period it all exploded to mass appeal. You might imagine how that goes. Though the writer was part of the cohort known as "Gen Jones" (a label rarely used today), it made his observations come from a slightly different perspective than you might think as he wrote his younger character living through the time period they all were living through at the time. It's a time capsule of an era few seem to discuss much anymore. Though perhaps there is a reason for that.

The second part of the series covers Hate itself more in-depth here:

Part 2

I recommend watching the videos for yourself, as it is a great look at a time period long gone and currently being sold as something it's not in order to both sell to Zoomers who have no context for it or for crusty Gen-Xers (and Ys) who have bought into the revisionism so they can consume more product and feel more important doing so.

The truth is actually not in the plentiful "Gen X is tough and younger generations are all weak" memes floating around like old Boomer jokes on Facebook, but in how they dealt with how rapidly the world was both changing through technology and, even though no one really noticed at the time, how it was breaking down socially. Things were "weird" and insane because the old ways were being forgotten and tradition and ambition was starting to fall through the cracks. It turns out it wasn't really a new era being born, but the beginning of the end of the old one. This is partially why it's been a subject of scorn and deliberate burial over the years since the '90s ended.

This is the trickiest part a lot of formerly Authentic (capital "A" like they would have wanted) Gen X era artists have when creating art today. They built themselves back in the day on Authenticity as the highest good and key to being Real, but so many have since bought their own hype and locked themselves into preset personality patterns that they forgot who they once were, where they started from, or why they did any of this in the first place, all to keep up with the Joneses of modern trends and attitudes. Their distinct identity is long gone and lost with the passage of time. I could name countless examples but I'm sure you can think of them yourself. There is no shortage of Gen X artists that have lost their edge for Safetyism and modern mainstream acceptability.

What the "Gen X Hate Revisited" video series does is present a good case with Peter Bagge's Hate just what that Authenticity would grow to be without the influence by artificial pop culture hype and untethered to nostalgic expectations of those who want this cohort to be a certain way in Current Year. Bagge remained authentic to his original vision and, as a result, managed to create a piece that works both well as both a time capsule and a series removed from it to stand on its own feet. You get to see that generation in a way you never really get to anymore and he does it by never forgetting where he came from in the first place.

This is mostly because, for all intents and purposes, as I hinted at before, that Gen X cohort doesn't actually exist anymore. Those people are all gone, the party's over, everyone got in line and marched in file out of town, into corpo world as the 1990s drew to a close. They deliberately made themselves irrelevant the very moment they could, almost like a final jest on their old image. Where they went, nobody knows, but the people left who still use that label are hardly who they used to be, and what they tend to be is unrecognizable to what the cohort once was.

So much Gen X art as a whole has simply vanished over the years and has since been absorbed into the safe muck of the ever-creaking corporate mainstream (See: Tim Burton. There, I gave an example) that it's hard to wonder if that Authenticity ever really existed in the first place or maybe it just needed a few bucks to be guided in the Right Direction. The question still remains: where did everyone go since the millennium pulled them all into a vortex of bland? Whatever happened to that distinctive identity? What did it become? Where are they now, and where are they going?

You might get some examples in the third part meant to wrap the Gen X Hate Revisited series up. You can watch it below:

Part 3

I'm not going to comment on the third part and will instead recommend watching it for yourself and coming to your own conclusions. There is little point making judgement on a generation that is still around and still young enough to really do anything or go anywhere. The point is more to see where they are now and where they might go while they still have the chance to do it. Baby Boomers might be locked in to their current path due to their age and inability to change. For Gen X, however, the road is still very much open.

I will say one thing before we wrap it up here, and that it is strange that the Authenticity displayed here, one that was so common with Gen X back at their peak, today feels even more like a relic of a generation that once refused to stay dead. They definitely aren't dead, but sometimes it feels like they were always meant to be, and clinging to the mainstream was the one way to avoid that fate. Does that make sense? I'm rambling at this point, just trying to figure it out. Regardless, they aren't dead, and they aren't done yet. No one really is. There's always a chance to change.

I don't want any of this to sound like I'm throwing stones here. Gen Y has done just about everything I talked about. Our "authenticity" was "objectivity" and leading the charge for materialism acceptance through long-dead trash like New Atheism. In pursuit of relevance and acceptable corporate trends to base our identities around we allowed ourselves to turn to bland inoffensive goo--our legacy is melting down in the 2000s to allow the current state of product worship to be the baseline in appreciating art and entertainment. We basically helped create the current monster of corpo slop worship. Anything negative I can say about Gen X can be applied just as harshly to me and mine. We have not been the preservationists we once saw ourselves as.

The generation that were the excited younger brothers of Gen X back in the '90s turned into wannabe Millennials, hipsters, and consoomers, over the last quarter century, clinging to dead childhood brands that are the last thing around to remember our existence from when we mattered. And all we want is to be left alone to die in the corner with as much cheap plastic crap as we can. What a glorious legacy that will be!

If anything, my generation is worse at all this. Gen X might have faded away, but we threw ourselves off the train before we even got to the stop we were being dropped off at. They still have much to offer, even today, that we could have passed on ourselves if we weren't too busy hoarding corporate products and useless baubles instead.

All that aside, it was an interesting look into generational trends of modernity. Nothing has really changed, it's just gone faster and faster beyond the speed of stability since the back half of the 20th century. Sooner or later (certainly sooner) the wheels will come off and the whole thing is going to derail and fly off a cliff. It's not sustainable, and everyone knows it.

Generations of people can't live separated from each other only to be disposed of when the next trend in line comes around to be cashed in on, rinse and repeat. There is more to us than what we can offer for some corporate monolith that doesn't care either way what happens to us. Whatever the future holds, it won't be in that. It can't be--the 20th century is over and that train is long out of steam. It won't always be this way, whether we want it to be or not.

But that doesn't mean there isn't plenty to learn from the past to help us carry forth to tomorrow. Even if the world ends, we can't stop. Art doesn't stop. We don't, either. We have to keep the torch alive and burning and continue passing it on. That is every generation's duty to the next. It will never change, no matter how different we see ourselves as.

Perhaps that's the question to ask in all of this. Can we keep that torch alive and burning, or are we destined to finally be the ones to fumble it into the ground and leave the future generations in the dark? Is there still time to adjust and recalibrate our aim?

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Be sure to check out Rawle Nyanzi's Venus Spectacular crowdfund! How does one fight a war without an army?