Gen X: The Generation That Never Existed

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that is definitely not an ironic Z Cavaricci shirt -- though we were also the ironic t-shirt generation

This is more aligned with cultural class than generation -- like Paul Fussell wrote about this at least as far back as 1980 -- he termed it "legibility" and it was a sign of the lower classes. According to Fussell, people from higher classes avoid and often abhor clothing and accessories that have visible branding. The next step down is very subtle branding.

I think Fussell is otm about that. In the early days of corporate-branded clothing you'd generally see items that made some kind of statement, like wearing an STP t-shirt said, "I'm good with cars" or an Adidas t-shirt said, "I'm sporty and I travel." As you go up the class ladder fewer people feel the need to make statements like that.

What blows my mind is the sports-branded clothes and the fact that nowadays a huge section of the spectating audience wouldn't think of going to a baseball, football, or even basketball game without wearing their official team replica jersey. As late as the early '80s, iirc, that wasn't even a thing, there was no such market for that. I don't see much evidence Xers have resisted that particular phenomenon.

are we talking jerseys specifically, or sports-branded clothing in general? I'm pretty sure I had a Raiders hoodie in the early 80s, and the team branded hats were prevalent then too ... I definitely remember people wearing Giants and Raiders shirts and jerseys in the mid 80s.

Jerseys, basically, the kind that enables the fan to essentially disguise him or herself as a member of the team, with the names of real players on the back. I do remember that kids could order jackets or obviously fake team jerseys from the Sears catalog back in the '70s, but then this whole different level of identifying with the team exploded at some recent point

ohhhhh ok! I feel like different pro sports had slightly different timelines .... like baseball was different than football or basketball, also the shirts were different material, idk whether the actual fabric/manufacturing was a part of this. But in terms of NFL and NBA -- I wanna say that the Chicago Bulls were definitely at the forefront of this. I could be totally wrong tho!

I agree with Steve Dahl who said that if you're old enough to be on the team, you shouldn't wear the actual jersey

what if you're too old?

idk i feel like the sports merch started earlier than what you're positing, but maybe that's because where I grew up our teams actually won shit, and people like being associated with winners, and also for a kid who wants to look badass ... the Raiders logo was like a skull and crossbones and their shit was black. Like some of these teams had really non-badass logos and mascots and colors.

relatedly, some teams were appropriated more by bangers than others -- I'm pretty sure at some point in time, certain clothing was actually prohibited at schools because of gang associations which administration believed would lead to violence. I forget when that started though -- wanna say late 80s at the earliest, but definitely 90s it was a thing.

people like being associated with winners

this is the key idea that also explains a lot of the corporate-branded clothing, since people think of successful corporations as winners as well

which brings us to .... Beck

I totally forgot about BUM equipment lol
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I really like the term "basic" to describe a certain normative aesthetic ... like ^^^

so I went and looked through my books and the Strauss/Howe 13th Gen book (from the mid 90s) says Gen-X is 1961-1981; Shortly after that boomer-penned volume was published, there was Generation Ecch, which said Gen X was 1965-1977.

But I feel a real demarcation (in the US) is the sense that we are a nation in decline. Heroic figures like King and the Kennedys were killed -- a priori. Like, we don't remember that happening, it had happened. It was a historical fact. Nixon won. Then Nixon's corruption was revealed. Things still sucked. The recession, inflation, de-industrialization, the decaying infrastructure ... the cold war was still going on, but it was dumb. Our country spent a shit ton on nuclear weapons and de-funded schools and social safety nets. The Japanese made better cars. Our cars sucked and our space shuttle exploded. An actor was elected president ... twice. ... I feel like people born in the late 70s (and 1980/81) grew up with a bit more hope? Like people who were still in grade school when the Berlin Wall came down, and there was glasnost and were in middle school/high school when Clinton got elected to break the Republican decade ... people who could get jobs out of high school working for companies designing websites, etc. as opposed to the crappy retail / office jobs those who became adults earlier were more resigned to ...?

I think we were the first generation to be overeducated. ... but for the most part, college was a lot cheaper so we weren't as ridiculously in debt, as millenials, who, according to all the articles, believe they are the first overeducated generation.

yeah the best thing about being gen x was still getting a state school undergrad education for less than the cost of a compact car.

Yeah when I saw what my alma mater is charging these days I was truly shocked. I had a partial scholarship but tuition was so cheap my parents let me keep the scholarship checks as a reward.

1 yr tuition is now more than I paid for tuition plus room & board for 4 years ( 2 years in dorm, 2 years private housing). Where the fuck is all that "extra" money going????

yeah i mostly worked over the summers (valet, serving, etc) and made enough to cover most of tuition

I just looked up my tuition (UVA) and it was around $4500-$4800 for two semesters.

don't, stop, thinkin about tomooooroowwww ♫

The Coupland thing

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Yeah see while I am gen x I fucked around forever dipping in and out of school so I'm in the enviable position of still paying off millennial-level tuition debt. It's the best of both worlds, really.

1 yr tuition is now more than I paid for tuition plus room & board for 4 years ( 2 years in dorm, 2 years private housing). Where the fuck is all that "extra" money going????

Administration salaries and to make up funding that has been cut by states.

Healthcare and higher education graphs look very similar on the same late-90s to today x-axis in executive/admin cost increases.

coupland’s def of genx definitely skewed heavily into late babyboom, longing for spaceage culture, self-recognition of falsity of roots boomerism.

And then again, it's possible that our unique shared experiences go beyond "We are the freakies and this is our freakies tree"

Maybe. I think the fact that we are all ilx posters may be more significant when it comes to attitudes towards marketing and personal branding (especially since they do seem to be cutting across generational lines, the reason I posted in the first place). That said, I read Coupland's Generation X in Grade 8 and he remains one of my favourite authors so I may not be doing my case favours there.

Deja vu the song

I just had to do a "generational diversity" online lesson for work. Was not aware that there's now more millenials in the workforce then gen X (35% vs 33%). The examples of generational differences all focused on boomers vs millenials. I'm guessing it was mostly written by Gen Xers tho because it portrayed us as having some of the good qualities of all the other gens.

no one has good qualities.

especially not gen xers aka boomers-lite

gen xers are the only good coworkers to have because we are the only ones who understand we’re all shit coworkers

cf Office Space

I'm self-employed. I no longer have co-workers, only clients. I feel like we are the "customer service" generation.

that makes you like the youngins

My parents (born in 1943 and 1944) are VERY adamant about not being Boomers and not having been hippies. They identify as warbabies. My father thinks he was a Beatnik and my mother thinks she was, like, a boho folkie Joan Baez type. Whatever gets you through the night, as Bob Marley sang on Shaved Fish.

Me, born 1971: I think I ended up being exactly the right age for Pacman, Thriller, Duran Duran, Members Only. Also Little Creatures and maybe Green.

Not much else. I felt too young for some stuff (Residents), and too old for some other stuff (Nirvana). I went on lots of weird detours relative to my peers, and there were certainly things that I explored later and ended up liking in retrospect.

One way in which cultural thinking about "decades" sucks is that you often don't really know you're in them; they can only be understood in hindsight.

All that said 80s music formed me and it is still my bedrock.

the 90s tv/movie version of the 80s was so crazily inaccurate to me, but by 2005 the revision was the history. Its kinda like how by 1985 everyone in 1967 was hippie, or how 50s greasers were a dominant social group i guess.

it’s like by 2005 ppl acted like joy division and magazine and wire and foetus were what we ALL listened to, but man journey was huge.

My feeling is that there are certainly generational traits and difference but they are usually discussed in a pretty narrow way and *usually* mean a certain subset of middle class to upper middle class white people -- and ignore lots of those too. Like the 90s is the story of grunge and blah blah blah but is the real story me wearing my Beastie Boys Check Your Head ringer tee, or the other (much more numerous) kids at my school who turned Garth Brooks into the biggest act since the Beatles and still filling football stadiums to this day?

also I think that if you broke things down by race/socioeconomics etc I think you'd find many more commonalities than by generation. hanging out w/my sister's family, i'm struck by how much my nephews (14) have with my brother in law (46), like he complains about the rap they listen to (they do like Eazy E now though since the movie) but they share a lot, even culturally, and sports etc, and basically they all live in the same suburban world and I think they have more in common with each other than they do, for instance, a 14 year old Mexican kid their age living in L.A.

Like a lot of the stuff that is different is pretty superficial: fashion, haircuts, how skinny or not skinny their jeans are, music...but I think their worldview and values are in line and as they get older the superficial differences will fade too.

Are you saying that you and your family don’t have friends in low places?

Like YMP, my parents are pre-boomer (born a day apart in the same hospital in 1944) and were emphatically not hippies, as they did not go to college after graduation in 1962. They had 1950s childhoods. To them, hippies were collegy (both of my mother’s younger brothers went to college and both were kind of hippyish). My mother was a classy version of a hair-hopper and my dad was a jock who liked the blues. They met at Danceland when they were 17 and were pretty much scenesters but not beatniks. My mom loved Roy Orbison and Tina Turner, my dad Hank Williams and James Brown. Their last musical hurrah was seeing the Rolling Stones play to 200 people, and then they went onto the suburban conveyor belt and had two kids, yada yada...

Haha no my brother in law loves Garth

There was way more prominent Garth Brooks love at my high school than Nirvana/grunge, but maybe that changed in/after 1992? I was gone by then.

Definitely as many Skynyrd t-shirts as Depeche Mode t-shirts at my high school. As much love for NKOTB as OMD.

There really were multiple eightieses; different people could drift through that time in totally separate cultural universes with little awareness of one another.

I suspect that is true of all times and places - perhaps moreso now than ever.

I think there were maybe a dozen people at my high school (2000 students total) who had Depeche Mode tees. ... vs. the hundreds of Guns N Roses, Garth Brooks, and Metallica shirt wearers. Plenty of NKOTB, but I think the NKOTB shirt wearers were mostly freshman girls

hey 2000 students isn't very podunk!

My first entry in my long-dormant blog of random yearbook photos through the ages (I was very bored and into my scanner at the time) was my freshman hs yearbook 1989-1990 and the photos of the seniors illustrate a range of 80s to 90s transition. https://yearbookeditor.tumblr.com

for example https://yearbookeditor.tumblr.com/post/28058759438/four-female-seniors

hey 2000 students isn't very podunk!

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Tuesday, October 22, 2019 11:39 AM (five minutes ago)

It was the only high school for the entire town. ... grades 9-12. ... except for the "continuation school" ... which is where the kids that got expelled for fighting and drugs got sent, along with the girls that had babbies.

But back to the t-shirts -- also a significant number of Iron Maiden and Misfits shirts, whether the wearers (mostly boys) were into those bands or were mostly about black t-shirts with skulls on them, idk, but really, the dominant graphic tee had the Raiders logo on it. Also black + skull

your school was five times bigger than mine