Gen X: The Generation That Never Existed

karen!

I LOVE YOU!!!!

The Voluptuous Horror of Being Called Karen

not a karen; the world

Rhonda?

accomplishing stuff is dumb. I just want to be shot out into space

- karen

was “bye Felicia” a thing before like 2 years ago? I didn’t even recognize what is was from until I had it explained to me. And I saw Friday like 20 times growing up. Were people “bye felicia-ing” each other in the 90s/00s? Sorry in advance.

I always put the bye felicia takeoff around the time of Vine.

If you ever owned a global hypercolour shirt then you are a gen Xer. There must be something crazy toxic in those because they seem to have been strangely resistant to being revived (also they were terrible).

yeah the bye felicia thing is def an internet-specific meme - it was not a thing in the 90s/00s

im pretty sure that’s british only, its right in the spelling

Nah that was briefly a thing in the US

🤔

it was a different time back then, we thought it was important for your clothes to tell other people how much you were sweating

it was spelled hypercolor. and it was an american company. it was huge for a few years in the cusp of the 80s and 90s. i had a t-shirt as a young kid

There are SHadOW ShiFteR shirts now.

it was a different time back then, we thought it was important for your clothes to tell other people how much you were sweating

https://i.imgur.com/cxWNJfS.jpg

I had a hyper colour Red Nose Day T-shirt. It stopped working (?) long before I stopped wearing it.

TS: Je suis Karen vs. We are all Karens now

This thread is much more fun than the “yo yo yo breakdancing ilxors in their thirties” one.

I’m much more chill at 40 than I was at 30

"If you look at the Gen X generational studies books that came out in the 90s, the tail end of Gen X was 1976 (maybe 1977). 1978 on were "Gen Y"""

I was born in 1976, and I always thought of Generation X as being ten years older than me, and American. They all had goatee beards and disliked working in an office. I like to think they were killed off by the dot.com boom, which made working in an office hip again. It pleases me to imagine fifty-something, sixty-something members of the Generation X race cycling around in the rain with Ocado delivery boxes on their backs. They had the opportunity to to work in an office and rejected it. Life in 2019 must be a paradise for them.

I think it's complicated by the fact that movies usually have actors who are older than the people they portray, so for example I have a mental image of Eric Stoltz as an archetypal Generation X person, but he was born in 1961, which makes him a member of the Blank Generation. Steve Buscemi was born in 1957, but he was always on the upper end of Generation X - he was Generation X's Yoda, its elder mentor figure.

Was David Lynch Generation X? He was born in 1946, during the baby boom, the same year as John Waters, and Oliver Stone, but he appealed to the Generation X market. Oliver Stone came across as someone who wanted to be Generation X but was not.

Steve Buscemi was 16 when Picasso died, which makes me wonder if the acid test is whether you coexisted with Pablo Picasso. I think the reason Generation X is overlooked today is that there are two Generation Xes - there's the media creation, which is overlooked because it is a dated relic of the 1990s, and the actual generation, who aren't really linked by anything. Also a lot of people in the media are of that generation, and from their point of view Generation X traits are "normal" and thus not worth writing about.

It pleases me to imagine fifty-something, sixty-something members of the Generation X race cycling around in the rain with Ocado delivery boxes on their backs. They had the opportunity to to work in an office and rejected it. Life in 2019 must be a paradise for them.


you seem like an asshole

bernie sanders is "silent generation" which nobody ever talks about maybe bc they're so silent

feel like there's been some interesting semantic drift on karen, which has gone from "white lady who will call the cops whenever she sees a black person" to "old person who will tell you to not litter". i'm very definitely the latter.

I am mostly conscious of the silent generation because my in-laws belong to it

One kind of demarcation is having come into pop consciousness during punk and its immediate aftermath. After ~1975 you may still nominally be gen x but will have had a different and arguably less vital set of formative cultural experiences.

Down the line that's the difference between being 11 and 16 when acid house is kicking off.

One kind of demarcation is having come into pop consciousness during punk and its immediate aftermath. After ~1975 you may still nominally be gen x but will have had a different and arguably less vital set of formative cultural experiences.

Down the line that's the difference between being 11 and 16 when acid house is kicking off.

― Noel Scott Emits (Noel Emits)

i'm going to guess you were born before 1975

when i was 16 i was listening to led zeppelin tapes and using a computer. i don't think what age i was when acid house kicked off made a lot of difference in my life, except insofar as acid house affected the demoscene.

...and it's not like i knew anyone who had an amiga so i never even saw "Jesus on E's"

But acid house / rave was driven by people who also would have been old enough to pick up on punk to some extent, more so than people who were 12 in 1987.

Not saying it's simply causal. But also it seems like if your first pop era starts after 1983 that's quite different to the period before.

People who lived in places where punk and acid house never “kicked off” don’t belong to any demographic

I always site Gen X people as born between 1961 (Douglas Coupland’s birth year) and 1979/80 (Thatcher/Reagan administrations begin).

But acid house / rave was driven by people who also would have been old enough to pick up on punk to some extent, more so than people who were 12 in 1987.

― Noel Scott Emits (Noel Emits)

I mean I grew up in suburban New Jersey. No, I didn't hear any punk rock, my parents wouldn't let me stay up late enough to watch Quincy. When I was 12 I was listening to "License to Ill" and "Raising Hell", if you want to argue my generation's cultural experiences are different and "arguably less vital" than yours be my guest. Nobody will listen to you, but given that we're both Generation X we're well used to that by now, aren't we?

I think of 1965-1975 as Strong-X, 1961-1964 and 1976-1980 as Weak-X, or transitional gens if you prefer. As a Strong-Xer I do notice stereotypical Millennial traits creeping in with that '76-'80 cohort, and I don't relate to them as much as I do the pre-'76ers as a rule.

i'm the Judean People's Front version of Gen X

Take it easy. I could have made it clearer but it should be obvious that I'm talking about a UK context of 70s punk (and the 80s pop fallout) and acid house as a pop phenom.

Yeah I could argue that the pop charts are less interesting in 1985 than in 1981, it's hardly a new claim. Don't take it personally - I was partly wondering why the 1976 guy above would set himself apart.

Please don't "U mad bro?" me, thanks.

...and it's not like i knew anyone who had an amiga so i never even saw "Jesus on E's"

...Second Reality?

(I didn't see Jesus on Es but I did grab the mod from aminet and then steal the breakbeat sample from it)

anyway generations are all very confusing but I resent this Karen thing without really knowing what it is or what it's a reference to, which I fully expect to be told is a very Karen thing to do, idk

xposts but aren't generational cultural touchstones always driven by people who were old enough to have picked up on the last generation's touchstones? I mean that time delay is kind of built in

I’ve encountered some older Gen X armchair punks who are extremely fucking reactionary. There’s a notorious Atlanta zine run by one of them that I pray to god gets washed away in a righteous Gen Z internet uprising sometime soon

basically white dudes who think their misogyny, homophobia, and racism means they’re sticking it to the establishment and thinking independently

Gen n: we have cultural touchstones you don’t ~understand~
Gen n+ 1: FUCK U, WE GET THEM, O BOY DO WE THEY SUCK AND EVEN U DONT GET THEM.

aren't generational cultural touchstones always driven by people who were old enough to have picked up on the last generation's touchstones? I mean that time delay is kind of built in

Well, exactly.

The point was simply that there's *one* difference (in the UK) between growing up 65-73, and after that.

Not a definer of an entire geberation and the suggestion that one is "arguably" better than the other was a little gentle retort to Ashley Pomeroy above. i.e. a joke.

yesterday a friends 14 year old daughter was telling me about karens (had never heard the term before).
in her world they are basically pushy mums who get their kids involved in every after school club etc.

Twenty-somethings I speak to all say that big Karen energy is wanting to speak to a manager, having highlights on a Rachel from Friends hairstyle variant they haven’t abandoned since the show was on broadcast, and calling other women ‘hunni’ on FB.

That, and she's an anti-vaxxer.

xp crut:
https://www.chunklet.com/
?

And in ref to the Gen-X subdivision -- this thread could serve as a demarcation line:

Here we post radio-slick, ultracompressed Modern Rock singles 1987-1990 w/ huge gated drums & lots of chorus! (youtube thread)

A few weeks ago I was arguing on fb w/a friend born in the mid-60s about when the Cure stopped being good in response to another friend who was born in the mid-60s earnestly trying to feel the love for the Disintegration album. Anyway, the latter friend just died a couple days ago.

xp not speaking for crut but I assumed he meant https://stompandstammer.com/

is there a non-US version of this generational warfare or

"...Second Reality?

(I didn't see Jesus on Es but I did grab the mod from aminet and then steal the breakbeat sample from it)

― a passing spacecadet"

of course, second reality rocked my world, fucking purple motion d00d

"basically white dudes who think their misogyny, homophobia, and racism means they’re sticking it to the establishment and thinking independently

― esempio (crüt)"

look i grew up on, like, fucking answer me! and bill hicks, i'm not going to say gen x is blameless. some of us have grown and learned since that time and some of us, well, still listen to whatever the fuck jim goad is saying these days.

"is there a non-US version of this generational warfare or

― deems of internment (darraghmac)"

it probably involves acid house deems?