ON TUESDAY, we discussed members of Seattle’s artistic community who feel left behind by the region’s cyber-boom.
Actually, a lot of folks my age or a little younger (what early punk rocker Richard Hell called the “Blank Generation”) feel out of the mainstream swing-O-things and always have. And now, just as we’re heading toward the supposed prime of our lives, many of us still feel that way.
Our elders, those ever-self-absorbed baby boomers, still essentially run everything in North American society. And now our youngers have become the darlings of demographic target-marketers everywhere.
Read about it in Eric Weisbard’s Village Voice essay, complete with a way-cool Pete Bagge cover illo.
“We’d always been Born Too Late,” Weisbard writes. “Suddenly we were Born Too Early as well. It was official: our crew–roughly 25-to-39-year-olds, though culture never breaks neatly–were the needy middle child of the latter 20th century. Caught between domineering elder sibs and spoiled youngsters.”
Our moment-O-triumph, Weisbard claims, was but a mere moment in popcult history, those few years of Cobain and Phair that occurred somewhere between the fall of New Kids on the Block and the rise of N’Sync. Our defining sociopolitical moment was lost somewhere between the ’87 stock crash and the six weeks of Gulf War protests.
Weisbard predicts us Baby Busters will be remembered, if at all, as a replay of the ’50s Silent Generation–those kids too young to have served in WWII, who were treated as also-rans in college by their older GI-Bill-student peers, who lived and worked in the war generation’s shadows as subservient toadies (according to the stereotype depicted in movies like The Apartment), and who ended up getting dissed as soulless Establishment lackeys by those boomer hippies.
If there’s a good side to this, it’s that after 20 years, I finally get to be on the old-fogey side of a generation gap!
To an ever-larger extent, Those Kids Today aren’t aping my generation’s punk, goth, old-school-hiphop, and industrial-fetish schticks. They’re unimpressed by alterna-rock angst, by the frustrated moans of an in-between generation that had expected it and all future generations after it to face permanently diminished expectations.
Instead, they’re either doing the techno-electronica thang (all positive, all upbeat, all celebratory) or the corporate-pop thang (all dreamy, all creamy, all steamy).
But, as usual, I do find things to admire about the younger generation. My generation, and the kids just after my generation, have been to, too large an extent, sexual cowards. Oh, we’ll dress up in PVC and indulge in porn and/or dildos, but real interpersonal involvement scares too many of us.
If you believe the Washington Post, however, today’s early-teens have a much more vigorous (yet still “safe”) attitude toward mutual pleasurement.
I’d just say to be careful about the ol’ pregnancy/STD thang and the emotional-relationship-turmoil thang, but otherwise go for it. You’re only young once.
TOMORROW: They’re called “weblogs,” and they’re the latest cyber-fad.
