Thought about posting some Dinosaur Jr. vids, but… eh, f*ck it. Oh well, whatever… nevermind
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I don´t know if these songs are the most Gen X songs of all, but I am pretty sure the videoclips captured the zeitgeist.
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The KLF were their own weird thing though.
This one spoke to me at the time although I’m more of an Xennial/early millennial.
When that came out it really was grim up North. Warehouse raves and drugs probably helped it improve a bit.
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so many good songs! huzzah for Pixies, Dead Milkmen, Violent Femmes, Jim Carroll… all solid GenX anthems for sure. Not sure what i would add to the list, but i’m loving this.
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I need all these compiled into a playlist.
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my first thought was “oh I’ll be clever and post Add It Up” but the spot’s been blown.
highly agree with @hoobajoob about the Pixies. But that said, I think R.E.M. was the OG antecedent.
the thread has pretty well nailed it well down, but since I’m here…
one gripe. I don’t think it actually matters, but at least let’s be honest about it: when we say “gen x”, it is assumed to mean the white experience of gen x. I mean, Ice Cube or Chuck D are solidly in the age bracket and sho nuff had generational angst, but the white spiral into detachment, irony, and self-parody seem to define what we mean by “Generation X.” so, I get it and that’s fine as an idiom, but it isn’t technically correct since it doesn’t describe the entire generation. but then I suppose all the American generation labels are de facto white? @anon61221983 how do historians deal with this?
“Just Like Heaven” would be the two-fer, you get the Cure and Dinosaur Jr. that way.
so anyway, anyone else ever notice the “all I wanted was a pepsi!” at the end of “How I Could Just Kill A Man”? at 3:44
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Do you remember when these guys were cool?
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Techno and house music are more whitewashed than white. Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson say that they never intended their music to be Black music, but if it wasn’t for them there wouldn’t be techno. Something else a little bit different may have taken it’s place but it wouldn’t have been techno as Techno City would never have been recorded to give it the name.
The Dance Music Hall of Fame didn’t work out last time, but if they tried again the inaugural inductees would be mostly POC and LGBTQ+.
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being the victims of the baby boom’s gigantic divorce rate certainly defined us
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Gen X outside US.
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Angry and disaffected was part of it, but through the filter of our history since then, those feel like they were almost aspirational to me. Lots of things were and are broken, but we were too. I wonder if not enough of us focused on us. (spoken from my own very limited experiences)
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It does seem like it was a trend among a certain sort of song of the era.
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Listen to this. I was into these dudes before anybody…
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In case you haven’t come across this cover-
Peter Murphy and Trent Reznor tearing up Warm Leatherette
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I have heard that before, it’s awesome!
When I graduated high school in 1985, I never figured my conservative classmates would misunderstand this one…but here we are, ya’ll!
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Shout out to DJ Minx.
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Since you raise Body Count. They also did a song called Institutionalized which I guess is kinda sorta a version of the same song.
And more generally, I know it’s not as achingly cool as some of the tracks posted here but this is about the most GenX track, not the coolest GenX track and so the only one that immediately springs to my memory centres is Creep.
And of course there is an excellent Amanda Palmer cover of that too:
I’d say a liking for rap and hiphop is also a white GenX kid thing. I mean this is the era that gave us loads of rock/rap collaborations, for example:
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Yes, BodyCount did a cover version of “Institutionalized”. Different lyrics, tho.
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Just ever so slightly… That’s why I described it as kinda, sorta the same song.
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