I’m just saying we do that better without recourse to the “cohort” idea, or at least as it’s currently outlined. It works as short hand but there are much bigger problems with buying into the concept and using it as a a frame work to analyze these things. The concept is too muddy and we too often work our way backwards from it. Instead of building out from the events themselves.
Nope. Which ever stupid ill defined version of millennial you buy into. I am resolutely in the first run of them. By some versions of it the very first year or two. I think challenger went down when I was 2, its probably one of the first big media events I remember. Many of the key things pegged as GenX experience happened or just persisted in my late childhood and early teen years. Or even just keep going until I was well into college. And many purported millennial trends particularly in terms of media and mass culture happened when I was already “too old”.
Basically I’m saying the gradations here are a lot finer and the divisions between them aren’t nearly as firm. My parents like wise fall into gaps like this. My mom based on age could easily fall into the oldest run of GenX. But almost nothing about her life experience, interests, or the culture she was tied to resembles what we talk about with GenX at all. Except having divorced parents. My father based on age is undeniably a boomer, but he was pretty young during most of the key events we define the baby boom aroubf. He was like 13 when Woodstock happened, and I think 19 when the Vietnam war ended. A lot of the things he experience, a lot of his interests, even what he does for a living cut closer to early GenX. And his own younger brother, unless you use the stictest date range for GenX is resolutely a GenXer in most regards and was even smeared as such in his 20’s (and he meanwhile loves to shit on millennials and “hipsters”).
All of my grandparents are in all regards cleanly “greatest generation”. But that means something else entirely for my one grandfather. Who was sitting in a neutral, 3rd world nation for the bulk of the key events we ascribe to that group. Where the depression and war rationing lingered well after WWII had ended. And the definitional thing about his early life and teens is probably the impacts of decolonization.
I’m not saying their aren’t are significant cultural invents or trends. Also not saying the ones pinned to cohorts aren’t important. Just that they do not cleanly relate to each other, don’t cleanly separate from previous events, aren’t experienced by a single “cohort” even in the key age period the cohort is supposed to map.
The idea of a cohort as commonly used doesn’t derive from or mean much in regards to these trends.
By attempting to make it fit, we exaggerate the importance of some of these and misinterpret them. And the whole thing is too often driven by trying to fit all of history into a frame work that only works at all when discussing the mid century or post war period.
It also tends to obscure some stuff. Like to go back where we started. Yeah the early baby boomers were the generation of civil rights. But they were also the generation of opposing civil rights. One side of that won out, but all the bad shit defines that generation as much as the good shit. And in terms of boomers as a whole. So does the back lash against civil rights advances that followed.
I’m not informing you I’m high fiving you. We both know things!
By my count Punk has died every 3 weeks since 1972.
