But they were discussed as a distinct age group between adults and children even as the full, modern concept of adolescents and young adulthood hadn’t fully formed.
Infact we’ve shifted significantly in our conception of “young people” from the 50’s teen boom to one of young adulthood. With the lowering of voting ages and what have.
What I’m complaining about is that we tend to exaggerate a single step in what’s very much a clean gradient. And assume it to be an end point. In part because we’re back identifying thing to underline cohort. We’ve decided cohorts are important, and this one in particular. So we search for what makes it important. And in terms of what we look for in identifying other cohorts. We only really look for the sort of things that that we’ve identified in that original cohort. And for the main ones we’ve identified them almost exclusively in relation to the Boomer cohort, then searched for equivalents of the big supposed Boomer benchmarks.
Even if you wanted to look narrowly at the rise of modern youth culture, and the full middle class. You’d be looking more at the end of child labor, the rise and success of the labor movement and socialism, and the development of the modern middle class in the interwar period. So if that’s what’s diagnostic for a cohort. Your cohort would be probably be bracketed from post WWI to post WWII.
Those interwar youth cultures were already pushing down into lower classes, my own great grandmother was the child of two immigrant garment mill workers. And grew up in a tenement. And she flappered it up like a boss. As wealth pushed down the class ladder, so did mass culture youth movements. And everything involved. The rise of radio and recorded music, movies as mass culture. And the moral panic that attended (largely prefiguring the comic panic almost entirely, including concerns about juvenile deliquency).
By narrowly focusing on the importance of that post war step, we peg the cause to the post war ecconomic boom. And not the middle class friendly policies and social changes that lead directly into it. There’s a narrowing of of what we’re looking at. We lock it onto the period of the cohort, instead of the actual context of the events in question. And there’s a base inconsistency to the base idea of what a cohort even is.
And I remember all of those as a millennial. Along with other cultural bellweathers like the pre internet world, local affiliate stations and their afternoon movies and syndicated classic TV, the fall of the Berlin Wall. They happenedat a younger, potentially more formative age. But I experienced them. So which set of events is determative for Gen X? This goes back to the teenage thing. As we tend to assume significant events driven by or experienced by people in there teenaged years. But a big chunk of any of the cohorts we’ve identified either didn’t experience it direct at all or experienced it to early or too late.
So how are we really determining these thing? GenX exists largely because the baby boom had ended as a statistical event. Millennials largely exist because of a calender change that ultimately wasn’t all that significant culturally or historically, and a large group of the corhort wasn’t around or cognizant enough of the world to experience it directly. It isn’t even as simple as children of previous cohort. Because both GenXers and a big chunk of Millennials are children of Boomers. While millennials are children of boomers GenXers and other Millennials. We largely spin a new one off whenever we need a new way to talk about “kids these days”. There are like two or 3 different cohort groups supposedly following Millennials, under a dozen different names. Even as we still roll most of them into millennials. And distinctly remember the same happen when I was a kid. We were rolled into GenX, then we were pegged with a Pepsi slogan, there were a few “generations” identified. Then some one hit on tying it all to the millennium. And there we go.
I’m arguing that those changes both predated the post war period and continued after. That it’s a longer based and broader trend than just the limited chunk we tend to talk about. And we limit the chunk we talk about in large part because we’re trying to shore up a cultural and historical catagorey that doesn’t really work.
Yeah. And what I’m trying to point to is that it’s all of us, the cohort concept doesn’t map cleanly to reality. Historians and other academics do just fine figuring it all without resort to the cohort concept, and often do much better. It’s predominantly a concept of popular discussion, marketing, media, and increasingly politics. And it helps push some very skewed ideas about the base concepts it attempts to encapsulate among the general public.
The concepts were pretty connected at the time. As hip-hop was rising around NYC. First punks and then the punk associated art music scene were largely the first people to notice hip-hop outside its own scene. And vice versa when punk rose up about a decade earlier. The same people who were figuring out hip hop were the first people outside of punk to start showing up to those shows. The confluence in those is all pretty interesting.
But it’s worth noting that punk’s rise was largely an event of the late boomers. And it had already “died” for the first time by the time the earliest GenXers.
There is a documentary, too. Does a good job (or at least a much better job then me apparently) at laying out the case of the teenager as a unique historical phenomenon and tying that to consumer culture aimed at young people. And you know, it’s a man, so maybe some people around here will listen to him! 