I was in my teens. I liked Nirvana, but didn’t think they were the best band ever like I guess I was supposed to. Comparing Kurt Cobain to John Lennon or saying Nirvana was the defining band of my generation? Come on, get real.
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I doubt this. Top 40 radio is most assuredly still a thing.
Just about every suburban kid I’ve ever met said they listened to the same thing: “Everything but country and rap”. Means “not from the ghetto, not from the sticks, from the suburbs”. Their definition of “everything” also appears a bit limited (Top 40?), as I’m not sure why rap is objectionable but Tuvan throat singing is okay 
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I wasn’t a huge Nirvana fan, I was barely a teenager when Nevermind came out.
Who would be considered as the defining band of Gen X, though (if the idea of picking one band isn’t silly in itself) - Radiohead? Beastie Boys?
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I dunno I really dug and still dig Beastie Boys which I can put the blame on my little brother for letting me have proper listen. Buts there is also R.E.M. that kinda blew me away once I started listening to the college station.
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Boomers, like U2?
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I’m just happy someone came up with a (slightly) better name for those born after 2000. The initial Strauss-Howe was Homelanders, and that’s got all the creepy.
(Fun Fact: X was supposed to be a reference to 10, as in 10th generation after the American Revolution.)
I do see the point of using generational designation as a frame, because there are common experiences even among a media-fragmented/segmented generation. How many of us Xers were in school, watching with our classmates, when Challenger blew up? Or spent our early years with some level of fear and dread because we heard garbled versions of the Satanic Panic and carried that idea into adulthood at a subsconscious level? Since X was the first generation to be strongly affected by effective contraception and legal abortion, X is significantly smaller, and because it’s a smaller generation, we’re also the generation that experienced the first round of massive cuts and tax protests in public school education. X is the first modern generation to grow up in the two income trap, because the economic policies of Nixon and Reagan required the second income to maintain the standard of living. If nothing else, having the generational frame makes the sociology and the social psychology much simpler, and is useful for handling interpersonal, intergenerational conflict in a therapy setting. But it’s just a frame, the way the map is not the country and the country is not the map.
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I like the cohort designation of Generation Jones for those born from 1956 (when the postwar boom turned into a really icky recession) to 1964/5 (the pill was introduced in 1962, but it took a couple years for mass adoption). I have one parent who is absolutely a Boomer (1949) and one is Jones, and they have significant differences in their cultural referents.
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lemme tell you… i CLEARLY remember the Challenger. it’s as forever etched in my memory as 9/11, and both of them still shake me and make me sad to contemplate to this day. the profound loss. so yeah, i agree with you that generational names and windows serve a function. i don’t any problem with them.
i was born in the summer of love, 1967, so i’m pretty early Xer. like @Donald_Petersen, i grew up really identifying with Boomers (partly because i have older siblings who are DEFINITELY boomers, partly because i am just a liberal hippie at heart), but aside from that there’s a TON about boomers i just don’t get. all the gen-x experiences really resonate with me, and i love all the music that shaped the classic rock era through the 90s and early 2000s. it’s funny that someone mentioned the standard “i like all types except country & rap” – because yeah, that’s largely me. i’m a suburbia kid. but i DO like country music circa 1930s-1960s, even into the 1970s, and early rap is great to me.
like @kermujin, we rode bicycles around our neighborhood as a gang, and had dirt clod fights, and all that. i didn’t live in southern California, but when i watch the original Poltergeist, or E.T., those kids were like us, down to a T. THAT is gen-x to me as i remember it. it was bicycles, classic rock, D&D, trying to be like the cool older kids, and being just incredibly geeky all at the same time.
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I was puzzled that they illustrate X, Y, and Z as club kids of the same apparent age who would not look at all out of place dancing on the same floor.
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News, as well. If you read newspapers or watched the evening news at all, it wasn’t really possible to constrain yourself in a small balkanized cell of the likeminded the way you can now. If you read only whatever mimeographed newsletters that were the era’s equivalent of InfoWars and Breitbart, you would have been considered “that paranoid nut who lives alone in the shack up the mountain” or similar. Nowadays you sway elections.
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It may not be cool to admit it, but I thought Michael Jackson was more of a big deal than Kobain, both in terms of music and celebrity status.
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Yeah, although being GenX myself, I’m more than bit tired of the John Lennon/The Beatles were the most important thing ever meme. I get it, they were popular when the Boomers were young and nostalgia is a powerful thing. But objectively? The Beatles were, okay, I guess. Personally I prefer Simon & Garfunkel as my favorite act from that era.
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Unpopular opinion, but I think the Beatles were all about themselves and their own drama. Their musical ideas were interesting, but I could never get past the self-centeredness.
I don’t know who the real voice of the Boomers was. Probably Dylan? His music was popular enough, ubiquitous enough, and influential enough. If I wanted to really geek out about this, I’d say Dave Van Ronk or Patrick Sky or whomever were even more influential because they influenced Dylan, but their music didn’t get nearly the exposure, so no.
I’m not a big fan of Simon and Garfunkel. They were okay. Not the best example of their genre, and maybe a few years behind the curve, but not bad at all. Not on Dylan’s level in terms of influence either, but just below him.
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I’m sure there are some? The ultra-religious are still with us, after all.
I don’t think there is one. I think if we have a defining concept of music from Gen X it’s diversity and independence in production. We’re the generation of punk and hip hop, after all.
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Don’t forget the many forms of EDM.
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Absolutely! Electronic music really had an interesting evolution in the 80s… So, back to the idea of diversity in music.
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OK, I had some problems with this concept before I even started watching, like “Why is Generation Z only 13 years, less than any of the generations before it” and “How do you know the event that will define the end of Generation Alpha,” but seriously, this is where my incredulity got too much:
[The Boomers] were the largest generation (before Millennials). They reached their peak in 1999 at 78.8 million people.
WTF?!
If no Boomers have been born since 1964, and I’m sure at least one or two of them have died since then, then how did they “reach their peak at 78.8 million people” in 1999?!
Also: “Generation Alpha will be the first generation to be born entirely in the 21st century.” Okay, by your definition of Millennials," sure. I’ve heard others that extend the Millennials to the end of the 20th century.
But even taking the 1998 date as granted, how is that tidbit important, given that literally no one from this definition of “Generation Z” will remember the 20th century?
There’s a whole bunch of “It is predicted” stuff there and statistics given, without any sort of citations anywhere. Like “It is predicted that Generation Alpha will be the wealthiest in history, in terms of global wealth.” - That is the among the most meaningless statistics I’ve ever heard. Especially given the spurious definition of “Generation Alpha.”
Yeah, I want my ten minutes back.
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Last time I was going to a club, I think there were 3 generations present, but the ones at the top of the age range did look more different from those at the bottom than in this video. Some younger X’s might still go to a club and some Z’s could get in now (if you count Z from 1998). But if the point is to illustrate the differences between the generations, it really isn’t a very good illustration.
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