It was around the time of that breakfast in Brussels that everything began to sink in for me, even if I still refused to see it. I was well into my forties, and dimly aware that there were by now a few billion people in the world leading full lives of their own, who would consider anything I had to say irrelevant simply by virtue of the fact that it was coming from an “old” person. And yet I was still stubbornly churning out thoughts as if they had some absolute meaning independent of the age and the perceived generational affiliation of the person they were coming from. I had not yet fully admitted to myself that the world belonged to young people now—who plainly did not belong to my universe of values and did not share my points of reference—and that from here on out my presence was, at best, to be tolerated.
Five years later I experience my life, most of the time, as a ghost. I see my psychiatrist and try to convince him that I am suffering symptoms of what is clinically known as “derealization.” I sit at home, and I read and write, and I literally have trouble comprehending that the world still exists. Sometimes I put on headphones and listen to music, and that brings it back again. But that transcendent world and this low one, the one in which this ghost continues to dwell, do not overlap.
I mean that last bit literally. I want to talk about my generation, but in order to do that I must first talk about music. For I can find no other way in.
It is perhaps our first and most primitive experience of time: an ordering of moments on the downbeat. Nor, it seems to me, could there be any memory of the past without memory of musical experience, nor any coming to consciousness without musical consciousness. Could I have begun to think the thoughts that I do had I not first apprehended the structure of the world in song? (...)
One thing about music, at least when you’re young, is that it’s never just music. My father was an adult, which meant in part that he just liked “music that’s good,” while my shift from passive inheritance to active cultivation involved a great many blind spots, and a great deal of parochialism and posturing. The musical totemism by which postwar youth consolidated their identities through affiliation with some genre or other was as real as any other social fact. Bobby-soxers, teddy boys, mods, rockers, punks, new wavers, and metalheads were governed by no board of directors or elected representatives, but these taxa constrained our range of choices nonetheless, and defined our sense of self as fully as any professional guild or political party. Circa 1985, the East German secret police compiled a full taxonomy of youth musical subcultures. An illustrated chart gave the typical age, appearance, and political orientation of their members. The skinheads had “partly neofascist tendencies,” the punks could be known by their “ ‘Iroquois’ haircut” and their “criminal conduct and asocial lifestyle,” and the goths were noteworthy for their “total political and social disinterest.”
The Stasi should perhaps be commended for taking the youth as seriously as the youth took themselves. Back home in Central California, we had to work the taxonomy out on our own. At the rear of the semi-rural house where my mother stayed after the divorce, a defunct chicken farm passed down by her parents, our property abutted the lot of a new Pentecostal church, separated from us by a barbed-wire fence. The pastor had daughters who used to come up to the fence to talk to us, intent on laying out the reasons we were bound for hell. When some friends of mine came over, we got the idea to go out to the field to see the girls, and to bring along a soundtrack. We had no portable electronics other than a set of Radio Shack walkie-talkies, so we placed one in front of a cassette player inside the house, and brought the other out with us—and in this way the girls who preached hellfire, channeling their dad, got a dim and squeaky rendition of Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark at the Moon channeled back at them.
The heavy-metal posture was a onetime thing for me, dictated by circumstance. For the most part my efforts at sculpting a musical identity were fueled by an esotericism that disdained common and easily accessible genres. I can see now that this was all largely epiphenomenal to a deeper and “more real” navigation of class identity. I was surrounded in those years mostly by poor white metalheads—a Judas Priest T-shirt, feathered hair, and acne were the default traits of the human male—while at the same time belonging to a white middle-class family perched dangerously close to the lower-class boundary, ever in danger of slipping beneath it. Musical cultivation, in this context, was a sort of currency by which one might hope to maneuver into an imagined aristocracy through seeking out the most obscure representatives of the narrowest genre niches. (...)
Over the course of the Eighties we witnessed the completion of a process of transformation by which hippies became yuppies, as memorialized in 1983’s The Big Chill, and the parallel evolution of Sixties counterculture into the culture of what was starting to be denoted, synecdochically, as “Silicon Valley.” Stewart Brand is perhaps the most perfect embodiment of this transition: from his beginnings as publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, which in the Seventies I brought down from the upper shelves (next to the eight-tracks) in order to look at pictures of nudist colonies and home births, he would help to shape the organizational principles of the nascent internet culture, and, most importantly, of Apple. The fact that capitalism’s most advanced experiments by the end of the twentieth century were spearheaded by people with a lingering sense of countercultural identity helped this economic order to become particularly adept at reuptake, at incorporating cultural expressions that were first made in some sort of spirit of opposition. In 1987, the Beatles’s “Revolution” was featured in an advertisement for Nike. By 1995, Janis Joplin’s ghost voice was made to sing “Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz” in a Mercedes-Benz commercial. And somehow, by then, Apple had managed to trademark the legacy of the Sixties as a key element of its corporate image.
It seems, now, that the historical meaning of Gen X’s famous aversion to selling out cannot really be understood without considering the world that was being actively created by our parents in the years of our generation’s formative experiences. We were, it seems to me now, doing our best to preserve postwar youth culture (and even interwar youth culture, as we’ve seen) against the rising force that would, soon enough, cast us into whatever came next: the world whose most important narratives are shaped by algorithms, and in which the horror of selling out no longer has any purchase at all, since the ideal of authenticity has been switched out for the hope of virality. We tried, and we failed, to save the world from our parents—that is, to reverse or at least slow down the degeneration of the hopes that they themselves had once cherished. And because we failed, we have been written out of history.
It is often remarked that there will never be a Gen X president of the United States. No one wants us to lead, or cares what we think. In political polling, American news outlets frequently move right from the boomers to the millennials. Though Coupland certainly could not have anticipated this meaning of X in 1991, it turns out that our name, or our lack of a name, fits perfectly with our general condition of invisibility. Generation X is the generation that someone might get around to assigning a real name later. Except that it’s already been more than thirty years, and the world has moved on.
