Generation Xer with an embarassing question about Generation Y culture? Post it here

Cafe Society
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I’m starting this thread as a 39 year old guy who grew up with Atari 2600 game machines, rotary telephones, cable television with only 36 channels, and MTV that actually played music 24 hours a day. I have a question about an element of pop culture today that may seem obvious to someone who is in their 20s, but it’s a complete – and probably embarassing – mystery to me.

My question: hipsters everwhere around here are wearing1970s-looking “Vote for Pedro” t-shirts. Hipster stores have tons of “Vote for Pedro” shirts on the racks. Googling around for “Vote for Pedro” just gets me links to sites selling “Vote for Pedro” t-shirts for hipsters. What the hell does the phrase mean? Where does it come from? Is it some catchy movie quote, like “Anyone? Bueller?” from my day?

There’s probably others in my boat, so I’m encouraging them to contribute to this thread. What all-pervasive element of pop culture are you completely clueless about?

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Try googling ‘vote for pedro’ :stuck_out_tongue:

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“Vote for Pedro” is from the movie Napoleon Dynamite.

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Was it an extremely popular movie among the hipster/emo crowd?

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Very.

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I know the teenaged crowd LOVED it. My two 18 year olds and all of their friends quote it incessantly. Idiot!

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Yes. And I say this purely on instinct.

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Oh, and I’m not calling you an idiot, elmwood. That’s from the movie.

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As a 32-year old male, it took me forever to figure out exactly what the hell a “Hollaback Girl” (made famous by Gwen Stefani) was.

And I’m still not 100% sure.

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For several weeks, I seriously thought “Vote For Pedro” had something to do with voting for Pedro Martinez on the 2005 MLB All-Star ballot. Partly because the first time I saw them actually for sale on a rack was in the Mets Clubhouse Shop near my office during Spring Training.

And yeah… I haven’t worked out Hollaback Girl yet either.

I’m 34, and can clearly demarcate a specific point in time down to the month and year when my awareness of current pop culture began to atrophy. That was June 28, 1999.

To paraphrase the very wise Abraham Simpson: I used to get jiggy with it… Then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I get jiggy with isn’t it, and what is it seems weird and scary to me.

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For me it was the summer of 1995, the day I learned that Alanis Morissette is younger than I am. All downhill from there.

–Cliffy

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For me it was the fall day in 1927 when I learned that the people at the Algonquin Roundtable mostly told fart jokes.

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So, what’s “emo”?

YES, I work at a very hip college! Never mind that, just tell me!

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According to Gwen Stefani, a hollaback girl is whatever you want it to be.

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it’s short for “emotional.” basically a genre of skinny white boys who embrace their nerdiness and sing about their ex girlfriends.

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Up to now, I thought she was saying “I ain’t no Harlem black girl!”

And I’m still not convinced she wasn’t just toilet-trained and is very proud, by pointing out to the world “That’s my shit, that’s my shit!”

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The stereotypical emo kid is a guy in tight jeans, crying softly as he plucks at his acoustic guitar.

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Why in my day, nerds didn’t have girlfriends, let alone “ex girlfriends”.

Damn nerds these days!!

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Where did the phrase “Grrrl power!” come from?

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For me, it was sometime in Summer of 2000 (age 28 at the time) when I noticed the difference between Gen X and Gen Y. My friends and I were in a club in Boston and noticed that everyone now looked like an Eminem and Christina Aguilera clone instead of a Eddie Vedder and Alanis Morressette clone.
My own personal guideline for the cutoff between Gen X and Gen Y is you are Gen Y if you have always had Internet and email in your dorm room (and not the crappy text based whatever we had that no one ever used in 1991. I mean Windows based Explorer / Outlook / Yahoo! Internet) you are Gen Y. Another rough guideline is if you were in high school at any time during the 80s makes you Gen X.