One of my first posts on this Board was a complaint about the mislabeling of the Generations. Baby Boomers supposedly went from circa 1945 to the beginning of the sixties. The biggest hump in the python was 1955, when I was born. But the media has always treated Boomers as if they were all born in 1945.
Boomers Turn 60! screams Newsweek now. No they don’t. The bulk of us are turning 50, and some are still in their early forties. We didn’t go to Woodstock – we were too young. And we didn’t go see the Beatles at Shea, either. We saw them on Ed Sullivan, if our parents let us stay up that late. we maybe caught the tail end of Howdy doody, before he disappeare from the air. we only saw Mickey Mouse club in reruns, and any Daniel Boone hats and paraphernalia we got was as hand-me-downs from older bothers and sisters.
we weren’t hippies, unless you could be one at 11 or 12. all that yuppie stuff caught us at the beginnings of our careers, not ten years into it. “Grease” and “:Happy Days” didn’t hark back to a beloved youth, but was a wholly new and weird experience.
“Gen W” might be a pretty good tag for the real boomers, not the Hillary Clinton and Dave Barry bunch.
As for being out of touch, and not being in on the latest trends – doesn’t bother me. I never was in on the trends even when I was supposed to be. Now that I’m expected to be out of touch, things go much easier.
No, these just mean you’re a giant nerd. I never even saw these new-fangled internets until 1996! My first email address was late that same year.
Or Northern NY (the forgotten zone). I had forgotten about the playing of both anthems. And if you were to fall asleep with the TV on, you’d wake up to a high-pitched squeal.
When I was really young I was floored by A&W when the car drove up to what looked like a big gas pump which was actually a speaker. We ordered off the menu surrounding the huge speaker and a nice lady in the the trendy fashionable orange and Brown… (I always associate that colur combination with the 70’s anyone else do that?) uniform brought out a tray which hooked onto the window.
Speaking of hooked on the window if you’ve been to a Drive in Movie and remember the three stages of sound that the Drive in (The Speaker/The Wire/ the Airwaves) you are definitely in the X zone.
Funny thing. My dad’s responsible for Subway being what it is today, back in his… was it Restaurant Business days? Forget the company’s name. See, Subway started out as a grease joint, and he suggested that they change it to be something healthier to compete. Worked pretty well. Those doctors who own it owe him one.
I’m 32 and while I no longer identify with a 20 year old, I haven’t lost touch with popular culture yet. I know when I will, however. February 8, 2006, give or take a couple weeks. That’s when our first baby is due and I’ve seen from my friends who have kids that they lose all touch with pop culture when the first one is born. If it’s not on NPR or MSNBC, they don’t know about it. Oh, they all think they’ll be “cool” parents but no matter how hip they were before, they all lose touch. Many of them seem to forget things they already know and regress a few years. I don’t expect to be any different. While I know what “Vote for Pedro” means now, in six months I’ll probably be like “Pedro who?”
At the boundary of Generation X and Generation Y; you would tip into the Nintendo wave of Generation X if there was a stiff breeze. The classic Nintendo console was sold between 1983 and 1989, and it’s likely that you or one of your childhood friends had one that was new out of the box. You were an adolescent during the rise of grunge, which to you would probably be like what album-oriented rock (Boston, Triumph, Van Halen, Aerosmith) was to me during the same stage in my life. Grunge is definitely Gen X music. If you feel like it was a part of your overall experience growing up, you’re probably an X. If it seemed like music that mostly older people liked, and that in the future you’ll feel more nostalgic listening to Linkin Park and Korn than Nirvana and Soundgarden, probably Y.
If your high school subculture had preps, stoners, jocks, motorheads, punks, nerds and the like - X. If they were scene kids - Y. IIRC, high school subcultures in the mid-to-late 1990s were about the same as they were in the mid-1980s, with the addition of goths and suburban white kids who acted like inner city blacks, and far fewer motorhead/groder/hesher types.
One anomaly; you probably heard more “X-TREEEEEEEEEM!” marketing than “AWESOME!” marketing as a kid. Your parents were probably clingier and more hovering than mine, and you probably had more pressure placed on you with regards to school grades, sports, extracurricular activites, and the like. Kids in your age group had the earliest “soccer moms,” while we didn’t.
Still, if you remember having a console television with a wired cable box, you’re probably an X-er at heart.
Thinking about it fr a few seconds, I’ll change “album-oriented rock” to “new wave.” The boomers had AOR, but new wave didn’t appear on the scene until the late 1970s. Devo released “Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!” when I was 12, Oingo Boingo released their first EP when I was 14, and A Flock of Seagulls released their first album when I was 16.
Okay, we get it! Black people are supposed to act one way, white people are supposed to act another, and it’s noteworthy when they switch - how many times are you going to cram that idea down our throats in this one thread? But listen, I don’t throw slurs at the growing population of inner-city black kids on skateboards around here, so why must you be so hard on white suburbanites who listen to rap?
About ten years ago, I caught a single episode of a middle-of-the-night Showtime program called “Twisted Puppet Theater”. It had a lot of running gags**, one of which was a bit called “Ask Shorty”, where the camera, as the person of a patron entering a bar (like the old Jackie Gleason show) asked the bartender, Shorty, for his views on the world.
In one segment, “we” ask Shorty: “Shorty, what’s your opinion of Generation X?”
Shorty: “My opinion of wha?”
Us: “Generation X”
Shorty: “Well, I think it’s OK for the minor itching, but for the real flare-ups, I recommend Anusol!”’
Still makes me laugh hard.
**Like “Little Known Puppet Facts”, in one segment of which there were some puppets standing around a cocktail party saying things like “Yeah, I did her!” “Mmm, yeah, I had me some of that action too!”, which fades down as the voice-over comes in with “Little-known Puppet Fact #52: Most puppets claim to have slept with Shari Lewis.”
It’s one thing to listen to rap. It’s another to all of a sudden at age 16 develop an Ebonic speech pattern like you is from da hood, G. I listen to rap. I used to drive a Ford Taurus around listinging to Wu-Tang Clan. I don’t act or dress like Method Man.
My coworker born in the Mid-70s was trying to figure out if he was X or Y. He sent me some artical about kids age 18-25 and how they are "bland, mediocre, vapid, vacuous, shallow, superficial, mindless, tasteless, insipid, inane and illiterate ". If you read the artical and feel resentment towards the author, you are Y. If you agree, then you are X you cynical bastard.
I never even saw these new-fangled internets until 1996! My first email address was late that same year.