COOL
GenX revels in consumer culture, having been made by the corporatocracy into a malleable captive market: Mindless consumers easily led by the annoited fashion mavens of the moment to the next trend, the next piece or pose of cool. Without intellectual depth or a questioning disposition, they move like lemmings following the directions and merchandizing commands dictated to them by their pop culture gods - fooling themselves that they are oh-so-non-conformist, and arty, and different. When, in fact, they look just like every other Xer and spout the same blank platitudes.

GenX has no sense of history, no connection to nor understanding of their place in the time stream - to pose is an end in itself for them. They think they are cool, yet they lack the basic knowledge that cool is ultimately about dissent, about original ideas - and posing, of course, is anathema to this.

What is so sad is that the mask has become the person, and the uniform of cool is now ... bought off-the-rack. The new aesthetic conformity they've created is constricting to the point of sameness. Pierced tongues, large tattoos over the cracks of girls' asses, the calculated behavior ... when everybody does it, how is it cool? Did we tear down the conformist restrictions of the 50's only to over time construct new conformist restrictions for society based on the tyranny of mass-merchandized cool [albeit with new lower standards]? The Too Cool To Care posture of youth, especially in the 70's when the younger brethren of the children of the 60's decided it was not cool to march in the streets anymore, or be political - to show you actually cared about something, was at first a reaction, then a posture, and now a way of life. Besides, in the 70's it was much more fun to just do the drugs, listen to spacey guitar rock and funk, and drive around in Trans Ams. Thus began the de-evolution into an ever-hardening of the collective heart among the young since the 60's. In the quest to appear cool, people - especially the young people, adopted the pose of indifference. "Whatever" first came into wide use as cultural shorthand to dismiss that thought unworthy of attention. The passivity brought on by so much pot-smoking doubled the effect, and unfortunately the pose of indifference transformed itself into actual callousness over time. People were much more concerned with feathering their hair and the right fit to their bell bottoms. The 70's cynicism and political withdrawal by the young exactly contradicted the idealism and involvement of the late 50's/60's beats and civil rights figthters and free-love flower children and hippies. It became hip to be cynical.

In the 80's it was a decade shift again, away from the 70's long hair, arena rock and passivity of marijuana to the buzzed hair of the punks and mods, the synth-pop of New Wave, GQ and retro geek fashion, cocaine for that high-energy buzz, neoconservatism, reactionary christian movements, and greed and materialism as virtues. Hearts hardened even more, and we learned to love the lies - the phoniness of Reagan and his 1950's worldview, trickle-down economics, and liberal arts were all but abandoned as youth sought to earn MBA's and get into that junk bond get-rich-quick game. The now ubiquitous patterns of cheating at school exploded in this time. Classism reared its ugly head again, and the hardened hearts had no trouble putting people out of work and making the numbers of homeless on the streets explode.

After years of "whatever" and fewer and fewer young people being politically aware or involved, understanding of issues eroded severely and cool was now more than ever about the right posture, the right clothes, the right hair, the right music. References in speech and correct use of slang speech and physical postures became a must. As the Boomers got older and started to have kids, and the Generation Gap faded from the lexicon, the Establishment started to become populated with ex-hippies and the dividing line between young and old for cool seemed to fade. It became ultimately a commodity to be sold. Politicians blatantly appealed to the cool factor, and by the 90's we had Bill Clinton playing a saxaphone on a late night talk show to prove to the young that he wasn't a stuffed shirt. It has ever been thus, but by the 80's marketers finally had a hold of cool with both hands, and it was now packagable, to be sold off-the-rack.

Generation X, so ill-informed, so distracted with cheap electronic entertainments, aiming so low in their cultural goals, were too clueless to notice the shift. Tired bands like ZZTop and Aerosmith got whole new careers thanks to the merchandizing power of MTV - the music network which would get head-shots of aspiring actors so as to pack the stage area for their broadcast shows with the beautiful people, totally polluting the process of celebrating a musical act by allowing true fans to get near. This merchandizing mentality did not go unnoticed, and GenX adopted it whole hog. They never even questioned it. Xers do it in so many ways in their daily lives, almost without knowing they do it, that the line between what they really feel and believe has become dangerously blurred with the poses they adopt, to the point that many probably don't know what they really feel or don't feel at all. As long as the hair, clothes, and piercings are right, and they know the lyrics to the currently popular gangsta rap tune, and can do the vacuous stare as they light up their cigarettes....

One can witness this in action at the movies. The GenX audience is quick to murmer or talk or in some way indicate - so others notice - that they "get it." Often comedy films are not funny, but GenX wants to indicate that they get where the joke was planted so they nervously laugh - as soon as possible after the punchline delivery, when what was said was simply not funny. And the characterizations in often self-absorbed and pretentious GenX films are less than a sketch most of the time. We are given a stereotype, or an outline of a character, and GenX as an audience accepts the draft as the final form. Again they indicate that they get it and can't be bothered with character development. "Oh that's the tough cop, frigid housewife, drug-dealer, hitman, closet homosexual..." GenX wants to go right to the action, to the conflict - the murder, the rape, the fight, etc. This has had a withering effect on storytelling, to the point that film comedies are simple gross-out fests and dramatic actors vamp and vacantly stare in place of acting out a character's feelings. GenX wants cartoon characters on-screen because they don't want to have an actual emotional reaction to fully developed characters, or they want the visceral goings on so extreme that it can cut through their hard emotional exteriors and generate some kind of reaction (witness the ear cutting scene in Quentin Tarantino's Reservior Dogs....this stagey and pretentious gangster film conveyed such menace and such realism in its depictions of sadism and violence that it took the genre to the next level...the question is, why even go to that level? In what way does it serve art? Rather it becomes a sort of twisted eroticism related to violence).

In society, as the GenX pose of indifference hardened hearts over time to callousness, the 60's teenagers putting daisies in rifle barrels devolved into almost a collective sociopathy whereby now we have a situation where gansta rappers can disrespect women by grabbing their breasts or dumping beer on them at parties/picnics and carrying weapons and flashing gang signs is portrayed as cool [see: Dr. Dre's "Ain't Nuthin' But A G Thang" music video]. Art reflects life with GenX or GenX copies artforms. I wonder what the women assaulted in Central Park would think of Dre's video?

Youth, as part of the pose of cool, now has to appear strong. Weakness is simply not acceptable, and the most blatant and vulgar displays of strength and power are most celebrated - being in a gang, carrying a gun, tattoos and piercings, ostentatious gold and diamond jewelry, tough-looking clothes and adornments. GenX is rarely allowed by their peer group to appear overly, or even perceptibly, emotional. So over time a debilitating de-sensitizing of the young has taken place (particularly since the late 80's), and the omnipresent media have spread the messages and images far and wide which now totally glorify violence and materialism. Is it any wonder then why a 13-year-old can stare into a news camera and vacantly state that their best friend just got shot without a trace of emotion? And then go on to say with a self-aware pose of toughness, "That's just how it is." Nearly 70% of sales for gangsta rap music is done by whites, who have copied the affected street lingo and mannerisms of black and latino criminal sub-cultures (and created their own gangs too) for so long that now middle and upper class kids (of all races) speaking in that style may actually not know how to do otherwise.

Tough poses. Not caring. Not feeling. Pushing the limits until no one can be shocked anymore....this is the legacy of Generation X to Cool.

People are born every second of every minute of every hour of every day. Some social scientists take this stuff very seriously - assigning specific years for the beginnings and endings of generations - usually they say that cultural markers, such as identifying with JFK's assassination rather than Kurt Cobain's suicide, determine which generation one belongs to. Then there are pop culture analysts who claim that there are Inbetweeners who come after the Baby Boomers and before Gen-Xers, and one guy selling a book claims there are Jonesers who are slightly different than Inbetweeners. Click here for a huge list of links to the serious scholarship [note: most of the links are dead, which I suppose says something about the interest level of scholars for Gen-X]. This site has an expAnsive view of Xers - those who are after the Boomers yet are not Gen-Y (and from the email I get clearly those born in 1979 or later do not want to be called Gen-X, thus they are Gen-Y). ~ author

Black GenX
Let's face it, in the United States since at least the late 40's youth have looked to black culture for clues to what is cool. This has been consistent for decades, and most specifically in terms of street fashion, affected mannerisms and word expressions, and music. This society-wide focus on black culture as a raw material source for cool behaviors and presentations is a rich vein indeed in the larger social fabric of America....

That said, black Gen-X has let us all down. Like their more numerous white brethren (and asian, hispanic, pacific-islander, and native-american as well), their sense of aesthetics and social responsibility is sorely lacking compared to that of their predecessors. The parents and grandparents of today's black Gen-X should be as horrified by the slack and ugliness of so much of the output generated by their offspring - from the gansta rap to their ignorance of politics and failure to participate - as the white and other colors of parents should be. But parents of all Xers have let them off the hook. Someone like an Ice Cube - the poet laurete of rap according to some - can tell a reporter that he won't put the positive messages which are on his records into his live shows because the audience shows up to hear the "motherfucker, bitch, boom-boom." Now, do you think for a second that during the 50's and 60's, when the parents of black Gen-X were educating themselves and agitating, at real risk of injury and death, for equal rights under the law, that if given a chance, they would not have infused their statement with their message?!?!? Ice Cube, with this remark (from a long interview in the L.A. Reader, about 1995) is emblematic of the phoniness which permeates so-called hip-hop culture, and the woeful vacuum of political thought among young African-Americans.

.....Younger black kids, say from 9 to 13 are the gestation zone for the new phrases, the new fashion choices, the new poses, which cross-pollinates with older black kids up to their late 20's (along with other races and cultures) to generate the "hip" and "cool" to come for the most part. For fifteen years the young kids have been polluted with gang imagery and lifestyles and influences, and this had made a whole generation inured to the evil and the crime and the degredation of women which comes from gangs. The influence became so ubiquitous that it has been adopted and completely legitimized since 1985. The posture of toughness that one must assume to be cool has lent itself to the creation of callousness, and tough poses have created tough behavior. In the 80's the Reagan revolution with its subtle and not-so-subtle racism (he gave a pre-election speech in a Southern town most famous for a lynching) sent powerful messages, and younger blacks emerging as voices in the arts and society reflected this back, often with, regretfully, with equally harsh observation....the comic Eddie Murphy would sprinkle references to white culture and black-white relations with nearly none of the compassion of the great Richard Pryor, rather he was angry, and he let the anger shape his content and delivery. Intolerance was met with intolerance. Young black artists in other fields also expressed frustration and anger with the new tone set by the Reagan Administration, which lasted throughout the 80's and into the early 90's, yet the high-minded and highly educated responses of the 50's and 60's seemed to missing. ....More to come....

BAD FILM
Just as with their politics Gen-X has nothing meaningful to say with their films. There is no daring new way to express the medium, the last to try is Boomer Peter Greenaway. Low-rent is their approach, pushing their output at film festivals hoping to get a big Hollywood deal if their film is a hit on the festival circuit, and most of what they show at these festivals are what the brilliant South Park lampooned as 'Gay Cowboys Eat Pudding' - excruciatingly tedious drivel about characters who for the most part couldn't really exist or aren't interesting enough to warrent a film about them anyway [case in point: The Royal Tennenbaums]. Gen-X filmmakers push the limits of esoterica beyond the bounds of relevancy in their desperate attempt to "stand out" and "be different." Writing a good script first seems to have escaped them, with a very few exceptions. Further, film schools are everywhere now and the sheer numbers of students in film school or graduating from film schools created a steep decline in the talent curve as people who just want a "cool job" pursue film careers when in the past it was those passionate about film who joined the few film programs there were in the 1970s or apprenticed within the industry before there were film schools. A friend of this site's creator was a waiter at Spago in West Hollywood during its heyday and he once had a group of film students from USC Film School ask him who a gentleman was at another table (as many people had gone up to this person). My friend replied, "It's Tony Curtis." None of the film students knew who he was. When Spielberg and Lucas were in film school they could've told you more about the career of Tony Curtis than he himself probably would have remembered. The dumbing down of culture is most evident for Gen-X in their films. When they do have something to say it's some weird twisted interior journey or some soulless expression of youthful anomie which lends no light on how a film's characters got that way. Kevin Smith said it for his generation when he was quoted as saying he may make only ten films because he thought he'd run out of things to say. In his stupid film Dogma he gave us a monster made out of feces - what a gift to cinema history. ...Much more on The List

GEN-X FILMOGRAPHY
... partial list only ...

Slacker, Spun, Buffalo 66, The Royal Tannenbaums, Dogma, Totally F***ed Up, Metropolitan, Kids, Boogie Nights, Leaving Las Vegas [the filmmaker may have been a Boomer, but Xers loved this piece of crap], Four Rooms, The Truth About Cats and Dogs, The Breakfast Club, Gummo, Blair Witch Project, Kids, Clerks, Reservior Dogs, Magnolia, Doom Generation, Zoolander, Do the Right Thing, Barcelona, Something About Mary, Last Days of Disco, Safe, Bottle Rocket, Good Will Hunting, Dumb and Dumber, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Eddie Murphy RAW, Mallrats, Independece Day, St. Elmo's Fire, Men At Work, ... etc

GenX has made a vocation out of being bad.

THE POSES
It seems to require a posture of toughness. Just look at Ice Cube's face. That scowl he seems to have perpetually scrunched up on his mug is almost a joke now. He's certainly not alone ....
THE MUSIC
gansta rap

THE PETS Pit Bulls and Rottweilers
THE FASHION
ugly, dirty, derivative, pretentious

THE CARS
muscle cars from the 70s, making auto racing popular again, SUVs

THE FILMS
the list is indeed long

THE AFFECTED MANNERISMS
the arm thing ('throwing arms' they call it), "you know what I'm sayyin'?" , "whassup?"


In their quest for attention and to show their carefully rehearsed pose of cool and toughness, they've not only adopted the pose of being bad, they've taken it upon themselves to be bad from within - when the mask becomes the man ... From black, brown, and asian kids hanging out with older gang-bangers and showing no emotion as others are attacked and/or killed to suburban white kids stabbing friends over drug debts or killing another just to see how it feels, distancing oneself from simple human emotion in pursuit of a tough demeanor has led to the wholesale slaughter of compassion from a whole generation of youth.

To be sure not all kids are bad, or have been bad for the past 25 years, but the overarching theme in the artforms they celebrate and draw from are glorification of the villian and of violence itself.

From the black clothes of the punks and Goths (both of which remarkably never went away from their late 70's introduction) to tattoos, cigarettes, Harleys, strip clubs, to every conceivable type of character from every segment of the entertainment world, it is only cool to GenX if it is bad. Kids have always rebelled against their elders, sought to stake out their own voice and aesthetic....but for GenX it is not ideas that drive their deeds and presentations of themselves but lazy posturing and a willing slide into the vulgar.

From the fun street beats, locking/popping/break-dancing and masters-of-ceremonies-on-the-mike of early street rap in New York City in the late 70's/early 80's we have slid down into the cesspool of today's actual murders committed by and against gansta rappers who call females bitches and hos and wear ostentatious displays of gold jewelry and diamonds, and literally throw money....to the white trash vulgar antics of MTVs Jackass, to comics characters such as Spawn, The Crow, to sideshow freaks such as "Puzzle Man" and "Tiger Woman" tattooing nearly every inch of their bodies - including their faces (titanium horns in the scalp for PM), to bands that merely scream unintelligibly and incite crowds to riot and commit vandalism and violence - to masturbating and performing bowel-movements on-stage, to videogames where body parts are obliterated and the blood and gore can add up to hundreds of kills per game.

The characters in fiction, the clothes, the piercings, the tattoos, the smoking, the affected posturing....things only seem compelling to GenX if is negative, dark, dirty, extreme, and bad.

Hip-Hop is SO Fake

Hip-Hop is so fake. BLING-BLING When hip-hop was known generically as rap in the early days, there actually was some inspired content to the lyrics from such acts as The SugarHill Gang, but once the artform caught on in the early 80s, such acts as NWA took it to vulgar territory and shamelessly glorified violence, gang culture, misogeny, and ostentatious displays of wealth. The single song which broke this new harder edged rap to a wide audience, and an avalanche of critical acclaim was NWA's Fuck the Police. Many thought it an expression of political outrage at persecution of the black man (and, yes, racism was and is still alive) ... But, let's get to reality for a second here ... it turns out that Dr. Dre and Ice Cube (the authors of the song) had been shooting innocent people with a paint gun, letting them think they'd been mortally wounded, to howls of laughter for themselves, and were subsequently pulled over by the police. The police failed to make the connection between the two and the paint-gun incident and let them go, but Dre and Cube felt that, well, they'd been unfairly harassed, and sat down and wrote NWA's seminal work Fuck da Po-lice ... and thus the die was cast and the phoniness which permeates hip-hop was established ....

THE VULGARIZATION OF CULTURE BLING-BLING is a result in large measure of the pervasiveness of the imagery and lingo and cultural affectations of hip-hop....

When Jay-Z first hit the scene I thought it must be a joke, the ostentatious displays of wealth seen for so many years in rap and hip-hop videos were so completely played out, but no, Jay-Z led to even more of the same, yachts racing the waters packed with people partyin' BLING-BLING diamond jewelry *ice* everywhereBLING-BLING huge gold chains with people's names in "ice" BLING-BLING throwin' the Benjamins BLING-BLING super-expensive clothes, sunglasses, etc. BLING-BLING gyrating females 5:1 for the males BLING-BLING ultra-expensive sports and luxury cars BLING-BLING and, my personal favorite as evidence that Black Gen-X has no politics: super-giant, mega-polluting, terrorist-supporting (heard of imported oil?) SUVs [Cadillac Escalade the one of choice] BLING-BLING-BLING-BLING-BLING-BLING-BLING-BLING-BLING-BLING ... and my absolute favorite: "Keep it real." If it WAS real not one person would have had to say that even once.

A special mention needs to made regarding Tupak. Anyone who's seen early interviews with him knows he started out as a sweet kid, idealistic, passionate, compassionate, and of course loaded with talent. But by his own admission, he didn't "understand" until he moved to Oakland [having lived previously in New York, Baltimore and other parts of northern California] and was "shown." What obviously happened is that someone early in his time in Oakland called Tupak a punk or in some other way questioned his blackness and/or his manhood. Tupak obviously made up his mind that he'd show that person (and the world), and thus set himself on the course to becoming the Supreme Thug. The sweet idealistic kid in the early interviews devolved into someone taunting the camera with, "If I drink its cuz a nigga drank! If I smoke, its cuz a nigga smoke!" ... Tattooed, gun-toting, in the employ of Suge, shot-up once before the final hail of bullets felled him, he unfortunately succeeded all to well.