The Birth of Generation X
Or how a whole generation became defined by the avant-garde
The following is a vulgar, self-absorbed lie, constructed from half-truths I have cobbled together. But then, of course, generational labels are supposed to embody a story we tell ourselves. This is my story. The use of the label X for my generation at first felt very comfortable and uncannily appropriate to my tastes. Like the ‘X’ in the 97-X radio station in Oxford, Ohio — the singular commercial alternative station at my alma mater throughout the ’80s and ’90s (now, sadly, no more). If you recall the movie ‘RainMan,’ when Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman are driving in Southwestern Ohio, you heard the tagline, ‘97-X, boom, the future of rock and roll!’. But more recently I have been questioning if perhaps it might be too appropriate for my particular private likes to be universal enough for a generational name. Ever since I was a child I was drawn to the “strange” and “alien” in music and art. After living abroad for most of my high school, I returned to the States in the late 80s and discovered that the local college station in Akron Ohio, was the only place that played the so-called “alternative” music I could stand. With the B-52’s bouncy music in the background, I recall the college radio announcer explaining the meaning of “alternative rock” and how they were exploring the limits of “rock” music. In retrospect, he was defining the “avant-garde” for rock music.
The term ‘avant-garde’ literally referred to the French military’s “advanced guard” or reconnaissance unit which would go ahead of the main troops and asses the forces and environment. This term was later adopted by artists and intellectuals who would push the boundaries, breaking artistic and cultural taboos. The term is credited to Henri de Saint-Simon who fought alongside Lafayette during the American Revolutionary War and at one point helped lay siege to Yorktown under George Washington’s leadership. In 1825 he coined the term about what he believed was art’s future role in spreading new ideas in society and pushing humanity forward. However, it was with the realism of Gustave Courbet’s art that many trace the true beginning of the idea of “avant-garde” art. Later the term became associated with new movements in art, architecture, music, and literature. By the opening of World War II the celebrated art critic Clement Greenberg in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” associated it with a new culture, explaining; “ In seeking to go beyond Alexandrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced something unheard of heretofore: — avant-garde culture.” This new culture was counterpoised by the commercial mass-produced culture as well as the formal high “academic” art both of which he categorized as ‘Kitsch’. Thus to Greenberg, the avant-garde was opposed to both highly formal as well as mass-produced art both of which he thought were, dull, and dumbed down society.
Shortly after the end of World War II, in 1948, Jack Kerouac embodied the disaffected, “avant-garde” youth as the “Beat Generation” and later in the sixties Kerouac’s “Beat” friend Ginsberg would latch on to the term “Hippie”. This term while acquiring a massive cultural cache, beyond that of “Beat”, was still too removed from the masses to allow it to define a generation. Meanwhile, in 1953 the term Generation X was coined to refer to these same “disaffected” youth via a photo essay by war photojournalist Robert Capa. Yet the term Generation X didn’t stick and the term “Beat” only managed to earn itself a place as a sub-cultural component of the so-called Silent Generation as did Hippies relative to the Boomers. Later in the 1960s, London journalists Jane Deverson and Charles Hamblett published a book of interviews with youth from the so-called “mod” or modernist subculture under the title Generation X.
However, it wasn’t until decades later in 1991 that Douglas Coupland’s book entitled “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture” helped give the expression more mass appeal. It described youth growing up in Southern California. This later usage echoed Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s earlier generational dissatisfaction with the corporate manufactured culture and lifestyle in which the youth found themselves entrapped. The desire to exit the “target market” and jump off the “merry-go-round” of status and money. The popularity of this book happened to coincide with what might be seen as a sort of incarnation of the Generation X zeitgeist in the person of Kurt Cobain. Kurt himself went on to seek out the remaining patriarch of the Beats, William S. Burroughs, and recorded a single with him, thus clearly identifying himself with these elder avant-garde masters.
It is not difficult to see how the primal urges and expression of Clement Greenberg’s “avant-garde” in the rejection of both high and low culture, are an expression of the Generation X ethos. However, this rejection also embraced the novel concept of using kitsch against itself embracing a “kitsch of the kitsch” as a weapon against the kitsch they were immersed in. This embodied the punk and later alternative rock ethos from which Cobain was born, following artists who reveled in the low class, like the films of John Waters and the music of the B-52’s culminating in the twisted hidden underbelly of the wholesomeness in David Lynch’s films, our generational cinematographic hero.
I vividly recall my discomfort when one day I heard Nirvana, a band that had till then enjoyed a relatively popular place amongst our small college counter-culture, being played on a major mainstream commercial station. To be sure the mainstream had flirted with our culture before, first, it was one minor track from the Pixies’ 1989 album Doolittle and then Sinéad O’Connor’s 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got album. But this was somehow very different. In short order all of what we saw as our alternative, modern, punk rock aesthetic was vacuumed up and packaged for the masses. It was both an exciting realization of the confident predictions that this music was the “future of rock-n-roll” as our local college rock station would proclaim, and wrong since what now becomes of the “advanced guard” when the normal troops caught up? By what merit could one still be a member of the “avant-garde”? The only move we had was to descend fuller into the Kitsch of Kitsch, so my friends and I jumped in the car and drove to Graceland, the epicenter of Americana Kitsch. Hoping the broader culture couldn’t stomach following us. Yet to my shock, it did. Finally, I gave up and ran away to Israel and then Russia for four years many of my friends ran away as well, to Ireland, Taiwan, South Africa, Nepal, or Japan.
I think Kurt Cobain, struggled with the same conundrum; here was a corporate rock star who hated all that corporate-manufactured rock stars stood for. He also tried to take refuge in the Kitsch of Kitsch, but somehow even the most deliberately “uncool” thing he did would turn into the “cool” of mainstream culture, from the dresses to the old lady glasses. I guess he never found an escape and as a man of self-contradiction and self-loathing he killed himself. I was in Novosibirsk when news of his death reached me, and even there I would see his visage emblazoned on the tee shirts of a few of the young Siberian youth. His death somehow immolated the moniker X onto my Generation. Generation X became the expression of the avant-garde as a whole generation. Slackers, self-destructive, we stepped out of the endless karmic cycle of gathering wealth and position, unlike boomer’s drug-addled death our rock heroes blew their brains out like Kurt or stabbed themselves to death like Elliot Smith.
Yet since Generation X was defined by the avant-garde fringes, most members of our generation are alienated from its defining features. The truth is the vast majority of my co-generation-ists reveled in the pure unadulterated Kitsch of AeroSmith’s “Love in an Elevator” or Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” which embody all that is hated by the idealized Generation X’er. Perhaps this moniker should be liberated from my generation and applied to any sub-group who embodies the avant-garde, the way “beat” or “hippie” once did.
