Generational Crisis...

I am a man without a country. Actually I have a country, it is a generation that I am lacking. Being born in the middle of 1980 on a warm summer day, during the rise of the Reganite regime, I am a cultural misfit. I have devised a little way to make this clear. Answer the following four questions. If you select the first answer you get a point. If you select the later you get no points. Question 1: Which movie do you better identify with (and has a better soundtrack), Singles or The Fast and the Furious? Question 2: Fill in the blank. When I grow up I want to be: Eddie Vedder or Fred Durzt. Question 3: Which were you most likely seen dressed in high school, flannel shirt and ripped jeans or chic designer wear you saw on TRL? Which would you rather watch on MTV: 120 Minutes and YO! MTV Raps or Jackass and Viva la Bam!? I score a 4. Which I hope you all do too... But that's beside the point. I clearly belong in Generation X and I am born on the cutoff year for statistics. If you got a zero, by the way, you are Generation Y ( as in, Y have you not killed yourself yet and done us all a favor...). I don't quite get it. I clearly feel a kinship with fellow Xers even though I almost consider myself a touch too young. I guess that could explain why I have almost always hung with older people or just snobs like me. Maybe I heard the sounds of Grunge just soon enough to be have my soul saved from the post-grunge fall out. I mean, what the fuck happened. In 1992 No Doubt was a ska band opening for Sublime is the LBC, and Jewel was a homeless Alaskan trying to make it through music. Now Jewel has sold her soul to product placement and is proud of it and Gwen is about to go solo with a hip album with "touches of r&b". "TOUCHES OF R&B" !!!!! WHAT THE FUCK!!!!! It's ok, like I say on The One Two One Giga, I never liked the bitch anyway. As much as I want to hate the little Vin Diesel wannabes wearing their red Yankees hats and slamming to rocked up gay men (read as George Michael), I can't. It's not their fault. The fault lies squarely on the fucking baby boomers. Let's face it, they lost the Gen-X battle. For those us who actually wanted an "Alternative" the jamband and inde-rock culture took to the sky. Without radio play and big labels we actually got, and still do get, good music. Corporate America lost. The baby boomers lost. They were down but not out. They decided that our younger siblings and even some of our kids were going to be under their control. The stepped up their game. They recruited and polished "inde" kids to lead the way and then dumped more sugar covered plastic into out music stores than Wonka has plastic covered sugar. A sure sign that it is not just the baby boomers, but the corporations as well can be summed up in two words: Paris Hilton. She is the mermaid on the bow of corporate America's ship. She is leading the charge, and she is too dumb to fucking know it. She makes it cool to be a corporate mogul. John Rockefeller eat your heart out, you don't have shit on Paris Hilton. This, in a nut shell, is why I get so pissed about the thought of being grouped with a whole generation that didn't have a fucking chance. Yet I still feel a little too young to have been at the Lollapalooza '92 show where Eddie Vedder was skateboarding around the venue because nobody knew who the fuck he was. I feel torn so I guess I will just have to brave my own way at the tail end of what could have saved all those youngsters. Our parents had The Who to talk about their generation. Who did they give us? Brittany fucking Spears. Gee, Thanks. With all this it is no fucking wonder that W is in the White House. Tell me what you think and how you did on the quiz. Later. B ¶ Permalink: