Popularized by gadabout Vancouver author Douglas Coupland at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, “Generation X” as a concept originally referred I believe to a kind of renegade-but-cosmopolitan postmodern drop-out mentality but can more properly be understood as a term bandied about by advertisers faced with a new generation of young people to whom it seemed impossible to figure out how to sell the mandated trinkets, toys, toaster ovens, and mediated experiences. The standard metric would have us hold that the benighted citizens of Generation X are folks who were born in the precious pink-and-purple-and-blue-hewed spatiotemporal window extending from 1965-1980. Born in November of 1979, I was about as late on this particular scene as it was possible to arrive. When the weird, creepy, brazenly blasé but ultimately a-little-too-controversial-for-the-bottom-line Calvin Klein porno-chic adds with the wood panel walls came out and got their fangs in our brainstems, I was fifteen years old, encamped out at the acreage, breathing it all in…listening to “Zurich is Stained” by Pavement, perhaps, or “Smothered in Hugs” by Guided by Voices. Whether you were an odd kid, an art kid, a jock, queer, a ufology kid, a Vans sneakers punk-rock slobberer, or a social nullity, it was very important in the last half of the 90s that you not ever show any sign that you cared about others or about yourself, but instead of in the ‘80s Gordon Gekko “greed is good” mode popular with coke heads, real estate agents, and libertarian-leaning American conservatives, what we were looking at in the 90s was the spectre of the universal teenager all in black, witnessing an atrocity, blinking quickly for effect, and then making a derisive wisecrack. Or maybe in the end just the opening line of Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation, from the same year as those aforementioned Calvin Klein adds, simply Rose McGowan at some kind of club or rave, practically spitting out the word “fuck.” As trouble and chance reign and adjustments must be made, some commentators and specialists have zeroed in on a small, roughly and unevenly spackled generation—a veritable island of misfit toys—which is to say the Xennial cohort, neither properly X nor Y, and the current metric has us very squirrely denizens who were born between 1977 and 1983 to be sole residents in current standing of Arthur Lee’s house that is not a motel, where we trip balls and bypass them shopping malls. My sister and I mostly get along really well, but if you take us as case subject Xennials we do bear testament to the fact that the older sibling may tend to be a little more X and the younger one a little more Y. For example, I don’t think my sister is likely to remember the opening line of The Doom Generation. But we both promise to try our best to remember your pronouns!
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Larry Roemer, 1967)
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