exipolar.net

Courtney and I were reading in an older issue of RADAR Magazine (March issue) that now my generation is now official called “The Millenials.”  I guess that’s kinda cool.  They write in an article about Jeff Godinier’s Book, “X saves the World”:

…Millenials (roughly people born between 1980 and 1995) lack the  noble skepticism of [Gen Xers].  They love stuff, they love celebrities, they love name brands.  They’re happy to do what advertising tells them to do.

Okay, so maybe it’s not the official name.  I’ve head my generation refered to as generation Y before.  Oh well.

But the cynicism, I slightly share.  Our generation doesn’t know how to be awesome.  Simply that, it seems that beyond being sheep to marketting, we as a society no longer have the will to be anything, or become anything outside of what were are told to be.  Now, we’ve heard this all before.  But honestly though, who can blame us.

By contrast, pop culture and market trends were easier to follow in earlier decades like the 80’s.  This is partly why I see retro movements like the Electroclash genre, bands like The Bird & the Bee, the come back tours of bands like The Who and Led Zepplin, and the new B-52’s album Funplex in this decade are so successful.  When we look back into earlier decades, we are able to recognize different movements and trends easily.  The 90’s not so much though.  I have a better handle on it now that we’ve gone this far into this decade, but the 90’s by comparison seems like this disjointed hodge podge of meaningless fakery.  I see a lot of my peers in nostalgia over cartoons of their childhoods on youtube.  I see a lot of my peers obsess over the fashion and music from the 60’s and 70’s.  Current fashion seems more like a yearning not for more simple times, but times in which you could say “this is now” or “that was then”.  We don’t have that anymore in this post modern world.

This generation is defined by having no identity of it’s own to make.  We have nothing to grab on to to build off of.  It easy to see that we are going to have to wait for things that haven’t been exlpored yet to be worth while.  I mean things continually evolve.  But what is quality of the progeny of past fashions.  So we naturally turn to the past when in retrospect, it seemed easy to be awesome.

But there are good movements.  However, it’s very subjective of who you are.  Are you a hardcore headbanger?  Or are you in the mood for some low key Ambient Techno?  Whatever you are in the mood for, it exists and there is an established market for it.  No matter how big or small, there is a market for whatever you think you need.  Spend a little cash and you can feel complete until it’s not enough again.

And those of us  who don’t want to buy into it are lost and without an identity because we are so culturally accustomed to buying our identities (buying of course is a term I’m using loosely, many of us download music, but the fact that we are using marketed content is what matters here.)

We are told that “you have to be yourself”.  Does that even mean anything when one can be seen as the construction of anything.  Rather, this generation does not create it’s identity, it cuts & pastes it together out of things it sees on the TV.

So what are we going to do?  Eventually we’re just going to get tired of being marketed to and more and more people are going to want something “real”.  After realizing, that nothing is real the way we think it is, we’re going to start using these consumables in was that are unintended.  We are already seeing this in things like Rick Rolling, and shows like Robot Chicken.  People take something that meant something fake, and using it in an unintended genuine way.  We are going to see more and more people use “fake” things as a motif for real art and expression.  We will cease to buy into and adopt our identity from the markets literally, instead use it in a way that was unintended by the marketer allowing the individual to define himself/herself via parody and satire.

We will mature through sarcasm.  It’s the only way really.

We will take the pieces and paste them into way unintended for the sake of our own individual entertainment.