Friday, March 13, 1998
Generation Exploited?
GENERATIONS: Contrary to popular belief, young people today
aren’t the only group to grow up with no apparent goals in life
By Dan S. Hong
Generation X … this is a favorite topic among college students
and pre-adolescent teenage rockers who think that the label is real
cool due to the mere connotation which it implies: the
pre-millennium generation defined by its lack of definition
obfuscated by mainstream-consumer ideology and pigpen parameters.
Yeah, well, I think it’s all entirely hogwash.
Mainstream society’s perspective on things must be ordered and
comprehensible to adults and old farts who want to understand what
the hell us kids are going through. So they conveniently give a
name for each generation to round us up and stereotype us according
to a set of characteristics that they either have imagined or
gathered from their "expert" field agents collecting precious data
on our world of subcultures.
To my knowledge, the term "Generation X" was fabricated by
capitalistic whoremongers in the media who wanted to package our
subculture into something that could be bought and sold at your
local Tower Records or Nordstrom’s. I admit that our generation is
not an exception in this deplorable nonsense. There’s the Lost
Generation of the early ’20s and ’30s, led by literary figures like
Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and others who were quite
disillusioned by the destructive consequences of the first World
War. Then there’s the Beat Generation characterized by all the beat
hipsters like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and
countless others who wrote like maniacs heavily drugged and
out-of-focus.
There are the constantly misconstrued anti-war hippies of the
’70s, and of course, the Baby Boomer generation which is
responsible for much of the nuclear garbage and filth we live in
today. This was based on their upbringing in the post-World War II
era when the United States of America came out hardly scathed on
home turf and flouted its superpower prowess over "enemies" like
Communism, the cannibalistic Japanese and the evil Nazi Germans,
while completely ignoring the intense race wars and genocides
between whites and all other minority groups including (but not
limited to) African Americans, Latinos, Asians and Native
Americans.
So, now we’re here in this decade of the most technologically
advanced age in all of human history. "Generation X," or whatever
we’re supposed to be, rocked to the pre-pubescent grunge of Seattle
while wannabe hip-hop babies bounced to Cypress Hill and House of
Pain. What nonsense that was. Then came punk rock for the vigilant,
supposedly anti-social "rebels," even though they were mostly
apathetic suburbanites driving brand-new Ford Explorers and
open-bed trucks while the more hip kids drove around trashy vintage
cars. Enter the final stage of the progression of us
twentysomethings and atomic teenage kids. Now we’re mindlessly
bopping to the electro-sounds of techno and gangsta rap, both of
which are completely bland watered-down trash, picked and assorted
for the popular flavors of popular youth consumerism. All of this
is great and all, but the bulk of the emphasis on these ideas was
nurtured and cared for by billion dollar corporations in the music,
film and TV industries, not to mention all the countless others
that blossomed like ugly spores on the purity of the underground
sound.
The diehard and hardcore underground believers were the only
ones who effectively channeled the true energy of the scenes’ ideas
into positive actuality.
I know I’m coming off as an ultra-elitist waving the banner of
hardcore for all of the categorical movements out there and under
here from punk-rock bopsters to hip-hop b-boyz, but that was the
true unspoken credo of all those who believed to help themselves
and/or to help others. Purists such as us who, like the bebop headz
of the ’50s and ’60s jazz scene, want only to purify and expand our
constructed subculture societies to bring together those who were
like us to coordinate some kind of community where we could come to
escape the mindless destruction that mass-consumer culture had
drenched our Big Brother society with. We are not here to set
trends or to produce the next Puff Daddy. We’re just trying to stay
alive in this ideological wasteland of broken lights.