Gen X: Least Annoying Generation?

On grunge and grumpiness

I am from a generation that very much wants to consume and reconsume its own shit.
- Filmmaker Joe Swanberg

The nineties ended twenty-four years ago, but an endless stream of high-definition video content has made the decade relentlessly relivable in no particular order. To flatten time further, many videos from the nineties show business executives and bands and actors and world leaders who still stand at the top of the world. In a digital-first world where it’s easier to watch reruns of the past than live in the present, it’s hard to tell if the nineties is the decade that never ended or the decade when everything ended.

In The Nineties (2022), Chuck Klosterman attempts to set the record straight about what we left behind and what we took with us from the nineties. The essay collection begins with Klosterman’s assertion that Generation X, responsible for Kim Kardashian, reality TV, and nu metal, is the least annoying generation. For Klosterman, a Gen X truther, this truth is self-evident because Gen X complains less “pedantically.”

As Litverse wrote last week, this is a classic Klostermanism. The idea that Gen X complains less than all generations before and after is easy to disprove, but challenging the claim misses the point of the collection. The Nineties is cultural criticism - subjective by definition - rather than historical record. The admirable fortitude of Klosterman’s baseless claims is part of the record of Gen X and the nineties in itself.

To really get the full experience, I highly recommend accepting Klosterman’s claims at face value. Maybe Gen X does in fact complain less pedantically. After all, to be pedantic is to care about details and get caught in nuance. Gen X was called the Slacker Generation. Klosterman’s contention is that Gen X simply didn’t care about things and so it’s obvious they wouldn’t complain as much. Case closed, according to The Nineties.

As Klosterman puts it with the passion of a part-time coroner: Gen X grew up with a “disinterest in conventional success” and “an adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard.”

Complaining just wasn’t cool and to be cool was everything.

In establishing this, Klosterman proceeds to find any way to include trivial anecdotes from Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain throughout the collection, relying on the wisdom of a suicidal heroin addict who made a career crooning anthems of apathy atop power chords to Gen X audiences around the world.

Cobain, whose journals are full of self-pity and self-righteousness, wouldn’t agree with Klosterman’s portrait of Gen X resilience. He knew that he had made a career from the young complainers of the nineties. As he explains in 1993’s “Serve the Servants:”

Teenage angst has paid off well
Now I'm bored and old
Self-appointed judges judge
More than they have sold

Gen X, the age group that reliably cries foul when forgotten by surveys, shopping reports, and polls, endearingly still sees themselves as aloof and all-knowing. So how can we keep defending Klosterman’s thesis?

The trick is to understand why Gen X still does seem so cool in comparison to the rest of us: they made complaining into an industry. Rather than choosing a personality from a buffet of algorithms that curses us with the same fate of the parents in Spirited Away, Gen X and elder millennials (ahem) were more likely to find their values from an industry of idols, addicts, rebels, and creeps who got rich complaining about the way things were in creative and catchy ways.

If a complaint is a subculture, is it really a complaint or a social movement?

Here’s why we should agree with Klosterman that Gen X complained less by complaining more creatively:

1. Gen X Complained in Abstraction.

Nirvana, who Klosterman assures readers changed the world as we know it, became one of the most famous bands in the world off the back of a song with the chorus:

A mulatto, an albino
A mosquito, my libido
Yeah
Hey
Yay

Beck’s 1993 hit, “Loser,” delivered a similarly powerful message, opening with:

In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey
Butane in my veins and I'm out to cut the junkie
With the plastic eyeballs, spray-paint the vegetables
Dog food stalls with the beefcake pantyhose

As American Songwriter remembers it:

With six verses, four choruses and some random lines, “Loser” makes no sense upon first listen or first read. Or even second. A young white guy sort-of rapping about monkeys, shotgun weddings, pigeon wings – what did this mean? Was it utter nonsense, or a deep statement by a legend in the making? Lines like Forces of evil on a bozo nightmare/ Ban all the music with a phony gas chamber – was it art, or gobbledygook?

Everything was up for interpretation because the less accessible, the more authentic the art and the more popular. Gen X turned complaints into big business and kept the feelings miscellaneous enough to be poetic and popular and relatable and, usually, just bordering the other side of intelligible.

Who could accuse Gen X of complaining when no one could even understand the complaints in the first place?

2. Solipsism, Not Social Outrage, was a Virtue.

In Klosterman’s world, Gen X is (was?) not as invested in ideology because caring too much about anything wasn’t cool in the nineties. The secret to being cool was not caring about anything outside your control. As he recalls:

Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool, in an era when coolness counted for almost everything. Solipsism was preferable to narcissism. The idea of policing morality or blaming strangers for the condition of one’s own existence was perceived as overbearing and uncouth Gen X didn’t complain as much because Gen X, The Nineties claims, was “exceedingly comfortable not knowing anything for certain.”

Klosterman stresses the point: in the nineties, awareness was optional and too much awareness was awkward at best and totally uncool at worst. Image: being informed was cringe. Why was ignorance such a virtue in the nineties? Because in the nineties, a happy life meant following your dream and being yourself. The Nineties reminds readers that, not long ago, everyone thought hustle culture and popular culture was fake and dumb. Finding fulfillment was easy as being yourself and following your own path and, once you found your own path, you never looked back.

3. It was Easier to Find Peace in the Finite.

At the start of the nineties, the media tried to find a suitable nickname for Gen X. Early attempts included The New Lost Generation, latchkey kids, and the MTV generation. In 1990, Time stretched the limits with “the New Petulants,” a nickname which doesn’t seem to cohere with the legendary stoicism of Gen X given that it’s just another way to call them “the New Complainers.” As the piece reported:

The twenty something generation is balking at work, marriage, and baby-boomer values. Why are today’s young adults so skeptical?

They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder. They have few heroes, no anthem, no style to call their own. They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial. They hate yuppies, hippies and druggies. They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders. What they hold dear are family life, local activism, national parks, penny loafers and mountain bikes. They possess only a hazy sense of their own identity but a monumental preoccupation with all the problems the preceding generation will leave for them to fix.

It’s interesting to see Gen X get accused of having a “hazy identity,” considering in modern culture that values every attribute of your identity as a currency. But the kids of the nineties didn’t have a “hazy” identity, they just didn’t care about being understood. The further away from the mainstream, a new industry of cool complainers told them, the closer you were to an enlightening apathy that would help you escape the system.

As Brad Pitt as his second-most attractive role after Snatch puts it in 1999’s “Fight Club” tells it:

We buy things which we don't need, with the money which we don't have, to impress the people that we don't like... working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.

In rejecting all promises of modern culture and exploring the inner self through a decade of, as Cobain put it, “angst,” Gen X expressed emotions for themselves and, in a sense, resolved them into a reputation of resilience. The point was not to be understood: the point was to find your voice in forms outside yourself and feel less alone and less whiny in the shared creative consumption of complaints that connected you to a selective subculture. Artful cynicism was the language of the nineties and in that cynicism was acceptance made possible through apathy.

With no urgency of accessibility and no culture of connection, it was a lot easier to figure out who you were back in the nineties. If you felt cool, you were doing it right. No likes, shares, views, or texts needed: the mystery was the meaning.

Résistance de la Rentabilité

Klosterman sums up the dramatic difference of Gen X culture with 1997’s “Flagpole Sitta” from the one-hit wonder from Harvey Danger, in which the complaining protagonist sings:

Been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding
The cretins cloning and feeding
And I don't even own a TV

In a lyric I always assumed to be illustrating the poverty of the self-admitted loser who doesn’t even own a TV, Klosterman sees a different story: the singer of “Flagpole Sitta” represents a culture where not having a TV was still possible and, possibly, admirable. As Klosterman describes: Gen X was “exceedingly comfortable not knowing anything for certain.”

This interpretation left me with a new perspective on the new millennium culture that now sees connection as currency and product and progress rather than the never-ending process of purpose and personality. It’s the difference between creating yourself and consuming yourself.

In the modern-day impossibility of isolation, Klosterman reminded me that there’s a school of thought that believes repression is the only real way to find meaning. When people are presented with the infinite, the only outcome is going to be an infinite appetite that leaves us empty. In the nineties, the mass media subcultures handed values to Gen X and told them everything else was a waste of time. This focus led to the concentration that led to the creativity of their complaints - and the profitability of it.

Klosterman claims that people lived life in an almost ecstatic complacence, because there was no overpowering social need to get involved in much of anything. After modernizing the memory with an abashed confession of his privileged upbringing and sinful heritage as a white male, he concludes:

It was, in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive.

Klosterman sums it up in a typically interesting yet distastefully dense explanation: from 1991 to 1999, “the validity of emotionally investing in the unreal” collapsed. By the turn of the millennium, we were connected like never before and our thoughts, values, dreams, and feelings became part of the grid. In the flatness of infinity, no one is special because every identity is as interchangeable as a playlist, scrolling Netflix, leaving a brief thumbprint on eternally looping prisms of purpose as light as air.

Or do we just not understand the youth of today?

This is the second essay of Litverse’s No-Context Nineties series. A new essay will be published weekly throughout the summer. Don’t miss the rest!

Read the first piece here.