300millionlittleusas: December 2023

Gen X Movies

You've heard the terms:

Slackers

Double Income No Kids

Casual friday

Mcjob

Yuppie kennel

Mcmansion

Computer nerd

Preppie

Stoner

Jock

Reject

Gamer

Space Cadet

Ska

Punk rock

Rap

Goth

Flying under the radar

Turn it up to 11

Thang

Brewskis

'Za (pizza)

Awesome

Epic

T-shirts

Ball caps

Sneakers

Gnarly

To the max

Wasted

Going postal

Chill out

Cool your jets

Get a grip

Fly girl

Rad

No way

Way

Totally

Like, as in 'Like, totally !'

Diss

You rock !

Shock jock

Dude

Valley Girl

They came from a generation less studiedthan any other in the present age, yet at least according to marketers, considered the most culturally influential in 2016.

Encyclopedia Brittanica says they were the first generation to grow up with cable and color TV, 24 hour news, digital music, co-ed sports, video games, the missing children 'Milk Carton Kids' and are often called 'Latch key kids', 'The MTV generation' and 'The Invisible Generation.'

Generation X orders more pizza than any other generation.

They are also the smallest and most overlooked corporate designated generation when they are demarcated at between 1965-1981, while Baby Boomers are indexed at between 1945 and 1965, and millennials are pinned between 1981 and 2004.

Yet The World Economic Forum said in 2021 that the overlooked and misidentified Generation X now holds the most cultural power.

- Goth Wiki

'The novel was a sleeper bestseller,[11] growing in popularity after a slow start.[9] The terms Generation X and McJob entered the popular vernacular through the book,[12][13] and Coupland [born in 1961] was declared [by whom?] a spokesman for Generation X by the Guardian Newspaper and lauded for having a feeling for the zeitgeist of the age.[14]'

- Generation X: Tales for an Accellerated Culture (1991 Douglass Coupland) wiki

Douglass Coupland's perception of Generation X were people born in the late 1950s and early 1960s

The marketing and survey corporations didn't like that because it made an un-neat extension of the Baby Boom Generation that began at the end of World War 2 in 1945 - to less than the recognized pre-determined generational span of 20 years for every generation - which fit within their establishmental rigidity, even though the start date of 1945 was artificially constructed.

The corporate marketers listed Gen X between a 15 year span 1965-1980, skewing the data against the overlooked generation the Strauss - Howe construct says began in 1961 and ended in 1981.

Anyone from either generation knows all to well the schizm that occured when the Monkees Saturday Morning T V show first appeared in the summer of 1966 targeting children with a new genre of music called 'Bubblegum Rock'.

To the baby boom Beatles fans, The Monkeys were a commercial, pre packaged made for TV group that had no musical legitimacy nor artistic validity.

To this new, as yet undefined, young cultural agregate, The Monkeys were fun, colorful and entertaining without requiring a lot of thought or world view knowledge - they were funny and sounded good.

Thus was created the clear and precise divide between Baby Boomers and the unnamed generation following them.

The Baby Boomers were the most studied, talked about and marketed to generation in history, in fact, they may have created the influence generational divides enjoy today, as they really were the first to be identified as a generation at all.

They changed the world for the better ending wars, racism and sexual discrimination with a cultural awareness of their power as the most populous generation ever, while ad agencies drooled over them.

Gen X is so named because so little was known about them, they were overlooked under the massive power of the Woodstock Flower Child Bohemian Peaceniks and Haight Ashbury Love In Electric Koolaid Acid testers who gobbled up all of the news media's attention not spent on covering the war (Vietnam - Southeast Asia war) and Watergate.

The unmentioned younger brothers and sisters watched and learned how to make things better and how to make things fairer from their older siblings, while remaining incognito and stealthy.

But that is the crux of what separated those cohorts, the acceptance, or at least the using of commercialism by the then unidentified younger siblings vs the then established outright opposition to it by the anti war baby boomers.

So then came The Archies, The Partridge Family, The Jackson 5 and Sonny and Cher plus a host of cartoon musical groups to cater to this new phenomenon.

Bubblegum Music Wiki

The bubblegum rock genre was credited with ispiring the birth of the U S punk and Post Punk rock cultures :

'“The Ramones, you listen to their songs and they’re complete bubblegum pop, without a doubt.” Lead singer Joey Ramone readily admitted, “We really liked bubblegum music, and we really liked the Bay City Rollers. Their song ‘Saturday Night’ had a great chant in it, so we wanted a song with a chant in it: ‘Hey! Ho! Let’s go!’ on ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ was our ‘Saturday Night.’ ” The Ramones wore leather biker jackets and ripped jeans and had tough scowls on their faces, but that pose was also underpinned by a Warholian irony and poppy fizz. Craig Leon noted that they embraced bubblegum and 1960s pop as “a return to the rock ’n’ roll roots.'

- The University of Iowa exempted from 'The Downtown Pop Underground'

The Beatles vs The Monkeys -

This was the clear cultural divide between the two age groups, one still undefined, that still separates each group today.

Cultural Generations Wiki

- Generation X Wiki

Samatha Mathis (born in 1970), who portrays 'The Eat Me Beat Me Lady' in the 1990 classic 'Pump Up The Volume', was dating River Phoenix (born in 1970) when he died of an overdose leaving 'The Viper Club', and was a member of the Screen Actors Guild's negotiating team when they went on strike in 2023 to secure digital rights for actors.

- ShowBiz411 September 27th, 2023

- Tilt August 27th 2020 (Steven Silver)

Pump Up the Volume inspired the modern Shock Jock radio genre.

The Brat Pack personified the Generation X presumed identity, until Gen X was declared dead in 1994 by it's creator, Coupland, for being co-oped by marketing groups, which he claimed the very cynicaland corporatist distrusting generation would not tolerate.