The archetypal Nineties youth was just the creation of marketing hype, writes Martin Wroe
THEY are the no-job, no-prospect, no-hope teenagers and twentysomethings, the so-called “slacker” generation — except that these archetypal youths of the Nineties may not actually exist.
Speakers at a conference on European youth this week will tell delegates that Generation X is not just dead, it never existed. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, grunge icon of a million slackers, may have martyred himself in vain.
“Generation X was a nonsense,” said Sanjay Nazerali, vice- president of the satellite music channel MTV, organiser of the Word of Relevant Mouth 96 Conference, looking at cultural themes among young Europeans. “It was a total fabrication on the part of marketeers. It is redundant as a term of describing young people but useful for trying to get money out of them.”
In fact, says the author of a new book on youth culture, the young get on well with their parents, study hard and are passionate about political causes, albeit in a less formal way than their parents.
John Grant, who has studied youth consumerism, says the birth of Generation X, marked by a cult novel of the same name by Douglas Coupland in 1991, was based on a small, unrepresentative group of recession-hit American graduates.
In fact, he argues, “a new generation gap” is emerging: Nineties parents have so little understanding of the lifestyle of the next generation that they see its lack of traditional political activity as evidence that it is apathetic.
“Apathy is a judgment made by the older generation of the younger generation because the young do not engage in collective political activities, such as marches, that a previous generation did.”
Research showing that today’s twentysomethings are the least likely in modern history to vote or join a political organisation is misleading. “They are not apathetic, they are channelling their passion in a new way — for example, into animal rights issues.”
These views appear to confirm recent US findings that young people between 16 and 29 regard the label “Generation X” as “uncool”. Instead they are a “DIY generation” who would rather form their own co-operative than be paid by a major company, who adopt their own style rather than follow one.
Ted Polhemus, author of Style Surfing: What to Wear in the Third Millennium, due out next month, says the reason Generation X does not exist could be because youth itself may be about to vanish — an inevitable result of a culture in which the old insist on staying young and the young want to grow old instantly.
“Generation X ghettoised the idea of young people, but it’s unclear if youth exists at all any more — no one now wants to be a teenager, let alone an adolescent. We have a continuum, with no sharp demarcation marked by the teenage years.”
But reports of the sudden death of this generation are rejected by Helen Wilkinson of the think-tank Demos. The phrase may have been exploited by the advertising industry but no-hope, no-good slackers were only ever one strand of the generation called X. As for the alleged subversive political activism of the young, she sees little sign that in place of formal political activity they have taken up DIY alternative politics.
‘It’s the death of politics if you start calling vegetarians who cycle politically active. The young are not as cynical and selfish as they have been depicted, but it’s wrong to say that invisibly they are as politically active as ever — most are pessimistic about whether politics can change anything.”
It is estimated that more than a million 16- to 24-year-olds attend licensed raves weekly, a market estimated at 2- billion per annum. “Rave culture” is now more influential and well established than previous youth cults such as mod or punk but big companies are struggling to define and reach its members. This week’s conference will try to explain the youth audience to confused advertisers.
But like addicts who can’t quite kick their habit, in the very act of killing Generation X, agencies want to rechristen it. Grant’s book explores “the New Youth Culture of Intense Experience”. The name of this culture is Sensorama.