I wish a lot of the commentors here would actually listen to what you're saying. All these "I'm Gen X, and we..." comments miss the point. I was born in '66 and I can tell you that nobody at the time wanted to be branded with a pre-packaged label that presumed to homogenize us all. No one then would have called themselves by that stupid name. We rejected that kind of monolithic identity. A generational name implies a list of characteristics to which all members must conform, and there was no way anyone would accept being told who they were. Then Grunge was invented by some marketer, signaling the first successful attempt to monetize and control the idea of non-conformity since Woodstock, even creating a new Woodstock for this new group of consumers. Suddenly, they could be sold the "right" clothes, and the right haircuts, and the kids all happily lined up to be branded with a big stupid X. But before then, we might have done away with those artificial social divisions, which are the cause of so much harmful tribalism today, and held to the idea that your character is not defined by the year you were born, and that basing your identity on your "generation" is a tool used by others to control and manage you.
Yeah, well said. "Generation X" was a marketing term that got foisted on people, and had an unfortunate homogenizing effect on lots of really cool organic culture which had already been taking form.
I believe it man, trust me I would not have picked the label “millennial” (I had a hard time pronouncing it 😂 and I never ate avocado out of anything but a tortilla either)
I find this comment ironic, since, this is the kind of anti-consumerist, hyperindividualist, anti-authority attitude you (commonly) see in Gen X, especially films like "Fight Club" lol
You protest too much. Gen X didn't reject labels. They simply didn't take labels as a serious hampering of individuality. Those who are Gen X accept labels as lines to be crossed, not crossed out.
@@ryanthec I very closely considered using a clip from young ones for this but it didn’t entirely fit, as that was early 80s. Maybe I should have though, because it was still absurdist humor beloved by Xers
@@cartoonaesthetics it was great video! Thanks for the upload! You can never fit everything in. I always felt like MTV…the fall of the Berlin Wall and Nirvana were checkpoints. But there were many others along the way. Phil Collins maybe? 😀
Do you have any idea what the words aids. And gay mean,??? I guessing no. So much for a true overview of anything if you leave 90% of the people who played a part in
As a Early/Elder Millennial, I grew up in a rural area and did not have access to my own internet connection until I was in my early/mid-20s. I did not buy a smartphone until many years after that too. The height of technology for us were videogames systems (which were all analogue) and VHS tapes...and later DVDs when I was an adult. My family didn't even get cable/satellite until I was in collage in the early 2000s, so I grew up watching the 6 local channels I could get on the 13" Black & White TV in my room (rabbit-ears and all).... often less if the weather was bad or the station moved their signal around..... which was promptly upgraded to a similarly sized color set around 1998. I spent alot of time outside or connecting with friends in person when FOX KIDS, must-see TV, TGIF Friday and PBS Scientific America wasn't on. I listened to a lot of music (cassettes, and later CDs), and red magazines. That was normal where I lived, and tons of kids had the same upbringing. I think alot gets lost when we speak about Gen X being the last analogue generation, because people forget that technology and trends moved slower several decades back. Millions and Millions of Elder Millennials grew up hanging out with their Gen X siblings and growing up basically just a disconnected. I had much more in common with my siblings than I do alot of people a few years younger than me who grew up with AOL and internet in a upper-middle-class suburbs somewhere out west. I truly miss those years too, of my mom teaching me how to use a payphone, read a map, thumb thru the yellow pages, and ask directions when I got my license. Things were really different, and I can't relate to most millennials who where born after me who were part of that "digital" generation - as while my schools did have a few Apple II's and later a couple Windows 95 and 2000 machines in the computer lab (remember those)... those machines where almost always localized and exclusively for Math Blaster or Oregon Trail. Even broadband internet was something the school system struggled to get when I was a senior in High School, and they were the only place around with it. I still remember my first typing class being on a type-writer. It was just different. I wish more middle & younger millennials would realize that a good chunk of the people born in the early and mid 80s pre-date that 'millennial' trend of ICQ, AOL and cellphones in High School. Mark Zuckerberg is my age, and our upbringings (and exposure to technology) couldn't have been more different - just as I am sure many of you in your 50s can attest that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs might have had a different exposure to technology growing up in silicon valley California than you guys did in the 70s and 80s. It's one of the reasons I do not like the Xennial term (its too vague), and think Millennials born before 1987 should be recognized as the first modern sub generation (which imo, would be ppl born between 1976 and 1986). I can tell you that having grown into adult hood in the analogue world, I still struggle most days with this imposter syndrome... where I almost feel like none of this is _real._ Like I am going to wake up and people will be dating at bars and clubs, and I won't need a internet connection to pay my bills or watch a show. Every time I go to a restaurant or hospital and they have a QR code or ask me to download a APP, it STILL feels absolutely bizarre and alien.. even after all these years. And in recent years I have found myself back on the dating market, and having last dated in 2005.... the hardest thing for me to accept is the other person looking at their phone thru 80% of the date, and being socially awkward. I just don't get it - my instinct is to get mad and demand they respect me enough to at-least look at me... but then I quickly realized EVERYONE is like that now. Things are just different, and when I speak about this I find its often people around my own age who relate.
Born in 81, fuck labels, let's tear shit up.🖕🏻 Didn't get a cell till I had a legal ID that could purchase beers.. Didn't get online till I was fifteen, same year I got a CD player, went to a friend's house and chatted it up on AOL in his parents laundry room... Had a job when I was ten, full time by the time I was twelve. You probably don't believe that, but it's the fuckin truth...
@@wpridgen4853 Hee, for Gen X cell phones were still generally for the really rich past a lot of our youth. We got pagers eventually, otherwise used our feet or tires to meet people to hang out / drop by houses in *person* even, just to see if anyone's in. Gasp. :) Personally I've tended to be a late adopter of most tech, whether for money or preference reasons. A lot of the new tech was actually really good and tended to last, but also a lot of it was kind of in awkward transitional phases that I didn't feel the need to keep up with. Cameras, notably, for instance: since I had the skills there was no real need to dive into primitive autofocus or a lot of automation. Didn't start going to CDs till maybe the late 90s, even. :)
Hello! I am a 57 year old who grew up a lot like you. My family didn't even have a TV set half the time until the 1980s so I couldn't even relate to my neighbors who were all watching the same TV shows/movies etc. My family read books and listened to a lot of music. When we did have TV we watched the music shows of the era as a family. Then in 1980 my father divorced my mother and married a younger woman who we moved in with. She was TV obsessed so all of a sudden we had this huge satellite dish and access to TV from all over the world. It was weird. I mainly watched MTV and cartoons and eventually playing a lot of video games when the first consoles came out.. Hanging out with my friends listening to music was the highlight of that time. Like you pointed out I can't relate to Steve Jobs at all. My town was a Milltown where all the mills had closed so jobs were scarce and so was money if you were my age and didn't come from a wealthy family. I had to drive 45 minutes to work once I got a car at 18. We shopped at thrift stores and never had Nike sneakers but used Doc Martens or some other shoe bought used. Then Nirvana hit the airwaves and I watched thrift store fashion sold at the mall and I realized my childhood was over. I don't know where I'm going with this but I related to your comment. I find today's phone culture terribly destructive even while I scroll away. We are all being manipulated by the technocrats even while they raise their children without access to the internet because they know how damaging social media and newsmedia is to a developing mind. I too often feel like none of this is real as you described. It is all so bizarre and seeing people I know who used to think critically totally brainwashed by Facebook and becoming fascists all while calling me a sheep for asking them where did their ideas come from so insane. What's going on in the US right now I have watched slowly happen for decades until smartphones and then bam! the propaganda machine hit overdrive with so many people on social media. Anyway thanks for writing your post, I am sure there are millions of others just like you who are growing up without broadband. Edit: sorry for the disjointed comment, I think I may have a.d.d. or something similar. Your comment was so well written I thought I should note this.
@@tomb613 Thank you for your great and thoughtful reply! I'm glad to see I'm not alone in any of this! 😄 I also couldn't agree anymore on that last paragraph - there is a reason silicon valley and the elites do not allow their children to engage with social media or to own smartphones unrestricted. Many sociopolitical cogs are turning in the background of today's society, and that grand 'algorithm' seems to be shifting our collective thoughts towards the whims of those whom command it. Rationality in the pubic discourse, I fear, is not part of that great scheme. Thank you for your story, and your kind complements! ❤
The term "Generation X" did not start becoming popularized in 1991. The famous punk rock band that featured Billy Idol as its lead singer was already called Generation X when thier first records were released in 1977. Billy Idol himself took the name from an obscure 1964 book written by Jane Deverson and Charles Hamblett. In 1991, Douglas Coupland was just re-using a popular term that had already been around for years already.
This era was peak animation. Computer animation lost a lot of the artistry that the hand drawn animation had. Liquid Television is an example of a perfect work of art.
I do like the amount of footage you use here, instead of just being voice over a single image or something. Having some obscure stuff like clips from some of the Mind's Eye CG shorts is a nice touch too.
My parents are apparently technically Gen x but they’re basically boomers like all their older siblings, and my dad basically never shut Fox News off in the living room once it happened.
I'm what I consider core Gen X, a year younger than Kurt Cobain and the youngest of the Beastie Boys. I read comics and Mad Magazine as a kid, in high school I stopped and only read underground comics, R. Crumb, American Splendor, Paul Mavrides' Anarchy Comics, etc. In college I got back into them with the rise of adult comics like Swamp Thing but after the first year of Sandman I was the stereotypical only Hate and Eightball reader (who also thought Neat Stuff had been better). I think the 90s was a little different for those of us who had been hip in the 80s, if you can forgive that. We had hardcore punk, zines, mail art, Subgenius, Discordianism, science fiction and horror fandoms, graffiti, skateboarding, just numerous cultures that had nothing to do with the mainstream. The whole alternative thing felt bad in a way that it probably shouldn't have, proprietary hipster anger at "selling out" I guess.
Maybe you just realized that you weren’t actually alternative or counterculture at all and had just bought into a different kind of justification for all of the worst aspects of American “culture”
Yep, the tech overlords have done the bait and switch, tantalized us with "the future", only to trap us in a kind of inescapable mental lockdown. 😮 And people overlook the fact that who are/were those tech pioneers? Gen Xers.
I'm an old Boomer who clicked onto this because I noticed Bagg's distinctive art style in the thumbnail (who I recognized from WEIRDO) and I wasn't disappointed by your dissection of 90s culture. As a child I'd bought a few Spiderman + Fantastic 4 comic books, but I hated the format. They were half pages of weird advertisements ("Hey kids, sell GRIT! America's family-est newspaper!"), and just when the story got going- CONTINUED NEXT ISSUE. I went back to my science fiction paperbacks. The graphic novel format finally gave me whole stories in one book, which was good because I became a DC fan in my 40's, not so much because of any Tim Burton flick, but BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES, I loved the writing, the relative sophistication for a kid's series, and my all time favorite Joker (Luke WHO??) and by the time of the first X MEN movie I was hooked on the superhero genre I'd sneered at as a pretentious Pynchon, Zola and Ferdinand Celine reading teen. Really looking forward to Part 2...
Gen X culture was also unique for the fact that it rejected so much itself that it was ultimately rejected by the establishment as simply too hard to sell to (after they tried to gaslight us as 'slackers' which we ironically owned/embraced instead) ....where the bigger manipulators then just moved onto the next (and more easily-led/manipulated) generation. Gen X ultimately became the passed-over generation. The cynicism, irony and absurdity of the time wasn't as nihilistic as you think, where the nihilism was critiqued and made fun of as well. The generations since either haven't property understood or contextualised the irony, sarcasm and absurdity or have instead (and unfortunately) devolved it into dumb supposed 'sass' and sadly embraced nihilism AS their sad life-meaning, like self-identified victimhood......and then useful-idiocy FOR their manipulators/the establishment.
I blame David Foster Wallace for his attack on irony and creating New Sincerity - which the 2010s Great Awokening embraced as an echo of yuppie Boomers neurotic about their “personal brand” and curated social media accounts, which is the total opposite of Gen X authenticity.
Gen X here. You make a lot of really good observations. There's one thing you get really wrong, though, about our ironic love of "insincere" retro aesthetics, and you cite the 50s. Well, no. You're a decade off. What you speak of is a SINCERE love of aspects of 60s aesthetics, and it's rooted in familiarity and comfort. These things were (still) around when we were little and felt protected, and didn't die out completely until the early 80s. Stuff like hearing "Mr. Lucky" in a grocery store, or variety shows being on TV. We know that a lot of that stuff is tacky, we just don't care because it feels good. I get the sense that you think that when they packaged us up to sell back to ourselves, we actually bought it. Sure, a few did. Most of us did for a minute, but by and large our generational moment of self-awareness and definition didn't last long. I mean, it's not like it was something we could unsee, but we lost interest in it pretty quick, having spent our lives being bored to death by our parents boasting about how cool their generation was and realizing what a waste of time and energy it was to emulate their generational ego tripping. We really only stick our heads up and speak to it when some younger person takes a shot at us as a generation for something we didn't even do, then we'll collectively tell 'em where to stick it and go back to listening to Glenn Campbell on AM radio.
Yeah, the 80's was that. 90's was a decade of cynicism because we saw how hypocritical it was having our "Boomer" parents order us around after their own Counter-Culture youth tore down the hard work their parents made during the 30s and 40s.
@@MaggieKeizai the 50's ascetic in the 90's has always interested me. I was at the tail end of gen-x and I remember a lot of the kids a couple grades ahead of me being really into turner classic movies and crime noir.
"gen x here" man the american is so devoid of any actual real identity that they'll gladly identity with such made up terms & artificial identities like "generations". the generational concept is mostly a product & construct of media & media consumption and nothing else.
I absolutely loved growing up gen x even though I didn't know what it was at the time. I think it's a quiet generation that is just fine with being generally overlooked. There are so many times where I hear a discussion on generations and it jumps straight from boomers to millennials and I'm glad to be a part of neither of those narcissistic groups
Gen X is lucky. I dislike being a later millennial because of the narcissism label. Yeah being born in the early 90s pretty much spoiled me to lots of stuff people before me didn’t have at a pretty young age so that narcissism kinda comes in. You’re lucky to be left alone and overlooked. Now everyone is moving on to dogging on Gen Z.
@@oldradiosnphonographs The narcissism label is accurate though. Even Gen Z noticed that about Gen Y since it's often Gen Y cancelling Gen Z's on the internet. I'm an early millennial from the early 80s. My gen is always grouped up with Gen X. While early 80s Gen Y do have plenty of overlap with Gen X, I think we're just a lost gen with no core identity between X & Y. Ryan Gosling is from 1980 but he's quintessential Gen Y. He's a bland corporate product that many 1990s millennials relate with due to his social isolation roles in Drive & Blade Runner 2049. Notice how he doesn't get the girl in those roles. He basically sacrifices himself to give himself purpose. That's what I noticed about late 1980s & 1990s Millennials, a nihilistic hopelessness where they view themselves as doomed. I'm from 1983 so I have a far more optimistic outlook similar to that of Karate kid. or Return of the Jedi. It's a naïve outlook though, in real life you really can't reform the Darth Vaders of the world lol.
@@HereticHydra I also wonder if getting the internet in our single digits as apposed to being a teenager or older fueled our Narcissistic attitude too?
@@oldradiosnphonographsthe internet is narcissistic, and was almost entirely populated by millennials from the beginning of it’s popularity, they’re just the first generation that was given a mechanism with which to push their narcissism into everyone’s face This also corresponds with the collection and sale of everyone’s information to advertisers in order to kill actual businesses, so there’s a argument to be made that the narcissism was always the point of social media, because they wouldn’t make any money otherwise.
This is the kind of art/comics/cartooning/ and surrounding cultural discussion/analysis that would make our boys like Eddie P. proud, killer video bro, you’re actually already a pro at this lol
Thank you, Comics Kayfabe is a big influence for me just in terms of their enthusiasm. Eddie Pissgore, RIP, does get a shoutout in the next part of this series.
After what the vultures pushed Ed into doing I thought Ya Boi Zack would be the only good channel anywhere near this scene but you’re really stepping up to the plate 👍
@@cartoonaesthetics Ed will be missed. His art and love of the gratuitous aspects of 70s and 80s horror will be sorely missed too, as he leaves a giant black hole in the scene with his demise. I know this sounds terrible, but: would the people who drove him to what he did, should find a similar fate, I would finally believe karma is real. Justice is rarely served in life, but if any deserved it - it would be those who robbed the world of such compassion, love and talent.
Instant sub. I was 15 in 1990, and Peter Bagge's HATE (along with other indie comics like Chester Brown's Yummy Fur, Joe Matt's Peep Show, and Daniel Clowes' Eightball) was such a revelation compared to the other superhero stuff that was available at the time. I've since rebought them all in collected books, plus virtually everything else he's put out over the years (of variable quality, admittedly) and am now eagerly awaiting delivery of HATE Revisited #1, which finally shipped today in the UK. Looking forward to the next two parts of this excellent series.
Early millennial. I see that early-90's period as a kind of turbocharged 80's, where a lot of the aesthetic trends reached their "final form" (and in subsequent decades, were concentrated into the synthwave aesthetic) - the movies became more intentionally over-the-top, "alternative" came into prominence on radio along with some breakthrough hip-hop and dance records, but the shock humor and hype for digital graphics on everything hadn't quite come into play - the comics I was reading as a kid were still being made without any digital production. Nationally, crime rates peaked in 1991 and started their long downtrend, if I remember correctly, which also marked the decline of stories built around street gangs and urban decay. There was a wave of pop environmentalism - Captain Planet and similar kinds of pollution-fighting characters and school posters that proclaimed "Reduce, reuse, recycle; there's never enough water to waste" and other PSA slogans. There were still after-school specials in those years, although cable TV was definitely sucking the air out of the room by then. Pro wrestling was still aiming to be "wholesome Real American" rather than "Attitude". All of that stuff shifted in a big way around 1994 and it was utterly jarring to me, at 8 years old. A decent chunk of Gen X were Reagan-Bush entrepreneurs - a lot of the people who ended up being tech industry billionaires found their footing around this period or a little bit later as the dot-com boom took shape. Tim Sweeney stands out to me as a guy who, now that he's at the top, yearns romantically for a libertarian America that provides the exact kinds of opportunities that he got in the early 90's, so he's deployed his money accordingly, without much attention to how the actual conditions have changed.
@@user-zx5gg8od6l I'm also from the early 1980s & what he said is accurate. 1990-1995 really was just a cultural extension of the late 1980s. He brought up wrestling which noticeably became darker around 1998 to appeal to the Gen X crowd. Culture didn't finally transition towards a more Gen X outlook until 1997/1998 - 2012. 2002 - 2012 were what I'd consider the early 80s Gen Y culture which was still shaped by Gen X irreverent & edgy aesthetics. Sam Hyde is basically early 1980s Millennials personified. Edgy as all hell.
@HereticHydra '85 here, I made the exact same reference to Sam Hyde. WOAh! Hey, while I'm here, did you experience the phenomenon of incessant armpit farting in the earliest part of the 90s? I remember one kid was a king of that maneuver, only he'd take it to the next level and fall flat on his back and while rocking back n forth would blast off multiples using both his leg pits. Quite amusing witnessing that happening randomly mid-conversation.
Early millennial here. I feel like I share a lot in common with Gen Xers since I got to experience a lot of the culture of their teenage and young adult years as a child. I feel sort of blessed that I got to experience a more analog childhood. I remember hearing the term "Generation Y" when I first attended college, but "millennial" would eventually become the preferred term as I entered my 20's. I look forward to the next part of this, hopefully you can talk about internet culture in the early days of its mass adoption. Webcomics, blogs, forums, instant messaging were all things I experienced as I was leaving my childhood and discovering who I was as a person and developing my tastes. For Gen Xers, they were young adults. They were real pioneers of internet culture and I think since dawn of web 2.0, old forum culture is more discussed by people my age rather than them, the people who were there before us who set all these things up.
Well, the next couple parts are really going to be about Hate mostly - talking about Gen X was just necessary preamble, but I had some other stuff on my mind about that I wanted to share, too.
the youtube algorithm has blessed the fuck out of us with this one. ive been thinking about these ideas a lot recently because every decade, the decade from 30 years ago gets glorified. the 80s loved the 50s, the 90s loved the 60s, the 2000s loved the 70s, the 2010s loved the 80s. it was obvious that up next was the 90s. you hit the zeitgeist and im glad i clicked on this. this is amazing dude. youve got a great voice, writing style, and quality. keep it up.
The 2000s Electroclash / Bloghouse was in love with the 1980s. The 2010s Great Awokening was more like a turbocharged version of “political correctness” from the 1990s.
it's almost halfway through the 2020s and we're just rehashing the 90s/00s from 2 decades ago...so what happens 2 decades from now when we go back to the 2020s and there's nothing there because everyone was trying to relive the 90s/00s? we've reached the point of media culture folding in on itself, particularly in a "post-modern" world i.e. everything has been said & done already...yet there's people still trying to reinvent the wheels that keep that media culture going.
Sir, stumbling upon videos like this are such a joy. Damn I really love TH-cam sometimes! Your words are packed full of insight and I learned so much. Keep making videos, this format is absolutely perfect IMO, you have a brilliant critical eye and it’s making me want to do more of a deep dive on some of these comics. Godspeed.
this is so well-written it's insane. You've been able to put in few words what I've needed entire paragraphs to even graze, while you hit it right on the nose. Well done.
A step up from the last video. this is a real interesting topic I know nothing about, so I'm learning a lot here. Can't wait for what's next in the series!
I think one thing a lot of analysis doesn't seem to get is how very many of us *did* know what we had, and probably gradually grew more angry, dissiilusioned, and/or cynical as more and more was *taken away* sometimes right to our faces, and as we realized that with the economic, err, changes of the Reagan/Bush era, there was suddenly college debt or inabiity to even *get* loans for college, which was still seemingly pretty mandatory to even work in the proverbial mail room so many places, while meanwhile older generations were living longer and healthier and way outnumbering us, so there wasn't a lot of room to get *in,* cause people weren't moving up or retriring. That also meant a lot of the companies and certainly political parties just weren't as progressive as we'd have wanted, and you had to be squeaky clean and boring just to get in a lot of places, and who wanted to do *that* besides the Young Republicans. Consequently a lot of us *did* work more social and cultural angles, and if we were lucky, could get by at them. And even there , there was a real difference in prospects and having been able to get started depending on where you were and if you were born, say, before or after 1970, give or take.
@@cartoonaesthetics I 100% appreciate your thoughtful social analysis of those times. You’re doing high-quality, sensitive, ethnography here. What you’ve posted doesn’t make me feel like a “study subject.” Instead, I feel like you’ve put yourself in my shoes.
Yeah, the video missed what was probably the single most important defining factor of GenX culture, the fact that we were the first generation to not do better than our parents, financially. There were fewer opportunities for us, yet we were constantly being told that material success was the most important goal in life; the "Greed is Good" decade. We saw how the Boomers went from spiritualist hippies to materialist yuppies. We saw public services that our parents and grandparents took for granted being privatized or outright eliminated under Reaganomics. On top of that, we experienced the crack epidemic, and the AIDS epidemic, and the "Satanic Panic"; and our government's dismal response to each. We saw the rise of the New Puritanism under Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell, and the ascendance of the Religious Right and the televangelist phenomenon. We saw the push for more and more censorship of the arts, represented by politicians like Sen. Jesse Helms and organizations like the PMRC. Most of us were born just before or shortly after Watergate, when trust in the government dropped to an all-time low; and watched conspiracy theories become a major cultural phenomenon. We were the first generation raised entirely on television as our primary cultural educator, with the extreme brutality of the War on Drugs constantly shoved in our faces. It's no wonder we became more cynical and ironic and edgy. Trying to dismiss that as just the result of self-awareness and marketing really fails to understand the huge social and political pressures that Generation X experienced during its formative years.
Except that Gen X ers are one of the most conservative generations of any still alive by polls.Those who are conservatives are just as cynical and independent as the liberal portions. Therefore politics and economics are at best only a partial explanation.
I'm more of a golden age comics fan, but the darker and grittier comics of the 80s and 90s were enjoyable. It's good to have a violent antihero protagonist rather than another overgrown boyscout in spandex
I can’t imagine the amount of work you put into collecting all that footage. Excellent video! As a cartoonist myself I enjoy seeing every element that influences a creator and I can’t wait to see the rest!
I don't mean to imply that any of the early Gen-X stuff in this vid influenced Bagge per se - his formative years were in the 70s & 80s. By the time the late-80s-unto-90s were happening, he was coming into his own.
I'm such a Marvel fan (ahem, let me rephrase that, I WAS such a Marvel fan in the early 1990s) that I often forget just how many GREAT comics that Vertigo was putting out. They were SO good, in fact, that I often forget (or more likely, block in my mind) that Vertigo was a branch of DC. It doesn't seem possible, honestly, but it's true. That was DC comics. What a trip. 😮
In a way Marvel tried to do their own version of Vertigo years later with "Marvel Max" but they could have helped the industry a lot if they'd just done that sooner.
Gen-X'er here. This is fantastic. I've subbed and I'm really looking forward to the next two parts. Even when the internet started to become a thing, we used it more as a way to arrange getting together in RL.
As a cusper between X and mil surrounded by mostly X'ers this is really helping me understand the people who were around in my childhood and teens to compartmentalize and process those experiences. Thank-you. Your channel might not have the most subscribers but these days anything over 10K subs is very rarely worth watching. You're the stuff I refresh the front page hoping to see, filtering and sifting through it all and I'm so glad to have found you.
On a side note, i always hated the idea of "rebelness" as a value in on of itself and not something that is completly dependent on the cirmcunstances of wheather or not it makes sence to oppose, support, or just be indiferent of "the stablisnmet", the general culture, or just "the current thing" on any given situation.
It was a dream having MAD magazine all along the way on our journeys... seeing it poke fun at us and satirize culture as a whole. You can still support them by subscribing. $20 bucks. CHEAP.
Grunge happened because we were the first generation to realize we wouldn't be nearly as well off as our parents, and we had the balls to express our disdain through music. We were the latch key kids who were left largely to our own devices because the 80s media was busy selling out the nuclear family to rampant consumerism. They told our parents that greed was good. Because Ronald Fuckin' Reagan said so. It was a dark and depressing, but also a great time to be a teen-ager. Fuckin' STOKED for part 2 & 3. Nice work bro, it's gonna be a treat to watch this channel grow!
Been following your twitter account for years now and you've always put out tons of fantastic anecdotes, great to see you make a larger scale video like this with a bigger connecting throughline, I'm looking forward to the next two parts!
There was a much larger cultural disparity between rural and urban life up through the 70s and 80s. The country boys from the 70s and 80s are the GenX that GenX is afraid to talk about. You also have to remember that an "analog life" included corporal punishment in schools for many of us. I learned to take a beating and not cry in grade school.
Thanks! It's not going to be All-Gen-X all the time, but there's lots of other great comics & animation from the 80s & 90s that I'd like to talk about in the future.
“Generation whose mental development was pre-digital “ isn’t really accurate. We grew up with computers and experienced the early internet and its transformation of our social world during our 20’s. I was not fully formed as an adult when the internet became standard life. I remember before, during and after. That is what is unique about Gen X
That's true, it would probably have been more accurate to say "pre-Internet" than "pre-digital," and maybe even then that would have applied only to the earliest Xers.
(Millennial here) Awesome work,. Nice video all around. 🔥🔥👏👏🔥🔥 Love the underground comics The first one I ever saw/read was my dad's copy of "Big Ass Comics" with stuff from several artists..
I grew up on Crumb and Bagge. I was hoping this video was more of a deeper dive into COMIX of the era. Stickboy, Yummy Fur, all the works of Dan Clowes. So many great artists of the time. Also the attempts of marvel and DC to break into the more adult genre of comics and graphic novels. Epic comics Dark Horse. Ect. Maybe you can do a follow up. I could go on and on about all of this. I’m sure I’ll regret forgetting to mention a few. Or yeah! also Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children was great.
I tend to really get going on whatever subject I'm addressing, so all the preamble of this part of the series was in service of eventually talking about Hate & Peter Bagge. Dan Clowes, Dark Horse, those are giant topics! I'll definitely be talking about them in the future.
Wonderful video!!! The nuances of a decades culture tends to get lost and flanderized the more time passes and the more people who weren't there come of age. Fascinating stuff. (zoomer review)
I first found "Hate" in a trade paperback at my high school library, of all places. I was an immediate fan. It turned me on to Peter Bagge's work, as well as other creators that inspired Bagge like Crumb.
First year millennial here, my whole life I was told my generation was gonna change the world, class of 2000, and even as a kid i knew nothing was going to change. But at that time people thought there was gonna be some kind of Renaissance in the year 2000 that never came. I do miss that feeling of the unknown of the future it's lost now.
@@cartoonaesthetics True and try not to mess them up as much as our parents did 😂 Most of us have one thing in common Gen X, Early Gen Z...... Divorce, blaming the other parent
Please please make more videos! The amount of knowledge, the library of footage, your editing style and a voice over that's actually NOT annoying makes for such a great watch.
Half of the people you’re showing are either Gen Jones or straight up Boomers. It’s also more likely that a Gen Xer was raised by someone from the silent generation.
Thanks for this...I guess you'd call the movies: "Singles", "Clerks", "Slacker", and "Gas, Food, Lodging" to be that self-awareness point. I remember being disturbed a bit when Singles came out. Didn't know at the time of course, but that was Capitalist Realism (Mark Fisher book) packaging us up into a product to sell back to us (Fight Club reference).
I think "Slacker" is the real deal - & that film actually helped popularize the term as synonymous to "Generation X." "Clerks" has an authenticity to it as well, also being a true independent work made outside of Hollywood. "Singles" was DEFINITELY the glitzy, Hollywood version of "Gen-X" though. I used some clips from it in Part 2 of this series, which premieres tomorrow.
Can't believe I got an issue of Peter Bagge's Hate in the mid 90's or something, here in Costa Rica, CA. As soon as I saw it I knew it was special. I was knee deep into comics back then, mostly old Metal Hurlant from Spain and British 2000 AD from the 80s which became an integral part of my life. I still have them 30 years later. I used to read Mad and Cracked magazines back then. Awesome times...
I was born in 1980, very young for a Gen-Xer, but I still identify most with that generation since I matured way faster than most kids. I definitely would not call myself an "elder millennial" since I was afforded way more benefits to being part of the booming economy of my generation. I was out of the house by age 18 and living on my own in 1999. I would definitely say that 1990 was the big turning point, not just for the big round number that came up, but because it really did feel like everything was changing, and I was so there for it at just 9-10 years old.
You've got some work to do selling Gen X as optimistic. It was a good time, because there seemed to be some barriers that were coming down that went way beyond Berlin, and the petty repressions of the 80's were obviously becoming unsustainable. But that doesn't mean younger people were happy. There was still a lot of loathing for the religious and the corporate, a dread of adult responsibility, skepticism regarding other people's intentions, and a need for escape through whatever substance you could get your hands on. If any attitude dominated, it was the sense that we needed to have as much fun as possible before the window closed on us. Still, good video, I'll be watching for the next one.
The 1990s was the "Ugly Decade." Generation X and the 1990s embraced all things ugly, taboo, rough, raw, raunchy and ridiculous. Think, "Joe's Apartment." We replaced "Dynasty" with "Melrose Place." We replaced Neiman Marcus with thrift store shopping. We replaced highbrow with lowbrow. Beauty was out. Ugly was in.
Cynical originally, as we realised pretty quickly we'd never have political power due to our boomer parents, but more recently happy about that once we realised that means we won't be blamed for the state of things now. I honestly think im the luckiest generation to have lived in history so far, and probably for a long time to come.
Fantastic video. I recognise some of the Fantagraphics clips from an old Channel 4 TV show called Made In The USA hosted by Laurie Pike. Have never been able to find the show online. Excellent work digging up the footage. Can't wait for parts 2 and 3.
I lived through it and you did a great job at summing up the era. Hate was THE Gen-X comic and I got every issue (from GOSH or Forbidden Planet in London) when released. Hate and Eightball were epic.
Nirvana (and Gen X) wasn't as self-loathing and as nihilistic as you think .....listen to the lyrics (and just feel the sound!) they're also really funny, sarcastic and genuinely self-depreciating.......which unfortunately gets lost when exploring it later, especially after Kurt shotgunned himself (which is what heroin, Courtney Love and the rest sadly resulted in).....then you have films like Singles and Reality Bites which were just lame and as bad an 'approximation' back then as they are today. Genuine self-depreciation (and sarcasm/irony) has unfortunately been far harder for the narcissistically over-'encouraged' generations since to properly contextualise or properly appreciate .....outside of using it as a tool to shamelessly look for algorithmic (and overly-conformist encouraged) 'likes'/'upvotes' (and supposed but REALLY lame 'sass') unfortunately. Gen X parents likely made a mistake putting their kids in front of something like The Simpsons and just assuming that they too would 'get it'......where the kids nowadays are unfortunately far more likely to just see the social-criticism in it as simply 'mean' (or just ignore/not-understand it) after growing up in far more conformity-encouraged/manipulated times where ANY 'criticism' (even 'critical' thinking) is now sadly seen as 'mean' (....and like racism [sigh]).....where they're ironically and sadly more likely to gravitate towards the lame/easy, cheap (and dehumanised) nastiness of something like Family Guy instead.....or all the other narcissistic and nihilistic supposed 'sass' now over-offered to them.
We saw the 80’s and 90’s and the transition from the organic to the digital age. We are old school, but know technology as well. We are the perfect generation.
I was born in 1988, so I was sort of a early to mid millennial. And I remember having that sort of experience of a analogue existence blended with a bit of digital existence. My older Sister was a earlier millennial and my younger brother was born two years after me but I was raised by Baby Boomer parents. I sort of had my formative early childhood in that sort of cultural cusp of the late 1980's to the early 1990's so I experienced that formative Gen X influence from things like Twin Peaks, Beavis and Butthead and The Simpsons. And I suppose experiencing that cultural "transition" period from the late 1980's to the early 1990's sort of explains why I like Vaporwave and Synthwave so much. Not to mention I moved up to the Seattle area right after my little brother was born because of my Dad's job being moved there.
People always say that pre-internet society was more 'in touch' with each other and maybe that's true for extroverts and people who fit in socially, but for social outcasts (take your pick which flavor of outcast), we were horribly isolated. For example, when a high schooler in my district took his own life on the steps of the school, I overheard the teachers saying , 'This is God's way of weeding out the weak ones." That was the attitude towards LGBT, mentally ill, neurodivergent, and basically anyone who was a "minority".
That's a good point. On the other hand, before the Internet, there was more incentive for social outcasts to socialize with each other irl, rather than on their computer screens
As an early member of Gen z I look at all this with a sense of awe and jealousy seeing a close knit culture and at the line of the changing eras, Anyhow great job with the video, I’ve been following you on Twitter for a while and this video reminds me of your old threads, keep up the good work.
I hope somewhere in the beginning the creator mentions all the recessions Gen X went thru 2000, 2008. My resume had like 4 companies in one year in that time period
I actually miss the humor of the 80s and 90s. It's true that people talking more can solve a lot of silly issues, but it was fun to not take life so seriously. Making light of things make it possible to live. On the flip side I believe that in modern times people have a false notion that they can solve everything through dialogue because they have fixed a few things like making the workplace more friendly and diverse. In reality there is still a lot of bias. There is also a false preconception that generations are making a better, strong, country, and a fixing real issues like global warming that are generally out of our control due to their vast scale. I think things are pushed on everyone in countries and their local tribal groups. Most of it is for money and control reasons. It's often enforced by younger generations which are easily influenced. It's sold by people in power who want to control everything to their advantage. Whether it's women who want more power/control, colored people who want more power/control, gay/trans people who want more power control, it's easy to entice people and bring them into the fold. This gives the people of the same denomination in power more power because there are more people that support them and their ideas.
There was a book from 1964 called Generation X, which was a study of mid-60's popular culture in the UK. Apparently, Billy's mother had a copy and when Tony James saw it, he suggested they use it.
Totally dig this video. It said more about the culture beyond books and cartoons. Didn’t really know what to expect from this video but I couldn’t stop watching. It was sprinkled with clips that I fondly remember growing up in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Very good stuff can’t wait for the next chapter. Instantly subscribed
You've got a lot to look forward to - if you want to stick to the Hate-verse, the "Bradleys" stories from Neat Stuff have been collected separately & you could start there. But Neat Stuff is still really good overall
If David Lynch was one year older, he would be too old to even be called a Boomer. Yet, you claim his show Twin Peaks is the zenith of Gen X culture. You are just referencing 90s culture, not specifically “Gen X” culture in most of this video.
I think this is an enlightening analysis for me, as the youngest of millennials who never touched that era at all, but that it is too “unselfconscious” of how much *Nostalgia* plays a role in biasing it.
Being solidly a member of generation X myself, i’m off a lot of who and what we were in the 1980s was marked by a deliberate rejection of boomer stuff. We did not like all that hippie shit, we did not like disco, we did not like self important music, and truth be told most of our boomer parents were self absorbed and not great parents. I mean, there are obviously were an awful lot that were, but something like third of us grew up in broken homes, and without a lot of the social conventions that would have helped compensate for that. So punk was an expression of that, but mostly it was new wave. Music that really was not very challenging, but which boomers just absolutely hated. But there is also sense of incredible optimism because of computers becoming increasingly available and a ton of good movies and jobs were pretty easy to find. I mean, you could put yourself through college with a good full-time job at a grocery store. So on the one hand, there was a deliberate reaction of what had come before, and on the other hand, there was a great deal of excitement about what was to come. And “poser” is already being used as an insult. And then in the early 1990s, the sense of optimism just kind of disappeared. I’m not sure why. I think some of that was almost all of us were out on our own now and well the stuff we had rejected was pretty clear, the stuff that we chose to accept was not. Which left us with the fear that comes from a wide-open future realization that your parents are not gonna be paying your bills anymore. You have this period from about 1978 to about 1983 where record labels had no idea what would sell and so they just shoved everything out there, and then from 1983 to about 1987 was very commercial, but then in the last part of the 80s Literally anything goes musically. You weirdo acts like they might be Giants and more serious metal acts like guns and roses. And you had indie comics everywhere and it was a really very exciting time. Then once grunge hit around 1992 it all began to feel like it was being rained in. That experimentation had given away to a new formula. Personally, as a new wave kid, I always rejected grunge. It wasn’t that the music was bad, it just felt commercial to me. Like a safe well scrubbed version of punk being used as a marketing tool for corduroy pants and flannel shirts. Bleah. I mean I was sick of the music. I grew up on, but I didn’t have a lot of love for the new music, and it is hard to rebel when rebellion is being mass marketed. I am rambling. Never mind. Forget it to take up your time.
This ' we ' doesn't work. There was a wide variety of Gen X. And New Wave came up with Boomers Hello???????. Grunge was also around before it was mass marketed and the Normies got hold of it.
Interesting video and, an interesting topic. I bartended through the late 80s and then all of the 90s, didn't really pay attention to much of what's being discussed here, but I did witness a lot of it. Ya know, Gen Ten is sadly the generation that seems hell bent on introducing a dictator to the nation. I don't where so many of us went wrong, but damn, they lost their way big time.
The 80s were not just blah Geo. H.W. Bush conservatism. There was also punk, a lot of crazy music including a lot of really neat synth work, The Talking Heads and other bands, micro computers going from toys to tools, hacking, all kinds of neat stuff.
I think Gen X were victims of media hype - they were both derided & exploited & it fostered generational narcissism. But like I say in the vid, most of my favorite culture growing up was made by Xers
@@nacflghs-n7w It's worse, now... because now we have instant gratification in terms of vanity on a global scale. Why else would Tik-Tok and Intsagram exist? For "educational purposes"... like Facebook did at first? Or "artistic self-expression" like TH-cam truly once did? Please...!😒
@@cartoonaesthetics I hated most culture of the 90's. And if it weren't for the tech it saw developed & made available during it--including the recovery of automotive performance and styling (The post-malaise/new musclecar era)--I would've probably closed my bedroom door, turned-off my TV and stereo, and waited for the year 2000 to come... like I had been doing since I first saw a truly futuristic concept car: The GM Aero 2000--which became the styling basis of the Saturn SC. That, and waited to see the 70's become retro-cool... like the 50's & 60's did during the 70's & 80's, respectively... like I knew they would during the 90's.
@@cartoonaesthetics It doesn't make you a bad person. And Chuck was really cool about it when I got it wrong. (He called me after this awful thing happened. He had sent me this amazing care package full of Chuck swag, and I told my wife he was on the phone, and got his name wrong. He walked me through it, and I promised I would never get it wrong again. My last name rhymes with some stuff that my elementary school classmates took full advantage of, so I have always tried to be sensitive about these things and I was terribly embarrassed that I got the name of one of my literary heroes not just wrong, but wrong to his face. But he was great about it. And the man is more than just a writer. He's a mentor to writers, and a good and decent man. You are doing good work. Keep doing it!
Thanks. I actually hadn't intended this as a multi-part series, but when the script recording wound up an hour long, I realized I'd have to cut it into 3 twenty minute segments. And fortunately there were logical stopping places at 20 minute intervals.
@@revjakenash1 Thanks again, that was the intent. I don't really like nostalgia-baiting, but generational differences fascinate me, and that was something Hate got me thinking about when making this video.
I wish a lot of the commentors here would actually listen to what you're saying. All these "I'm Gen X, and we..." comments miss the point. I was born in '66 and I can tell you that nobody at the time wanted to be branded with a pre-packaged label that presumed to homogenize us all. No one then would have called themselves by that stupid name. We rejected that kind of monolithic identity. A generational name implies a list of characteristics to which all members must conform, and there was no way anyone would accept being told who they were. Then Grunge was invented by some marketer, signaling the first successful attempt to monetize and control the idea of non-conformity since Woodstock, even creating a new Woodstock for this new group of consumers. Suddenly, they could be sold the "right" clothes, and the right haircuts, and the kids all happily lined up to be branded with a big stupid X. But before then, we might have done away with those artificial social divisions, which are the cause of so much harmful tribalism today, and held to the idea that your character is not defined by the year you were born, and that basing your identity on your "generation" is a tool used by others to control and manage you.
Yeah, well said. "Generation X" was a marketing term that got foisted on people, and had an unfortunate homogenizing effect on lots of really cool organic culture which had already been taking form.
Now you sir, are a man with some sense.
I believe it man, trust me I would not have picked the label “millennial” (I had a hard time pronouncing it 😂 and I never ate avocado out of anything but a tortilla either)
I find this comment ironic, since, this is the kind of anti-consumerist, hyperindividualist, anti-authority attitude you (commonly) see in Gen X, especially films like "Fight Club" lol
You protest too much. Gen X didn't reject labels. They simply didn't take labels as a serious hampering of individuality. Those who are Gen X accept labels as lines to be crossed, not crossed out.
The British show “The Young Ones” changed our brains as 12 year old boys.
@@ryanthec I very closely considered using a clip from young ones for this but it didn’t entirely fit, as that was early 80s. Maybe I should have though, because it was still absurdist humor beloved by Xers
@@cartoonaesthetics it was great video! Thanks for the upload! You can never fit everything in. I always felt like MTV…the fall of the Berlin Wall and Nirvana were checkpoints. But there were many others along the way. Phil Collins maybe? 😀
@ryanthec the day MTV went on the air was very significant, and we all knew it at the time. I still remember that day.
Do you have any idea what the words aids. And gay mean,??? I guessing no. So much for a true overview of anything if you leave 90% of the people who played a part in
@@eliselianaboyd2547 aids is a RLM meme right
As a Early/Elder Millennial, I grew up in a rural area and did not have access to my own internet connection until I was in my early/mid-20s. I did not buy a smartphone until many years after that too. The height of technology for us were videogames systems (which were all analogue) and VHS tapes...and later DVDs when I was an adult.
My family didn't even get cable/satellite until I was in collage in the early 2000s, so I grew up watching the 6 local channels I could get on the 13" Black & White TV in my room (rabbit-ears and all).... often less if the weather was bad or the station moved their signal around..... which was promptly upgraded to a similarly sized color set around 1998. I spent alot of time outside or connecting with friends in person when FOX KIDS, must-see TV, TGIF Friday and PBS Scientific America wasn't on. I listened to a lot of music (cassettes, and later CDs), and red magazines. That was normal where I lived, and tons of kids had the same upbringing.
I think alot gets lost when we speak about Gen X being the last analogue generation, because people forget that technology and trends moved slower several decades back. Millions and Millions of Elder Millennials grew up hanging out with their Gen X siblings and growing up basically just a disconnected. I had much more in common with my siblings than I do alot of people a few years younger than me who grew up with AOL and internet in a upper-middle-class suburbs somewhere out west.
I truly miss those years too, of my mom teaching me how to use a payphone, read a map, thumb thru the yellow pages, and ask directions when I got my license. Things were really different, and I can't relate to most millennials who where born after me who were part of that "digital" generation - as while my schools did have a few Apple II's and later a couple Windows 95 and 2000 machines in the computer lab (remember those)... those machines where almost always localized and exclusively for Math Blaster or Oregon Trail. Even broadband internet was something the school system struggled to get when I was a senior in High School, and they were the only place around with it. I still remember my first typing class being on a type-writer.
It was just different. I wish more middle & younger millennials would realize that a good chunk of the people born in the early and mid 80s pre-date that 'millennial' trend of ICQ, AOL and cellphones in High School. Mark Zuckerberg is my age, and our upbringings (and exposure to technology) couldn't have been more different - just as I am sure many of you in your 50s can attest that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs might have had a different exposure to technology growing up in silicon valley California than you guys did in the 70s and 80s.
It's one of the reasons I do not like the Xennial term (its too vague), and think Millennials born before 1987 should be recognized as the first modern sub generation (which imo, would be ppl born between 1976 and 1986). I can tell you that having grown into adult hood in the analogue world, I still struggle most days with this imposter syndrome... where I almost feel like none of this is _real._ Like I am going to wake up and people will be dating at bars and clubs, and I won't need a internet connection to pay my bills or watch a show. Every time I go to a restaurant or hospital and they have a QR code or ask me to download a APP, it STILL feels absolutely bizarre and alien.. even after all these years.
And in recent years I have found myself back on the dating market, and having last dated in 2005.... the hardest thing for me to accept is the other person looking at their phone thru 80% of the date, and being socially awkward. I just don't get it - my instinct is to get mad and demand they respect me enough to at-least look at me... but then I quickly realized EVERYONE is like that now. Things are just different, and when I speak about this I find its often people around my own age who relate.
Born in 81, fuck labels, let's tear shit up.🖕🏻
Didn't get a cell till I had a legal ID that could purchase beers..
Didn't get online till I was fifteen, same year I got a CD player, went to a friend's house and chatted it up on AOL in his parents laundry room...
Had a job when I was ten, full time by the time I was twelve.
You probably don't believe that, but it's the fuckin truth...
@@wpridgen4853 Hee, for Gen X cell phones were still generally for the really rich past a lot of our youth. We got pagers eventually, otherwise used our feet or tires to meet people to hang out / drop by houses in *person* even, just to see if anyone's in. Gasp. :)
Personally I've tended to be a late adopter of most tech, whether for money or preference reasons. A lot of the new tech was actually really good and tended to last, but also a lot of it was kind of in awkward transitional phases that I didn't feel the need to keep up with. Cameras, notably, for instance: since I had the skills there was no real need to dive into primitive autofocus or a lot of automation. Didn't start going to CDs till maybe the late 90s, even. :)
Hello! I am a 57 year old who grew up a lot like you. My family didn't even have a TV set half the time until the 1980s so I couldn't even relate to my neighbors who were all watching the same TV shows/movies etc. My family read books and listened to a lot of music. When we did have TV we watched the music shows of the era as a family. Then in 1980 my father divorced my mother and married a younger woman who we moved in with. She was TV obsessed so all of a sudden we had this huge satellite dish and access to TV from all over the world. It was weird. I mainly watched MTV and cartoons and eventually playing a lot of video games when the first consoles came out.. Hanging out with my friends listening to music was the highlight of that time.
Like you pointed out I can't relate to Steve Jobs at all. My town was a Milltown where all the mills had closed so jobs were scarce and so was money if you were my age and didn't come from a wealthy family. I had to drive 45 minutes to work once I got a car at 18. We shopped at thrift stores and never had Nike sneakers but used Doc Martens or some other shoe bought used. Then Nirvana hit the airwaves and I watched thrift store fashion sold at the mall and I realized my childhood was over. I don't know where I'm going with this but I related to your comment.
I find today's phone culture terribly destructive even while I scroll away. We are all being manipulated by the technocrats even while they raise their children without access to the internet because they know how damaging social media and newsmedia is to a developing mind. I too often feel like none of this is real as you described. It is all so bizarre and seeing people I know who used to think critically totally brainwashed by Facebook and becoming fascists all while calling me a sheep for asking them where did their ideas come from so insane. What's going on in the US right now I have watched slowly happen for decades until smartphones and then bam! the propaganda machine hit overdrive with so many people on social media. Anyway thanks for writing your post, I am sure there are millions of others just like you who are growing up without broadband.
Edit: sorry for the disjointed comment, I think I may have a.d.d. or something similar. Your comment was so well written I thought I should note this.
@@tomb613 Thank you for your great and thoughtful reply! I'm glad to see I'm not alone in any of this! 😄
I also couldn't agree anymore on that last paragraph - there is a reason silicon valley and the elites do not allow their children to engage with social media or to own smartphones unrestricted.
Many sociopolitical cogs are turning in the background of today's society, and that grand 'algorithm' seems to be shifting our collective thoughts towards the whims of those whom command it. Rationality in the pubic discourse, I fear, is not part of that great scheme.
Thank you for your story, and your kind complements! ❤
@@wpridgen4853so you're not a millennial and neither is the OP here
The term "Generation X" did not start becoming popularized in 1991. The famous punk rock band that featured Billy Idol as its lead singer was already called Generation X when thier first records were released in 1977. Billy Idol himself took the name from an obscure 1964 book written by Jane Deverson and Charles Hamblett. In 1991, Douglas Coupland was just re-using a popular term that had already been around for years already.
This era was peak animation. Computer animation lost a lot of the artistry that the hand drawn animation had. Liquid Television is an example of a perfect work of art.
Aeon Flux?, The Maxx? Hells yeah!
I do like the amount of footage you use here, instead of just being voice over a single image or something. Having some obscure stuff like clips from some of the Mind's Eye CG shorts is a nice touch too.
GenXer here. You're immensely spot on. A lot of GenXers forgot their roots. It all fell apart when those two towers fell.
My parents are apparently technically Gen x but they’re basically boomers like all their older siblings, and my dad basically never shut Fox News off in the living room once it happened.
I'm what I consider core Gen X, a year younger than Kurt Cobain and the youngest of the Beastie Boys. I read comics and Mad Magazine as a kid, in high school I stopped and only read underground comics, R. Crumb, American Splendor, Paul Mavrides' Anarchy Comics, etc. In college I got back into them with the rise of adult comics like Swamp Thing but after the first year of Sandman I was the stereotypical only Hate and Eightball reader (who also thought Neat Stuff had been better). I think the 90s was a little different for those of us who had been hip in the 80s, if you can forgive that. We had hardcore punk, zines, mail art, Subgenius, Discordianism, science fiction and horror fandoms, graffiti, skateboarding, just numerous cultures that had nothing to do with the mainstream. The whole alternative thing felt bad in a way that it probably shouldn't have, proprietary hipster anger at "selling out" I guess.
It was called that before grunge.
Maybe you just realized that you weren’t actually alternative or counterculture at all and had just bought into a different kind of justification for all of the worst aspects of American “culture”
Hail Eris! :D
@@davidbonar5190 All Hail Discordia! 🍏
"Eventually, everyone realizes they have to grow up and sell out!" - Lenny Bruce
This is incredibly depressing as a millennial, especially seeing footage of the pre-internet freedom i vaguely remember.
Time to read The Giver again
Yep, the tech overlords have done the bait and switch, tantalized us with "the future", only to trap us in a kind of inescapable mental lockdown. 😮
And people overlook the fact that who are/were those tech pioneers? Gen Xers.
Wow. A cartoon analysis channel with cultural references beyond just, well, cartoons. Glad I found you and subbed.
That's the Fairsley Difference
Probably had to ask alot of permissions for these. lol. _SO_ many clips from familiar channels I like.
I did the same, but now we have to wait for Part 2!
Ooh do a Bobby Madness chapter please! He came from New York& became part ofthe East Bay Ca punk scene. Still active, cool stuff
I'm an old Boomer who clicked onto this because I noticed Bagg's distinctive art style in the thumbnail (who I recognized from WEIRDO) and I wasn't disappointed by your dissection of 90s culture. As a child I'd bought a few Spiderman + Fantastic 4 comic books, but I hated the format. They were half pages of weird advertisements ("Hey kids, sell GRIT! America's family-est newspaper!"), and just when the story got going- CONTINUED NEXT ISSUE. I went back to my science fiction paperbacks. The graphic novel format finally gave me whole stories in one book, which was good because I became a DC fan in my 40's, not so much because of any Tim Burton flick, but BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES, I loved the writing, the relative sophistication for a kid's series, and my all time favorite Joker (Luke WHO??) and by the time of the first X MEN movie I was hooked on the superhero genre I'd sneered at as a pretentious Pynchon, Zola and Ferdinand Celine reading teen.
Really looking forward to Part 2...
Gen X culture was also unique for the fact that it rejected so much itself that it was ultimately rejected by the establishment as simply too hard to sell to (after they tried to gaslight us as 'slackers' which we ironically owned/embraced instead) ....where the bigger manipulators then just moved onto the next (and more easily-led/manipulated) generation. Gen X ultimately became the passed-over generation.
The cynicism, irony and absurdity of the time wasn't as nihilistic as you think, where the nihilism was critiqued and made fun of as well. The generations since either haven't property understood or contextualised the irony, sarcasm and absurdity or have instead (and unfortunately) devolved it into dumb supposed 'sass' and sadly embraced nihilism AS their sad life-meaning, like self-identified victimhood......and then useful-idiocy FOR their manipulators/the establishment.
I blame David Foster Wallace for his attack on irony and creating New Sincerity - which the 2010s Great Awokening embraced as an echo of yuppie Boomers neurotic about their “personal brand” and curated social media accounts, which is the total opposite of Gen X authenticity.
Exactly ! But many of Gen X sadly don't understand that either. But those were most likely the Normies.
I agree completely. The Gen X cynicism was often misunderstood and misapplied.
you just had to make us laugh, that's where black marketing came in, imo
Gen X here. You make a lot of really good observations. There's one thing you get really wrong, though, about our ironic love of "insincere" retro aesthetics, and you cite the 50s. Well, no. You're a decade off. What you speak of is a SINCERE love of aspects of 60s aesthetics, and it's rooted in familiarity and comfort. These things were (still) around when we were little and felt protected, and didn't die out completely until the early 80s. Stuff like hearing "Mr. Lucky" in a grocery store, or variety shows being on TV. We know that a lot of that stuff is tacky, we just don't care because it feels good.
I get the sense that you think that when they packaged us up to sell back to ourselves, we actually bought it. Sure, a few did. Most of us did for a minute, but by and large our generational moment of self-awareness and definition didn't last long. I mean, it's not like it was something we could unsee, but we lost interest in it pretty quick, having spent our lives being bored to death by our parents boasting about how cool their generation was and realizing what a waste of time and energy it was to emulate their generational ego tripping. We really only stick our heads up and speak to it when some younger person takes a shot at us as a generation for something we didn't even do, then we'll collectively tell 'em where to stick it and go back to listening to Glenn Campbell on AM radio.
ALL OF THIS (fellow Gen-Xer here, from proabably nearly the other side of the world)
Yeah, the 80's was that. 90's was a decade of cynicism because we saw how hypocritical it was having our "Boomer" parents order us around after their own Counter-Culture youth tore down the hard work their parents made during the 30s and 40s.
Thanks for sharing this
@@MaggieKeizai the 50's ascetic in the 90's has always interested me. I was at the tail end of gen-x and I remember a lot of the kids a couple grades ahead of me being really into turner classic movies and crime noir.
"gen x here" man the american is so devoid of any actual real identity that they'll gladly identity with such made up terms & artificial identities like "generations". the generational concept is mostly a product & construct of media & media consumption and nothing else.
I dig the Kayfabe style thumbnails, RIP Ed.
I'm not trying to rip them off or anything, but Cooper is just such a good font. Cartoony, but legible.
RIP Ed. You were murdered by terrible people, and you only made life more enjoyable for fans of comics like myself.
I absolutely loved growing up gen x even though I didn't know what it was at the time. I think it's a quiet generation that is just fine with being generally overlooked. There are so many times where I hear a discussion on generations and it jumps straight from boomers to millennials and I'm glad to be a part of neither of those narcissistic groups
Gen X is lucky. I dislike being a later millennial because of the narcissism label. Yeah being born in the early 90s pretty much spoiled me to lots of stuff people before me didn’t have at a pretty young age so that narcissism kinda comes in. You’re lucky to be left alone and overlooked. Now everyone is moving on to dogging on Gen Z.
@@oldradiosnphonographs The narcissism label is accurate though. Even Gen Z noticed that about Gen Y since it's often Gen Y cancelling Gen Z's on the internet. I'm an early millennial from the early 80s. My gen is always grouped up with Gen X. While early 80s Gen Y do have plenty of overlap with Gen X, I think we're just a lost gen with no core identity between X & Y. Ryan Gosling is from 1980 but he's quintessential Gen Y. He's a bland corporate product that many 1990s millennials relate with due to his social isolation roles in Drive & Blade Runner 2049. Notice how he doesn't get the girl in those roles. He basically sacrifices himself to give himself purpose. That's what I noticed about late 1980s & 1990s Millennials, a nihilistic hopelessness where they view themselves as doomed.
I'm from 1983 so I have a far more optimistic outlook similar to that of Karate kid. or Return of the Jedi. It's a naïve outlook though, in real life you really can't reform the Darth Vaders of the world lol.
@@HereticHydra I also wonder if getting the internet in our single digits as apposed to being a teenager or older fueled our Narcissistic attitude too?
@@oldradiosnphonographs 100%, imo
@@oldradiosnphonographsthe internet is narcissistic, and was almost entirely populated by millennials from the beginning of it’s popularity, they’re just the first generation that was given a mechanism with which to push their narcissism into everyone’s face
This also corresponds with the collection and sale of everyone’s information to advertisers in order to kill actual businesses, so there’s a argument to be made that the narcissism was always the point of social media, because they wouldn’t make any money otherwise.
This is the kind of art/comics/cartooning/ and surrounding cultural discussion/analysis that would make our boys like Eddie P. proud, killer video bro, you’re actually already a pro at this lol
Thank you, Comics Kayfabe is a big influence for me just in terms of their enthusiasm. Eddie Pissgore, RIP, does get a shoutout in the next part of this series.
After what the vultures pushed Ed into doing I thought Ya Boi Zack would be the only good channel anywhere near this scene but you’re really stepping up to the plate 👍
@@cartoonaesthetics Ed will be missed. His art and love of the gratuitous aspects of 70s and 80s horror will be sorely missed too, as he leaves a giant black hole in the scene with his demise. I know this sounds terrible, but: would the people who drove him to what he did, should find a similar fate, I would finally believe karma is real. Justice is rarely served in life, but if any deserved it - it would be those who robbed the world of such compassion, love and talent.
Instant sub. I was 15 in 1990, and Peter Bagge's HATE (along with other indie comics like Chester Brown's Yummy Fur, Joe Matt's Peep Show, and Daniel Clowes' Eightball) was such a revelation compared to the other superhero stuff that was available at the time. I've since rebought them all in collected books, plus virtually everything else he's put out over the years (of variable quality, admittedly) and am now eagerly awaiting delivery of HATE Revisited #1, which finally shipped today in the UK. Looking forward to the next two parts of this excellent series.
Glad you enjoyed it. I would like to do videos about Dan Clowes comics in the future, there's so much to talk about!
i loved the buddy series growing up... much love to my local library for having these in stock when i was young
Early millennial. I see that early-90's period as a kind of turbocharged 80's, where a lot of the aesthetic trends reached their "final form" (and in subsequent decades, were concentrated into the synthwave aesthetic) - the movies became more intentionally over-the-top, "alternative" came into prominence on radio along with some breakthrough hip-hop and dance records, but the shock humor and hype for digital graphics on everything hadn't quite come into play - the comics I was reading as a kid were still being made without any digital production. Nationally, crime rates peaked in 1991 and started their long downtrend, if I remember correctly, which also marked the decline of stories built around street gangs and urban decay. There was a wave of pop environmentalism - Captain Planet and similar kinds of pollution-fighting characters and school posters that proclaimed "Reduce, reuse, recycle; there's never enough water to waste" and other PSA slogans. There were still after-school specials in those years, although cable TV was definitely sucking the air out of the room by then. Pro wrestling was still aiming to be "wholesome Real American" rather than "Attitude". All of that stuff shifted in a big way around 1994 and it was utterly jarring to me, at 8 years old.
A decent chunk of Gen X were Reagan-Bush entrepreneurs - a lot of the people who ended up being tech industry billionaires found their footing around this period or a little bit later as the dot-com boom took shape. Tim Sweeney stands out to me as a guy who, now that he's at the top, yearns romantically for a libertarian America that provides the exact kinds of opportunities that he got in the early 90's, so he's deployed his money accordingly, without much attention to how the actual conditions have changed.
@@user-zx5gg8od6l I'm also from the early 1980s & what he said is accurate. 1990-1995 really was just a cultural extension of the late 1980s. He brought up wrestling which noticeably became darker around 1998 to appeal to the Gen X crowd. Culture didn't finally transition towards a more Gen X outlook until 1997/1998 - 2012. 2002 - 2012 were what I'd consider the early 80s Gen Y culture which was still shaped by Gen X irreverent & edgy aesthetics. Sam Hyde is basically early 1980s Millennials personified. Edgy as all hell.
@HereticHydra '85 here, I made the exact same reference to Sam Hyde.
WOAh!
Hey, while I'm here, did you experience the phenomenon of incessant armpit farting in the earliest part of the 90s? I remember one kid was a king of that maneuver, only he'd take it to the next level and fall flat on his back and while rocking back n forth would blast off multiples using both his leg pits. Quite amusing witnessing that happening randomly mid-conversation.
@@HereticHydra To a Millenial. A Generation X person will not see Sam Hyde as anything edgy.
The 90's were just a sloppy repeat of the 80's
Early millennial here. I feel like I share a lot in common with Gen Xers since I got to experience a lot of the culture of their teenage and young adult years as a child. I feel sort of blessed that I got to experience a more analog childhood. I remember hearing the term "Generation Y" when I first attended college, but "millennial" would eventually become the preferred term as I entered my 20's.
I look forward to the next part of this, hopefully you can talk about internet culture in the early days of its mass adoption. Webcomics, blogs, forums, instant messaging were all things I experienced as I was leaving my childhood and discovering who I was as a person and developing my tastes. For Gen Xers, they were young adults. They were real pioneers of internet culture and I think since dawn of web 2.0, old forum culture is more discussed by people my age rather than them, the people who were there before us who set all these things up.
Well, the next couple parts are really going to be about Hate mostly - talking about Gen X was just necessary preamble, but I had some other stuff on my mind about that I wanted to share, too.
@@cartoonaesthetics Completely fair and understandable, looking forward to it.
@@cartoonaesthetics I bet you get a lot of things wrong
😁
@@nacflghs-n7wwhat a weird thing to say
@@HiDefHDMusic Not weird. A lot of people get LOADS about Our Cultures wrong.
the youtube algorithm has blessed the fuck out of us with this one. ive been thinking about these ideas a lot recently because every decade, the decade from 30 years ago gets glorified. the 80s loved the 50s, the 90s loved the 60s, the 2000s loved the 70s, the 2010s loved the 80s. it was obvious that up next was the 90s. you hit the zeitgeist and im glad i clicked on this. this is amazing dude. youve got a great voice, writing style, and quality. keep it up.
Thank you very much I'm glad you enjoyed it
It’s closer to 20 years. 70s was the 50s, 80s was the 60s, etc..
The 2000s Electroclash / Bloghouse was in love with the 1980s. The 2010s Great Awokening was more like a turbocharged version of “political correctness” from the 1990s.
it's almost halfway through the 2020s and we're just rehashing the 90s/00s from 2 decades ago...so what happens 2 decades from now when we go back to the 2020s and there's nothing there because everyone was trying to relive the 90s/00s? we've reached the point of media culture folding in on itself, particularly in a "post-modern" world i.e. everything has been said & done already...yet there's people still trying to reinvent the wheels that keep that media culture going.
@@i-never-look-at-replies-lol "We're through the looking glass here people" - the gen x classic film JFK (1991)
Great video, I'm eagerly awaiting the next part!
Sir, stumbling upon videos like this are such a joy. Damn I really love TH-cam sometimes! Your words are packed full of insight and I learned so much. Keep making videos, this format is absolutely perfect IMO, you have a brilliant critical eye and it’s making me want to do more of a deep dive on some of these comics. Godspeed.
Thank you!
this is so well-written it's insane. You've been able to put in few words what I've needed entire paragraphs to even graze, while you hit it right on the nose. Well done.
Thank you, I was trained on Twitter
A step up from the last video. this is a real interesting topic I know nothing about, so I'm learning a lot here. Can't wait for what's next in the series!
A step up from talking on a cheap mic over a single screenshot? Yeah I would hope so!
I think one thing a lot of analysis doesn't seem to get is how very many of us *did* know what we had, and probably gradually grew more angry, dissiilusioned, and/or cynical as more and more was *taken away* sometimes right to our faces, and as we realized that with the economic, err, changes of the Reagan/Bush era, there was suddenly college debt or inabiity to even *get* loans for college, which was still seemingly pretty mandatory to even work in the proverbial mail room so many places, while meanwhile older generations were living longer and healthier and way outnumbering us, so there wasn't a lot of room to get *in,* cause people weren't moving up or retriring.
That also meant a lot of the companies and certainly political parties just weren't as progressive as we'd have wanted, and you had to be squeaky clean and boring just to get in a lot of places, and who wanted to do *that* besides the Young Republicans.
Consequently a lot of us *did* work more social and cultural angles, and if we were lucky, could get by at them. And even there , there was a real difference in prospects and having been able to get started depending on where you were and if you were born, say, before or after 1970, give or take.
Thanks for adding additional context. Obviously, not being an actual X-er, my analysis is incomplete.
@@cartoonaesthetics I 100% appreciate your thoughtful social analysis of those times. You’re doing high-quality, sensitive, ethnography here. What you’ve posted doesn’t make me feel like a “study subject.” Instead, I feel like you’ve put yourself in my shoes.
Yeah, the video missed what was probably the single most important defining factor of GenX culture, the fact that we were the first generation to not do better than our parents, financially. There were fewer opportunities for us, yet we were constantly being told that material success was the most important goal in life; the "Greed is Good" decade. We saw how the Boomers went from spiritualist hippies to materialist yuppies. We saw public services that our parents and grandparents took for granted being privatized or outright eliminated under Reaganomics.
On top of that, we experienced the crack epidemic, and the AIDS epidemic, and the "Satanic Panic"; and our government's dismal response to each. We saw the rise of the New Puritanism under Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell, and the ascendance of the Religious Right and the televangelist phenomenon. We saw the push for more and more censorship of the arts, represented by politicians like Sen. Jesse Helms and organizations like the PMRC. Most of us were born just before or shortly after Watergate, when trust in the government dropped to an all-time low; and watched conspiracy theories become a major cultural phenomenon. We were the first generation raised entirely on television as our primary cultural educator, with the extreme brutality of the War on Drugs constantly shoved in our faces.
It's no wonder we became more cynical and ironic and edgy. Trying to dismiss that as just the result of self-awareness and marketing really fails to understand the huge social and political pressures that Generation X experienced during its formative years.
Except that Gen X ers are one of the most conservative generations of any still alive by polls.Those who are conservatives are just as cynical and independent as the liberal portions. Therefore politics and economics are at best only a partial explanation.
I'm more of a golden age comics fan, but the darker and grittier comics of the 80s and 90s were enjoyable. It's good to have a violent antihero protagonist rather than another overgrown boyscout in spandex
When it's done well, it's like a big piece of chocolate cake for your inner adolescent
I can’t imagine the amount of work you put into collecting all that footage. Excellent video!
As a cartoonist myself I enjoy seeing every element that influences a creator and I can’t wait to see the rest!
I don't mean to imply that any of the early Gen-X stuff in this vid influenced Bagge per se - his formative years were in the 70s & 80s. By the time the late-80s-unto-90s were happening, he was coming into his own.
I was pretty stoked to watch part 2. Now I am looking forward to it. Remember when television, was like, "liquid" television?
I plan to have part 2 up this Friday, stay tuned!
I'm such a Marvel fan (ahem, let me rephrase that, I WAS such a Marvel fan in the early 1990s) that I often forget just how many GREAT comics that Vertigo was putting out. They were SO good, in fact, that I often forget (or more likely, block in my mind) that Vertigo was a branch of DC. It doesn't seem possible, honestly, but it's true. That was DC comics. What a trip. 😮
In a way Marvel tried to do their own version of Vertigo years later with "Marvel Max" but they could have helped the industry a lot if they'd just done that sooner.
Gen-X'er here. This is fantastic. I've subbed and I'm really looking forward to the next two parts. Even when the internet started to become a thing, we used it more as a way to arrange getting together in RL.
@@french.toastman thanks, glad you’re enjoying it
As a cusper between X and mil surrounded by mostly X'ers this is really helping me understand the people who were around in my childhood and teens to compartmentalize and process those experiences. Thank-you. Your channel might not have the most subscribers but these days anything over 10K subs is very rarely worth watching. You're the stuff I refresh the front page hoping to see, filtering and sifting through it all and I'm so glad to have found you.
That's very kind, thank you. I'll try to keep things interesting.
On a side note, i always hated the idea of "rebelness" as a value in on of itself and not something that is completly dependent on the cirmcunstances of wheather or not it makes sence to oppose, support, or just be indiferent of "the stablisnmet", the general culture, or just "the current thing" on any given situation.
@@maeianomarengo4316 definitely
It was a dream having MAD magazine all along the way on our journeys... seeing it poke fun at us and satirize culture as a whole. You can still support them by subscribing. $20 bucks. CHEAP.
That’s NOT cheap by any means, inflation bro. 20$ will buy me a carton of eggs instead
Grunge happened because we were the first generation to realize we wouldn't be nearly as well off as our parents, and we had the balls to express our disdain through music. We were the latch key kids who were left largely to our own devices because the 80s media was busy selling out the nuclear family to rampant consumerism. They told our parents that greed was good. Because Ronald Fuckin' Reagan said so. It was a dark and depressing, but also a great time to be a teen-ager.
Fuckin' STOKED for part 2 & 3. Nice work bro, it's gonna be a treat to watch this channel grow!
Instant fan, great video! Got my notifications for part 2!
@@WhiteEnough this Friday!
Been following your twitter account for years now and you've always put out tons of fantastic anecdotes, great to see you make a larger scale video like this with a bigger connecting throughline, I'm looking forward to the next two parts!
Thanks. Fact of the matter is, if you want to pontificate, more people will watch & listen to a yt vid than will read a long twitter thread
There was a much larger cultural disparity between rural and urban life up through the 70s and 80s. The country boys from the 70s and 80s are the GenX that GenX is afraid to talk about. You also have to remember that an "analog life" included corporal punishment in schools for many of us. I learned to take a beating and not cry in grade school.
That's a good point about rural & urban life being more divided. & I'm sorry they beat you in school, no child deserves that.
That was the fastest sub I've made. Excellent video essay. Can't wait to see what you put out next.
This led me to a truly introspective nostalgia trip. Thank you.
np
Can't wait for the rest of this!
As one who was there, I think this is an exceptionally accurate and insightful analysis. Liked & subbed.
Thanks! It's not going to be All-Gen-X all the time, but there's lots of other great comics & animation from the 80s & 90s that I'd like to talk about in the future.
“Generation whose mental development was pre-digital “ isn’t really accurate. We grew up with computers and experienced the early internet and its transformation of our social world during our 20’s. I was not fully formed as an adult when the internet became standard life. I remember before, during and after. That is what is unique about Gen X
That's true, it would probably have been more accurate to say "pre-Internet" than "pre-digital," and maybe even then that would have applied only to the earliest Xers.
looking forward to it
Finally deep dive on alt comix
(Millennial here)
Awesome work,. Nice video all around.
🔥🔥👏👏🔥🔥
Love the underground comics
The first one I ever saw/read was my dad's copy of
"Big Ass Comics" with stuff from several artists..
@@eaglebladedolphinbrother4611 a crumb classic. Git on it!
I grew up on Crumb and Bagge. I was hoping this video was more of a deeper dive into COMIX of the era. Stickboy, Yummy Fur, all the works of Dan Clowes. So many great artists of the time. Also the attempts of marvel and DC to break into the more adult genre of comics and graphic novels. Epic comics Dark Horse. Ect. Maybe you can do a follow up. I could go on and on about all of this. I’m sure I’ll regret forgetting to mention a few. Or yeah! also Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children was great.
I tend to really get going on whatever subject I'm addressing, so all the preamble of this part of the series was in service of eventually talking about Hate & Peter Bagge. Dan Clowes, Dark Horse, those are giant topics! I'll definitely be talking about them in the future.
Wonderful video!!! The nuances of a decades culture tends to get lost and flanderized the more time passes and the more people who weren't there come of age. Fascinating stuff. (zoomer review)
Wow, brilliant work. Subscribed, really looking forward to pt ii. Huge Twin Peaks fan 😎
@@Penguin806 thanks!
I first found "Hate" in a trade paperback at my high school library, of all places. I was an immediate fan. It turned me on to Peter Bagge's work, as well as other creators that inspired Bagge like Crumb.
My school library had "The Bradleys" collection, crazily enough. I found it after reading all of "Hate" & I didn't even know about "Neat Stuff" yet!
First year millennial here, my whole life I was told my generation was gonna change the world, class of 2000, and even as a kid i knew nothing was going to change. But at that time people thought there was gonna be some kind of Renaissance in the year 2000 that never came. I do miss that feeling of the unknown of the future it's lost now.
Take good care of your kid - that's the unknown future
@@cartoonaesthetics True and try not to mess them up as much as our parents did 😂 Most of us have one thing in common Gen X, Early Gen Z...... Divorce, blaming the other parent
Please please make more videos! The amount of knowledge, the library of footage, your editing style and a voice over that's actually NOT annoying makes for such a great watch.
Man, I can’t wait to have a culture
Half of the people you’re showing are either Gen Jones or straight up Boomers.
It’s also more likely that a Gen Xer was raised by someone from the silent generation.
Thanks for this...I guess you'd call the movies: "Singles", "Clerks", "Slacker", and "Gas, Food, Lodging" to be that self-awareness point. I remember being disturbed a bit when Singles came out. Didn't know at the time of course, but that was Capitalist Realism (Mark Fisher book) packaging us up into a product to sell back to us (Fight Club reference).
I think "Slacker" is the real deal - & that film actually helped popularize the term as synonymous to "Generation X." "Clerks" has an authenticity to it as well, also being a true independent work made outside of Hollywood. "Singles" was DEFINITELY the glitzy, Hollywood version of "Gen-X" though. I used some clips from it in Part 2 of this series, which premieres tomorrow.
@@cartoonaesthetics Slacker is a special one for me (along with Office Space), as I grew up in Austin during that exact time period.
Ahh Generation X was a punk band the only thing that author did was use their name and labeled to whole generation with it.
Can't believe I got an issue of Peter Bagge's Hate in the mid 90's or something, here in Costa Rica, CA. As soon as I saw it I knew it was special. I was knee deep into comics back then, mostly old Metal Hurlant from Spain and British 2000 AD from the 80s which became an integral part of my life. I still have them 30 years later. I used to read Mad and Cracked magazines back then. Awesome times...
That is awesome. Magazines were such gateways to other worlds back then
I was born in 1980, very young for a Gen-Xer, but I still identify most with that generation since I matured way faster than most kids. I definitely would not call myself an "elder millennial" since I was afforded way more benefits to being part of the booming economy of my generation. I was out of the house by age 18 and living on my own in 1999. I would definitely say that 1990 was the big turning point, not just for the big round number that came up, but because it really did feel like everything was changing, and I was so there for it at just 9-10 years old.
This is great. I really enjoyed your work
You've got some work to do selling Gen X as optimistic. It was a good time, because there seemed to be some barriers that were coming down that went way beyond Berlin, and the petty repressions of the 80's were obviously becoming unsustainable. But that doesn't mean younger people were happy. There was still a lot of loathing for the religious and the corporate, a dread of adult responsibility, skepticism regarding other people's intentions, and a need for escape through whatever substance you could get your hands on. If any attitude dominated, it was the sense that we needed to have as much fun as possible before the window closed on us.
Still, good video, I'll be watching for the next one.
At the time, being a Gen-X kid, I thought we were totally doomed and useless, lol. We didn't turn out that bad and got our shit together.
The 1990s was the "Ugly Decade." Generation X and the 1990s embraced all things ugly, taboo, rough, raw, raunchy and ridiculous. Think, "Joe's Apartment." We replaced "Dynasty" with "Melrose Place." We replaced Neiman Marcus with thrift store shopping. We replaced highbrow with lowbrow. Beauty was out. Ugly was in.
For a lot of it, yeah. This is what Paul Skallas calls "The Vulgar Wave"
As a late Gen Xer, this is an outstanding summation of the 1990s. Looking forward to the other parts!
Cynical originally, as we realised pretty quickly we'd never have political power due to our boomer parents, but more recently happy about that once we realised that means we won't be blamed for the state of things now.
I honestly think im the luckiest generation to have lived in history so far, and probably for a long time to come.
Fantastic video. I recognise some of the Fantagraphics clips from an old Channel 4 TV show called Made In The USA hosted by Laurie Pike. Have never been able to find the show online. Excellent work digging up the footage. Can't wait for parts 2 and 3.
That whole segment is on TH-cam, it's where I found it
I lived through it and you did a great job at summing up the era. Hate was THE Gen-X comic and I got every issue (from GOSH or Forbidden Planet in London) when released. Hate and Eightball were epic.
Glad to hear you say that because as an old millennial it's somewhat conjecture for me to talk about gen x, I'm glad I was somewhat accurate.
Just discovered your channel. Great video and looking for more! (it's me Ramiro)
Nirvana (and Gen X) wasn't as self-loathing and as nihilistic as you think .....listen to the lyrics (and just feel the sound!) they're also really funny, sarcastic and genuinely self-depreciating.......which unfortunately gets lost when exploring it later, especially after Kurt shotgunned himself (which is what heroin, Courtney Love and the rest sadly resulted in).....then you have films like Singles and Reality Bites which were just lame and as bad an 'approximation' back then as they are today.
Genuine self-depreciation (and sarcasm/irony) has unfortunately been far harder for the narcissistically over-'encouraged' generations since to properly contextualise or properly appreciate .....outside of using it as a tool to shamelessly look for algorithmic (and overly-conformist encouraged) 'likes'/'upvotes' (and supposed but REALLY lame 'sass') unfortunately.
Gen X parents likely made a mistake putting their kids in front of something like The Simpsons and just assuming that they too would 'get it'......where the kids nowadays are unfortunately far more likely to just see the social-criticism in it as simply 'mean' (or just ignore/not-understand it) after growing up in far more conformity-encouraged/manipulated times where ANY 'criticism' (even 'critical' thinking) is now sadly seen as 'mean' (....and like racism [sigh]).....where they're ironically and sadly more likely to gravitate towards the lame/easy, cheap (and dehumanised) nastiness of something like Family Guy instead.....or all the other narcissistic and nihilistic supposed 'sass' now over-offered to them.
That's a good point about Xer parents, whom I'm not particularly enamored of
We saw the 80’s and 90’s and the transition from the organic to the digital age.
We are old school, but know technology as well. We are the perfect generation.
lol & so modest too
This feels like a Madseasonshow video
I'm not familiar with him but watching a few seconds of one of his videos, yeah, I see the resemblance lol
I was born in 1988, so I was sort of a early to mid millennial. And I remember having that sort of experience of a analogue existence blended with a bit of digital existence. My older Sister was a earlier millennial and my younger brother was born two years after me but I was raised by Baby Boomer parents. I sort of had my formative early childhood in that sort of cultural cusp of the late 1980's to the early 1990's so I experienced that formative Gen X influence from things like Twin Peaks, Beavis and Butthead and The Simpsons. And I suppose experiencing that cultural "transition" period from the late 1980's to the early 1990's sort of explains why I like Vaporwave and Synthwave so much. Not to mention I moved up to the Seattle area right after my little brother was born because of my Dad's job being moved there.
I "grew up" in New Zealand in the 90s and it was glorious and we were super optimistic. Even the UK in the latter quarter was great fun.
The homophobia and racism was rife though.
People always say that pre-internet society was more 'in touch' with each other and maybe that's true for extroverts and people who fit in socially, but for social outcasts (take your pick which flavor of outcast), we were horribly isolated. For example, when a high schooler in my district took his own life on the steps of the school, I overheard the teachers saying , 'This is God's way of weeding out the weak ones." That was the attitude towards LGBT, mentally ill, neurodivergent, and basically anyone who was a "minority".
That's a good point. On the other hand, before the Internet, there was more incentive for social outcasts to socialize with each other irl, rather than on their computer screens
But those also had Cultures. And Met. In Flesh. Outside.
definition kills the vitality. what a great observation!
As an early member of Gen z I look at all this with a sense of awe and jealousy seeing a close knit culture and at the line of the changing eras, Anyhow great job with the video, I’ve been following you on Twitter for a while and this video reminds me of your old threads, keep up the good work.
Thanks!
I hope somewhere in the beginning the creator mentions all the recessions Gen X went thru 2000, 2008. My resume had like 4 companies in one year in that time period
@@IndieGuvenc be sure to watch the entire vid to find out (& don’t skip the ads)
I actually miss the humor of the 80s and 90s. It's true that people talking more can solve a lot of silly issues, but it was fun to not take life so seriously. Making light of things make it possible to live. On the flip side I believe that in modern times people have a false notion that they can solve everything through dialogue because they have fixed a few things like making the workplace more friendly and diverse. In reality there is still a lot of bias. There is also a false preconception that generations are making a better, strong, country, and a fixing real issues like global warming that are generally out of our control due to their vast scale. I think things are pushed on everyone in countries and their local tribal groups. Most of it is for money and control reasons. It's often enforced by younger generations which are easily influenced. It's sold by people in power who want to control everything to their advantage. Whether it's women who want more power/control, colored people who want more power/control, gay/trans people who want more power control, it's easy to entice people and bring them into the fold. This gives the people of the same denomination in power more power because there are more people that support them and their ideas.
2.10 what did the phrase Generation X mean before that? I mean Billy Idols first band was called Generation X back in 1977.
There was a book from 1964 called Generation X, which was a study of mid-60's popular culture in the UK.
Apparently, Billy's mother had a copy and when Tony James saw it, he suggested they use it.
this was actually pretty cool, can't wait to see the next parts
"Obey your thirst"
-Sprite
I considered using one of those Sprite ads for this. "Image is nothing"
We knew exactly what we had....and we see everything that has been lost....
I was there for the videogames, some music, cartoons and comic books - and, ofc AOL. My modem still goes brrrrrrrrtttttttbrrrttt.
A real generational marker, knowing the sound of a dial-up modem. No mom you can't use the phone I'm online right now!!
Great first part, look forward to future parts
Totally dig this video. It said more about the culture beyond books and cartoons. Didn’t really know what to expect from this video but I couldn’t stop watching. It was sprinkled with clips that I fondly remember growing up in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Very good stuff can’t wait for the next chapter. Instantly subscribed
Glad you were into it, thanks for the sub
Having lived it it was more tragic than beautiful and for sure we don't know what we had
Hey, long time Twitter follower here, so cool to see you making videos. I'll have to check out HATE and Neat Stuff sometime this century.
You've got a lot to look forward to - if you want to stick to the Hate-verse, the "Bradleys" stories from Neat Stuff have been collected separately & you could start there. But Neat Stuff is still really good overall
If David Lynch was one year older, he would be too old to even be called a Boomer. Yet, you claim his show Twin Peaks is the zenith of Gen X culture. You are just referencing 90s culture, not specifically “Gen X” culture in most of this video.
Good stuff man I too was a small child at the height of this era. Hope you blow up and make more interesting stuff.
Thanks man
This was awesome, defiantly caught the vibes without hitting the same old same ole tentpoles.
Your right, we didn't know wha we had. We do now.
This is my favorite episode of The Wonder Years.
lol
I think this is an enlightening analysis for me, as the youngest of millennials who never touched that era at all, but that it is too “unselfconscious” of how much *Nostalgia* plays a role in biasing it.
Being solidly a member of generation X myself, i’m off a lot of who and what we were in the 1980s was marked by a deliberate rejection of boomer stuff. We did not like all that hippie shit, we did not like disco, we did not like self important music, and truth be told most of our boomer parents were self absorbed and not great parents. I mean, there are obviously were an awful lot that were, but something like third of us grew up in broken homes, and without a lot of the social conventions that would have helped compensate for that.
So punk was an expression of that, but mostly it was new wave. Music that really was not very challenging, but which boomers just absolutely hated. But there is also sense of incredible optimism because of computers becoming increasingly available and a ton of good movies and jobs were pretty easy to find. I mean, you could put yourself through college with a good full-time job at a grocery store. So on the one hand, there was a deliberate reaction of what had come before, and on the other hand, there was a great deal of excitement about what was to come. And “poser” is already being used as an insult.
And then in the early 1990s, the sense of optimism just kind of disappeared. I’m not sure why. I think some of that was almost all of us were out on our own now and well the stuff we had rejected was pretty clear, the stuff that we chose to accept was not. Which left us with the fear that comes from a wide-open future realization that your parents are not gonna be paying your bills anymore.
You have this period from about 1978 to about 1983 where record labels had no idea what would sell and so they just shoved everything out there, and then from 1983 to about 1987 was very commercial, but then in the last part of the 80s Literally anything goes musically. You weirdo acts like they might be Giants and more serious metal acts like guns and roses. And you had indie comics everywhere and it was a really very exciting time. Then once grunge hit around 1992 it all began to feel like it was being rained in. That experimentation had given away to a new formula.
Personally, as a new wave kid, I always rejected grunge. It wasn’t that the music was bad, it just felt commercial to me. Like a safe well scrubbed version of punk being used as a marketing tool for corduroy pants and flannel shirts. Bleah. I mean I was sick of the music. I grew up on, but I didn’t have a lot of love for the new music, and it is hard to rebel when rebellion is being mass marketed. I am rambling. Never mind. Forget it to take up your time.
This ' we ' doesn't work. There was a wide variety of Gen X. And New Wave came up with Boomers Hello???????. Grunge was also around before it was mass marketed and the Normies got hold of it.
Interesting video and, an interesting topic. I bartended through the late 80s and then all of the 90s, didn't really pay attention to much of what's being discussed here, but I did witness a lot of it.
Ya know, Gen Ten is sadly the generation that seems hell bent on introducing a dictator to the nation. I don't where so many of us went wrong, but damn, they lost their way big time.
Great video. I look forward to your future work 🧐
Thanks
Loving it so far & looking forward to seeing where this goes.
The 80s were not just blah Geo. H.W. Bush conservatism. There was also punk, a lot of crazy music including a lot of really neat synth work, The Talking Heads and other bands, micro computers going from toys to tools, hacking, all kinds of neat stuff.
@@alexcarter8807 love talking heads
FINALLY! Someone that agrees with me that the whiny attitude of 90's youth was a bunch of bullshit!
I think Gen X were victims of media hype - they were both derided & exploited & it fostered generational narcissism. But like I say in the vid, most of my favorite culture growing up was made by Xers
@@cartoonaesthetics '' & it fostered generational narcissism ''
As opposed to now ?
@@nacflghs-n7w It's worse, now... because now we have instant gratification in terms of vanity on a global scale. Why else would Tik-Tok and Intsagram exist? For "educational purposes"... like Facebook did at first? Or "artistic self-expression" like TH-cam truly once did? Please...!😒
@@cartoonaesthetics I hated most culture of the 90's. And if it weren't for the tech it saw developed & made available during it--including the recovery of automotive performance and styling (The post-malaise/new musclecar era)--I would've probably closed my bedroom door, turned-off my TV and stereo, and waited for the year 2000 to come... like I had been doing since I first saw a truly futuristic concept car: The GM Aero 2000--which became the styling basis of the Saturn SC. That, and waited to see the 70's become retro-cool... like the 50's & 60's did during the 70's & 80's, respectively... like I knew they would during the 90's.
Pahlaniuk is pronounced "PAHL-a-nick". NOT "Puh-LAH-nee-uck".
Gen X still cares about pronunciation, grammar, spelling, and language generally.
@@No-One-of-Consequence thank you for your service
@@cartoonaesthetics You're welcome. (Don't get me wrong. I still subscribed.)
@@No-One-of-Consequence I really do care about such details. But turns out I’ve been mispronouncing his name for decades apparently
@@cartoonaesthetics It doesn't make you a bad person. And Chuck was really cool about it when I got it wrong. (He called me after this awful thing happened. He had sent me this amazing care package full of Chuck swag, and I told my wife he was on the phone, and got his name wrong. He walked me through it, and I promised I would never get it wrong again. My last name rhymes with some stuff that my elementary school classmates took full advantage of, so I have always tried to be sensitive about these things and I was terribly embarrassed that I got the name of one of my literary heroes not just wrong, but wrong to his face.
But he was great about it. And the man is more than just a writer. He's a mentor to writers, and a good and decent man.
You are doing good work. Keep doing it!
@@No-One-of-Consequence thanks man
great pacing on this, when you land on Hate the stage was set just right to frame me back to the time and place
Thanks. I actually hadn't intended this as a multi-part series, but when the script recording wound up an hour long, I realized I'd have to cut it into 3 twenty minute segments. And fortunately there were logical stopping places at 20 minute intervals.
@@cartoonaesthetics It was fantastic, it made me nostalgic, but did not feel like nostalgia content.
@@revjakenash1 Thanks again, that was the intent. I don't really like nostalgia-baiting, but generational differences fascinate me, and that was something Hate got me thinking about when making this video.