hold my beer I know a kid. Dennis. Dennis was in my CNC class; he wasn't old enough to drink and he supplemented his family's income by working at a kennel. Dennis was the first person I saw display true, vehement rage at Millennials - he hated our instructor but he hated him as an entire class of people. Dennis was the first person I heard say "no one gives a shit if you're a ravenclaw or a hufflepuff, ass." I of course know a bunch of older GenX and their hatred of Millennials is something, but they got nuthin' on Dennis. You know what I hate? Strauss-Howe Generational Theory. I hate it for the same reason I hate homeopathy: It has a gloss of sensibility but it's nonsense deep down inside, I know it's nonsense, and yet Bach flower essences calm me down. I see the voodoo for what it is and yet I am a zombie. Strauss-Howe Generational Theory is where we get "millennials" from. They coined a name for GenX, too ("thirteeners") but since it was stupid, dismissive and demonstrated the archetypal 'boomer hatred for GenX, GenX adopted Douglas Coupland. "Millennials" stuck because the generation itself was still eating play-doh while their parents were busy hating on the slackers that were about to invent the Internet. So okay. Thumbnail sketch of Strauss-Howe Generational Theory is that sociologically? What matters is who you grow up with, and who your parents are. Your life experience is dictated by what you were allowed to do as kids and who you were allowed to do it with. Chinese Zodiac ain't much different, it's just more granular. Latin Zodiac is a totally different thing. The Romans? The Romans believed in Strauss-Howe Generational Theory. That's who Strauss and Howe cribbed it from. It's a philosophy of empire, through and through, a patrician, moneyed and elitist explanation of the Decline and Fall. Romans called 'em saeculums because the Romans never thought of anything original, they were a borrowing culture, and they borrowed saeculums from the Etruscans. Etruscans thought a saeculum was a human lifetime, thought their culture had ten of 'em, and lasted roughly 850 years. Strauss and Howe took it one better and went "you're a kid, you're a parent, you're a grandparent, you're dead" for a human lifetime and decided that any given lifetime, excuse me saeculum was divisible into four generations. Strauss and Howe made a big point about how their theory demonstrates all of American history but they also count American history back to 1600 and they go "yeah, Civil War, big head-scratcher that one" and predicting the past is hella easier than predicting the future but goddammit, there's truthiness here. ________________________________________ "GREATEST GENERATION" Saved the goddamn world from fascism and it was a close thing. Sacrificed a bunch and shall never be criticized as a result. Threw vastly more socialism at post-war Europe than they were willing to enjoy at home because Red Menace but also because too much capitalism among the ruins and you end up with warlords. SILENT GENERATION: Too young to fight WWII, too old to do anything but get in the way and raise Generation X. Spent their adulthood being accused of communism whenever their skirts were too short or their term papers weren't decorated with American flags by "the Greatest Generation" which, as previously discussed, is immune to criticism of any kind. BABY BOOMER GENERATION: Kids of the Greatest Generation who can always hold "I fought Nazis" over the heads of their spoiled children, who came of age during the Golden Age of Capitalism and wanted for nothing. Teenagers did not exist prior to the 'boomers. The 'boomers were the first generation to consistently go to high school let alone college. They grew up in an era of military, economic and cultural superiority that has never been seen on this earth before and will never be seen again. They worked for nothing, they wanted for nothing, their contribution to society was largely not making as much of a fuss as their parents did when they were forced to share their classrooms with minorities. GENERATION X: Too young to fight Vietnam, too old to do anything but get in the way and raise Generation Z. Spent their adulthood being accused of communism whenever their paychecks were too small or their music wasn't decorated with American flags by the 'boomers who, as previously discussed, never.worked.for.anything.in.their.lives. MILLENNIAL GENERATION: Came of age after The End of History, after peak oil, after September 11, into an economy that had no room for them, with the least-understanding parents and grandparents in the history of mankind. Weren't so much promised a golden future as expected to create it for the 'boomers. The Long Boom was over for Generation X but the 'boomers had no reason to notice that because it was fucking over someone else's kids, not theirs and fuckin' hell they'd bought a house and a car on one blue-collar income what the fuck is wrong with you, Junior? GENERATION Z: Grew up with the most cynical parents in the modern history of America, picking over the cultural ruins of boomer and millennial detritus, cultural hegemony in the rear window and global wars of scarcity erupting in places the news tells them not to care about. Legitimate fears about the planet being unlivable in their twilight years as a direct consequence of oldsters who are telling them what to do. If that's not enough, Strauss and Howe don't call them "Generation Z" they call them the "Homeland Generation" and fully expect them to fix everything, because as the last generation in the saeculum, that's their fucking job. ___________________________________________ So there's your framework. Millennials, as a group, can't catch a fucking break because their parents ate all the cake and then told them they didn't get a slice because they're too slow. The kids around them, meanwhile, only know the cake through rumors and have no problem telling them to shut the fuck up if they want real problems they should take their fucking noses out of their Friends reruns and smell the melting permafrost. The guy who wrote A Generation of Sociopaths got a book deal because he first wrote an essay called "They promised us flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" because the beating heart of millennial culture is disappointment and betrayal and no one fucking cares. There's a real undercurrent of millennial writing that fundamentally boils down to "spoiled child after her parents went bankrupt." It engenders virulent selfishness; Ayn Rand grew up bourgeois in Moscow and then the Whites stole her birthright, et voila, "objectivism." Every supervillain origin story is some form of "promise betrayed" with various aspects of culpability depending on what sort of villainy you need; the culture millennials grew up in was one in which their parents clearly didn't trust them to walk to school, let alone save the world. GenX? Lawn darts and three-wheelers. Millennials? Super Soaker bans. And then to make matters worse, GenX flipped the whole goddamn script by inventing the Internet and then the Millennials created social media so their parents could compare notes about how much they suck across thousands of miles of distance. ________________________________________ Not all millennials are bitter, disappointed underachievers scratching out a living by ranting about their childhood on Substack but it's definitely a genre. It's the disasterporn of a subsector of society that would rather figure out what went wrong than how to make it right. Plenty of people move on and make lives; their identity isn't bound up in how great malls used to be. What's interesting to me is Freddy DeBoer's adulation of Generation X, the message of which is "your whole childhood was bullshit for us, and it was because your parents were busy spoiling you." Coupland is a 'boomer and he clearly and obviously saw everything going wrong. If you read Generation X it's about a bunch of people who can't form personal friendships even in a place where personal friendships are the only thing to do because they've been ignored their entire lives and don't know how to do it. If you read DeBoer's rant, it's about how great things were back when he could talk to people. His principle complaint is that things were great back when culture was pushed at him relentlessly and now that he lives in a "pull" world he has no fucking idea what to do with himself. It's the fundamental "millennial" problem: some people don't know how to make lemonade. There's a fundamental lack of adaptation at the heart of every one of these laments and it's always some form of "but you promised" without any aspect of "so instead I." Make no mistake: millennials have a lot to bitch about. But there's a real self-celebratory vein of millennial culture, as exemplified by Freddy DeBoer, that insists on knowing why nobody is listening.I actually spent about a half hour writing a (sort of bitter and angry) response to this... but I just deleted it because the world doesn't need more negativity.
see? you had a thoughtful response full of informed nuance across generations.... mine looked more or less like a line by line personal attack: Where the fuck did you live? oh yah... Connecti-fucking-cut. How did your rich, white, privileged Connecticut ass escape the conversation? I've been fretting about the environment since elementary school in the 80s. If you didn't know, shame on you. What in the cis-hetero-patriarchal bullshit is this? because of course you do. I had to go look you upGas was cheap, and we didn’t yet know that we should feel guilty for burning it.
Movies had tits in them. God, I miss tits in movies.
I live with my girlfriend and my cat Suavecito.
Yeah I had an observation in the back of my head about how he romanticized Generation X because he lived in abundance, whereas my take on Generation X was "welcome to Thunderdome, bitch" because I did not. But realistically, the whole schtick is "we were promised abundance and instead we live in scarcity" which definitely sucks? But at some point you need to put on your problem-solving cap and I think there's a lot of people whose problems have always been solved by their parents. And your parents can't bring the malls back. So... there's actually a point here. It's not the point he wants to make so he didn't, but fundamentally, ratings in the '80s hinged largely on how much violence was in them, not how much nudity. Blade Runner is a PG with two boobs, Total Recall is a hard R with three. Andromeda Strain is rated G, fer chrissake, because nobody cusses and nobody shoots anyone else. What happened, fundamentally, is the 'boomers took over and started protecting everyone else's children from tits. Now? Now you can show someone blowing someone else's head off in close-up and get a PG-13 but the minute an aureola shows up it's an R.What in the cis-hetero-patriarchal bullshit is this?
I think tits are a shorthand way of thinking about the ways in which romance is portrayed on screen these days, and the ways it's portrayed in little-to-none. Top Gun has a great romance story, e.g., and there's no tits. You just don't really see that in the action-thrillers of today. Like no one is contemplating a remake of Basic Instinct, which was a cultural phenomenon in like '92 or whenever. It's easy to forget that Rom-Coms can be good, because they're so, so, so bad nowadays. But in the 80s you had when Harry Met Sally, and in the 90s As Good as It Gets. WTF even passes for a rom-com these days? Nothing that's ever going to attract a co-ed audience. Admittedly, I don't read cis-hetero as a pejorative in the way one is supposed to these days. But romance is dead in movies and in real life, and bringing it back in movies is a good start to bringing it back in real life.
I think tits are tits. There's a certain amount of un-cladded-ness that you pretty much need to have in any light sex comedy just to set the tone. Much of the nudity in the '80s was exploitive, no doubt but when you penalize "here are boobs" and don't penalize "here are guns" there will be more guns. Take Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It's simply a different movie without Judge Reinhold fantasizing about an undressing Phoebe Cates. Is it exploitive? Sure. Is it more exploitive than Leaving Las Vegas? Is it more exploitive than Risky Business? The smart, active, empowered characters in that movie are the prostitutes, full stop. Is anyone going to remake Risky Business? Never. Perish the thought. There are three Human Centipede films, ten Saw movies and what got an NC-17 in 2000 purely for plot is a billion dollars worth of Jennifer Lawrence vehicles by 2012. This movie is, beat for beat, Romancing the Stone. It's not spectacular? But neither is Romancing the Stone. For that matter, I would argue that the buddy movies have gotten more inclusive. I'll take this sort of thing over Poison Ivy or Beautiful Creatures any day.WTF even passes for a rom-com these days?
Even though I'm the same age DeBoer (2000 grad), I actually don't know if things were better in the 90s or not--not because I had a different lived experience, but because I have so little connection to what it's like to be a kid now. I have a 3 and 5 year old, so they're not yet in a mode where they're discovering friendships and culture for themselves. My guess is that some things will be much better than they were for me and some things will be much worse, but most things will be similar. My millenial cred is high. I failed out of high school while trying to drink myself to death on two separate occasions and doing as much LSD as I could get my hands on. But outside of movies and record stores, which were objectively better than what we have today (and I'll fuckin' go to the mat on both accounts, though maybe not with you!), I don't remember it nearly as fondly as DeBoer. That's probably because I took my flunkie ass to community college, then to a third tier state university that wouldn't rank in US News' top 1000 schools and got an education that was productive and useful. One superpower I have is the ability to see what's useful in the long run, and I think that separated me from many contemporaries. The late 90s were when first tier state schools started really preferring students with high test scores and high GPAs (though nothing like today's rat race), and everyone was focused on getting to the good school rather than what comes next. For me, what comes next has always been paramount, and probably insulated me from the broader anxieties experienced by many peers. You'd hear all the time, "You can't do that," but followed by an empty stare when you asked why not? I think where a lot of the millenial bitterness comes from is that we were all banned from biking more than a half mile from the house, but everyone thought the covenant was that we'd always be protected. The forced tradeoff of security for freedom only turned out to be a one way street. But I never bought into that bullshit, and just kind of went my own way. And I find myself at 40 with a high-paying job that doesn't really stress me out too much, but I'm still thinking about what comes next. The whole security for freedom trade still isn't working in my mind, and I hope it never does. But enough with the navel gazing. I think that the one thing that is inarguably horrible about being a kid these days (and again, I'm not too adjacent, just trying to synthesize what I see around me) is social media. I am not being hyperbolic when I say I think there is nothing redeeming about it. (Hubski isn't social media, so no, I'm not being hypocritical.) In fact, I think given the permanence of anything posted on the internet, we should treat it more like a tattoo than an ephemeral moment in time. I would argue that social media should be illegal for anyone under 18, and I actually don't think that's an unreasonable position. I don't know at what age kids start using it, but I am certain that it will spark fights and outrage in my house. But other than that, I would imagine being a kid these days isn't so bad. I think parents are more interested in their kids than my parents' generation was (I literally think my mom has no idea what I do for a living and I see her about once per week), and most people seem happier and less apathetic to me (surveys of self-reported mental health notwithstanding...I think there's a lot of reason to doubt many of those) than they were in the 90s. Being interested in anything in any serious way in the 90s was enough to get you bullied. Apathy was the coin of the realm, and that is not something to be nostalgic about. Having kids is an optimistic act, and I definitely wouldn't have had them if I didn't feel good about the future. I guess that's against the grain of a lot of millenials, but to me the world, shitty as the news cycle can be, is in a really good place.
The moral panics of the '80s were AIDS, Dungeons & Dragons, drugs and rock music. The moral panic of the '90s was No matter where you were, no matter what you were doing, someone nefarious (and as you were a mature adult, and as there was a whole generation younger than you, they definitely listened to Pearl Jam ifyouknowwhatImean) was going to Steal.Your.Child. This is important because it reflects an inversion: in the '80s, children had to be kept on the straight and narrow lest they fall afoul of temptation. In the '90s, children had to be wrapped in bubble wrap and held in isolation against errant strikes of lightning. There's an agency in upbringing that has been there throughout time: up until the '90s, the concern has been "what will the kids get up to." Compare and contrast 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s horror/exploitation films with the '90s. Serial killers used to come after you if you transgressed. "I know what you did last summer" worked in the '90s (the book was written in the '70s) because it's about kids just living their lives who end up being stalked and murdered. Final Destination? Frickin' causality itself is the villain. Movies are vastly worse. Record stores have the advantage of curation, but I never experienced a record store that had any gift of curation. I include the record store run by a friend of mine that sold exclusively industrial music - because he sold exclusively industrial music, he sold all industrial music and lots of it is terrible. It's worse than that - the late '90s were when things shifted from "you should go to college" to "of course you're going to college" and the prices matched. Millennials took the brunt of that, too - there are far too many people with degrees, so degrees get deprecated, and there's no limit to how much you can owe. But again, no generation has had as much parental involvement in their college as millennials. The agency is notably absent. Well, scratch that. We see a lot of GenZ who are so mollycoddled by their GenX parents that they can't so much as go out and interview for a job without Mommy coming, too. But there are also a lot more GenZ who took one look at the college landscape and said "If my choices are working retail with no debt or working retail with $40k of debt, I'll skip the debt, thanks." And this is why I hate Strauss & Howe - it fucking makes sense. I'm eight years older than you but I was walking to school in 2nd grade, coming home to an empty house and half the time making my own dinner. My wife is three months younger than me but her parents are 'boomers and she still talks about that amazing time in 3rd grade when she walked all the way to school and back. Now granted - I grew up in legit don't-tell-the-social-worker neglect and she didn't. But there was a very real cusp between the feral and non-feral children in my cohort and it was, to a man, how young are your parents. I think social media will die with the boomers. I think it was created by millennials for them and their parents and I think GenZ doesn't give a shit. Our experience with GenZ is they don't fucking care, Facebook has always been a trap, don't hustle for clout hustle for money, an online presence is a massive net-negative and if you're not being remunerated don't bother. My kid is ten. She has a friend that desperately wants a youtube channel. She and my daughter and two of their other friends endlessly rehearse online skits that shall never be online, constantly revising, constantly discussing, with no real intent to ever actually do anything with it. I have a number of friends whose children are approaching college, in college or freshly out of college and none of them give the first fuck about social media. My experience with community college is the younger you are, the less you engage with social media of any kind. There was a frontier where it was beneficial but that frontier was full of McDonald's and whorehouses by the time GenZ made it there and they have better shit to do.I think where a lot of the millenial bitterness comes from is that we were all banned from biking more than a half mile from the house, but everyone thought the covenant was that we'd always be protected.
But outside of movies and record stores, which were objectively better than what we have today (and I'll fuckin' go to the mat on both accounts, though maybe not with you!),
The late 90s were when first tier state schools started really preferring students with high test scores and high GPAs (though nothing like today's rat race), and everyone was focused on getting to the good school rather than what comes next.
I think that the one thing that is inarguably horrible about being a kid these days (and again, I'm not too adjacent, just trying to synthesize what I see around me) is social media.
Curation was non-existent at Borders, but at least there was a "new releases" section that I could browse on Tuesdays, which, fortunately for me, was the day I got paid for my line cook job every week. So there was an order of operation--pick up check; cash check; go to music store. And usually I'd be on the lookout for whatever the local college radio station was playing for the previous few weeks. I know people find new music now, but I honestly don't know how, and I think I'm too old to care to figure it out. We've gained so much with the ubiquity of the internet that I am not at all nostalgic for the days that came before, but I think there is a lot of good that comes from being at a particular place at a particular time, record shop or otherwise. Example, I work remotely. I fucking love working remotely. I put in a solid 15 hours of work per week, get paid for forty, and spend the rest of my time working on my side business or running errands (or going to the gym, playing tennis...whatever I want, really). It's awesome for someone like me who has a lot of contacts and is very comfortable in his career. The woman who works for me? The 28 year old who jumped directly from post-doc to this company? Not so much. I fear that she and all like her are siloing themselves into a really bad situation. People need to get to know you and you need to get the know the world around you. Record shops were just one of a bunch of ways to get out and meet real people and make human connections that are more difficult to do in online only environments.
excerpt from the manifesto that saved my show It's really funny. Tidal hooked up an AI to their recommendation engine. You can type requests like "give me an hour's worth of music that goes well with Prodigy's 'Firestarter'" and it will give you bizarre r&b tracks you've never heard of. "genre" was this thing that fans did by hand and there's no real collation. Soundprinting? GraceNote does that automagically, that's why your Android phone tells you what song is playing in the background on your lockscreen. But GraceNote has never bothered to pull in ID3 tags, standardized or otherwise. You wanna see the search string I use to find new music? That's for Gazelle, which drives most torrent sites. The ! means "fuck off don't give me any of that shit." I'd totally "!alternative" if I could, but anything to the left of Journey gets labeled as alternative. I probably listen to ten hours of new music a week. It's work. Streaming services won't do it for you. Your friends will. My kid went through the pandemic remotely. She figured out how to sneak into her teacher's assistant's Google Meet room when the assistant wasn't there because she was (and is) an idiot. She'd go hang out with her friends in the "secret meet" and there'd be five of them, locked down in a pandemic, figuring out how to watch netflix together or play video games or who knows. We did bring it to the attention of the teacher just to keep her out of trouble? And she promptly deliberately forgot. They kept using that "secret meet" for as long as they had school laptops. Would she rather play in person? Every time. There are better games to play and it's much more interactive. But we've got a whole generation of kids who had to figure out how to pass time in the digital, which makes passing time in the real easier. I think some people don't make friends well, and that the situation can make things more challenging? But nature finds a way.I know people find new music now, but I honestly don't know how, and I think I'm too old to care to figure it out.
Goth/Industrial music is grossly under-represented in today’s streaming landscape. ID3v1 held 80 genres, five of which overlap with On The Edge’s typical playlists (Industrial, Euro-Techno, Gothic, Darkwave, and Techno-Industrial). Spotify, on the other hand, has over fifteen hundred. From a curational standpoint, Amazon and Tidal have none. Discovery of Goth/Industrial has become nearly impossible, partially though commerce and partially through design as the music has become exclusive enough to be invisible. It has become necessary for someone to push music at the pullers. That someone should be us.
industrial, industrial.techno, synthpop, witch.house, IDM, shoegaze, !experimental, !pop, !psychedelic, !minimal.house, !freely.available, !hard.techno, !art.rock, !retrowave, !metal, !black.metal
Bandcamp remains a very good way to find new music, for anyone else reading kbs comments. Kind of cool to search by region using tags on that site.
I don't know that I agree. To make Bandcamp work you need to set yourself up to follow every label or artist that's interesting, and often the labels worth following are 70-90% garbage. Bandcamp does have "ratings" but they appear to consist of "top downloads, of the past few hours, within our narrowly-defined genres." I have a buddy who "topped the charts" last week on Bandcamp. LAST WEEK. This week, if you search for his name and spell it exactly, you are on the second page of results - not on the charts, within general search. If you look up the album that "topped the charts" (and I mean, he was between #5 and #1 for a week) for his genre, it has 40 downloads. On the other hand, I can go "discover - best selling - any format" and today, the second thing it throws up at me is a single released two days ago with twelve downloads. Last week, the first thing it threw up at me was an album from nineteen-fucking-ninety-TWO. Meanwhile, the whole "scene" if you will is trying really hard to like that shit new VNV nation album and it's nowhere on the charts. Yeah you can buy it on Bandcamp - and it's got 1200 purchases. And that doesn't include every DJ who got it free whether they like it or not; it's been fairly compulsory to play a couple spins whether you like it or not, because it's VNV Nation (unless you're lucky enough to live in a locale that hates VNV nation on sight). I'm probably a thousand dollars into Bandcamp because I think artists should eat, and I'm $20 a month into Tidal for five years because I think artists should eat, and I'm a seedbox into torrenting because I do discovery my way, and the fuckin' torrenters actually use taxonomy. I know a guy who was in the room when Jerry Yang turned down Larry and Sergei when they tried to sell Google to Yahoo for one.milllllllion dollars (pinkie ring). Guy confirmed what I already knew: Yahoo, at the time, was a hand-tuned hand-selected hand-curated list of useful links while Google was "here's an algorithm." Yang couldn't see automating his life-blood so he passed. He shouldn't have? But if your whole business is around hand-fit non-scalable curation, the bots are never going to do it the same way. You wanna see how an algorithm picks a hit song?
To me, the discovery from Bandcamp is in the followers feed and nothing else. I add people I know, or who have already bought an album I love and sometimes they'll have something interesting. Certainly a lot of noise to signal, I'm sure your torrent system is better. But what I like about it most is that it is definitely not an algorithm.