Generation X weaves a complex musical legacy

Although Gen X is linked to the grunge explosion of the early '90s, its glory years also included a roots-music movement and the mainstream rise of rap.

BY ERIC R. DANTON

The Hartford Courant


Eddie Vedder is 40.

Forty!

It wasn't so long ago that the Pearl Jam singer seemed ageless. With his band perched atop the charts in the early 1990s, Vedder was the popular symbol of a generation, a flannel-clad prophet giving voice to the disenfranchised acolytes of music called grunge.

Grunge's followers were tagged with the label ''Generation X,'' and the media dissected the motivations and modi operandi of young people commonly regarded as sullen slackers. That turned out not to be the case, of course Gen Xers overcame the economic recession of their early post-college years to play a key role in the '90s tech boom and grew up to be reasonably well-adjusted citizens, parents and neighbors.

Yet misconceptions linger and are even codified in things such as Whatever: The '90s Pop & Culture Box (Rhino), a new seven-CD compilation of music that completely misses the point about the relationship between Gen X and the music of the 1990s. Now, as the leading edge of Generation X begins following Eddie Vedder into middle age, it's time to more carefully examine the musical legacy of what has become pop culture's middle child, wedged between the marketing cash cows of the baby boom and Generation Y.

DEMOGRAPHIC BLIP

''In part, the story of the '90s is one of a demographic blip, of a particular age group having its brief, shining moment in the media spotlight,'' rock critic and author Jim DeRogatis, 41, writes in the liners notes to Whatever.

That's true, but it's not the whole story. Generation X is indeed inextricably linked to the grunge explosion of the early '90s. But its glory years also included a powerful roots-music movement, the mainstream rise of rap, the downfall of the aberration known as hair metal and the beginnings of what will surely form the foundation of Gen Y's legacy: emo. From Minneapolis in the early '80s to the death of Kurt Cobain and the dissolution of Uncle Tupelo in 1994, Gen X's musical legacy is staggeringly diverse.

The musical culture of Generation X is popularly believed to have been a revolt against the hair-metal debauchery of the late '80s. Actually, it began even earlier, as a younger age group reacted to the monolithic self-absorption of the baby-boom generation: 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964, according to demographers. Their development mirrored that of rock 'n' roll, and early boomers were children of post-war prosperity who witnessed The Beatles and Bob Dylan push against the boundaries of music. They basked in the mud at Woodstock and demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. They knew what it was to be young, man, and they haven't stopped talking about it since.

Their children noticed and, as children do, rejected the things their parents held dear. Those children, 41 million of them born between 1965 and 1976, were dubbed Generation X (though some definitions extend Gen X to 1978 or '79).

Punk was the first musical reaction to the classic-rock ethos of the Woodstock generation. The original punk rockers were late-period boomers eager to distance themselves from the supercilious upper end of their demographic, and their music, reflecting the dour economics of the late '70s, became a template for Generation X and the ensuing ''post-punk'' movement that eventually birthed grunge.

Assigning a birthplace or starting date to Gen X music is completely arbitrary, but let's say it began in the early '80s as part of underground scenes in towns such as Minneapolis and Athens, Ga. That's where the likes of Husker Du, the Replacements and R.E.M. co-opted elements of punk and made music reflecting values that were their own.

There were other post-punk scenes in other cities throughout the `80s: Boston yielded Mission of Burma and the Pixies. Dinosaur Jr came from Amherst. Fugazi hailed from Washington, D.C. Metallica moved from Los Angeles to the Bay Area. St. Louis gave rise to Uncle Tupelo, which kick-started alternative-country. And there was Seattle, which became a catch-all for the vibrant Pacific Northwest scene that included Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Mudhoney and others. Nirvana, a Seattle band, pushed punk into the popular consciousness in 1991 when it released Nevermind.

ALL ABOUT CRED

Punk was music obsessed with credibility, and nothing was more credible than rejecting an older generation's symbols of success. In the music business, that meant bands snubbed overtures from the major record companies and released their music on independent record labels. Eventually, though, bands that patterned themselves after the original post-punk acts started to become popular outside their own scenes. In many cases, they were unable to reconcile the competing notions of indie cred and mainstream success.

If punk started as the music of economic rebellion, it had a spiritual cousin in hip-hop. Rap was also obsessed with credibility, yet there was no similar ambivalence about popular success in rap music.

Hip-hop is ''arguably the single most significant achievement of our generation,'' Bakari Kitwana writes in The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture (Basic Civitas Books, 2003).

By ''our generation,'' though, Kitwana means black people born between 1965 and 1984. ''Generation X,'' he argues, is a term that applies primarily to whites, who are less conflicted about the split hip-hop represents in the black community. For all its cultural acclaim, Kitwana writes, rap music has foisted negative stereotypes on a generation of black youths, who are inundated with glorifications of ``anti-intellectualism, ignorance, irresponsible parenthood and criminal lifestyles.''

Subdividing Gen X isn't so easy, though, given the far-reaching influence Kitwana's hip-hop generation has had on its predominantly white counterpart. A former punk-rock trio called the Beastie Boys showed that white kids could rap with License to Ill in 1986, and a straight, short line connects Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine and Limp Bizkit.

By the time the likes of Limp Bizkit arrived in the mid-'90s, bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam had demonstrated, however reluctantly, the financial possibilities of their music. The dollar signs attracted new bands that didn't share their predecessors' misgivings about commercial success, and rap and rock reconnected in the '90s, both as a short-term rap-metal musical fad and a longer-lasting business philosophy that placed a premium on material rewards.

The arrival of those bands, beautifully symbolized by the release in 1994 of Green Day's Dookie, signaled the end of Generation X's period of musical primacy.

GENERATION Y

Credibility doesn't look so different from commercial success to many of the 60 million-plus members of Generation Y, defined as people born between 1977 and 1993 or '94. Most members of the Bling Generation don't remember a time before MTV or the Internet, and their relationship with music, and pop culture in general, is necessarily different because of that.

Older generations see in Gen Yers a grabby sense of entitlement and a constant desire for distraction from the realities of the world around them. They don't have to actively seek music because it constantly surrounds them. It's online, it's on TV and in soundtracks, and it's more portable than ever, thanks to an ever-increasing variety of digital devices. All of those things will inform Generation Y's own musical legacy, whatever it turns out to be.

Generation Watch