This piece was originally read at the Open Book open mic night at the Fiction Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, July ‘25
An article recently made the rounds among my fellow Generation X friends suggesting that Gen Xers might actually be the cool ones. That’s the way the article phrased it—“what if gen xers are actually the cool ones?”—as if it would be a surprise. As if it’s not clear.
The article was written by a Millennial, so it managed to be a TINY bit judgy and condescending, even while complimenting us. For example, the article says of Gen Xers, “they appear frustratingly unaware of the role that privilege played into their cynicism and ability to be disengaged.” But otherwise the article really does say we’re the coolest.
The article was in Vogue, so if you think Gen Xers AREN’T the cool ones, you have to take it up with Anna Wintour, who’s the cultural leader of…the entire world.
Anyway, I’m not here to debate whether it’s TRUE that Gen Xers are the best. I mean it’s probably true, but whatever. I’m here to talk about how it came about: How did Gen X get so great? What is the source of our wonderfulness?
Was it because we were “latchkey kids,” and had to fend for ourselves after school until our dual-income parents got home from work? Because our parents left the key under the mat, and we had to look after ourselves and not wreck the house? Did that independence give us our incredible…panache? Being the most under-parented generation in history and having to make snacks for ourselves probably did contribute to us being total badasses. But I think there’s more to it.
I think the reason Gen X is the coolest, and the greatest, is the music we grew up with. I don’t mean the music was great. I mean the exact opposite. It was perfectly dreadful. 80s music, the music of my generation, was a shitstorm. But it made us great. Let me explain.
If you compare mainstream 80s music to any other decade of Earth’s history, you quickly notice that it’s tinny, boring, and gutless. It has no beauty, grandeur, or meaning. It has bland melodies, childish production values, and bad drumming. There’s been severe musical inequality between the decades, and Gen Xers got the bad end of the stick. Of course there were exceptions, but the mainstream sound of the decade was bloody awful. I’m not gonna give examples, I don’t want to single anyone out—and it’s not necessary.
What’s important is that we Gen X-ers spent our formative music-listening years, when our tastes were forming in our teeny-tiny teen brains, inundated by mediocrity. Think of the generational trauma! Teenagers wandered around aimless, dazed, empty—it was a true “teenage wasteland.” I remember at one middle school party, some crushingly god-awful song was on the turntable or boombox, and I looked around at my friends wondering, “Who are we? What are we doing? Is there nothing better for us?” We tried to smile. But true happiness was impossible!
This condition of musical precarity is terrible for the teenage mind. It causes feelings of emptiness and hopelessness, and makes teens more vulnerable to fear. An adult brain can survive many hours without good music. But a teenage brain without good music will begin to deteriorate and decay within 6 minutes!
Under these conditions, some kids were lost, fated to listen to 80s mix-tapes until the end of time. Others lashed out and became burnouts.
But, in many of us, it induced resilience, resourcefulness, and pragmatism. That’s right—our resourcefulness didn’t come from latchkeys. It came from having to go out and find good music. We learned quickly that to have a happy teen life, we needed better music. So we ventured into the cities, found divey used record stores in places like Greenwich Village, and greedily purchased the music from other decades, from other worlds, from indy labels. Networks formed to disseminate good music among our people. “Classic rock radio” emerged, not simply to preserve so-called “dad rock” from the previous generation, but rather to preserve the sanity of Gen Xers. Gen Xers became searchers and explorers. We became philosophers, as we wondered why the Universe would treat us so poorly, and how such bad music could possibly exist. We became like mythical creatures forever seeking to escape our tinny ridiculous decade.
The horrors of 80s music also toughened us. Some call us cynics, but in fact we’re realists. 80s music made us jaded and street-smart. And here we find Gen X’s greatest quality: of all the generations of the world, Gen Xers have the keenest eye for bullshit, because we heard so much of it in our youth. We actually start from the assumption that everything is bullshit, and proceed from there. Gen Xers can easily see through the bullshit of both Baby Boomers and Millennials, to say nothing of Gen Zers, because we came of age amidst a culture brimming with bullshit. We’ve had enough. That’s why you’ll frequently hear Gen Xers saying to people of other generations, “Would you cut the fucking bullshit already?”
Given this history, is it any wonder that Gen Xers are the coolest? When you see the jaded, unimpressed 10,000 yard stare of the Gen Xer—a look sometimes mistaken for cynicism, but which can come across as rather cool—know that that look was borne of 10 years of avoiding bad music.
If your hackles instinctively rose at the idea that ‘80s music might have been terrible, you may well be British and probably an avid reader of that bible of ‘80s pop, Smash Hits:
Britain’s most fanciable
Some time in the autumn of 1983, a woman walked into a newsagent in southwest London and had an extremely confusing conversation with the shopkeeper. That woman was my mother, and after some determined badgering she had finally agreed to add the British pop magazine
Counterpoint: in 2024 this great generation of Americans shifted 9 points to elect Trump.