for lumps and men even know where their prostate is (if they haven’t actually found it yet).
We were the first to make food a mainstream cultural art form, to democratise fashion, to insist on a soundtrack, to recraft our living spaces, to search meaningfully for spirituality outside the confines of the Church, to fuel the proliferation of art, television, restaurants and nightclubs. Our love of rave went on to inspire the hip hotel trend of dressing every lobby like a chillout room, while our love of travelling has fuelled a truly globalised culture in food, fashion and design.
Our social fixes are charities like Comic Relief, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, War Child, Smart Works: organisations that actively seek to redress the inequalities in the world. This is what we care about the most. Fired by youth and entitlement, in its early years of power Generation X set out to create a world that did not judge you for your colour, your nationality, who you fancied or what sex you were. It is your values, your ideas and your thoughts that distinguish you instead.
And now, that world is beginning to look a little shaky. The year 2016 brought democratic earthquakes in the shape of Brexit and Trump that look like they may be undermining much of the progress we made and fought to achieve. And we are no longer young. We are, more or less, in our forties. And being in your forties certainly makes you look in the mirror and reflect. So this seems a timely moment for something of a calibration. Where have we come from (good times!), and where are we going (uncertain ones)? It’s hard to have a moment in front of the mirror these days that doesn’t feel tinged with nostalgia. For instance, it is rare you go ‘Look – wrinkles. What fabulous proof that I am so wise from experience and laughing so hard.’ Mostly it’s ‘Wrinkles – you bastards. Why is the Protect and Perfect not working?’ And you reach for another green juice.
The rebellion we felt in our adolescence and early youth is still there, but what are we going to do with it now? Have we really shaped society in the way we all wanted and, now we are in positions of power, how are we going to lay things down for ourselves and our children in the future?
Are we riven by midlife crisis or are we, in fact, only just coming of age? Excitingly, our best could be yet to come. As the designer Alice Temperley puts it: ‘I’ve got to the point where I feel I’ve grown up. Where I realise what’s wrong and what’s right and what’s important in life. I’ve worked hard to get to this point and now I feel poised to take it to the next stage.’
Danny Goffey, the musician once of Supergrass and now Vangoffey (Sample song: ‘Trials of the Modern Man’), points out it was not Coupland who coined the term ‘Generation X’ but Billy Idol, the musician from Middlesex who used the name for his punk band in the Seventies. Idol had sourced the title from one of his mother’s books, a study by two English journalists on Mod subculture in the Sixties. The interviews detailed a culture of promiscuous and anti-establishment youth, something Coupland saw as characterising the kids he was describing in his novel. Generation X is the child of the sixties, the child of punk. These movements before us evolved us, their values sit deep inside us.
Nowadays demographers commonly assign the X generation to those born between the Sixties and early Eighties; those after are known as Generation Y, or Millennials, and our kids are to be known as Generation Z, or Centennials (born after the turn of the century). Meanwhile our parents are the postwar generation, or Baby Boomers, born in the aftermath of the shattering devastation in the middle of the last century. Theirs has been a life of relative peace and prosperity, and they have benefited from enormous capital growth and social investment. The gap now between their experience and those of Millennials is perfectly illustrated in average income – despite being retired, Boomers have a higher income than the average working Millennial. Meanwhile it is the Millennials (and of course X-ers) who are paying those Boomers their income in the form of pensions.
What makes X-ers really interesting, though, is that we had the Nineties. The last decade before the internet hit, before smartphones connected us to everything, at every moment; the time when further education was free, housing was just about affordable, and, crucially, when wave after wave of youth culture crashed on our shores, each new wave a brilliant reaction to the one that went before. Oh kids, you missed out there. And Boomers – sorry you were too busy working to really enjoy them.
The Nineties were an adventure in cool. Out of grunge – a literal rejection of everything that came before it – came heroin chic (yes, drugs are cool – even the bad bits!), Britpop, logo-mania, Paul Smith, the Inspiral Carpets, John Galliano, Soho House, Alexander McQueen, Kate Moss, the Gallaghers, Quaglino’s, The Word, Blur, Marc Jacobs, Marco Pierre White, the Turner Prize, Loaded magazine, pickled sharks, rave, Liam ’n’ Patsy, Helmut Lang, superclubs, the Wonderbra, The Big Breakfast, Trainspotting, Chris Evans, Pulp, the Spice Girls, Tate Modern – I could go on.
In one short summer – let’s take 1997 – Tony Blair was elected, the Prodigy released The Fat of the Land, Oasis dropped Be Here Now and Diana died. That was in just four months, like the arc of a single night: the build, the high, the comedown. We were crowned Cool Britannia, because right then and there, there was nowhere else in the world culturally more exciting.
There is no such roll call of cool that exists for the Noughties (Ellie Goulding, anyone?), or indeed the decade we are currently in, because instant access and transparency now conspire to make culture a pretty homogeneous mass. There are no definitive fashion trends or musical movements as everyone has access to everything everywhere and tribalism has died. Working-class culture is pretty much consigned to the scrapheap as changes to the welfare state mean there is no lifeline on which working-class artists or musicians or writers can survive and thrive. They must instead take a zero hours contract in a call centre. The Nineties, however, were the product of the disenfranchisement our generation felt during the Thatcher years, strong responses to a changing economy and society.
This was reinforced by our methods of communication: in the Nineties we physically went places to meet up, swap hairstyles and be cool, whether it was a club or a record shop or a field or a street or a store. We didn’t connect on chatrooms or on WhatsApp groups. We did it face to face, in places where we met other people who expressed themselves like us, and we exchanged ideas and hung out with each other and felt our rebellion communally. Together, in self-selected communities, we practised large-scale irreverence and cynicism of everything outside of our own group, but together we were fiercely strong and loyal.
Physically showing up to something gave our communities a validity and a value that today’s virtual communities cannot share. Nineties tribes were not just about how you looked – they were also about how you actually behaved, where you went, who you were with, what you did when you got there. You couldn’t tell lies about that, like you can now on social media – there were no filters or hashtags. Communities were something you did together, on a dancefloor or in a pub, sharing a feeling, not alone in a bedroom, staring into a screen all on your own. As a result our communities, whether that be our friendship group or our cultural tribe, were awesomely strong and meaningful to us (while they lasted). We were the new, with the big ideas and the modern outlook and the future.
Yuppies, a job for life, Thatcherism – by the Nineties they were all over; a broken dream. The crash and Black Friday put paid to that, as did the housing market and negative equity and all those redundancies. Money was for losers, with hideous values – experience was what we valued. And government? It gave us the Poll Tax and the Criminal Justice Bill. Instead, we chose the Summer of Love and ecstasy and eco protesters and Swampy. We were Greenpeace and gay culture (not everyone was gay, not yet – it took the Millennials to progress that far, but lots of us were and the rest were our best friends), and we used marketing, PR, television and festivals to take everything that was cool and below the radar and counter-cultural and make it ours. We took it and celebrated it and commoditised it and marketed it and turned it into the mainstream – our mainstream.
Our idea of family was more fluid. Weddings got bigger and bigger as getting married became less about commitment and more about making a social statement and throwing a party. Sex and sexuality loosened, Europe opened up and cheap travel blossomed – no one batted an eyelid at a weekend in Prague, a night in Paris or the NY-LON (New York–London) commute.