"We've got no war to name us" Paul Westerberg

You name it, they've been named it: Generation X, Generation Next, the alt.generation, the Blank Generation, Generation Eccchhh, the virtual culture, invisible kids, the grungeneration.

Of course, by now we all know that "Generation X" was first coined in a 60s book on Britain's Mod culture. That Richard Hell coined the term Blank Generation back in the early 70s. The more things change, the more they double back on themselves. Could be it's just a reflection of our own lack of imagination. The mere fact that we have to corral everything into some media-enforced holding pen betrays our inability to deal with the young and the restless. But is the post-baby boom, post-post-modern generation really anything we haven't seen before?

"Been there/Done that" Dr. Dre

Just what we need, right, another essay on youth culture. Well, believe me, baby, I'm trying not to write one. If I can box my way out a of a wet paper essay, I'll be punching to the last breath. It feels so old to be talking about the younger generation, the "kids today" as I call them, as though they were some flannel-clad butterfly wriggling on the end of a pin. But of course, there are differences. This generation is growing up in a virtual environment that can only foster (fester?) a twice-removed detachment. The Internet, 64 Meg first-person shooter videogames, serial killer trading cards, real-time real life television, Faces of Death...every aspect of life - even death! - has been documented, chronicled and uploaded for your viewing pleasure. Everything can be experienced...secondhand. It's no wonder some of these kids feel the need to pierce, stab, tatoo and burn their skin just to remind themselves they're alive. When every sensation is offered to you through a filter, when everything comes from the cold and limp on a gurney, what can you do but turn inward?

"When there's no future how can there be sin?" Johnny Rotten

This is one of the first generations that's been forced to rebel against itself. Their Hippie grandparents and Punk moms and dads at least had some staid, complacent "establishment" to poke and prod. Now everyone knows that the government is corrupt, the environment is toxic and big business controls the world. Ho hum. How quaint. When everything is permitted, what do you to piss off anybody? Well, maybe you can't piss off any body, but you can piss off some body : your body. So we fold ourselves inwards like some M.C. Escher origami blue-print. Techno-noise- one-man band machine-made noise - rules the clubs where the kids dance as fast as they can, against one another, against themselves, against the world. If the 60s were evolution, the 70s were revolution, the 80s were gratification, well the 90s are...negation. Communism fell, the kids yawned, and Kurt Cobain pulled the trigger.

When Tinkerbell fell, an audience full of kids clapped as hard as they could to bring her back. When Kurt Cobain spray painted the floor and the wall of his attic, people danced, cried, then watched the MTV retrospective (after all, that's where they found Kurt). The posthumous albums went platinum (good marketing gimmick). Bush (sorry Bush X) went top ten a couple months later. Pathetic? Well, as Bart Simpson would say, "Yeah, but what are ya gonna do?”

"Nothing's shocking" Perry Farrel

Don't know if there really is any cause for gloom and doom. The fact is that kids always have to rebel. That's what adolescence is all about. The challenge is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to rebel (do you rebel against the folks when mom's wearing a Clash t-shirt?). If the kids of today are rising to that challenge, if their creativity is strong enough to find new ways to say "up yours", then that's actually hopeful. I mean, has the Peter Pan version of youth - innocence before the Fall - ever been true? The flip-side of Peter Pan is Lord of the Flies. Kids love building blocks, stacking them up into towers and pyramids. They love equally to push them over once they're done. Remember that the architects, executives and actors at Disneyland are, for the most part, adults. The footsoldiers and enforcers for the Khmer Rouge were, in some parts, kids.

In the end, is the beginning. If the kids want to stare into the Abyss, even wade into it and splash around, maybe that's not such a bad thing. They're media savvy enough to know the difference between staring at the Abyss, and becoming the abyss. The evangelists and scare-mongers who think the X-Files is poisoning impressionable minds are only painting targets for the kids' volley of spit. And that's not such a bad thing, is it? No one's comfortable with their adolescent selves, so let them escape and negate that for awhile, so they can grow up and, in a healthy way, miss the point of the next generation. Hey, ask anyone with a compost heap: Flowers in the dustbin can still bloom.

April, 1997

P.Dantek