I often wonder why there isn’t more hate and angst in youth culture now. A lot of that, I think, is how different “millennial angst” is manifested in pop culture. It’s absolutely out there - it’s just communicated so differently than ours was, because the outlets or so different.
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#InThe90s, “hate” was a mantra. It was *cool* to hate. We hated pop music, we hated old people, our parents, conformity, war, capitalism, commercialism, “selling out,” “the man,” preppies, jocks, “suits,” etc. We defined ourselves not by what we LIKED, but what we HATED.Pokaż ten wątek -
"Hate" meant something very different than it does now. Now hate is something that means cruelty, bigotry, intolerance, and there’s nothing cool about it. That’s a good thing! But it’s wildly different than how youth culture was for my generation.
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I mean, there’s a real and glorious Nine Inch Nails tour t-shirt that just says, in big bold letters, “HATE 1990.” I’m not sure you could define 90s angst any more concisely than that.pic.twitter.com/xzvzO4pc3G
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Another 90s band shirt that’s always stuck in my mind is the Pearl Jam one that said, large and bold, “9 OUT OF 10 KIDS PREFER CRAYONS TO GUNS.”pic.twitter.com/ZEDOdiwbRn
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Nirvana, meanwhile, took the famous smiley face logo of the 60s/70s, which became a symbol of peaceful protest, and made a mockery of it - its crossed eyes and warbled mouth suggesting it was fucked up, and just didn’t care.pic.twitter.com/uUDE9WAyyG
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That disaffection was the way Gen-X rebelled against what it perceived (accurately, I would argue) as a hollow movement by its boomer ancestors. The hippies tried to change the world with love, but was anything actually better?
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Did Boomers not betray their supposed ideals with a full buy-in of Reaganomics and consumerism in the 80s? Did anything even fucking matter? What was the point of even trying to care, anymore? That’s what Gen-X angst was reacting to.
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There have been a few youth culture movements that were famously about external angst. In the late ‘60s, a protest movement gave us some of the best music ever created. The same thing happened with the punk scene of the late 70s/early 80s.
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And then it happened again with grunge/alternative in the 90s. Punk and grunge didn’t really have the same easily-defined historical points of anger (Vietnam, the civil rights movement), they were just youth sort of abstractly angry at rules defined for them by older generations.
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Rules that made no sense to them, and didn’t seem to be adding up to anything other than wealth and power for a select few. And that's where I think Gen-X angst and millennial angst converge.
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A side note here: I didn’t mention metal music, because the metal scene - along with it horror movies, D&D, etc - was famously misinterpreted by older generations as a movement of hate and evil, but it’s actually always been intensely positive.
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Metal was raw expression, letting out emotions and creating a community around it. It’s so intensely misunderstood. Even though there was a perception of youth angst surrounding metal in the 70s/80s, I don’t view metal as a protest movement at all.
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I think metal is something much simpler, and more wholesome - a way for people to release their negative feelings, and find connections around them. The nicest people I’ve ever met have been metalheads & horror fans. They’re processing their feelings in a really healthy way.
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So now, what is millennial angst? It’s obviously very real, and rightfully so - it’s been a while since a generation has been shafted as hard as millennials. And yet, there’s very little direct anger in millennial pop culture, the way there was in the 90s.
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We have the most horrific sack of rotten evil flesh as a President, we have historic income inequality, astronomical debt, healthcare bankruptcies, and a looming climate apocalypse. The kids should be RAGING. So, why is all the music so… happy? Or internally emotional?
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Kids now are turning their anger into activism and action, not just screaming it in lyrics and saying "whatever, man." That is... very good. It gives me hope.
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All of this circles back to “ok boomer,” and how it’s expressing the same things we were mad about as 90s teens, but making it a casual joke. Youth angst now is expressed through jokes and memes and intentionally difficult-to-decode language
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Language that bounces from app-of-the-moment to app-of-the-moment that older people can’t possibly keep up with. The rebellion is more of a “secret code” and it’s more joyful, less hateful, more silly, more weird, but every bit as real.
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Still though, it's weird to me as a Gen-Xer that we aren't experiencing more of a renaissance of rage-filled protest music. But it's just the different way that a new generation processes and expresses things.
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A lot of Lorde’s “Pure Heroine” exudes millennial angst to me. It feels very contrary to its contemporaries like Taylor Swift or Adele, because it isn’t so focused on internalized feelings.
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The album’s opener, “Tennis Court,” starts with the fantastic line “Don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk?” That stings with the disaffected tone of the now defining phrase of millennial angst, “ok boomer."
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Many other moments on the rest of Lorde's album continue the theme of suburban teen disaffection, calmly shrugging off institutions and traditions that older generations take so seriously.
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Millennial angst is about pulling the mask off of things they’ve been asked to care about for reasons they don’t understand, which get frantically and inaccurately translated by confused boomers as “millennials are killing off THING X!!.”
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But they’re killing off THING X by just not caring about it or even having the luxury to even try to care. “Millennials Are Killing Napkins” is one of the funniest real headlines I ever read.
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Imagine being 21 in 2019, watching every institution collapse around you, and trying to care about buying fucking NAPKINS because the Betty Crocker Corporation sold repressed 1950s women on the idea that their home couldn’t be proper without them.
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My generation tried to FIGHT the system in the 90s with rage, but millennials are doing it so much more passively, without hate, and often just by the necessity of how poor of a hand they’ve been dealt. They just make jokes about how dumb it all seems now.
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“lol the emperor has no clothes” is the new “fuck the man.” //
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1990s: "This is your world in which we grow, and we will grow to hate you." 2010s: "We're so happy, even when we're smiling out of fear."
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I didn't talk about hip-hop much in this thread because I'm speaking largely from the perspective of my experience as a white suburban 90s teen and the culture that surrounded that. But even hip-hop follows a similar arc in terms of how it expressed anger from then to now.
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