It’s been a while since we Gen X’ers had a good, long stare at our collective navels. The occasion of the 20th anniversary of our invention by the media is begging for more of this “are we becoming them?” kind of nonsense. Count me in!
Nirvana marks this auspicious anniversary with a reissue of “Nevermind” so bloated with extras and marked up in price that even Mick Jagger would blush. Pearl Jam team with Cameron Crowe for a career-retrospective documentary that makes a compelling argument that Eddie Vedder did the right thing by not blowing his brains out too. And R.E.M. trumps everybody by quietly, gracefully calling it a career, provoking pangs of nostalgia in, well, just about everyone I know.
Here and there, you see the media-bait question, “Wait, aren’t all these Generation X people waxing nostalgic about the rock-n-roll of their youth just doing what they angrily accused Baby Boomers of doing twenty years ago?” Well, yes and no. Look, we’re all entitled to mourn our youth. And this was a hell of a week to remind anyone who was a teenager twenty years ago that we’re not young anymore; that our heroes are dead or dying and that nothing – no song, no record, no band – will ever speak to us like the music of our youth. Not because Nirvana, Pearl Jam and R.E.M. were better than Elvis, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, or better than…whatever the hell the kids are listening to today. But because music that speaks to you when you are 15, does so on a much deeper level than when you are older. Every crush, every kiss, every three week romance just kills you and the music that helps you understand it all tattoos your brain permanently. Everybody Hurts, if you will. And that is the feeling that we mourn this month. And we are entitled to this period of mourning and to the sense of outrage we will feel when our beloved songs inevitably get sold out and are used to sell cars, hamburgers and life insurance.
One key difference between this round of Gen X nostalgia and all the previous decades of Boomer nostalgia: twenty years ago, we still had a mass media. This meant we all had to share Rolling Stone magazine with its endless “greatest ever” lists that always placed the Beatles at the top; we all COULD NOT AVOID that Beatles documentary that took over ABC for a year and OMG the Elvis stamp! Fat Elvis! Skinny Elvis! And that is largely what makes “Nevermind” so noteworthy. They pierced through. They made it to the Top of the Pops and dozens of great bands got to follow them, for, like, two years. Now, who cares what is the best selling record in the country? We download music and share it on blogs. Don’t like Rolling Stone? You can actually read the NME online and immerse yourself in a weird little world where Oasis’ recent break-up is, like, the biggest news ever. Don’t like that? Migrate over to Pitchfork, where the LCD Soundsystem break-up is the biggest thing ever. My friends and I aren’t clogging up the TV airwaves with our nostalgia; only our own Facebook newsfeeds. Which is important, because we are not the world. Hell, we’re not even the generation. Half our generation could give two shits about R.E.M. They were too busy listening to hip hop back in the day.