But First, Some Ground Rules

As with any deep dive into popular culture, music, generational norms, and all of the other ways one can dance about architecture it is best to set some ground rules and definitions before we get stated.

1) I might as well get my biases out in the open first things first. I’m a, uh, heterosexual, cisgender, white male born in the United States to two college educated parents in the latter half of the twentieth century. Or in other words, I best represent the machine that people were raging against. Anyway, my views on music, Gen X, and culture in general are going to be biased towards what I was watching and listening. There are pretty sizable gaps in my musical world and I’m admitting it outright. All I am saying is that on the plus side I have the same ethnographic makeup of a music executive in the early 90’s. On the minus side, most of the evil in this world has been created by people with the same ethnographic makeup of music executives.

2) If this blog takes on a more academic tone at times than my usual writing there is a reason for it. Despite the fact that I have completed enough liberal arts courses that one could count them on one hand after an unfortunate chainsaw accident I have built up a list of graduate thesis topics over the years and this series (including one topic in particular) covers a lot of them. Basically, if I ever end up actually doing my combination sociology, history, statistics, and economics graduate work this will be the foundation.

3) The thesis statement of all this is that in the short sliver of time that Gen X held sway over popular culture it produced a set of musical hits that were not only massively different than what had come before but also covered an incredibly diverse and eclectic group of artists. Songs that thirty years later you wonder how in the world did they become hits or acts that are still playing major venues when you’d think that they would have never escaped the coffee house circuit. As I said in the first post: how does an unknown Tori Amos sell two million copies of strikingly personal music at the same time as Paula Abdul has a hit song that features MC Skat Cat?

Figure 3: Mr. Cat was unable to be reached for comment, possibly due to the fact that he is a cat.

4) Defining generations is one of those constantly debated things that as an outsider I get to avoid to a degree. For the record, I hold by Strauss and Howe’s definition of Gen X being those born between 1961 and 1981 (while I have issues with a lot of their work, naturally.) I personally tie whether you are Gen X or not to the following: How old were you in the Fall of 1991 when you first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit”? I had just turned eighteen and was a freshman in college, so I consider that to be the prime age. 1981 is a little late in my view (a ten-year-old wasn’t really a target market for Nirvana) while going back to 1961 lets us include Henry Rollins in Gen X while excluding Madonna, which just feels right.

Figure 4: Mr. Rollins could be reached for comment. However, the transcription software is still deciphering the interview and was not finished in time for this post.

5) As for how I define this Gen X pop culture window I book frame it on one end with Nirvana and their utter elimination of hair metal. On the other end you have the Spice Girls releasing Wannabe in 1996 and ushering in the girl band / boy band pre-produced pop culture that took over everything in the late 90’s. There is obviously an earlier impact before Nirvana, and some after the Spice Girls, but I consider 1991 - 1996 as the brief moment in time where people listened to Gen X.

6) It’s impossible to talk about this time in music without talking about MTV, music videos, and the commercial image of artists. Expect some detailed analysis of videos and why some struck gold while others are laughable.

7) If there is one thing that I cannot stand when talking about music it is discussing what defines a hit, specifically if someone is a one hit wonder or not. The Billboard chart does not always match the cultural zeitgeist, and it certainly doesn’t capture the lasting influence of songs. Chuck Berry is officially a one hit wonder with that hit being “My Ding a Ling”. It is a stupid way of defining music.

Instead, I am going to opt for the following test. Are you down with O.P.P.?

Since 95% of the people reading this responded correctly I can easily state that Naughty by Nature had a hit. If everyone can recognize the song, I don’t care how much it sold.

Anyway, those are the ground rules. Next time, we begin with Nirvana, the death of hair metal, and why you should watch music videos with a stopwatch.