Ghosts of Gen-X
Sometimes I watch footage of artists who marked my adolescence and feel an anguish there isn’t quite a word for yet. It’s not quite saudade; it’s specific to the pace of what I perceive as the 1990s, captured on celluloid and digitised, fractured by strips of static. It is the stoned drawl of dead grunge singers in torn jeans, the awkward beauty of the likes of Fiona Apple and Hope Sandoval and their inability to play the game of rapid-fire Q&As understood to be integral to being a public figure. There is a dreaded reductionism in the term zeitgeist, which I reluctantly use, knowing that while in truth the decade began with the Gulf War and ended with the most political blowjob in history, I can’t help but associate it with a quiet retraction. Writers were given hour-long interviews on national television, the internet had not yet entered every home and I was indoctrinated by the tail-end of media which demanded patience. I don’t remember Kurt Cobain’s death, but I remember the despair of young men who do. I never had to wait for mail-order magazines but when I was fifteen I spent hours in an Oxfam Music judging how best to spend the little money I had on a CD going by its artwork and tracklisting. Some of those albums ended up on bonfires, some of them are returned to code on my Mac, some formed my greatest musical obsessions and some were made by people I would idolise, then meet ten years later and wish I hadn’t.
When I was nineteen I fell in love with a musician fifteen years my senior. I mistook his loneliness for independence and emotional ineptitude for stoicism. He had been in a band which got close to ‘making it’ and never got over the concessions he had to make in order to make a living, so he lived in the past. His house was a cornucopia of obsessional reverie. The get-to-know-you portion was spent two days straight getting high, leafing through magazines older than our parents and listening to every record we could. I trawled through his bookcases slipping vinyl from sleeves with the care of a Rabbi because he was so precious about his things, and we frantically swapped one for another, having to lift the needle and adjust dials, a process more tactile and therefore more erotic than clicking a touchpad. We knew that we were both going to die and that there wasn’t enough time to swap all the articles and short stories, to listen to all the LPs all the way through. We drove the Welsh coast sometimes at a slow pace, listening to Zeppelin while visiting sites which inspired songs, and sometimes faster, consuming lines of speed and hours of Psychic TV. In anxious anticipation of the acceleration of time and culture and its transition from analogue to digital, under the suspicion that we would lose this space for road trips and languishing, he digitised huge libraries of music for me. He would stay in his den of antiquity and I, the Millennial, would leave with my black box labelled 1960–1999. He gifted me a prehistory.
What he gave me were relics he thought encompassed his era: the generation which resisted all the gaudy consumerism left over from the golden age of capitalism; the generation of flannel and nihilism, of the resistance to smiling television faces, work and the pursuit of happiness; the generation of Prozac Nation. For someone entrenched in the endless proliferation of identity politics, the ADHD buzz of social media and acceleration of absolutely everything, I find that Generation X suddenly tugs at my sleeves with the quiet dignity of a weaponised silence, a sort of monument to boredom as a political decision to be unmoved by the shit outside. I discovered everything Genesis P-Orridge had ever done through him, he put it all on there for me. The night I found him most endearing was also the night I fell out of love with him. He was depressed and wanted to stay in watching old bootlegs and documentaries. We watched the one in which Courtney definitely had Kurt killed, then I watched him gazing at home videos of Perry Farrell and his old girlfriend and muse letting off fireworks in their bedroom, scaring the shit out of their pet chicken; young, hopeful and in love, or just pale and high. I realised he would never exist in the present with me.
Recently I caught up with what Genesis was doing and started listening to Psychic TV again. I tried and failed to recall where I had lost the black box circa 1960–1999; I always lose something moving homes. This collection is notable because it contained the files most difficult to reacquire: all the bootlegs, demos, the projects under various names. Hours of work led to the collection, but the collection was also a fetish — a magical object onto which each stage of work marked an inscription of us. I have no way of contacting him, even if I wanted to; the black box contained him, at least in part. It was the only ghost of us that I possessed, and losing it taught me that even ghosts can die.
When I was eight years old, I discovered that Princess Diana had died, in a mass of hysterical Brits huddled around a café television broadcasting from Westminster to Spain. I asked my mother why she cried and she answered the wrong question, simply reiterating “Diana is dead!” I wanted to understand my mother’s connection to this event. It was my first experience of collective and public mourning. I knew that I stood very much outside of the outcry but it didn’t bother me; I was a child. Now it almost makes me envious. When Bowie died I was with another Gen X man I had a relationship with throughout my twenties. He cried for two days, lit candles, and we played every album start to finish over the course of a week. There was a portrait of Ziggy hanging in our living room, an effigy to the queer, the posthuman, to a generation daydreaming its way out of the despair of hegemony. While I love much of the music and appreciate Bowie’s integral role in pop culture, I wasn’t sure how much mourning I deserved to do. My partner was distraught; he lived through the birth and death of a star. I was merely standing by quietly holding onto the markers of my past while they all got cancelled for problematic behaviour. I held space for his sadness and he moved on, but something lingered for me.
Generation X could not embody the aesthetics and ideals of the generation preceding them, and so they built a fortress of quiet melancholia, a resistance to speed and volume. The men mourning Kurt Cobain and David Bowie could not do so directly, so they connected with their youths and all that they contained through these effigies; scratched VHS tapes, bootleg records and DIY altars. We build monuments to the past through which to mourn it because we cannot possibly live it again. Generation X was cast into silence and it resulted in the mass production of tangible objects, many of them surplus and hurled into landfills, but all of them attempts at preserving a moment in time, sustaining a silence. My generation articulates with such speed and abundance that we break web servers, but there are no huddled masses; deaths are inscribed on a web feed and forgotten as fast as the next stone is cast at the next idol to be condemned. The acceleration of data, of discourse and aesthetics, was a necessary turn away from the navel-gazing effect of a generation often accused of political silence, but it leaves me cold. Silence was never a powerful enough weapon to counter the protrusion of the imagined Atom Bomb, grunge was never going to topple consumerism, but an unleashed acceleration of aimless articulation of anything and everything is not the antidote to cultural constipation. We need to imagine a different future.
It doesn’t surprise me that this cultural impasse produced Vaporwave, a musical and aesthetic sensibility that monumentalises a future which never happened via a past which was never experienced. It literally illustrates the impossibility of direct experience I have encountered through my sitting adjacent to the nostalgia of people I have loved. I exist in a violent oscillation between unprocessed pasts and futures unrealised, and the dreamy pastels of a techno-utopian vision pasted over the haunting crackling of repurposed music amount to an anachronism which is as haunting as it is comforting. It points to something we never had in order to shine a light at something that might be, and this contains a nostalgia I have always felt prohibited from, and a hope I feel we are bereft of.
I was raised on the cusp of the transition of ghosts from the analogue to the digital. Was Kurt Cobain’s death ever really mine? No, but it was never really theirs either. I have grown up to learn that my partners’ stoicism wasn’t cool; it was emotional constipation. Our age gap wasn’t a testament to my wisdom but their midlife crises. It was probably the quiet machinations of misogyny that had everyone convinced that Courtney killed Kurt. I have also learned it is OK to long for the crackles in the uploads and for quiet cynicism. Most of all, I have learned that in our endless speech we forget to make anything and just end up more alienated from one another no matter how much we articulate.
Originally published at http://girlgotakeyboard.wordpress.com on July 26, 2020.
