Within a few weeks, a big “X” appeared. on mobile phones around the world, the undoubted revenge of if not a generation, then at least one of its most successful descendants. OUR the millions of women and men born in the West between 1965 and 1980 may be going through hard times, poorer, more uncertain and more disillusioned than the boomers who preceded them. and less adapted to modernity than the millennials, zoomers and alphas that followed them, but what’s left of Generation X is a huge legacy, a legacy that conditions the present despite the uncertainty and predicament of the people. Starting with the fact that “X” was chosen (unfortunately, at least according to the author) to replace the twitter bird, and before that they gave the name to the space conqueror (Space X), the first electric SUV (Tesla Model X) and one of numerous children (full name X AE A-12) 52-year-old Elon Musk, the most disturbing and ubiquitous representative of “Generation X”.
Kurt Cobain in a floral skirt
Being a fleeting and usually poor generation compared to the previous generation, X has made its mark, and sometimes ahead of its time. Creating with Nirvana an immortal and still influential album like doesn’t matter , Kurt Cobain frequently appeared on stage in a floral print skirt, a gender-bending gesture in the traditionally masculine world of American rock, thirty years before Timothée Chalamet’s outfits (Cobain was a neo-feminist and anti-MeToo, and in interviews he said things like “instead of to teach women how to defend themselves, men need to be taught not to harass”).
MICHEL HOUELMEC SAID THAT IS LEAVING DECADES BACK. KURT COBAIN IN SINGLE WAITING #METOO. IN 1995 THE FILM “L’ODIO” BURNED IN THE SUBURBIA WHILE AMMANITI AND VIRCI (PR) WATCHED ANOTHER ITALY
New cannibals
If Douglas Coupland may have disappeared somewhat on the international stage after suggesting the name “X” in his 1991 book, in France Michel Houellebecq published his first novel three years later. Expanding the area of struggle becoming the main character of world literature, and remains so to this day. In extension Welbeck, or rather its main character – expresses the most ruthless disappointment in professional life, decades before the quiet departure (detachment from work, which is so much talked about today), and it renews the class struggle by extending it to the sexual life, the new battlefield of liberalism, and not just the economic one. In Italy, the 1990s spawned the cannibal literary movement (from the anthology Gioventù cannibale, Einaudi 1996) and authors who are destined to live like Niccolò Ammanitiand from the same year august holidays From Paolo VirziWhat with Silvio Orlando and Sabrina Ferilli christens the birth of what over the years will be called “left ZTL”, away from the proletarians, but close to the historical centers of the thinking middle class, reading books and despising television.
MADONNA WAS BORN A FEW YEARS BEFORE THE GENERATION DESCRIBED BY DOUGLAS COPELAND, BUT IT WAS THE ONE THAT RECOGNIZED TODAY’S FEMALE POWER, HAIRED BY BEYONCE AND TAYLOR SWIFT.
Nahel Marzouk killed by a police officer
The French generation X made a film like “Hatred”, in which in 1995 new star Vincent Cassel talks about the suburbs and the police, which, unfortunately, turns out to be relevant in the summer of 2023, when 17-year-old Nahel Marzouk is murdered. police officer during a check in Nanterre. Then there’s Daft Punk and, more generally, the French Touch movement that influenced world music.from Air to Phoenix by Thomas Mars, husband of Sofia Coppola, author in 1998 Virgin Suicides Sophie Marceau del apple time But also the icon “X” Charlotte Gainsbourg, able to link several eras and several worlds in music and cinema: the worlds of parents Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, stars of the 60s and 70s, with the worlds of the Danish director Lars von Trier. or the great American Beck, who, after the 1994 Generation X anthem Loser – Soy un persodor / I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me? – continued to release great albums for decades (from Odelay to Sea Change) until Hyperspace in 2019, collaborating with another fifty-year-old Pharrell Williams, in turn “X” and a few months ago appointed artistic director of global luxury giant Louis Vuitton.
Influence on those who came after
First of all, the continuous light of Madonna, born a few years earlier than the convention that started the generation in 1965 (Madonna from 1958, and Coupland himself from 1961), but definitely an “X” in the ability to elevate the feminine power later embodied by Beyoncé . or move between genres, as Taylor Swift does today. Sandwiched between boomers and “Y”, “Z” and the company, “X” can be vague and confusing, but for this very reason, perhaps the most influential generation of our time.
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