Do youth ever make their own culture?
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- Опубліковано 6 тра 2023
- Or is it just the olds? Let's look at Millenials, Boomers, Zoomers and Generation X.
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as a member of gen z we need to make the absolute silliest, zaniest culture for the next generation
I can’t wait for the “Thesis on silly people”
Depression 2.0
FR. I do my damn best to help make our own culture as a generation
God gives his toughest battles to the silliest goobers
We already did
I teach high school, and what I find intriguing is not just that the students of this generation are often making their own culture, but also that in the absence of gatekeepers, they often cherry-pick from previous cultures to their individualistic liking. I have students who are obsessed with early hip hop, or tv from the ‘70s, or silent films. Thanks to the massive cultural library of the internet, they can immerse themselves in the cultures of the past and have a wildly different take on the world than their peers.
Exactly this is why I swear I was born too soon.
I'm an Xer, and one of the UA-cam channels I follow are a group of teenagers who just goof around. What surprises me is that all the music in their videos are from the 70s, 80s and 90s. When I was a teenager in the 80s, it would never occur to me listen to 30 to 50 year old popular music. For example, I was 12 years old when Elvis died, and I had never heard of him until then.
@@Alex_Plante I was born in 1990 and listen to 70's, 80's, 90's, 2000's, stuff that my dad listened to and older siblings and cousins listen to. But I don't really listen to stuff from Elvis' era or before. My 10 yo also likes some of that same music.
I don't think it's really a generational thing, 70's and 80's just objectively has timeless classics and you happened to be born in a time when they were new.
@@Alex_Plante Its funny because a lot of the huge Marvel movies like Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy have included tons of hits from before the 2000's that now I, as a zoomer, have come to enjoy listening to
I'm thankful because I personally don't enjoy artist like Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, and mumble rap, but I got to explore and discover classic rock and indie music through my high school years despite the prevalence of these artists on the radio. Everyone got to find what they wanted from where they wanted without needing to wait for radio time or pay for records/CDs it's pretty nice
One argument against this approach is pretty simple: only young people decide what parts of culture to adopt as their own youth culture. The young may not be the ones making the content, but they're the ones who choose to either adopt it as their culture or discard it. In that sense, they construct their own culture without actually producing its parts.
Bellwether
I'd say that's half true, a lot of stuff like music ends up on the radio because of previous gens more than later gens, and growing up with something influences people to associate it with different feelings. It's only more recently with online streaming where younger people can be far choosier and not just have to deal with "Programming", both on TV and on Radio, you don't watch what's on or listen to what's playing, you look it up.
That may partially be why Zoomers trend a lot closer to their gen or within their gen than the past generations.
It's not really an argument against the theory as it's well established that children are very impressionable and their experience in early life will reflect on their future life in major ways. This is a completely undisputed fact. Considering the influence of the media, their parents, and their community live in, and almost none of the culture they grow up with is theirs. They have minimal influence. If you're parents raise you in a religion there's a 80% chance you'll adopt that religion long into adulthood, if your parents talk politics you have a 80% chance to adopt their politics even through college and into late life. People don't change as much as people think, they just put on a different mask.
so you're telling me they walk into a space that's been created by someone else and act like they made the rules and destroy whatever they feel like
@@fawnrot No one is saying that.
i think vine deserves to be mentioned in regard to the young mellinial and older gen z crowd. something created by us, for us, and arguably has defined and/or created the platform for that group's comedy culture today
Yes! Vine definitely fed into the modern meme culture in a big way.
Vine wasn’t really gen Z. Even the oldest ones were like 14 when it was around.
@@666sk8erguy yeah my sister was a millennial on it when i was like 5 but i still can quote a lot of them 🤷🏻♀️
@@LilacBadger You were 5 when Vine was popular?? Oh my god am I really that old?
would Vine really be classified as Gen Z though considering its biggest creators are now pushing 30 which makes them late Millennials/ early GenZ
I feel like for Gen Z, one of the most culturally significant works was SpongeBob, a show made mostly by Gen Xers and Boomers. The fact that it has stayed so universally prominent with people my age for over 20 years is really impressive.
20 years is rookie stuff. In the 80's we were watching Warner Bros cartoons from the 40's and 50's. lol
@@rustydowd879 yeah, you may have watched tom and jerry as a kid, but were people 10 years older than you also watching, referencing, and quoting tom and jerry religiously?
@@playerwil , Tom and Jerry were MGM back then. I'm talking about Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, etc al. If I quoted a Looney Tune, not only would my parents get it, my grandparents would too. WB cartoons were cultural bedrock back then.
I absolutely agree. I remember the day I had to break the news of Spongebob's original creator dying to my peers. It had a profound effect on a lot of us.
@@rustydowd879 okay boomer u had like 3 tv channels. We have the entire internet and almost every zoomer still knows and understands spongebob references
as a zoomer, Frankie off the Chizzle was my go to sitcom growing up. thanks J.J. for giving light to this very underrated show
Still remember the theme song
season 3 sucked tho
@@Folgemilch21season 3 was the best one I bet you were the one guy that like season 4
It exists now, doesn't it....
What even is is lmao?
It honestly makes so much sense that the kids who grew up in the 60s were the ones that made 80s and 90s comedies
and those that grew up on the 80s and 90s are making the 2020 comedies
Hi JJ, long time Friend, first time commenter. I am a folklorist for my career; I work for a state government in America and I travel my state identifying, recording, and promoting our state traditions. And I think what this video is approaching but doesn't quite mention is the difference between popular culture and folk culture. I think what you and the New Yorker are noticing is that older generations make youth popular culture, but in terms of what sticks in a generation (what becomes generational folklore) is up to the youth to self select. The most interesting thing about the internet is that its self moderation means we get a closer look at generational self selection for folk culture. My colleague Andrew Peck at Miami University of Ohio writes about how corporations "kill memes" because a corporation can't utilize the self moderated flow of transmission like the greater vernacular internet. i think that's related; a generation's popular culture and folk culture have different modes of transmission, and I think this video illustrates those different modes in an interesting way.
Great comment. I think Memes have become as much of a valid generational cornerstone as other more established media. Perhaps more so, as they burn brightly and quickly into the zeitgeist before disappearing. A year down the track, people not exposed to a particular internet meme are not likely to have any idea what it means, but for people who caught it, it may become a common reference among their peer group in the same way as a hit song or a key TV episode was for their parents generations.
There are some corporations that have hired gen z people to run their TikToks and actually make good memes
@@trevormoffat4054 great comment as well. i think you make a good point of people forming connections around memes and its quick-paced, segemented culture, and to that extent, I think it is the catalyst to our communal concerns nowadays. friendships seem scarcer than ever and somehow it feels as though we're more fragmented than pre-internet generations
@@tjwestbrk you are certainly correct about the fragmentation of current generations. It’s becoming a common refrain- “More connected, but lonelier than ever before”.
That is such a cool job!
As a 2001-born European, I can say an important feature of zoomer culture is the death of the monoculture. Since the mid-2000s, personalized social media feeds have put us in increasingly isolated bubbles, with names and references typically familiar within some, but not all of them. Therefore, music and movies don't sell in numbers as impressive as before (though that's of course also due to the streaming industry). Essentially, there's a lot more media out there to consume, and very rarely do we find any one piece of media that the majority of zoomers care about. Even the artists you mentioned aren't as big as their millennial or gen-X equivalents.
I think my lived experience absolutely confirms your thesis. As a member of Gen X I have a literal memory of the point when I realized that there where more good books out there then I would ever be able to consume. However, I did not feel that way about video games or TV or movies or music. I could pretty much count on all my peers consuming roughly the same video games and TV shows etc. as I did. There was some point past 2000 when all of this simply ceased to be true. There was now so many shows (primarily streamed) and movies and musical groups and genres and maybe especially video games that it was impossible to consume any large chunk of the most popular stuff. The culture went from huge swathes generally consuming roughly the same thing to everyone involved in a choose your own adventure based on their tastes and often just luck of the draw about what they happen to find that they like.
I recall reading somewhere that Elvis was the first 'super group' musician. Someone that everyone listened to, while U2 was the last super group. Even someone as big as Brittany Spears only ever had a minority as her fan base.
Very true, and Im not sure whether or not to be happy or sad about it. On one hand, there is a lot more out there to enjoy. On the other, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to relate to other people my age. Im only 23 and I’m already starting to feel kind of out of touch. It’s surreal.
As far as being an effect of media saturation that is true. But otherwise the trend is towards global monoculture via globalization. It also seem like subcultures are not what they once were. Previously young people were often divided into somewhat rigid subcultures: jocks, skaters, geeks, gearheads, etc. each with their own standards, tastes and values. Gen Z seems to be drifting away from this and are much more accepting of other people's differences. At least that's how it seems to me here in the States.
I'd like to add that the times when something breaks the standard, it last a much shorter time in cultural memory. For example, everyone I knew was talking about tiger king and squid games and now it's silent. Like bringing up tiger king is cringe or too far in the past
Today is even more of a monoculture. Consuming different media from your neighbor doesn't constitute an entirely new culture. What you're talking about is a change in celebrity culture. More people started favoring microcelebrities.
I think that the youth’s role in this cultural dialogue are not as either cultural creators or as passive consumers, but as the tastemakers. As you said, people older than them tend to make the media - for the various reasons listed - but the olds (for lack of a better term) make many genres and tastes of media. It is the youth that as a general collective resonate with the certain media pieces, trends, and styles that become associated with them.
I think that's true, though they often wind up liking stuff that is a product of experiences not their own.
Excellent point!
I like that, the staying power of any group or work is determined by the desire for its presence. Young people thereby dictate the culture by curating what is most relevant to the time period.
In a certain documentary "The Merchants of Cool" they explain that the best demographic to market to are older teens and young adults because they are at an age where they have just the right combination of enough disposable income and little enough sense that they are willing to spend the most money on stupid shit, stupid shit being defined here as "severely marked up novelties whose profit per unit sold is particularly high". Second place is toddlers and kids because they can get their parents to buy even stupider shit by that same definition, but not at nearly the same volume. Difference is that nearly all young kid shit is inane drivel that doesn't become a cultural touchstone unless the gods of irony decide that it is a cultural totem that is celebrated ironically when older, which isn't a lottery of odd interest you should expect to win.
thats a lot of words to say that young people decide what young people like
I'm a writer, the older I get the more clear this becomes. I used to be hyper-obsessed with the idea of catching the moment of the youth geist and being representative of a particular portion of time (feeling that if I grew old my cultural awareness would wither and I would simply become a fogey/frump), but my amateurish attempts in my late teens and early twenties were often no more than that, amateur. I realized a lot of artists were not quite like one of my idols, Brett Easton Ellis, and don't just start churning out great novels at 19--not that his first were anything particularly great, though they were innovative and spoke to the change that was to come to literature in the 80s and 90s. All this is simply to say that now I am 100 pages into something that actually feels professional, after so many failed attempts, settling well into my late twenties and excited to potentially take the next decade improving and growing this work, rather than pumping something out to be part of the times.
Good job man, hope you do well :)
Beautifully said, I wish you all the best ❤
In my early twenties feeling very angsty and like I’m running out of time, this helps a bit
I 100% agree on this, and it's pretty plain to see that most authors throughout history just didn't get good at the craft until they were older and had more experience in the world. Many, if not most of the great authors didn't make it big until their 40s or 50s.
Likewise, as JJ pointed out, this applies to writing music, movies, and UA-cam too.
We tend to think of actors starting out as young and pretty people, but surprise, basically everyone *playing* a teenager in movies and TV is in their 30s because they're just not good, experienced actors until that stage in their lives. Besides, makeup can fix that anyway.
Long story short, 19 year olds are almost always incompetent, inexperienced, and as far from being well-polished as you can get. Mary Shelley being one of the few outliers.
Your best work will probably come to be by your 40s or 50s. That's just how it is, and too many young people don't realize this.
Unless you're a musician probably; their best work usually comes out between their mid 20s and mid 30s.
Man, that mention of Franky Off the Chizzle really took me back. So much nostalgia!
I dead ass said “who tf is that”
I assumed it was just a Canadian show.
I thought that was a s*x move?
hey! go back to breaking dirt blocks!
Franky OTC absolutely ROCKS!!!
One time when I was 12 and had the flu I asked my mom to go pick up a copy of the newest Mad Magazine for me to read, and she couldn't find one and got me an issue of Adbusters because she was told it was basically the same thing. That was a bad few days.
I loled
I loled
I loled
I loled
I lmfaoed
They didn't often make their own culture but what happened to hit a stride with the youth is what became culture, not always the things the movers and shakers expected to be popular.
Suprised to see you here
True
Yeah. I feel like although the previous generation created most of the things we associate with the following generation, the greatness from the people of that past generation were only cemented by the following generation. It's only that those particular individuals were "different" from the others of their older, out-of-touch generation and somehow "understand" the youth, thus accepted as being "one of them" instead. That begs the question, does that person's success become a fruit of the old generation or does the generation that bought the tickets and praised them take credit for their success?
what a great point
The cooks dont care what menu item you choose, so long as you eat their food.
I think this is actually quite a nice sentiment, because it doesn't put the youth in constant conflict with the older generations, but the older generations as actively part of youth culture. I always felt that artists were younger than they often were, and often had a sense that even if they were old, they understood young people better than other adults did (probably not true, but who knows). I think nowadays, this is changing with Tik Tok, UA-cam, and Twitch, with Gen Z making a lot of their own culture, but also, the internet has made it possible to sift through libraries of the past.
So, as much as Gen Z appears impenetrable, they actually draw on and tend to appreciate older aesthetics and content, because it's stuff they genuinely like. Also, Millennials aren't in the youth phase anymore, but it's obvious how powerful our generation is economically now. So much content is stuff that derives from the 1980s and 1990s nowadays.
I am on the old side of Gen Z myself, and I find it really hard to relate to the culture of younger zoomers. I grew up with the Internet and started actively using computers basically as soon as I was able to barely operate a keyboard, but I also spent a good chunk of my child- and teenhood without smartphones or social media. I remember me in 6th grade being jealous of the rich kid who had an iPhone while everyone else still used those crappy flip phones. I remember us sending each other apks of games like Doodlejump over Bluetooth because none of us had a proper Android phone yet, and me using a 3DS to browse the Internet back when my laptop broke.
This might just be the "my group is inherently special" type projection that you see with every generation, but I really think that the label of Gen Z is flawed for throwing together two age groups with such vastly different life experiences. The introduction of smartphones and social media into every aspect of daily life changed society possibly even more than the Internet itself, and their long lasting effects on the development of children/teenagers are yet to be fully understood. I'm personally very grateful for having been born into that sweet spot where I was able to enjoy everything the Internet had to offer at a very young age, without being brainwashed and manipulated by social media algorithms.
I still argue Zillenials (94-99ish) had some of the most unique coming of age experiences because of the phenomenon you described.
To be fair, everyone is “brainwashed”, but for different things for better or worse. That’s what social norms are for. They brainwash you into staying in check with society, which can arguably be a good thing. Anyone, brainwashed or not, will call themselves “not brainwashed”, because we see others’ biases as flawed products of brainwashing but our own biases as virtuous beliefs. It’s the inherent closed mindedness that shuts us off and makes so many generations, from the beginning of human civilization, say “back in my day”. You’re right, it is a “my group is special” projection to say, “we are smart (I’m part of your ‘group’) but the young’uns are brainwashed drones.” I think we should give the younger “gen Z’ers” time to grow into older individuals before harshly judging them before many of them can even read a book-kids are brainwash able. We were too, but we grow out of (hopefully) our younger selves. I’m sure the previous generation could see our bumbling young selves as brainwashed, internet-addicted, spoiled and priveleges fools, too. Remember, just a few hundred years ago, reading books was the “TikTok” of back then that the older generation looked down upon.
I feel like this is why many people prefer micro generations instead. A 5 year span makes more sense to me than a 16 year span.
Yeah I liked the fact my childhood was enhanced by technology not taken over by it.
I’m 15, so one of the youngest gen zs and we probably have more in common with gen alpha - I was admittedly an ipad kid. (i still am) (I don’t have a phone) I definitely feel inbetween-y too.
I didn't grow up with any of the TV shows he mentioned, I’ve watched a few episodes maybe, but I just looked it up and I was a baby when the suite life ended. My little brother is 11, so officially gen alpha and he and his friends are actually so adorable. They probably do get too much screen time, but I’m so glad they’re growing up with bluey lol
This is reassuring as a young person. Youth culture masquerades as being made by the youth by using young actors and performers, and when you're young it can give you the impression that you're past your prime if you haven't made an impact on the world yet by age 25. But in reality, while the faces of culture tend to be in their teens or 20s, the people who make the biggest creative or innovative impact are almost always much older.
"The Man Is Sticking It To The Man" is a real thing. I daresay that even younger people making it big send a distorted image of their world view. About the only one who is 100% honest on his situation is Cr1tikal, since he has always been humble about flaunting his opulence and explained time and time again that he's only allowed to live that lifestyle and invest in people and projects because he rolled really high on the lottery of life. You watch other big shots that are younger than 30 and you'd think they're all self made men or that their influence comes out by their mere existence.
Somebody (a scammer, I think) once said something along the lines of *"if you were younger than a teenager in the 90s, you don't really remember the 90s, you only remember the marketing"* ... and I think that's true for most generations. Everybody starts by consuming passively, then they start to copy and follow, and by the time they finnished creating their own identity it's likely there will be already younger people copying them.
This is also reassuring as a middle-aged person. Nice to know that I may still be able to create something that resonates with youth and I haven't completely missed the boat by not having succeeded at it (well not too much at least, one thing I did was somewhat popular) in my 20s.
Look up Rick Rubin if you've never heard of him. He was an extremely culturally influential figure through the music he helped produce well into middle age.
Same. I’m gonna be 30 in a few years, and I keep thinking that’s the point when I’ll be basically past my prime and no longer “with it”, but honestly, I think I have the rest of my life to make good IPs for society and make a positive impact on the world.
Intuitively this makes perfect sense. When elder gen Alpha is in high school, experiencing their youth culture, they’re going to be too young to actively be writing, directing, and many too young to be acting in media that alpha will watch. At least, that was the case until hyper-media like TikTok lowered the bar of creation requirements to near-nothing aside from a camera and idea. So maybe this won’t hold up in the future, but makes sense for every previous generation
This is interesting to read, because while I wasn’t old enough to experience this, I do remember that UA-cam was initially viewed as the kind of site where all you needed to do to make it big was grab a camera and start filming yourself. Even though I only got onto UA-cam in the early 2010s, I still remember many people had that perception until it started to fade away by the late 2010s as UA-cam became more professional, even though even by the early 2010s, there arguably was a fairly large shift away from pure amateur works towards semi-professional individuals that were good at making videos of their chosen genre.
@@Treviisolion And we still think UA-camrs as more approchable and below cable tv, even though the average UA-camr is probably just as relevant as many niche cable shows from the 2000s were. Heck, something like G4 was way more niche than many Twitch streamers and UA-cam reviewers.
You could say the same about UA-cam, especially if your around from the start. This platform and it’s influencers and creativity has changed dramatically
@@Treviisolion yea I would say the UA-cam of 2005-2009 was the most authentic.
@@mastersnet18 if only there were still something like this today. I'd probably be all over it!
As someone born in 1999 I feel like people from 1996-2001 should have their own category, we tend to get along more with millennials not so much zoomers and are just old enough to know what it’s like to not have crazy technology while also knowing everything about tech because we grew up during its boom
As a millennial I am frequently innundated with millennials who claim to not be millennials for exactly this reason. '87 for me, '82 for my sister, and I know people born in '89 who will fight tooth and nail that they aren't millennials, they're Gen X, according to them. Just, accept your generation for what you've been lumped in with and stop hating on the rest of them, you're part of the statistics being generated for that generation, you may just not see yourself as represented by the image portrayed and reported on.
As somebody born in 2001, I completely agree.
The fact that literal children don't become cultural icons for their fellow children is some deep philosophical stuff. Props to that guy from New Yorker.
Hey, it took that guy decades to realize children make terrible public figures.
Right? All those words just to say, "Generation is defined by when you're born, culture is defined by adults at that time
Teenagers aren't children. Those old enought to work in menial jobs are old enought to work in cultural jobs. It is like applying Lenin's concept of Proletkult to age instead of class.
@@Ribulose15diphosphat what i dont get is what are we defining as youth, is it just under 18, so 21 isnt young.
@@Ribulose15diphosphat this might come as a shock, but shelf stockers and soundstage cleaners aren't exactly the pioneers of culture
Always hated the hard cut offs to the generational tags. As someone who was born on the late edge of Gen X. My friends were certainly influenced but Gen X but completely too young to have any effect on it, but millennial culture always seemed too young for us.
Yeah it's all very arbitrary. Though in the context of this video, it is helpful in illustrating how old "young" celebs like, say, Justin Timberlake tend to be.
Yeah that was my thought too. The general trend is that kids consume stuff by a bit older people but the hard lines don't make sense.
That’s how I feel as an older gen z. My brother is older than me and was born in 1995, as were most of his friends, so I always felt on the cusp. Not being in high school makes me feel too old to be gen z now…
@@JJMcCullough I would say most of the singers and bands probably are young enough to fit their generations these days. Since record companies specifically want young people. But keep in mind many of them don't write their own music. How much of current music written and produced by record companies? All they want is a face, and someone who can sing halfway decent, although with autotune even that isn't necessary. I would still say older people are running things. Kind of sad.
Plus it's way too US centric. For example a lot of stuff considered part of the 'Millenial' generation were still in effect well into the early 2000s in Europe (eg 90s Cartoon Network shows airing during the mid 2000s). Plus class also has an effect, since people who aren't as well off can't get all of the newest stuff immediately. The whole generation labels just seem really arbitrary and stupid.
I find comfort in this. As a 27 year old creative that's only now starting to get off her ass, it's nice to know that not everybody got famous by the time they were my age. Shoutout to the Greenpeace guy who didn't start Greenpeace until his 60s.
What do you make?
I'm interested too lol
Your last point is so fascinating. What is the societal and psychological effect of having a youth culture that was actually created by youth-- with all their passion, anxiety, and inexperience-- as opposed to one that was "moderated" by an older generation?
Another interesting aspect of the Gen X, Millennial and Zoomer divide comes in the form of tech. Although the further down the line you go in generations, the more they're associated with computer science, programming, information gathering, the works, the reality of it is that there is a steady decline in the tech savviness of the later generations compared to the earlier ones. For instance, a lot of programmers, game developers and innovators are people who were born during peak Gen X and studied from scratch how to do their thing, Millennials went on to learn and innovate from them and Zoomers tend to have a very mixed relationship with working on tech. As the technology grows easier to use, there's less of a need to learn its intrinsic value. Most people on the younger side I know can't even understand the structure of a filesystem.
I may be a Zoomer, however I have been working with tech at a young age. My taste for computers is a big part of why I am wanting to major in computer science. (New High school graduate)
I’ve spent hundreds of dollars (maybe over a thousand dollars) on special software for my day-to-day use, yet deep down, it’s all just code.
I’m already diving into Firefox theme design, as well as a little bit of programming.
as a gen X whose Grandma talked about wind-up cars and the emergence of telephones and then tv, furnaces in homes etc....this tech difference is not new or unique to the last three generations.
I remember reading an article that speculated that as technology and our standards of life continue to improve, the "smart" people will continue to get smarter, while the "dumb" people will get dumber. The writer said this was because as life becomes easier, most people will no longer need to be as savvy and thus grow dumber, while the smart ones will need to become smarter as they become fewer and thus need to be able to sustain the existing tech for the "dumber" majority.
Not sure I buy fully into it, but the decline of tech savviness of zoomers and Gen alpha leads me to believe there is some truth in that speculation
@@hardlo7146 I can believe in the Idiocracy theory. Though I'd say it's more that the technology is just a side effect of people getting unused to war and famine in the West or being kept under autocratic governments in the East.
You’re correct that youth culture was generally crafted by the older generation as they were the ones with the capital and connections to create movies, music and games. However this is being turned on its head with the current UA-cam and TikTok generation who bypass traditional media and are actively creating the culture themselves.
That is a really good point, but I'd argue the overwhelming majority of creators who are currently successful on those platforms are, and the youngest, older Zoomers.
The trends are actually mostly shaped by those who control the algorithms though. That's still the older people with money.
I think when Gen Z's humor and culture will be analyzed in a few decade's time, the biggest things that will stand out are how connected and universal the internet made our experiences, and how absurdist our humor tends to be. I think that's fascinating!
"culture" lol you mean self obsessed narcissism?
I completely agree with your comment about how the "humor" in Gen Z's culture is influenced by the connected and universal nature of the internet. Though what is often overlooked is that this form of humor often involves referencing previous jokes or memes, which can create a sense of absurdity for those who are not familiar with the reference.
Dialects, for example, can be viewed as absurd too if people from different parts of the world try to interpret them. The unique linguistic structures and references of dialects can be difficult to understand for those who are not familiar with them. Similarly, in Gen Z's culture, jokes and memes may contain references that are specific to certain online communities and cultures, making them difficult to understand for those who are not part of those communities.
I do want to point out that calling it absurd might not be the best way to describe it since it has a negative connotation to it. Instead, calling it abstract or complex might be more appropriate. To neglect any biases it is important to note that this humor is often misunderstood by people of older generations, those who fall out of touch, or those who are not online quite a lot or part of various communities.
@@CrisStan love your response, great points here! An aspect is how quickly trends come and go on the internet when everyone’s constantly online, so layers can be built up extremely quickly which completely divorces jokes from any origin or meaning
@@MythicBricks what a circle jerk we have going on here hahaha
@@MythicBricks Exactly. It becomes more of a game of "remember this," rather than it's funny because it's true. Which I honestly don't mind as long as I get the references. In my mind it also relates to nostalgia, as Gen Z is also known to be the nostalgia generation, that being-- being born with technology at a young age and reminiscing at how primitive and archaic it was. Therefore meaning from memories has a strong effect on what some find funny or not.
I think about this a lot when I'm teaching K-12 students. They often seemed shocked when I know something about pop culture or they usually think of me as super old, and I roll my eyes, because I know that a lot of the people who they idolize are Millennials or even Gen-Xers--especially when they saunter into the room singing a song as if it were a new thing and I think, "y'all, that song has been around since the year my mom graduated from college!" I'm looking at you Burger King jingle...
I don't know if it's the nature of teaching middle and high school kids (Australia has grades 7-12 in one secondary school), but I've always managed to surprise and shock my students when I can reference their slang (no cap), or their memes, or their idols, etc, because of course, as their teacher, I'm the nebulous "oLd PeRsOn".
As an elder millennial, I've taught baby millenns through to now the oldest alphas. Post-pandemic, I am starting to really feel the difference in my students and I think I can't keep up with the youth culture. What has struck me a lot as a change in the years is how fast the turnover of new memes or slang is in Gen Alpha compared to the Zoomers. Zoomers repeat a phrase or meme ad nauseum for 2-3 years and it'd still be relevant. Now with these alphas? 6 months later you better know that you compliment a kid on their drip and not their fit, etc.
I'm seeing a lot of the kids I teach now also reference touchstones that are of my generation - and then I realise of course, my fellow elder millenns are their parents. So it's a real mixed bag of those students who hear a remixed song, thinking it's new, and those who have millennial parents who've played them the original (or at least, the late 90's early 2000s version, because of course not all our music was original either ;) )
As an older millennial, a huge amount of my youth culture was weird unsupervised internet stuff, geocities sites and neopets fanart and the like, which was all definitely produced my people my age. But I guess the first rule of neopets fanart us we don't talk about neopets fanart.
I'm glad someone is talking about this. The people with enough influence to guide a generation almost always belong to the previous generation. We are more alike than we want to admit
Yep and a lot of these "icons" are also less than 10 years older than the youth that they have the ability to influence so it makes perfect sense that, in the case of bands, most of their members were also within 5 to 10 years of each other's ages.
Then, those of us who later cuspers that are part of the younger third of these generations usually had siblings or friends who were older and consumed that media, resulting in us doing the same.
I think the premise is based on a false asumption since the Boomer generation was barely participating in youth culture during the 1960s. At the end of this decade the oldest would have been 14 while the youngest were 6, this means a very small portion was even old enough. The decade of teen and late teen boomers is really the 70s when you think about it.
@@Mattdewit I guess the question is who makes up the "youth". There are plenty of folks that act like I'm still "the youth" and I'm nearly 30, married with a kid. I think "the youth" is 10-16 as far as who decides what is hip. To discuss whether the premise is fair you have to agree who participates in "youth culture"
Finally! It's about time Franky off the Chizzle got the respect he's due.
Underrated and forgotten show, never even got a dvd release
@@oaf-77 it actually did, but only in Australia, bizarrely. It's huge over there
My parents are both late boomers (1959 and 1963) and they definitely were not old enough to be a part of the 60s cultural revolution. I feel like the culture they experienced in the 70s as teens was probably created by older boomers.
I'm a similar age to them and my cultural 'moment' was in the early to mid 1980s, not even the '70s although I was aware of the more 'mainstream' popular culture in the 1970s, i.e. stuff that was family-friendly and on TV.
Even as a Milennial, I enjoyed Frankie off the Chizzle. Its ability to offer viewers slapstick humor, while delivering social commentary without beating you over the head, lent to its timelessness. Without question, television at its finest.
Knowing Mr. Beast is my age is a blow to my ego I did not need.
As someone born in 1980, I can never help but feel how arbitrary and meaningless these generational divides are. By the timeline given here, I would qualify as Gen X, yet the movies listed as the quintessential Gen X movies came out when I was a child, and I was only 14 when Kurt Cobain died. So when people talk about Gen X youth culture, I don't feel like they're talking about me. I resonate more with the youth culture of the oldest Millennials than I do with the Gen X-ers, but of course I was already an adult and too old to be paying attention for a lot of the youth culture of the younger ones, who really do feel like a separate generation from me and my friends born only a couple of years after me. The fact that I'm supposed to be a member of the grunge generation even though I'd have been a Millennial if I'd been born six months later really makes me wonder why we even bother. Do I have to be a member of any named "generation"? Can't I just be some guy who happens to be a certain age?
the exact divides are bullshit. there definitely is cultural chnge through the decades that affect people growing up at the time. but it's clearly a continuous development, not clear cut new generations.
someome born in 2000 has a very different childhood than you. I, born in 1990, still experienced the pre-cellphone (well before they became a standard) and we did not have a PC at home when I was small. so, my early childhood is somewhat close to a lot of people born in the 80ies but later on, when i became a teen, every kid had a cellphone and things changed
so, you will have some things in common with people born in 1875 and people born in 1885, but those two will likely already have significantly different experiences to eachother
I think so much of it has to do with economic status too. I was born in 1997, but grew up without much access to the internet and 90% of my entertainment was stuff from the 90s. I relate way more to most people I’ve met who were born in the 80s than anyone I’ve met who was born after 2000. I definitely know same-aged people who grew up on the internet and with cell phones, who are totally into the current Gen-Z trends, but it’s not close to all of them.
generational labels are made by and designed by the powerful and elite.It`s to keep us divided and ignore the real enemies of the average person,the top .1% and they are readily spread about by lazy media because simple labels gneralizing 20 years or so of people is a lot easier then going into so many other things that define people
Think of it more like a continuous spectrum than discrete jumps like that
same to me
im from 95 I was 2 years when the zoomers started. Can I even be called millenial? I surely dont see me that way. Im a zoomer
I get into generational study every once and a while and I’m much more on the team of classifying generations by cultural events. I’m only 20 so really the only ones I can speak on are September 11 and the Pandemic. My sister is about 10 years older than me and considered a young millennial. Even though she apparently barely made the cusp she is basically a pure-bred full on millennial who for example still says doggo and whatever because it bothers me lol. I guess I’m a sometimes stereotypical certified zoomer too. Despite being less than a decade apart our childhood worlds were completely separated by 9/11 because although young, she still can remember a “before” period. She was even in school the day it happened, and could probably remember pieces of it. I’ve always separated millennials and zoomers by 2001, almost like it was fact, it kind of seems silly not to imo. Also at that point it was definitely international so there’s not really a regional divide for non-americans like the gens after the wars. As for gen Z and gen Alpha (new current gen), I definitely think the Pandemic is going to serve as a similar period as 2001 did for my group. It’s also almost neatly categorized in the 20 year generation span we usually assign. I think the generation Z cut off should be those who never experienced a “before covid” life, even if they were just really young but don’t remember, like zoomers who were born before 9/11. Anyway, time to show this to my parents and make them mad about celebrities who aren’t actually gen X lmao.
How do you think the Great Recession in 2008 influenced youth culture? What would youth culture look like if it never happened?
I feel so old. ❤😂
Similarly to the cultural effect of 9/11, I believe the boundary between Gen X and Millennial is the memory of the Challenger shuttle disaster.
Ever read Generations by Strauss/Howe?
in my case, the cutoff is reliant on the collapse of one currently non-existent country. basically, if you sorta heard of it but didn't get the impact of the event when it happened or were born no more than 9 years after it, you're a millennial. if you not only remember it, but have a decent grasp of what this event meant, you're gen x
also another thing i'd like to mention is whether you remember life before social media or not. like, i didn't have any accounts before being 14 and i do remember my parents worrying abt me spending too much time on the pc the same way zoomers' parents are worried about their kids and smartphones.
I've recently acquired a medicine ball, i respect that you've got both the balance and strength to make videos while balancing on these nightmares.
I've got a long way to go, thank you for inspiring me JJ!
My parents are both boomers, born in 1960 and 1962. They would have been 10 and 8 when the decade was over. There was no way they could have affected the culture unless it was kid stuff.
Sure but other boomers were born in the 40s and were at the age to be rebellious. I think the whole initial premise is silly.
Eminem in gen x
@@nathanhargenrader645 who else is calling boomers people born in the forties?
@@nathanhargenrader645 I agree.
@@nathanhargenrader645 if you were born in 1945, the earliest born who could be called a boomer, you'd be 24 in 1969 which is still too young to be leading culture.
A trend I've noticed that I think will be interesting to see going forward is the increasing influence of nostalgia on youth culture. The Gen Z mainstream seems much more interested in the media of previous generations, the media of millennials/gen X in particular, than previous generations have in what came before them. I think Olivia Rodrigo is a good example of that, one of the biggest AND youngest Gen Z stars making pop-punk music that was much more an aspect of millennial youth culture rather than Gen Z.
The Gen-Xer's in my cohort were about as much interested in 60s culture as they were 80s. I'm sure a lot of it was aimed at Boomers wanting to relive the good old days, but there are a lot of people my age organically interested in, say, The Doors or Led Zeppelin.
ObZen is still the greatest album ever and it came out in 2008
I was surprised that my 18yo nephew didnt look down on non-current music like it seems that nearly all other generations did. "That's old-people's music; you are not UTD". Instead he was listing to stuff from the 1920s and stuff from previously unknown celebrities from Mongolia, for example, at the same time as listing to the regular radio play. The internet gave him the ability to explore nearly every kind of media from nearly any age and country. Is he a quirky person or is he average of his generation?
@@skybluskyblueifyas someone who will turn 19 in a few days can confirm its quite normal
Ive had convo's with my friends about who their favorite classical composer was the same day as listening to metal with them
One of the fondest things I remember from high school was conversations like this you would have. Glad to still hear your opinions via the UA-cam.
Great video! It makes sense, growing up most of our childhood idols (actors, musicians, sports stars etc.) are usually at least a decade older than us, so naturally most would be in the generation above, but still setting the culture for our generation
I barely started the video but why is JJ dressed like Shaggy
lmao
Im glad someone else had the same thought as me! granted his pants aren't the right color.
Love this topic and it hits directly on something I’ve complained about before. Alongside the New Yorker article’s very understandable frustration with “boomer veneration” there seems to be an opposite phenomenon where (mostly younger) people like to blame boomers for things that happened in the ‘50s or early ‘60s when most of them were like 10 years old.
Oh yes true. Reagan was born in 1911, making him part of what is termed the "Greatest Generation". Also proves not all in the Greatest Generation were so great. :D
Exactly - my parents are boomers but they didn't have the independence or resources to do anything until the early 80s (after graduating university)
Very true
Yes, but don’t forget- to Zoomers, everyone over 25 is a ‘Boomer’. They aren’t talking about a specific generation.
I would really love to see an in-depth examination of this focusing more on the smaller creators. For me and my friends we tend to consume less centralized content, content from a large number of smaller creators or from places like reddit where no one really has a massive following. I would love to see a scientific study or video series exploring what most people from generation consume, not just the bigger things but the smaller ones too.
Grunge really came in at the end of the 80s. Rock was huge, Springsteen, Elton John, Queen, all the 70s rockers exploded in popularity and found a new home in the 80s, it’s rock is often underrated only due to the equally huge success of pop in Michael Jackson and Madonna.
Edit: I included this because ALL of the 80s rock icons were boomers.
As a millennial myself, I associate music from my youth more with pop punk bands.
It honestly feels like that was the last time punk/ alternative rock was really mainstream. Bands like Blink 182, Linkin Park, Fallout Boy, Sum 41, Green Day, Bowling for Soup, etc.
Maybe that was just later in the generation, but I don't see that type of music being as popular these days.
there is a severe lack of electric guitars in the mainstream today, it's criminal!
That was about the only time punk was mainstream. And those of us who were elder punks hated it. Yeah, the sound was a throwback to bands like Chelsea, Eddie and the Hotrods, 999, etc. But the closest any pop punk band from that era ever came to mainstream success were the Ramones.
Really want to annoy elder punks? Remind them the Sex Pistols were a manufactured boy band.
Nothing encapsulated my youth more than RuneScape videos with Simple Plan playing on the background
@@Marshtard is being mainstream a good thing, though?
@@mollieisabellereynolds my tastes are very mainstream, i'm not qualified to answer that
...but anything to remove "shape of you" from the airwaves, yeah
I do think that even though a lot of youth culture is made by people who aren't young, I still think that in the pursuit of selling things to young people you have to still be in tune with what they want. Like, there's plenty of stuff that gets made to target young people that young people will make fun of as "How do you do fellow kids" sort of behavior. While they might not be skilled or knowledgeable to make it themselves, I think trends will still "speak" to young people as something idyllic. Then that evolves into the phenomenon of generations being stuck on issues and trends that were around in their coming of age.
To a certain degree I think this is true, but on the other hand, I think big media defines what youth will like, simply by making the media. Like, because youths can’t choose what is made, only what is consumed, they will end up consuming media and culture that was decided entirely by a previous generation, simply because that is all there is. While there s a degree of choice involved for the young consumer, much greater latitude is exerted by the older producers.
Love this video! Your cultural studies/sociology themed videos are the best!
Honestly this video gave me some hope as an aspiring Zoomer aged artist. The youngest person mentioned here, Olivia Rodrigo, is only one year younger than me and I always feel a sense of dread and frustration when I see people who are successful in the areas I hope to achieve success in are near my age or worse, younger. But honestly this video enlightened me on how its completely possible to be in your 40s and still make a genuine cultural impact.
Yeah man that sh is depressing. Thats one of the most characteristic problems of our generation. Social media effect.
Just know that where there is one Olivia Rodrigo there are more than a million people that age who are not Olivia Rodrigo. Some people just strike gold and everyone else has to just do their own thing regardless. That is life and you’re not a failure.
Hang in their... Your time will come.
I realized this way back when I was watching Blink 182 and Fall Out Boy music videos portraying the bend being in high school despite them being in their 30's at that point.
I was born in 1997. What a terrifyingly confusing time to be born. I don't quite remember 9/11 yet I distinctly remember Blockbuster
Same
You're a Cusper buddy. Let me guess, first phone was a flip or slide phone?
Blockbuster was around since 2011. You’re gen Z
Excellent video, really thought-provoking.
Another weekend, another fantastic J.J. video
I love the point that you made about how today's younger generations are the first that create their own content. I'm and I've wanted to be a content creator for as long as I can remember. I think that's a fairly common experience for anyone in my generation that had UA-cam at a young age. I actually made a video myself about that phenomena and the effects that it might have on us. Content being created by the masses instead of TV Writers and etc. is definitely more chaotic but it's also more fun in my personal opinion. Everything has its drawbacks and we're still in the early days of internet all things considered so things might be better moderated in the future. I also appreciate how much you try to understand other generations without overly simplifying them. Awesome video!
I think using Hollywood movie casts as your generational barometer are always going to be a bit skewed since movies historically cast twenty somethings as teenagers to get around child labor laws. The "generational portraits" of these generations as 20 somethings are probably going to be closer to the actual generation's ages. The cast of Reality Bites, for instance are mostly actual Gen Xers.
On top of the labour laws, a lot of teen centric movies and tv shows have sex scenes which would be very not okay to have a minor do. Which I always find weird whenever there’s a scene like that but I’m supposed to believe that these people are 16/17.
Then you have people like Carly Rae Jepsen who is older than Adele. How many of you knew that she was 28 years old when she did call me maybe?
It's funny because she was frenchie in Grease Live and was actually 7 years older than when Didi Cohn played Frenchie in the movie version of Grease and we all know how that movie is infamous for all the actors looking too old.
Hey J.J. your mentioning of the New Yorker is very interesting to me. I would love to see a video where you cover some magazines/papers that have shaped contemporary culture.
Thanks for making a video about this. I first noticed this when reading the novel Generation X that the author Douglas Coupland was 8 years older than me, which felt like a lot when I was 22! He is a boomer but gave us the generational label that stuck and I thought that was interesting dynamic as you point out. We need those older brothers and sisters to express what we are living through I suppose.
22! !?
I can't believe you're 1124000727777607680000 years old!
I think this is less a show of how little youth influence themselves, and more how arbitrary the lines between generations are. If you look at most of the examples, you'll find that the "influencers" of a certain generation tend to be only a few years older than the oldest of the generation or an older member of the youth generation, which makes sense, because that's when they'd be young adults influencing the teens and tweens. For example, Dylan, Joplin, Hendrix, and Garcia were all in their 20s in the 60s, and all of them practically missed out on WW2(the defining characteristic of the silent gen) and grew up in the post-war era(the defining characteristic of boomers), they then played music for people who were less than a decade younger than them. So, it's quite silly to say that they weren't part of the baby-boomers when they were in the same age group as their baby boomer audience
True, in most cases, the people influencing a generation are from the generation before it, and are maybe a few years older than that generation. Paul McCartney (shown in the thumbnail) was born at the same time as the examples you gave, in the early 1940s before the 1946 cutoff, which would make then Silent Gen rather than Boomers. In the 1960s, Boomers ranged from kids to teenagers, so of course most weren't influencing culture. They really started influencing culture in the 1970s and 80s - think Donna Summer, Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson, etc., all Boomers. Influencing Boomers isn't the same as being them.
But while there is some overlap between generations, the generations in general are defined by specific events and phenomena, and growing up in a certain time period is fundamentally different from being an established adult at that time, even if not far apart in age. I am a Millennial, and I was a young adult when September 11th happened. While some Zoomers were born prior to 9/11, they're too young to have vivid memories of a pre-9/11 world and how much different it was.
Part of the credit goes to the youths, because they chose to spend their money on certain artists over others, pushing something new into the mainstream. However, I think another thing to remember is we really define youth culture and different generations culture only by the rebellious and new faction of it.
Reading Chuck Klosterman's book about the 90s JJ has read, I was surprised to see Garth Brooks was a far, far bigger artist than Nirvana in the 90s. For this to be true there were certainly plenty of young people also buying Garth Brooks CDs. Yet any TV show depicting a flashback of the 90s is going to make it full of grunge Nirvana references. Just like some movie depicting the 60s is just going to show the protesters, even though I suspect most youths were probably happy watching TV at home instead.
We don't care about the cultural shifts that are small additions to the norm. We care about the punks, goths, rebels, who at the time we thought might be destroying society.
Thank you for making this video. It was wildly enjoyable.
I'm an older zoomer myself (1999) and while the singular examples you pulled are solid, I think one of the defining aspects of our culture is how it is so ANTI solo defining figures. Thanks to the sheer explosion of creativity brought on by the Internets lowered barriers, it is completely possible for each of us to consume an entirely different cultural diet from others in our demographic.
When I talk with my friends, we all know who Mr Beast, Pewdiepie, Dream and SSSniperwolf are. Some of us may watch a few of them. Yet we also have a plethora of other creatives we follow with their own audiences. I love watching DropoutTV, my roommate loves watching Hololive. For our two cases the thesis holds true, but if we were say, fans of modern MCYT, then our "culture" would be dictated almost entirely by other zoomers.
being born in 1983 i am a late gen x-er, not a milenial, milenial is more 1985+ honestly
If you left high school / 11th grade before 9/11 is a good idea of when gen-x ends
It's not that it doesn't have defining features, it's just that these things become clearer in hindsight. When the Alpha Gen is the current youth culture, it will be much easier to tell what the defining features of Gen Z really are.
...but that's only if you buy into the way "generations" are generalised in the first place. It's all pretty arbitrary tbh.
@@mollytovxx4181 A somewhat decent way to do it is by key events everyone remembers. For boomers that is JFK getting shot. For Gen X I’d argue that’s 9/11. For millennials it could be 2008 financial crash. My examples may not be perfect but I was talking with my boomer grandparents and it reminded me of my mother talking about 9/11.
@@badart3204 Although this is all pretty dependent on where you grow up as well. The experiences and cultural touchstones of someone born in the 1950's USA won't necessarily be the same as someone born in the exact same year but in Japan instead. Even globally shared events will have a different sort of impact on different groups of people. When people talk about "The Silent Generation", "Millennials", "Zoomers", or the rest, they usually have a fairly western, middle class, and English speaking context in mind. 🤷♀️
Part of what you’re describing is that you were at the right age where the traditional cultural gatekeepers were getting destroyed by the internet. The music, tv, and movie industries were not ready for that change.
While it’s true that traditional culture made for Zoomers was mostly created by older generations, the role that Zoomers played in creating their own meme culture cannot be understated.
I really think this is the part that differentiates the said in this video with reality; while it is true that the younger generation is, more often than not, in the side of consumer rather than creator, that does not mean that is passive by any means, and it is made cristal-clear by your comment about the Meme Culture.
Culture that needs to be consumed needs it to survive; if you're not consumed you're canceled as a show, broke as an artist, etc. - That means that as consumers, the collective youth played the role of a Judge and Jury, and sometimes even of executioner. Nothing about that is passive, and the younger people furthermore influenced the culture around them by sheer collectivity of their generation, which is a lot more of a correct cultural-decisive aproach to the matter than the individualistic metris of age-groups of point-and-choose artist. While an argument may be made for marketing and publicity and it's impact on consume of differente pieces of cultural-media, the truth is that something may be a succesful business while not being a succesful cultural mark, although success may make it easier, you still need to be referenced, talked about and become part of aesthetics to actually be part of a culture, specially of young culture.
While the newer generations have an easier way of showing the scale of cultural success by creating their own meme-images in the Internet, in contrast to the older generations whom satirical media was mostly shown on newspaper and made by people of older generations, it would be neglectful to try and say that the older generations didn't had, in their youth, their own Meme Culture, it was just portrayed in other ways. A bif difference between zoomers and millenials and those before them is that Zoomers and Millenials don't need to portray them in those other ways, they can just grab any electronic device, use Paint MS, and create something that expresses their opinions on the matter. On the other hand, when Boomers or Gen-Xters needed to create a meme they made it by fashion and style, they copied hairstyles, they copied what they found to be "a cool attitude" on TV Characters, they were mimicky of their surrroundings to express themselves and in turn created a paradox of consumerism where, while they couldn't by passive consumers (You literally couldn't, what you consumed made for a ranking for others to create similar content on media or different approachs, it was all risk-gain) they would be passive mirrors of what they consumed, making it seem as if the corporations made by older people where the one deciding what youth-culture was, but were merely creating a product that, if failed, would never become a staple of youth-culture.
When you can only send something and hope it lands, are you really the creator of the culture when it is sucessfull? Or are you merely absorbed by others and transformed by interpretations of the youth? If the latter is true, can you really say that you influenced youth, rather than youth influencing you to create by consuming what they wanted? And when you get to that point, who's to say who's leading whom to what? Is your individualistic-self what makes your creation an act of culture, or is the choice of the youth?
I feel that one of the central weaknesses of the argument is the assumption that only those who produce or create culture are active participants. Consuming culture is not a completely passive act. Individuals have their own perspective on culture and how/why they consume it, what they say about it (especially with their peers) is part of how a generation forms its identity, values and collective lived experience. As a millennial, I listened to a lot of indie rock in the early 2000s. Most of these artists were gen x-ers with millennial audiences. I don't listen to much of that stuff any more, but what stays with me is the people with which I listened to that music, the places I heard it and the experiences I had while it was playing.
Such an interesting conversation!
As a Zoomer, I definitely feel your last point quite a bit. When I look at something like UA-cam with tons of successful people in my currently young generation, it can often make places without that sort of age distribution feel old/outdated, despite that, for better or worse, having been the norm.
To have strict cut off years from one generation to the next is pointless. There isn’t a distinct moment when all the boomers suddenly become Gen X, for example. Plus the people from earlier years of a generation (i.e. early 80s millennials) will have much different experiences than those from the later years (mid-90s millennials). I get its easy to summarize cultural events through the lens of these generations but it the events happen in such a linear process that by oversimplifying it the way we have been misses the point.
I have often reflected on this kind of thing - you make great points -I appreciate the high-detail work - for this kind of video one must absolutely pinpoint peoples' birth dates etc exactly and get it right! and you did!
Very interesting and thought provoking video JJ!
I can think of two examples of this phenomenon, one from Japan and another one from my current home country of Kazakhstan. While anime and manga starring high school age protagonists are a dime a dozen, Makoto Shinkai's movies are particularly noted for capturing the anxieties of an audience born and raised during Japan's "Lost Decades", whose teenage years were also lived in the shadow of the 2011 earthquake. The director himself was born in 1973 and thus had his formative years just before Japan's economic bubble popped in 1991.
For the Kazakh example I'm thinking of the popular (and at one point controversial) boy band Ninety One, named after the year the country got its independence and popular with teens and young adults whose musical tastes were informed by exposure to K-pop. Seen as a quintessential Kazakh "Zoomer" act, technically only two of its originally five, now four members are Zoomers. It may be arguable to what extent the 1996 cutoff line is even applicable to Kazakhstan, but what's concrete is that at the time the group debuted as a teen-targeted act in 2015 only those two members were themselves still teenagers.
You are very insightful. Had do you only pointed out that authors work on the boomers, this would’ve been an interesting video. The fact that you extended that concept so thoughtfully is why I enjoy your channel so much!
It’s so nice to see a video that was created from the disciplined thoughts of a curious mind. This is what I imagine cultural Salons might’ve been like way back in the day.
It would be interesting to do a poll asking a large number of people from each of the generations you talked about to list the top 15 celebrities of their generation. I imagine that the lists would get more and more diverse as you went towards the younger generations, but I would be curious to see by how much.
I was born in 1996 and although I got plenty of influence of pop culture from the 2000s and 2010s, I never explored too much of the new technologies and trends my peers experienced during childhood, alternating 2000s and 1990s, so I always felt as a mix of Millennial and Zoomer.
I was born in 2002 and by almost all definitions a Gen Z, but I always felt that due to a very late adoption of the internet and a general ignorance of popular media that I am a late millennial/zillennial.
It's funny you mention Easy Rider, it was produced by Bob Rafelson who also co-created the Monkees. Ive thought about the concept of your video a lot because I love the Monkees and when I first learned about Rafelson I thought it was odd that a man in his mid 30s was the creative force behind a TV show synonymous with 60s teenage hippy counter culture
How about Aerosmith in the 90s?
As Millennials, we naturally grew up on both Boomer and Gen X stuff and icons up throughout the 90s. Movies and cartoons from cable TV on one hand, then on the other hand were the up and coming superstars that we idolised so much from the entertainment industry. 2Pac as a Gen X rapper has had a lasting effect on me to this day, if we forget about Eminem for one second here. -Boybands and frosted tips eww.-
I feel that we as a generation, the very first time we were able to create something for ourselves akin to a culture was the fateful instance when we became chronically online and cultivated a digital presence on the internet unlike anything done before. Mid-00s was an era where millions of us were able to define our own identity in the form of an unprecedented body of work spurring countless of flash games and animations, a society that was like our own little haven of fads or memes while transitioning into adulthood. Of course, none of this would be possible without the generations before us. The most prominent developers and entrepreneurs of the early internet at the time were Gen X, too. _Like Freakazoid._
I feel like that when it came to nickelodeon and disney
I am 19 years old, a full-time worker, and a full time college student. I technically have time every day to work on my creatives, but after working 8 hours I just want to sit at my desk and play video games (especially since I work 2-11). I pay for college, but I live with my parents. I still don't have much money, so funding my creative endeavors is still a challenge.
Love these kinds of cultural videos from J.J.
a huge thing: the age of our parents... my husband and i straddle the boomer/x-er line ... he has always thought of himself as a boomer, and i am firmly all about the X. His parents were ten years older than mine. how we were raised, our home lives, has everything to do with the difference in perspective or identity that we've always felt. good stuff as always, j.j. : )
what i mean is: you can't judge chris cornell or eddie vedder as "young boomers" until you take the age of their parents and their home lives into consideration.
Thanks for including my tweets in your video!
As a French, I have never heard the Baby Boomers being associated with the 60s. In fact, the chronologicaly very first event I've ever heard of as being "boomer" is the Woodstock festival of 1969. In France, boomers are more closely thought about in relation to the 1970s and the 1980s, and events such as the "oil shock" ("choc pétrolier") of 1973 and the election of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 1974 are usually seen as the starting points of the boomer being relevant. The most commonly association to the Boomers would be that they were the last generation to have known the "glorious thirty" ("Trente Glorieuses"), the period from roughly 1945 to 1975 when France and Western Europe had its most durable economic boom. The social and cultural domination of the Boomers is most commonly associated with the Mitterrand years, from 1981 to 1995, and as soon as the mid-1980s, the election of François Mitterrand as French president and the relatively chaotic political landscape that emerged from it (even thought, retrospectively, it was still much more stable that what came since the mid-2000s) were considered to be the result of the Boomers becoming the main demographic in the country.
As a 21 year old gen z-eer who grew watching youtube, almost all of my favorite creators are non gen z but rather people in their 30's and 40' and beyond. I feel like its a common idea to seek out people who have had more life experience than you in order to gain some sort of insight you or your peers don't possess yet
The lines are quite fuzzy. I was born in 1994 which "technically" makes me a millennial, and I always have thought of myself as one (I even have a Homestar Runner pfp for Pets's sake). But every single movie, tv show, and musical artist you mentioned in the Millennial section are things that I remember distinctly being kind of old when I was a kid. I have much more vivid memories of things you mentioned in the Zoomer section, like Zack and Cody. Which makes sense, since I was only 11 years old when it premiered in 2005.
Interesting, I was born in 1992 and hadn't heard of Zack and Cody. But it might just be that, for whatever reason, I never watched Disney Channel. I knew of iCarly only because of parody edits on UA-cam. It was all about Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network for me.
@@gdtyra iCarly actually was on Nickelodeon lol. I suppose everyone has a different experience. I actually specifically remember when iCarly was new, because it was sort of a successor to Drake and Josh, which is a show I would associate more with my own childhood. It's in fact been so long that iCarly has been rebooted with the characters as adults.
@@RunstarHomer oh you're right... I also thought Drake and Josh was Disney because in my mind Nickelodeon didn't do live action shows (although I know they did some in the early 90s/late 80s too). Huh... Maybe I just stopped watching those channels earlier than I thought
This is a fascinating video, I think your observation about accessibility being an issue previously regarding young people having an effect on their own media is 100% spot on, with the explosion of UA-cam and tiktok its obvious the intent to create has always been there, but maybe silenced by older, louder people
One of your best videos, interesting stuff
A good example of a show for millineals and by millineals is Hey Arnold. The voice actors were all playing kids pretty much their exact age.
Was definitely one of my fave shows growing up and one thats still holds up today.
Can you really say it was "by millennials" though? It's true that the kids were voiced by kids, but how much input did they have in the direction of the show? It was created by a guy born in the 50s, and it looks as if most of the writers (that I found in a quick google search) were also born in the 50s and 60s. The animators weren't children (or at least I really hope they weren't...that'd be pretty dark).
@@mollytovxx4181
I thought about clarifying that it was just the actors. I just didn't
@@Bartholomule01 I thought it was worth clarifying since it was a Nickelodeon show, and there were quite a few Nickelodeon shows around that time where kids did have more creative input than acting. I wasn't sure if maybe Hey Arnold also had some contributions from kids on the script (seemed plausible), so I looked into it. Doesn't look like they did. I thought other people might have had a similar thought process to me, so figured I'd leave a comment to save some confusion. Wasn't trying to like... call you out or something pointless like that, so I'm sorry if it looked that way.
Remember that in the grand scheme, the ranges of these generations are arbitrarily set, or to put it another way, its not the span of the ranges and who is in them that's important, but instead the the beginning and end. In this sense, it actually makes a ton of sense that the people that become the avatars of the next generation are late members of the previous generation, because it takes the voice of someone experienced in the old to create something new. In that sense its not the people born within the era that sets these endpoints, but instead the year that these movements were started.
I'm 1994, so technically a younger millennial, and it was interesting to hear what you categorized as examples of youth culture for gen Z vs millennials. I very much feel like both boy bands / girl groups AND iCarly / Suite Life / etc were a part of my culture growing up.
It was also interesting to see how many of the artists and activists you mentioned were born within a couple years of the transitions between generations.
Thank you I really enjoy your content
I think what you allude to at the end about the consequences of culture being created without the moderation of older generations is spot on. It will be super interesting to see how that progresses as content creation production continues to become more accessible.
Dear lord, did I like heavy metal music in the 80s because of the boomers. Also realizing that most of the members of these bands were likely boomers. My life is clearly a lie 😂.
This was so interesting because, like the music snapshot you get around 14 years old and never lose it - neon, parachute pants, Whodini and big hair are forever locked in my mind simply because of the time I experienced it. It really goes to show that any "ownership" of your generational culture is even more contrived that we thought.
Wonderful, exceptionally researched and produced as always JJ! I hope you are feeling better, we truly appreciate you. Sending you positive vibes 😊. Have a great week everyone!!
Yeah the revolution was very very televised.
Music when my Zoomer self was zoom zooming around the junior high school was the first (or second I guess, but first mainstream) wave of trap music, and all of what I grew up calling 'conscious' and 'industrial' hip-hop. It has put an imprint into my soul that causes me to feel a compulsion to dress like Tyler the Creator.
J.J. I tend to idly just listen to your videos, but you using the skype notification sound really made me just jump out of my seat as if I'd been waiting for someone to message me all those years ago.
Kindly, don't do it because I don't need to be startled. But also, please continue to do it because I need that taste of nostalgia.
This all hit me pretty hard as an elder millennial (Gen Y). I was at Zumiez on the weekend... and I was amazed at the new New Balance skate shoes and how they were actually highly sought after over DC and Adidas and Nike... IT also still throws be for a loop seeing some "WalMart" brands like Champion being popular and pricey. Hell, the New Balances were $110 USD.
the new balance thing is recent because of the trends
Thanks for making this video, I am now going to have an existential crisis as I frantically look at the birth dates of everyone involved in the things I like
Interesting video idea.
I've always felt that generations should really have a bit of wiggle room on their starts and ends. A +/-2 or 3 years makes the most sense to me just because really what is a year or two in the grand scheme of things other than generalizations lol
ive lived in canada all my life and i have never heard an accent quite like yours. this is impressive
Im surprised you didn't discuss yhe impact of the choices of young people about what culture they consume abd promote. It might be an impossible question to fully answer, but it would be interesting to interrogate how much of the culture is shaped by top down (ie: Hollywood directors from previous generation deciding what media exists), vs bottom up (ie: teens deciding what they like, which then shapes what gets made)
Given how nebulous generations are I've fluctuated from being older Z to around the middle of the generation, but I remember the era of the internet from the early to mid 2010s where Millennial was catch-all for young people to the point that for the longest time I though I was a millennial. However, being present online through much of these millennial led events did feel like I was along for the ride, yet still involved in some way, although in hindsight definitely wasn't the case.
Great video!
Fascinating!
Yeah I remember finding out that Rhett and Link were relatively old by the standards of UA-camrs. It's also been curious how after Jon Jafari (born 1990) left Game Grumps, he was replaced by the much older Dan Avidan (born 1979), who is 8 years older than his cohost Arin Hanson.
This is such a great example
Arin himself is a genuine example of youth producing their own culture though since he first got big making animations online as a teenager.
To be fair Rhett and Link have been on youtube since 2006
Quite an interesting piece! I hadn't thought about this before, and it's amazing, really. I would have to say I agree with the article, and your investigation pretty much proves it. I have always known that older actors played younger people in teen movies and shows. It will be interesting to see what happens as the younger generations take more control of their culture. I'm not sure what I think about that.🤨😄 Thank you, J. J.!