Welcome to Nevermind

After slacking on it for over a year, it's time to launch this thing

Welcome to Nevermind, and thanks for subscribing!

I’ve had the idea for his newsletter simmering for a long time (I think I registered the Substack well over a year ago), but work, life, and my own lassitude got in the way of properly launching it. But Matthew Perry’s tragic death last week reminded me that life is short, and is getting shorter all the time. If I was ever going to do this…

The top-line mandate for this publication is to treat Generation X as a proper object of history, analysis, criticism… and love. It is modeled fairly directly on Alan Cross’s ongoing history of new music, but while Cross focuses on alternative music, I want to cast a wider net, taking in the entire Gen X scene. So we’ll be looking at literature and film and music, but also science, culture, and politics and just about anything else that catches our eye. 

One of the motivating ideas here is that Generation X is, to a large extent, a forgotten generation. “Gen X erasure” is a real thing, and while it’s sometimes kind of amusing, the inability of the culture to “see” Generation X in its broader narratives has led to serious blindspots in our collective self-understanding. I’d like to correct that here. 

I’m not sure yet how this will go. I have a long working list of things I want to write about, starting with obvious subjects like the movies of Richard Linklater and the books of Douglas Coupland, but also David Foster Wallace and Naomi Klein and Damien Hirst and Alex Garland.  But I look at my list and I also see, in no obvious order, hair metal, Bill and Ted, nuclear Armageddon, cyberpunk, Degrassi, and Participaction. 

So we’ll see. I think I’ll probably start with a manifesto of some kind, to try to lay down some signposts of what Generation X is, what it means, what it stands for, and what holds (or held) it together. For now, if you are new to my writing and want to see what you might expect, you can begin with the book I co-wrote with Joseph Heath, The Rebel Sell. It’s about as close to a critical document of Gen X culture as you’ll find. 

More recently, I’ve written a few more self conscious pieces about Generation X. These include:

As leading Gen Xers approach 50, they're uncomfortably aware of the inexorable march of time

Eddie Van Halen, Bill and Ted, and mourning a generation

My fellow Gen Xers don't appreciate our great gift: we were ignored

A lot of this, on inspection, deals in one way or another with mortality, for obvious reasons. But this isn’t intended to be a death watch, a drumbeat of lament every time some Gen X icon slouches into oblivion. It’s going to be, more than anything, a celebration of what we had and, perhaps, still have, as children of the last days of analogue. 

I hope to get going next week, and publish more or less weekly. In the meantime, feel free to forward this to anyone you think might be interested. 

ap