Radar has an amusing article about how we poor suckers in Generation X were totally screwed by being stuck between the culture-dominating Baby Boomers and the next-gen Millennials. The best part of this article is the flame war that goes on after the article between self-appointed representatives of the respective generations. The comments basically boil down to “who gets to claim punk rock?”

Oh, white Americans. We loooove to be on a team, don’t we? I say “white” because for some reason, other races don’t count when we think about generational identities. One of the commenters has a nice point when he says that Gen X gets to claim hip-hop, which most would agree is the biggest cultural phenomenon we’ve seen since the advent rock n’ roll. But even though members of our generation invented hip-hop, it actually belongs to Gen Y, because they were the first white kids to appropriate it properly.

Personally, I don’t really give a rat’s ass what generation I belong to. I barely identify with my friends, let alone some guy in New York who writes for Radar Magazine who happens to have been born within the same 20 year window as me. And any attempt to define millions of people into one cohesive group tends to tell us more about the people doing the defining than the members of the group themselves. I’m sure there are lots of morons in their 20s right now. Whether or not they are bigger morons than we were in our 20s is strictly anecdotal. As people get older and start to feel like culture is leaving them beyond, they love to find ways in which the world is changing for the worst. I won’t deny that the country’s in a pretty shitty state, but I sure don’t see how we can blame the generation below us for that.

That being said, I would still leap at the chance to kick the Leave Britney Alone kid in the balls.