I’ve been thinking recently about youth angst and how differently - and famously - it was expressed through music #InThe90s. The further we get away from the era that defined people of my age (my teen years were spent in the 90s), the more alien it feels in retrospect. A THREAD.
I often wonder why there isn’t more hate and angst in youth culture now. A lot of that, I think, is how different “millennial angst” is manifested in pop culture. It’s absolutely out there - it’s just communicated so differently than ours was, because the outlets or so different.
#InThe90s, “hate” was a mantra. It was *cool* to hate. We hated pop music, we hated old people, our parents, conformity, war, capitalism, commercialism, “selling out,” “the man,” preppies, jocks, “suits,” etc. We defined ourselves not by what we LIKED, but what we HATED.
"Hate" meant something very different than it does now. Now hate is something that means cruelty, bigotry, intolerance, and there’s nothing cool about it. That’s a good thing! But it’s wildly different than how youth culture was for my generation.
I mean, there’s a real and glorious Nine Inch Nails tour t-shirt that just says, in big bold letters, “HATE 1990.” I’m not sure you could define 90s angst any more concisely than that. 
Another 90s band shirt that’s always stuck in my mind is the Pearl Jam one that said, large and bold, “9 OUT OF 10 KIDS PREFER CRAYONS TO GUNS.”
Nirvana, meanwhile, took the famous smiley face logo of the 60s/70s, which became a symbol of peaceful protest, and made a mockery of it - its crossed eyes and warbled mouth suggesting it was fucked up, and just didn’t care.
That disaffection was the way Gen-X rebelled against what it perceived (accurately, I would argue) as a hollow movement by its boomer ancestors. The hippies tried to change the world with love, but was anything actually better?
Did Boomers not betray their supposed ideals with a full buy-in of Reaganomics and consumerism in the 80s? Did anything even fucking matter? What was the point of even trying to care, anymore? That’s what Gen-X angst was reacting to.
There have been a few youth culture movements that were famously about external angst. In the late ‘60s, a protest movement gave us some of the best music ever created. The same thing happened with the punk scene of the late 70s/early 80s.
And then it happened again with grunge/alternative in the 90s. Punk and grunge didn’t really have the same easily-defined historical points of anger (Vietnam, the civil rights movement), they were just youth sort of abstractly angry at rules defined for them by older generations.
Rules that made no sense to them, and didn’t seem to be adding up to anything other than wealth and power for a select few. And that's where I think Gen-X angst and millennial angst converge.
A side note here: I didn’t mention metal music, because the metal scene - along with it horror movies, D&D, etc - was famously misinterpreted by older generations as a movement of hate and evil, but it’s actually always been intensely positive.
Metal was raw expression, letting out emotions and creating a community around it. It’s so intensely misunderstood. Even though there was a perception of youth angst surrounding metal in the 70s/80s, I don’t view metal as a protest movement at all.
I think metal is something much simpler, and more wholesome - a way for people to release their negative feelings, and find connections around them. The nicest people I’ve ever met have been metalheads & horror fans. They’re processing their feelings in a really healthy way.
So now, what is millennial angst? It’s obviously very real, and rightfully so - it’s been a while since a generation has been shafted as hard as millennials. And yet, there’s very little direct anger in millennial pop culture, the way there was in the 90s.
We have the most horrific sack of rotten evil flesh as a President, we have historic income inequality, astronomical debt, healthcare bankruptcies, and a looming climate apocalypse. The kids should be RAGING. So, why is all the music so… happy? Or internally emotional?
Kids now are turning their anger into activism and action, not just screaming it in lyrics and saying "whatever, man." That is... very good. It gives me hope.
All of this circles back to “ok boomer,” and how it’s expressing the same things we were mad about as 90s teens, but making it a casual joke. Youth angst now is expressed through jokes and memes and intentionally difficult-to-decode language
Language that bounces from app-of-the-moment to app-of-the-moment that older people can’t possibly keep up with. The rebellion is more of a “secret code” and it’s more joyful, less hateful, more silly, more weird, but every bit as real.
Still though, it's weird to me as a Gen-Xer that we aren't experiencing more of a renaissance of rage-filled protest music. But it's just the different way that a new generation processes and expresses things.
A lot of Lorde’s “Pure Heroine” exudes millennial angst to me. It feels very contrary to its contemporaries like Taylor Swift or Adele, because it isn’t so focused on internalized feelings.
The album’s opener, “Tennis Court,” starts with the fantastic line “Don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk?” That stings with the disaffected tone of the now defining phrase of millennial angst, “ok boomer."
Many other moments on the rest of Lorde's album continue the theme of suburban teen disaffection, calmly shrugging off institutions and traditions that older generations take so seriously.
Millennial angst is about pulling the mask off of things they’ve been asked to care about for reasons they don’t understand, which get frantically and inaccurately translated by confused boomers as “millennials are killing off THING X!!.”
But they’re killing off THING X by just not caring about it or even having the luxury to even try to care. “Millennials Are Killing Napkins” is one of the funniest real headlines I ever read.
Imagine being 21 in 2019, watching every institution collapse around you, and trying to care about buying fucking NAPKINS because the Betty Crocker Corporation sold repressed 1950s women on the idea that their home couldn’t be proper without them.
My generation tried to FIGHT the system in the 90s with rage, but millennials are doing it so much more passively, without hate, and often just by the necessity of how poor of a hand they’ve been dealt. They just make jokes about how dumb it all seems now.
“lol the emperor has no clothes” is the new “fuck the man.” //
1990s: "This is your world in which we grow, and we will grow to hate you."
2010s: "We're so happy, even when we're smiling out of fear."
2010s: "We're so happy, even when we're smiling out of fear."
I didn't talk about hip-hop much in this thread because I'm speaking largely from the perspective of my experience as a white suburban 90s teen and the culture that surrounded that. But even hip-hop follows a similar arc in terms of how it expressed anger from then to now.
Rap music in the 90s was - rightfully! - very angry. "Fuck The Police" is a pretty radically different in-your-face way of reacting to societal ills than the subtle, conversational tone of the best hip-hop protest song of recent years, "This Is America."
It's all weirdly hilarious to me because there's an outpouring of establishment adults having panic attacks about "the kids these days" and how they've lost their ways, but really that's just a generation worried that their long-standing safe space is being cleverly laughed at.
It's difficult for me as an old dude to process, but I think this generation that's inheriting a historic mess created by blind trust in flawed institutions... is dealing with it quite well. Differently than my generation, but more effectively. The kids, I think, are alright.
Okay, let's talk about this - because I once felt like this, but no longer do, and I think the relationship musical taste had with personal identity is another huge aspect of why music plays less of a role in protest now than it did in the 90s.
Similar to how we 90s teens defined ourselves by what we hated, we also defined ourselves by our musical preferences - and not just the music we liked, but the music we HATED. There were groups formed around the schoolyard around music identities: The punks, goths, preps, etc.
The internet changed how fragmented youth identity was. Everything became a remix. All we had then was record shops, FM radio, and MTV, and we picked a lane of musical taste to align with who we wanted to be.
Now there's YouTube, Spotify, and social media. Kids can access anything in the world, on demand, and it's opened up musical taste, broadened it, made it less narrow and less important to one's personal identity.
When I was a teen #InThe90s, if you heard a song on the radio by a band you liked, you had to make the VERY HARD DECISION to believe that the rest of the album might be worth investing 16 precious dollars of allowance money - $16 in 90s money! - was how much it cost for ONE ALBUM
(and that's a modest number in the US, you UK/Canada/Aus folks were paying exorbitant sums of money for albums - and they wondered why piracy took off!)
So when you bought that album, often the only one you could afford for the week or month, you were gonna listen to it over and over again until you LOVED IT, even if it sucked, because you didn't really have any other choice. You attached your identity to music, hard.
The same was true with video games back then. I played so many frustrating and objectively awful NES games because those fucking things were $40-60 - in 90s money! And if you got one for Christmas, you were stuck with it for a while, so you'd better learn to love it.
So as a 90s teen it's been a journey to watch the "Tumblrfication" of musical identity, where everything is a playlist, albums don't matter as much, genres are no longer attached to personal identity. Kids like pop/rap/hip-hop/country/indie in equal, interchangeable measures.
I turn on the "alt rock" radio station I listened to as a teen - and being from Seattle, it was a big deal back then - and most of what I hear sounds like what I would have called "pop" music, not rock. But it isn't pop anymore. It's just "music." The internet remixed everything.
Nothing exemplifies how youth music and musical identity has changed more than "Old Town Road." The most successful song of the decade is an absolutely bizarre mix of hip-hop, country, and fucking NINE INCH NAILS.
"Old Town Road" makes no sense to my generation, which kept its musical preferences in very tight lanes. "Anything but country" or "anything but country & rap" were common white rock kid phrases in the 90s. Those don't mean anything anymore, they seem mean and exclusionary.
So it really makes a lot of sense that music isn't the primary canvas for expressions of protest and angst anymore. Music is personal, emotional, and universal now. For young people, music is an infinite background mixtape to life, but memes are the way to say "fuck you."
