So there have been a few things (memes, engagement bait, the usual) going around on Threads about GenX and music lately that got me thinking. One in particular commented on how my generation was one of the last to really immerse ourselves in our favorite music to an obsessive degree, and how the extreme prevalence of social media kind of took away the ability to slow down and connect with our favorite things for more than a few minutes at a time.

I suppose I agree to this to some level, given that the internets have dulled my sense of glomming onto an amazing album that I listen to over and over, something I would frequently do with gusto in the 80s and 90s and maybe into the early 00s. While I don’t think social media was the sole direct reason for this, I could conceivably say that it did rewire my brain a bit to cause it indirectly. Over the last several years, I became more obsessed with the tsundoku of collecting new releases and full discographies, given how easy it is to do so these days in digital format. And in the process, I forgot to latch onto those few albums that truly change me, whether personally, emotionally or creatively. [This is something I’ve been working to correct over the last several months.]

Those Threads posts did, however, get me thinking about those years in the late 80s when my music obsessions first started peaking. And in the spirit of the “we’re the last generation to experience this” theme, I started thinking: In a way I get this, especially when I think about 120 Minutes. When I was in high school, specifically my junior and senior years, the number of kids I knew who loved music as much as I do, let alone what kind of music I listened to, I could probably count on two hands.

I wasn’t just a weirdo nerd who obsessed over dorky things like radio and records, I was also one of the VERY few kids who wore those Cure and Smiths tee-shirts to school. That was why those two years were so formative and memorable: that brief stretch from late 1986 to late 1988 were the only moments in time in my youth when I’d been able to surround myself with people of similar mindsets and musical tastes. Again, this was well before social media where I can now easily find and follow a music nerd of equal obsessiveness in about ten seconds.

Watching 120 Minutes, then, was that little bit of extra excitement and hope for me. It wasn’t just about listening to this different style of music, this ‘college rock’ or ‘modern rock’ as it may have been called, that I loved so much. I was also about connecting with an alternative lifestyle that I knew existed somewhere outside of my tiny life in the small town I lived in. For those brief two years this was something I could share with a dozen or so other kids, and they understood just as I did how fleeting this kind of thing was, back before social media permanently and constantly connected us all together. I couldn’t help but feel that bit of lingering hope that somewhere out there, well beyond the unending forests of small town central New England, were more kids like myself.

In a way, it’s like tsundoku in a social setting: knowing there are others out there, just waiting to be met, even if we never do. And that was just enough to make me feel a little less alone.

As for the title I used above, the choice of the last generation: this was a tagline at the end of one of the ten-second buffers for the show. It’s a very GenX phrase at that: one, it riffs ironically on Pepsi’s then popular culture-grab tag (“the choice of a new generation”), but also on the back end of the Cold War, when we still weren’t sure if the Soviets were going to bomb us into oblivion. Added to the fact that the visuals for the buffer were pulled from two music videos with dire themes: Laibach’s cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” (torch-bearing soldiers marching slo-mo through semi-darkness towards a village bonfire) and Killing Joke’s “A New Day” (the slow rise of the morning sun behind a ragged and bare mountain), that tagline fading in at the final moment like a stark reminder of our potential mortality at the hands of others. Heady stuff to see at 1am on a Sunday night when you’re overtired and not looking forward to another week of dealing with jocks at school and grim news in real life.

But at the same time, as a GenXer, we embraced that grim reminder because we dared to. Because there was that slim chance that it would all get better. Because it was easier to embrace the darkness than to curse the one candle that someone else inevitably controlled. Because darkness was where the more interesting, the more creative, the more alternative things hide. We knew there were alternatives out there, beyond what was being fed to us.

Sometimes I think about that, and sometimes I remind myself that this was how GenX survived the jocks and the bulllies, how they survived the Reagan and Thatcher years, how they survived the Cold War, and how they taught themselves to see life in different ways.

And these days, sometimes I hope that newer generations learn how to do this as well.