MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Most of the cultural artifacts that characterize Generation X were created in the early nineties, a decade when, according to leading Gen X critics Douglas Rushkoff and Douglas Coupland, most X’ers were entering their thirties (as well as, gulp, the corporate job market). This is a problem. Starting its examination with central X’er texts, such as Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991), this paper seeks to address this problem by tracing X’er culture backwards in order to locate a rupture between it and the ideals of Baby Boomer culture. It finds this rupture in 1976, a year that many punk rock icons declared to be “Year Zero.”

Leaning on the postmodern theory of Frederic Jameson, his engagement with history and pastiche in particular, this paper interprets punk rock’s “Year Zero” as a year outside of history. It uses this ahistorical reading to illuminate the evolution of Generation X culture from the late 1970s to the early nineties. In doing so, the paper relies heavily on paralleled close readings of Elvis Costello’s first single, “Less than Zero” (1977) and Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel of the same title (1985). By examining key cultural artifacts that precede the early nineties, this paper seeks to isolate certain artistic attitudes and experiments that eventually culminate in the production of such iconic X’er expressions as Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” (1991) and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994). In doing so, this paper seeks to challenge the early nineties as the fixed center of Gen X culture in favor of a more evolutionary reading that stems from late punk rock and the collapse of Baby Boomer idealism.