My G-G-G-G-G-

EEK asked me in a comment on the last post:

So if you're going to be the voice of our generation, what are you going to say?

The question is a little tongue in cheek, but I think it deserves a serious answer. Or, baring that, a serious exploration of the premise of the question.

I would never be so bold as to choose a single message I think everyone in my generation should hear, and in this inescapably post-modern era, there would really be no way to get a single message out to a generation anyway.

Besides, being the voice of your generation doesn't really work that way. It means that you reflect or embody the force, movement or personality that's somehow shared by everyone in your generation.


I read this wikipedia entry on Generation Y every six months or so. No one has reached even a wikipedia-worthy consensus on what our generation is about.

We know it has something to do with our generation being the first to grow up with (and so take for granted) computers and the internet, we think it has something to do with 9/11 and maybe even the new millenium, but at the moment, that's all we got.

Right now, the most famous people in our generation are actors, athletes and musicians, because those are the things that can make you famous while you're still young. Still, when the most famous person is Britney Spears, you know that there's a lot more substance still to come.

When will we be able to pick a true voice of generation? That depends on what a voice of our generation still means.

I think of voice-of-a-generation types generally as writers, maybe because I am thinking about Jack Kerouac, and I think of writers as starting to find their voice in their 30s.


Of course, if we're talking about a figure we can all unite behind, like a JFK, we may have to wait until we start electing public figures to high office, which wouldn't come until the 2020s at the earliest.

Then if we're talking about a common experience all of us can share, it would have to be something on t.v., the last way to experience a message that it's plausible an entire generation can share (for the record, t.v. viewing numbers make YouTube viewing numbers look silly).

However, t.v. audiences are getting spread over more channels and across more time as TiVo and YouTube allow culture to be random-accessed. Maybe the final time we were all united in a single experience has already happened, during 9/11, but then even 9/11 meant different things to different people.

We'd have to go back, way back, to find a single t.v. experience shared by each person in our generation in the same way. For my part, I'm betting on TMBG's early '90s appearance on Tiny Toons.


Maybe all this theorizing is futile. It's possible that there's no longer any way for a single person or experience to embody a generation.

Remember how you're the person of the year? (If you are reading this post three months from now or you were out of the country for that news cycle, you won't). Time thinks our diffusion of experience means only a diffusion of media can represent who we are.

I think if there's no way for a single person or voice to embody who we are, then that's the only message that makes sense for our generation. There's no longer any way to say the one thing that will unite everyone. The only thing we can do is try to present what's really happening with ourselves and what we see around us, and, if that reflects our generation's experience in some way, they'll find us.

I say, just like your ee, the trick to writing big is to think small. Call it the Tony Wilson model. I've identified one artistic movement, production company equivalents organizing informally and producing lots of content, and one location, New York City, where I think it's happening. I think that could be enough to hang my hat on.