We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming…

To bring you Generation Catalano!

Doree Shafrir has a particularly great article in Slate this week, which is itself a response to an interesting think-piece in New York Magazine by 27-year-old Noreen Malone, who wrote about her generation, the Millennials.

In the article Shafrir muses that there should be a little micro-generation that can fit between Generation X and the Millennials. Generation X is huge, spanning almost two decades from the people born in the 60s up until about 1981. I was born in 1982. By most demographers’ generation delineations, my friend who just turned 30 would have more in common with President Obama than me. The two of them would be, of course, fellow Gen-Xers. I, on the other hand, should fit nicely in the world of Hannah Montana, iCarly, and whatever else the kids are watching these days. I’m all in favor of a new generation class, since I, like Shafrir, seem to share so little in common with the generations on either side of me. Shafrir defines this group as the “Carter babies,” those born during Carter’s administration, from 1976 to 1981. I understand that this is a tidy package, but I think we might extend it a few years, say, from 1976 to 1984.

Unlike Gen-X and the Millennials, this micro-generation suffers from somewhat of an identity crisis. It was apparently the editor at Teen Vogue who suggested “Generation Catalano.” That being Jordan Catalano, the heartthrob played by Jared Leto in the mid-nineties single-season TV drama, My So-Called Life. Generation Catalano clearly skews to the female gender (he never made me swoon), but whatever. I’ll take it. And while My So-Called Life played a year or two before I was old enough to “get it,” Shafrir also points to Freaks and Geeks, a show near and dear to my heart, and its protagonist Lindsay Weir another torchbearer of our nomadic group. Shafrir characterizes this generation as one “never fully comfortable with its place in the world; we wander away from the periphery and back again.”

I like this idea, and think it rings true. Though there’s a specific element to Generation Catalano that Shafrir hints at but never hits: our micro-generation is the only group to come of age both in a pre- and post-internet world. By the time any of us had email, we had to learn how to use the Dewey Decimal system, because we had to go to the library if we ever wanted to research anything. We were the last group of people to have to memorize phone numbers in order to call someone. People not five years younger than myself had cell phones when they were 12. I can still remember the phone number of my best friend when I was eight-years-old, but never once did I memorize a girlfriend’s number after high school. We left childhood in a world without the internet, a world almost hard to imagine anymore, and then, all of a sudden, the internet appeared and we broke from the previous generation. I was 14 when my family got the internet for the first time, and we were a little late to the game. If you were born in ’76, you were closer to 20. Born in ’84, maybe you were 11 or 12. But this was the only group of people, a distinct, specific group, that was old enough to understand the world before the internet, and young enough to adapt to it with an almost second-nature aplomb.

That’s what separates us from the Gen-Xers and the Millennials more than anything, I think.

Shafrir points out that grunge is Gen X’s greatest artistic legacy, while Malone nods to the Fleetfoxes as one of the Millennials’ defining bands. This seemed like a fun game, so here, just for the hell of it, are some music videos of Generation Catalano’s most defining artists:

The quintessential Catalano:
Kanye West – “Runaway”

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Y Control”

Fiona Apple – “Not About Love”

Bon Iver – “Holocene”

Beyonce – “Countdown”

A word on Beyoncé and this video, in particular: how perfect is she and it as a representation of Generation Catalano? So much has been made of whether or not she stole choreography, but the whole video is an homage to the past. She stole everything, from choreography to wardrobe to sound! It’s a postmodern song and video predicated on nostalgia for times Beyoncé never lived in as a means to create music for a demographic she doesn’t belong to. Not that I and people my age aren’t her demographic, but we’re not exactly tearing up the clubs, either.

This micro-generation of ours is so strange. Gen-Xers by and large shunned The Man, their parents, authority and history, though they revel in nostalgia as a unifying force. Millennials look affectionately on their parents and established authority with a hopeful eye fixed on the future. Beyoncé would like to be Tina Turner, Diana Ross, and Audrey Hepburn all rolled into one. Like the rest of us Catalanos, she neither has any outright distaste for her predecessors, nor does she find much capital in the future.

We Generation Catalanos feel little urge to rebel, and little hope for what’s to come. It’s a weird place to be. Aligning us with Carter makes a lot of sense.