Badass at the age of 7. Just like Axl Rose.

April 1981. My birth. Right at the front door of the 80’s. I pretty much saw the whole show, save for maybe the opening theme song. I remember old school MTV. I remember the Soviets. I cheered when the Bears won in ’85 and cried when they lost the NFC Championship in ‘88. I remember Scot Goldyn wearing a sweet Guns ‘n’ Roses t-shirt when I was in 1st grade. And I remember my teacher writing 1988 on the board every day for the first week of 1989, then muttering, “I’m never going to get this right.” as she corrected it. She was old. This is when I learned old people forget sometimes.

It all landed me at the gates of adulthood in the spring of 1999. The last graduating class of the 1900’s, the entire millennium even. Kinda cool, at least we thought. We caught the tail end of grunge, flannel and the Iron Curtain, and were in high school just as AOL was peaking as cell phones were ringing. We can identify with both, but are identified by neither. So in the realm of generational identification, this raises an issue. Are we Gen X or Gen Y?

Well, that’s a tough one. It seems like there’s a gap in the generational identification system, or whatever the hell it’s called, where years ’79 – ’81 can’t easily be placed in either.

A 20-something who doesn't tweet?! Holy shit!

Generational identification is a tricky thing, especially as one generation ends and another begins. The world doesn’t work in perfect 15 year blocks, things gradually happen. When one generation ends in 1964, and the next starts in 1965, are those people really that different? Of course not. Plus, every individual is different. Not everyone born after 1985 tweets, despite what they’d have you believe.

So let’s take a look at these two generations. The first thing to note is that all kinds of definitions exist when it comes to time spans. Some people use specific years, others ballpark it, like mid-60’s to late 70’s. There is a lot of “generally accepted” thrown around, so obviously there’s no concrete answer to any of this.

Gen X is mostly a 70’s thing. A birthday between ’65 – ’80 seems to be the most common start and end (although I find it laughable that a 15 year old and an infant can be categorized in the same generation. Maybe in 1865, but not in 1965). Some broad strokes as to what defines Gen X:

"Tear down that wall!" The President of the 80's.

1. History: They either consciously or physically missed Vietnam and the crazy hippies. Their war was the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall was probably the first huge political moment they remember, followed by the Persian Gulf War. They came of age with Reagan (many even remember the last assassination attempt on a President) and most were old enough to put Clinton in the White House once, and many twice. The 1986 Challenger Disaster was another moment many remember. The flight had New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe aboard as the first teacher in space, which raised interest in schools across the country. According to a New York Times poll, nearly 50% of students aged 9 – 13 watched the event live in classrooms.

2. Technology: They grew up on TV, but more specifically, they were at the oldest 15 or so when cable hit and TV vomited out like 30 more channels. They remember the start of HBO and begging their parents for all those extra channels, some targeted to them for the first time. This is when everyone started freaking out that kids were watching too much TV.

Air and Sea Battle. The original Halo.

They also witnessed the birth of video games as Atari carried the 70’s and Nintendo took off in the 80’s. And, on top of that, they saw the home computer creep in and start replacing typewriters with word processors. It was a cool development, and Apple’s famous 1984 commercial made it feel like a revolution (or tried to. At the very least, it started a trend of lavish TV commercials debuting during the Super Bowl).

3. Pop Culture: I believe music and movies are tough because you can never account for the older cousin who got you into Mötley Crüe when you were 5, or the kid who grew up watching Star Wars but was born in 1983. Just because it’s one of your favorite movies or bands growing up doesn’t put you in that generation.

Spencer Elden, the "Nevermind" baby, was born in '91. A Gen X icon who has probably never seen a cassette tape.

That said, they are an undeniable part of every generation. This may be a bit biased, but when Gen X hit their 20’s, they made some of the most socially relevant music since the 1960’s. Grunge rode the pulse of a generation entering the work force in the early 90’s recession, and the general disillusionment that they felt – demonstrated no better than in the movie “Reality Bites”. Rap shed a light on life around the poverty line that shocked a nation and launched a new kind of mainstream music. From an artistic standpoint, this was all a long way from Tawny Kitaen dry humping a Jaguar (which, frankly, had no place in a song about finding yourself. Maybe a bodacious babe on six-figure car is what David Coverdale was looking for. But I digress).

Winona. Making depression adorable since 1994.

In defining this generation, you can’t ignore the John Hughes films. It’s interesting that the middle school girls dreaming of one day living out Molly Ringwald’s fairy tale ending in Sixteen Candles grew up to become Winona Rider in Reality Bites. Hell, Kurt Cobain was at the right age to BE one of the kids in The Breakfast Club. The Hughes films really opened the door for a world that would be dominated by marketing towards teens. As a matter of fact, Gen Y is often considered the first to enter a world already marketed to them.

So, what about this Generation Y? The obvious year to start them is when Gen X ends, so that puts us at 1980 or ’81. But there’s another school of thought on Gen Y – the “Millenials”. In the 1991 book “Generations”, and later in 2000’s “Millenials Rising: The Next Great Generation”, William Strauss and Neil Howe identify kids who graduate high school in the class of 2000 and onward as a distinct generation, based largely on the media-generated perception of these kids being some kind of futuristic, heroic, half human-half-cyborg generation. This puts a twist on Gen Y, and a new name on them, but for sake of simplicity, let’s continue to call them Gen Y. It’s easier to type.

1. History: The Berlin Wall is more of a historical event then a remember-where-you-were thing. The Gulf War is a vague memory. They really only know two names attached to the presidency – Bush and Clinton. They also represent a majority of the 20-somethings who played a huge role in putting Obama in office. Finally, 9/11 is without question the defining political event of their lives.

All kinds of crazy stuff went down in chatrooms. Your rung on the social ladder was never secure.

2. Technology: While video games and TV progressed and were no doubt a huge influence on the generation, the big coup is the internet. AOL hit its stride starting in 1996, when many of these kids were just entering their teens. For most of them, their high school years were spent downloading Nelly, surfing adult websites, and spreading reputation-crippling rumors at 128K/sec in instant messages and chatrooms.

3. Pop Culture Music-wise, the commercialization of Alt rock and Hip hop hit full stride as this generation grew up. Britney Spears and N’Sync were the only music videos on MTV during their high school years, which usually didn’t have music at all. Probably the most redeeming “artist” (btw, this is when we had to start using the term “artist”, cause somehow “bands”, “rappers”, and “singers” was too musically-racist) was Eminem, who had a handful of insightful lyrics, but even that’s a stretch. But this isn’t a time to judge. Eminem and Linkin Park through Blink 182 (whose video poked fun at some of their contemporaries) and 50 Cent represent the big music acts of this generation.

Sorry, Nashville. Feeling left out? Kenny Chesney. Happy now? Okay, moving on.

Will Ferrell really took off as the comedic voice of Gen Y growing up, but an argument could be made that The Matrix was a generation defining movie in that it set a technological tone. American Pie was kind of the gateway movie for many Gen Y-er’s either just starting or set to enter high school in the same way John Hughes films set up Gen X. Finally, Napolean Dynamite really captured a generation by making internet-and-TV-induced social retardation and general awkwardness cool and funny.

People were excited about the class of 2000 before color photography was invented.

4. Wild Card – The biggest player here is that these were children of the new Millennium. The class of 2000. The most ballyhooed class of all time. Everyone was eagerly anticipating the turn of the Millennium, and these were the kids who walked through the doors of adulthood at the very moment the calendar turned. They were branded with double zeros, and it was them who would usher in the new wave of cutting-edge, jackass ‘0-somethings to follow.

So there you have it. Gen X vs. Gen Y. I did a little Facebook survey and found that people around my age are all over the board on what they consider “their” generation. Some people who graduated high school in 2002 felt they were Gen X, and some graduating in ’97 said Gen Y. It seemed more who you identify with than what year you were born, which really splits the class.

But there is no bigger generational refugee than the class of 1999. In my survey, they split down the middle thinking X or Y, which makes sense. If we use the guidelines of Gen X as ’65-’80 and Gen Y as class of 2000-on, that means if you were born in 1981 and graduated in 1999 (basically the first six months of ‘81), you actually don’t have a generation.

Joe on the left, me on the right, and Stasi the "Millenial" in the middle. Old men at the young bride's wedding.

The hard line between ’99 and ’00 is even more evident in how I’m perceived by these so-called “Millenials”. When someone from the class of, say, 2002 asks how old I am, the response is along the lines of “oh, you’re like my age”. However, if they find out I graduated high school in 1999, it becomes “you’re old”. This revelation turns me from 20-something into a kid from the 90’s. Those are the older kids, thus I am an older kid.

To be perfectly honest, I’m fine with being a 90’s kid. I have a ton of 90’s memories. But if I’m not Gen Y, then do I share the memories of Gen X’ers? Most of them at least remember it being 1970-something. Most remember MTV’s first days, not just the sweet 80’s videos. And some of them even watched the Gulf War live.

From a tank.

In Iraq.

That’s the conundrum. We’re clearly too old to be Gen X. We were influenced by them, but we simply weren’t them. And with Gen Y, there’s this Millennium thing that provides a precise starting point for a younger generation, something most generations don’t deal with. In addition, many don’t share our non-internet, land line past.

Gen Y: File this thing under WTF?

So where does that put us? The late 90’s kids? And even more so, those of us born between January and July of 1981? Let’s say there’s a new generation. Too young to be Gen X, but graduating high school before 2000. It’s a small gap, but there are some key elements that show just how transitional it was.

1. History: Let’s face it. Not much happened from ’94 to ‘99. As a matter of fact, all the excitement was directed towards the year 2000, with the Y2K bug and impending apocalypse. The biggest stories were that Bill let his Willie get the best of him and OJ got away with murder*.

* Debating if this was true or not was as big a topic and punchline as there was in the late 90’s and even after.

There was one huge event that really rocked America in 1999: The Columbine School Shootings. For us, it was senior year, but you kind of had a “Jesus, good thing we’re almost out of here” feeling, whereas kids just entering high school must’ve wondered what the heck they were getting into. You could make the argument that the mid-to-late 90’s is when all the events and hatred was brewing that lead to such an event. But even so,we weren’t going to class with the fear that something like this could actually happen. That was a fear the class now entering high school would have to face, and I’m sure the effects could fill volumes. In fact, the Virginia Tech shooter was a mere 5 months away from his freshman year in the Spring of 1999.

Everyone was getting rich. Some fast and furiously.

But generally speaking, we were in social and political bubble. Literally, when you remember the whole dot com, NASDAQ thing. The economy was booming and life was pretty good. Often times it’s an major (and sadly, often bad) event that defines a generation. No event – no definition.

2. Technology: We entered high school making phone calls. We left it sending IM’s. We were a generation that, when entering college, were basically introduced to the future. Our dooms had T1 internet connections when half our parents didn’t even have dial up. We abused Napster, downloading enough music to make Lars Ulrich lose his shit (Metallica doesn’t melt your face for free). We thought car phones were as good as it got, then a few years later had something even better – anywhere phones. The world we knew as freshmen in high school was practically the stone age compared to the world as freshmen in college. We had to convince our parents that even though our older brother didn’t need a computer in college, we’d fail out if we didn’t have one (It usually worked. Dude, you’re getting a Dell). And this transition somehow landed right as we were turning 18.

3. Pop Culture: In talking about the transition of technology, it’s interesting to look at two classic high school movies of the late 90’s: Can’t Hardly Wait and American Pie. Both fall right on that Gen X, Gen Y bubble. But if you look closely, you’ll notice that in Can’t Hardly Wait, only the “nerds” talk about computers and the internet. Better yet, Pres-stooooone actually uses a pay phone (at which point Dharma rudely interrupts, costing Preston the chance to ask Barry Manilow if “Mandy” is about a dog. I love Dharma). Yet, in American Pie, one of the most classic scenes involves streaming video of a hot-bodied, bad-accented Nadia over the internet. And it goes to the WHOLE SCHOOL. (An artistic look… evidently American Pie regulates hard on youtube.)

This little guy changed everything. Right after a few busy signals, disconnections, and sibling fist fights.

Technologically, it seems like one takes place in ’96, and the other in 2001, but they’re actually from ’98 and ’99 respectively. It’s because these movies fell in that brief period where the internet went from something only a few people had to something everyone HAD to have. We were the group driving the internet to the social forum it’s become today. AOL was cramming so many free trial CDs into our real-life mail boxes that no one noticed the irony. They were going to replace the very things that drove their business. And remember those AOL profiles? That was Facebook circa ’99, relationship status and all (Apparently AOL had no clue how big this was going to be with teens. They had a bunch of high school kids figuring out what to do with a category called “Marital Status”. How is a 15 year old girl supposed to brag about her bf?!). It’s a prime example of just how quickly technology was changing in the late 90’s.

Rebellion. What a turn-on.

Another TV show that threw us for a loop is My So-Called Life. When we were watching that show in Middle School, we imagined that’s what high school was like. But how Gen X was that? It was the grungiest of all grunge. It was kids being the quintessential high schoolers of 1993 (I’d kill for AJ Langer to show up right now with those nappy curls and rebellious attitude). But it was so Gen X. By the time we graduated, high school was NOTHING like that. It was The Spice Girls and Abercrombie all the way. Or the punk/skater kids listening to NOFX. I never liked them, but I liked that they existed.

As for music, we were in 7th grade when Kurt Cobain put a bullet in his head and 10th grade when someone else put a few in Tupac, and we were thankfully in college by the time N-Sync put about 10,000 in popular music. In between, we had what? Matchbox 20? Shania Twain? The Hot Boyz? Realistically, Dave Matthews Band must’ve been the biggest band during my high school years, rap and hip hop was in better shape with Wu Tang Clan going strong and and Puff Daddy made some noise with his little family or whatever, but it was more a continuation than a renaissance.

I’ve always though that’s why so many of my friends were into classic rock, and I’d imagine a lot people around that time were into older music as well. Ours just wasn’t that great. (One another side note, I personally got into the nu-metal thing, but I’m pretty sure I’m in the minority there.)

It’s no coincidence, in the last few years, as we grew into our mid-20’s, that indie rock and underground hip hop finally broke into a somewhat more mainstream audience. Think about the influences there. It’s very much a throwback to the music we were listening to in 5th grade, not 12th. And thank the Lord for that. Seems we caught a transitional music period too.

Another often overlooked change that recently took place is medicating mild mental disorders. Before I entered high school, I’d never heard of OCD or ADD or any of that. Obviously, people have been depressed forever, and Gen X was apparently the most depressed generation of all time. Despite this they weren’t all poppin’ pills for it. But by the time I left high school, every other kid was being “treated” for something and needed a pill. In and alarming 2001 study, the World Health Organization said 1 in 4 people had a mental disorder.

The glorious Munster High School, post millenium, and post me.

Finally, on a personal note. My high school was under construction for 4 years, turning it from a place straight out of Dazed and Confused into one that would ring in the new Millennium. It was a complete overhaul, we had to exit and re-enter the building to get from class to class, there were new floorplans, and my junior year Battle of the Bands had to be cancelled as the Auditorium was rebuilt (tragic). The dates of construction: 1996-1999.

So what does it all mean? It means that because we’re on the cusp of Gen X and Gen Y, we’re really in neither. And it’s only natural, since so much was changing, there was no one thing to latch onto. Historians are in a wait-and-see mode, and therefore, so are the Generational… um… ists..?

In the end, it makes us a pretty diverse group. We took the best Gen X and Gen Y had to offer and rolled them into one pretty dynamic generation. We know how to roll with the punches, and you can make the argument that we’re more prepared for change than the generations before or after us.

We’re old enough to see how the world was before this technological revolution, but young enough to control where it’s going. We’ve seen music written from the heart, and now have the power to push it back to the forefront. And we’ve seen one global enemy of America eliminated, only to witness the birth of a new one. A truly adaptive generation. Maybe that should be the name. Either way, here’s to the classes of ’97-‘99. Leave it to the 1900’s to save the best for last.