GENZEN: On microgenres and microgenerations
by: deliriously…daniel
(originally hosted on the Private Suite Magazine website, reproduced here with permission)
this article will share albums that aptly embody the Zennial ethos, like christtt’s entire discography.
The past is alterable. The past has never been altered.
Zoomers are at war with Millennials.
Zoomers have always been at war with Millennials.
The year is 20-something. Twitter is in flames! Cross-generational alliances are forged and dissolved and fed to the feed. Gen Z's TikTok comment cabal says Millennials are toast while the old guard of boomers are playing oversized tic-tac-toe with wined-up Gen Xers and mutual melodramatic indifference.
Sheriff Mario RPG’s Geno Boost 2
It is a distraction. It is just one of online tribalism's many fork-tongued strains. And it is a culture clash without solid borders between factions. With names like the Sandwich Generation and Generation Jones, the idea of "cusper" micro-generations between established generations is far from new. "Xennials" in particular are well documented. With birthdates somewhere between '77 and '85, Xennials are characterized as enjoying an analog adolescence and a digital adulthood: "the last gasp of a time before sexting, Facebook shaming, and constant communication," as described by Anna Garvey, who calls it "The Oregon Trail Generation"—after fond memories playing the game on second-gen Apple computers in part-analog,, part-digital classrooms.
Compared with this rich profile, the following cusp generation has inspired very few meaningful discussions, let alone attempts at classification. Most of the generational designations considered "official" (often by age-targeting ad agencies) do themselves a disservice by declaring December 31, 1996 was the cutoff between Millennials and Gen Z. I think anyone born within 12 years of that borderline can agree that the difference between Millennials just shy of the Xennial cusp (those born roughly 1985–1990) and the typical face of Generation Z couldn't be more culturally vast.
runescape.wav2戰利品的戰爭 by runescape斯凱利
There has to be another slice in there to make juxtaposition between all three generations more illuminating. That's where birth dates 1993–1999 come in. From the Game Boy Color to Homestar Runner, awkward scene phases, and the VHS–DVD death–life cycle, this particular cusp can lay claim to many oddities of the early internet era, enjoyable only through the lens of an imaginative child throttled by a dial-up connection.
Who's in a Name?
Without any consistent label that would come from academic and media attention, this piece's featured micro-generation goes by many names whenever scantly explored through clickbait or Medium articles. Zillennial or Zennial is usually most common, with this article emphatically endorsing the latter.
With such a cool-sounding name, what makes Zennials so great? Well, it's not that they're better than any other generation—but they do have unique problems. And unique perspectives that ring uncannily true with themes recurrent in vaporwave aesthetics and music.
Pikachu Noticed the Weed, by Office WRKR
From the viewpoint of common Millennial and Gen Z tropes*, Zennials are stuck between a rock and a hard place: Millennials are (smugly) seen as lazy and entitled without long-term commitment, while Gen Z has been born into an uncertain global fate they never asked for—yet passionately wish to rescue through social change, advocacy and tolerance. Torn between inertia and action, the Zennial can be seen as either apathetically committed to preserving the past's momentum (the zen of ignorance, perhaps), or an older guard to be folded into the youngsters' coming revolution (a zen of solidarity).
This valley between the status quo and a subversion of it suggests that Zennials have a confused relationship with capitalism and consumerism—their childhoods are punctuated with the nostalgia of Go-Gurt, GameCube games at Blockbuster and frustratingly slow Neopet feedings, yet as digitally awakened early adults, they can see just how many of those memories were manufactured by corporate suits for a profit.
The Demise of Nanami by nanoshrine
At the same time, the web's awkward adolescence mirrors the Zennial's. Omnipresent forums, the start of YouTube, countless flash game sites, ChatRoulette, YTMND and beyond: this Internet had far lower standards for going viral, and a higher tolerance for humor now considered "cringey," granting Zennial teens loosely moderated sandboxes for collaboration and expression.
Still, being too young for Occupy Wall Street and too old for March for Our Lives, Zennials have had to align themselves politically at a more individual level, exploring their complicated relationship with consumerism, marketing and branding through art representative of such a fugue state. While many vaporwave producers today may see the genre as devoid of all the symbology it's been hyped up to have—perhaps rightfully so—it still makes sense why such a mythos behind the music would appeal to a thoughtful Zennial grappling with anti-capitalist sentiment and brand-steeped sentimentalism. Especially when so much of vaporwave imagery is seeded with Zennial cultural cornerstones, from corrupted PlayStation and Windows logos to eerily empty internet landscapes and the silent influence that comes from having lived through 9/11 without knowing it as more than an emotionally muddled pre-school memory.
Eggo, Ego, Ethos
flower, by cacola
The idea of "brand death" was a particular inspiration for this piece: raised with fond recollections of Grimace, Count Chocula, and any number of other charming corporate icons, it's jarring to now see the likes of Wendy's, Pop-Tarts and so many more transparently debase themselves with cringeworthy Twitter bandwagon-hopping and other vapid attempts to humanize their ultimately heartless money-making operations. Just as the Zennial's rose-tinted view of corporatism is shattered by the internet's clearer view of reality, so too does vaporwave thematically represent a "slow death" of trademarked nostalgia into a polygonal primordial soup of grown-up cynicism, and how all of us with personalities indirectly forged by elements of consumerism must now separate the marketed myth from the emotion we've tied to it—hopefully learning something about ourselves in the process.
For Zennial childhoods were seeded with visions of a false future we never really understood in the first place. Unable to remember the '90s yet unable to empathize with elementary schoolers on Instagram, Zennials are left with just a strange and awkward chunk of optimistically futuristic Y2K aesthetics to call their own. Whether it's early Blink-182 or eBaum's World, Salad Fingers or MiniClip, a Zennial's closest cognitive touchstones now often appear crude and indecipherable to anyone who didn't grow up with them. Along with this, the likes of AOL Instant Messenger chain letters and Majora's Mask creepypastas helped cement the Zennial condition as one ominously and wistfully trapped in time, a never-ending Limewire download that may or may not be a virus ready to wreck the family's Gateway desktop.
Unable to truly articulate how they feel and estranged from their bookending generations, Zennials can at least find symbolic comfort in the sovereign state of vaporwave—where the skeletons of obscure media (likewise lost to time) can be resurrected, glitched, slowed down and commandeered like marionettes doing a danse macabre for their own sake, all atop the crumbling ziggurat of a hollowed-out Chuck E. Cheese's.
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*Please note, this article is in no way meant to validate unfairly generalized generational stereotypes. Such mass assumptions about massive swaths of people can easily come off as ageist or ignorant, yet collective public sentiment is still worth studying, especially as it inspires art and discussion without splitting hairs. The compartmentalization of Millennial, Zennial and Gen Z qualities here is merely meant for illustrative purposes, and thematic comparisons with vaporwave will likely ring true for readers of all ages. The primary goal here is a microgenerational profile, not an intentional exclusion or judgement.
