The Pop, The Punk and The Pointless.

I was born a member of the in between generation. Between the reckless and disenfranchised generation X, and the woke agendad / easily upset generation Z. We were all old enough to remember when Monty Python were funny and young enough to understand the basic functions of the I-phone. I was at the tail end of the generation that gave way to Nirvana. The generation that made the silent agreement to split into two distinct groups; well rounded sell outs / mentally ill nostalgia junkies. We vaguely remember 9/11 and grew old enough to believe that Courtney killed Cobain. We were stuck renting without hope of owning our own homes and out of fear, got up every day, put on our eyeliner, listened to our pop punk playlists and dragged ourselves to work for the meagre pleasure of not living on the streets. We weren’t woke enough to be liberal but we weren’t old enough to be ignorant. We were just the PlayStation generation, hooked on progress but desperate for regression. Some of us wore suits to work and some of us wore jeans, but deep down behind our adult illusions we were all still smoking fifty-p cigarettes at the back of the field. We were still angry that Jamie Oliver took away our vending machines and our lunchtime burgers and chips.

Most of us studied in mobile classrooms, because the old buildings were outdated and the new buildings were too good for us. Those were for the next lot. We were just the stop gap. The in between, the temporary. By the time we hit our thirties our education was outdated. Our degrees were useless and we envied the classmates who had left schooling early to learn a trade. The big bad bullies of our youth had learnt to plumb and build and wire and had married the girls they dated on and off between years 9 to 11. The popular girl that all the boys had fancied was now a mother of three with lip filler. We looked back shamefully on the times we would slap girls arses in corridors. We remember shying away from reading out ‘the N word’ whilst studying Of Mice And Men at GCSE English. We have heard rumours that grades now come in numbers instead of letters but that all seems far too complicated to understand.

We are the generation beginning to dread forty. Friday nights no longer last until the early hours but the hangovers last through Sunday. We don’t know any of the songs they play in clubs but we still enjoy the feeling. We take joy in being asked for ID, unless we have forgotten to take it out and we often look in mirrors disturbed by the premature hints of grey. We aren’t old enough to have fought for this present but we’re too old to fight for the future. We’re stuck, feeling like we don’t matter. Like nothing we do will ever really affect the course of history. We’re not old enough to have ushered in the technological revolution and we are too early to usher in the cultural revolution. We’re clueless. We’re useless. So we just tread on, pointlessly into the void, listening to pop punk anthems with the cuffs of our cardigans shyly covering our knuckles. Trying to accept that although we might not be the generation that brings great change to the world, we are the generation that got to witness the true and the raw evolution of colloquial ideology. We might not matter in the grand scheme of things, like a single star can’t light up an entire night. But we got to be there, we got to witness the progress and the passion and the shifting of tides. We might not be the future, but we were there to see it born.

I think that golden age thinking has a part of me long for the version of the past I have seen solely in cinema, but in reality I think I'm right where I need to be.

We are the last generation to use house phones to call our boyfriends/girlfriends. We used disposable cameras on school trips and had the dark blurry images developed at Boots. We played outside not because we were forced to like our parents but because we understood that outside was better than inside. We are the last generation that had to use their imagination to have fun. Kids dont tie a string between two cups anymore to talk across a distance. They don’t have conker wars and they don’t care about the endlessly exciting worlds that exist out there if you just have the energy to dream them up; and with that I fear for the future of art and expression. I fear for the eventual dulling of the human soul. We were right there, the in-between generation. Sure we were destined never to make a difference but hell, we were lucky enough to witness it all change, and that sounds pretty fucking punk to me.