Gen X had the best "we're all gonna die" music. We're still singing it today.
My mental time capsule of the songwriters who captured the collective trauma and angst that defined Gen X in the nuclear age.
This is a post originally published just about this time last year. With last night’s news on our minds, it seems like a good time to reshare it (very lightly edited).
While certainly no one generation has a monopoly on fearing war, Gen X grew up with a singular relationship to words like “nuclear,” “nuclear facilities,” and “nuclear reactors” — so much so, I bet one or more of these songs are running through your head right now.
Sending my deepest wishes for peace to all innocent people today. And every day.
Yesterday, someone on Instagram asked me how I stay so positive about the state of the world.
I thought, wait…I am positive?
Okay!
I suppose what I am positive about is that when all decent people step up, educate themselves, and act instead of wallowing in resigned despair (with that, here is my PSA to kindly research Trump’s Project 2025 through this handy link), we make change.
And so, I try to put that message out in the world.
My belief in the good of people to overcome very bad things doesn’t come from blind optimism or naivety — it comes from perspective. You know, that thing you get when you’ve lived more than a few decades and try to pay attention to at least some of it.
I am, as you all well know, a proud, card-carrying member of Gen X, and by that I mean that hahaha of course we have no cards because no one actually remembers we exist.
We do exist. And we survived some serious shit.
While I don’t subscribe to the Grievance Olympics, our society knows well about the Greatest Generation fighting and dying to prevent fascism. Boomers and The Silent Generation fighting and dying for progress and civil rights. Millennials fighting for…I don’t know.
Color-coded bookshelves maybe?
(Kidding! Millennials came of age post-9/11, into the Unwinnable War on Terror, straight through the Bush recession of 2007-2009. The ombre bookstacks were just a happy little bonus when things got better. I have some too.)
As for Gen X kids, we woke up basically every morning, aware that that day had a non-zero possibility of ending in a mushroom cloud, our clothes melting off our bodies and our hair falling out, desperately hoping our fellow latchkey loved ones would come home with a few contaminated cans of Chef Boyardee or Carnation Instant Breakfast Bars, that we might feast before crumbling into irradiated dust.
Dark? Bleak?
Of course.
But… there was music!
A.K.A. 80s music.
A.K.A. The best musical decade ever and no I will not be taking comments at this time.
This summer, swimming in quite a bit of fear, anxiety and disgust, I have been finding strange comfort in the music of my youth.
Those who didn’t live through the 80s immediately think of bouncy early Madonna tunes, pop-synth tracks from A-ha and the Thompson Twins, glam metal anthems from Guns n Roses, Whitney Houston’s otherworldly lungs, and the iconic Michael Jackson’s moonwalk. All of them are worthy, important and wonderful.
But none of them make my mental time capsule of songwriters who captured the collective trauma and angst that defined Gen X in the nuclear age.
If you want to know the fears that shaped a generation, look at their music.
That's great, it starts with an earthquake
Birds, snakes, and airplanes…
•••
There's a room where the light won't find you
Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down
•••
This is a world destruction your life ain’t nothing
The human race is becoming a disgrace
The rich get richer.
The poor are getting poorer.
Fascist, chauvinistic government fools.
•••
Ninety-nine red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it's red alert
There's something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Since pretty much everyone forgets Gen X exists, I shouldn’t be surprised that subsequent generations get so much about us wrong.
From time to time, I come across 80s-themed bachelorette parties, everyone in hot pink tights under tutus, leg warmers, fishnet gloves and bandanas for headbands, as if my entire high school graduating class walked out the door each morning looking like Jem and the Holograms and singing Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.
It all seems so bright. So fun! So peppy!
(Those bachelorettes, by the way? They never dress alt-punk/new romantic, because that would require far too much androgyny and not nearly enough cleavage.)
(Related: I miss bolo ties just a little sometimes.)
The vision of the 80s as a decade neatly summed up by pop tunes and unnaturally vibrant glow-in-the-dark cami tops just doesn’t jibe with a lot of our lived experience. If you’re looking for a clothing metaphor, I’d at least go with overdyed acid-washed jeans — someone pummelled the shit out of them, then covered them up with a lively purple or cheerful turquoise, but the distress showed through. You could never forget how rough things were underneath.
Now that I think about it, it was the same with our music.
No one mastered “We’re all gonna die” quite like the artists of the 80s.
The subgenres, as I see them, boiled down to “We’re all gonna die so we might as well dance,” (1999, Dancing With Tears in My Eyes) closely followed by, “We’re all gonna die so we might as well fuck,” (Melt With You, Heaven, Everybody Wants to Rule the World), and “Oh crap, I really hope we’re not all gonna die” (The Russians, It’s a Mistake).
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the “wake up, some of us are dying right here” songs from NWA, Public Enemy, and Boogie Down Productions, who wrote boldly and unapologetically about the war on Black Americans in our very own borders.
Put it together, and youv’e got an entire music catalog of generational trauma, heavy on the electronic beats.
Although in fairness, Cyndi probably just wanted to have fun because hey, you might as well go down doing Jell-O shots on Avenue B with your besties.
While 1999 remains the most anthemic and most danceable in the genre, the award for Most Ironic Post-Détente Era Death Anthem is easily Forever Young, by Alphaville.
How many prom-planning committees through the decades have plucked that teen-friendly theme of universal longing for youth without really listening to the lyrics?
Let's dance in style, let's dance for a while
Heaven can wait, we're only watching the skies
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst
Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?
Let us die young or let us live forever
We don't have the power but we never say never
Sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip
The music's for the sad men
Can you imagine when this race is won
Turn our golden faces into the sun
Praising our leaders, we're getting in tune
The music's played by the mad man
Spoiler: “This race” was not a track & field event.
I still choke up every time I hear those opening notes in my AirPods. Yes, because I’m old now and have to get mammograms and youth’s like diamonds in the sun and all that — but also, it reminds me of a time that there was a real possibility that said bomb would be dropped, and we could only hope we’d go quick, and not like Steve Guttenberg.
(Who else still has nightmares about The Day After? And can you believe that schools made it mandatory for children to watch? Today’s helicopter parents would never.)
So I keep trying to figure out why I’m finding comfort in these songs right now.
At first, I imagined it was a trip back to the school dance songs of a so-called “simpler time,” when no children were depending on me for their entire livelihood, and there weren’t quite so many confusing varieties of Coke to choose from.
Then I thought, maybe it’s the opposite.
For me, this music is a cathartic trip back to a very complicated time, when things felt tenuous, if not dire. When every time we turned on the TV, there was a guy in charge who wanted the world to think he was the biggest, toughest boy on the playground with the most loyal henchmen and the most dangerous toys and he wasn’t afraid to make threats that would destabilize the world.
[Edited to add: And here we are again.]
In response, we didn’t give in to grief and despair. The world rallied and spoke up. We marched and wrote protest songs and made movies. We didn’t dismiss the science and the data. We didn’t dismiss lessons from history.
We listened, we learned, we collectively said, “we can beat this.”
And we did. Not all the terrible things, obviously, but one of the very big ones.
Reagan even credited The Day After for influencing him to sign the nuclear peace treaty with Gorbachev, and that inarguably makes all those years of bad dreams worth it to me.
(I have no idea if he ever listened to Alphaville TBH.)
So here we are. Still standing. All these years later.
Not so young, but not nuked into infinity either.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying, “Well, our country survived other threats and we’ll survive fascism too.” Because we won’t.
I’m just saying that positive change, like the defeat of an existential threat, isn’t something that just happens; it’s something we make happen.
I’ve seen it.
And I may be overly optimistic when I say: I still believe in us.
Hug your family, check in on your people, make a playlist, and light a candle for peace tonight. 🤍 xo L
Born in 1965, I am the oldest of the Xers. I remember all these songs. I remember the Cold War all too well. I wore a Jean vest, camo bandanna around my neck, Guess ankle zipper jeans and ankle boots. Yes I also wore neons sometimes to the clubs with fingerless gloves. All the music, it’s easy to forget how traumatized we were. Drugs, sex, rock n roll, and nukes. War Games was especially poignant. Thanks for this trip down memory lane. Also, I grew up in Los Angeles. I remember all too well the emergence of the Crips and Bloods - gang warfare.
Born in 1970 … and my parents wondered why I wore black lipstick and combat boots and rejected all the pink pop “pretty” stuff as a teenager. It’s a Mad World (Gary Jules’s version is particularly haunting these days)