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It was a period of ambivalence, defined by an overwhelming assumption that life, and particularly American life, was underwhelming. That was the thinking at the time. It is not the thinking now.
It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.
The new goal was to emotionally and intellectually remove oneself from an uninteresting mainstream society.
An authentic jerk was preferable to a likeable sellout. It was a confusing time to care about things.
In the middle of the song, Cobain casually intones, “Oh well, whatever, never mind,” a Gen X aphorism so on-the-nose it would have been ridiculed if the Gen X proboscis were not still in utero.
In 1992, bragging about your area code was a collective expression of the community where you were. By 2002, it was an individual connection to the place you had left.
What matters more is what The Phantom Menace has come to represent: the saddest repudiation—and the harshest confirmation—of the entire Generation X ethos.
He watched tanks being driven through the walls of compound residences while a loudspeaker repeatedly broadcast the phrase “This is not an assault. This is not an assault.” Even in 1993, that level of ironic cognitive dissonance was too much.
