Generation Y

I am a little off the pace when it comes to keeping up with the car chase of progress as it accelerates down the hill of change towards the unsuspecting fruit and vegetable stall of the zeitgeist. So feel free to scoff when I tell you that it was only yesterday when I first came across the term ‘Generation Y’. (First use of the expression, according to the infallible Wikipedia, was 1993)

Y. Now that is a pretty lazy stab at naming an entire age group if you ask me. Perhaps someone thought ‘ah, these are the children begat of Generation X ergo X+X= Generation Y. Leaving aside the questionable algebra, this particular naming convention has one very obvious problem, it starts far too late into the alphabet. If we had been talking about Generation A and B or even G & H, I think that they might have got away with it. But X & Y? Presumably that only leaves room for one more generation, the cybernetic filth terrorists that will be Generation Z, and then what?

But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Perhaps that is how it is for Generation Y. The previous letters have messed things up so much that by the time poor old Y has made it to the party all the beer has gone, the house has been trashed and Ms Gaia, the owner, has unexpectedly arrived home early from her two week vacation with her new boyfriend Mr Environmental Catastrophe and is now staring menacingly through the window. “One more Generation,” he’s shouting through the double glazing, “That’s all you’ve got punk, then I’m coming in.” (Now that, my friend, is a stretched metaphor).

Ultimately, convention requires the name of a generation to have a whiff of despondency to it; The Lost Generation, The Blank Generation, The Silent Generation, The Me Generation (rapidly replaced by Generation 2000), Generation X with Billy Idol, Generation Game and T-T-T-Ttalkinb-b-boutmy Generation, the list is quite literally a list. So in that respect, Generation Y fits right on in... Generation Why? Why? Why oh why? The plaintive question of a sad, curious child... Why is there war Mummy? Why is the sky broken Daddy? Why couldn’t anyone come up with a better name for my age group other than the bloody letter Y, Generation Text for example, see I made that up just now, and I’m not in marketing or anything.

So who are the Generation they call Y? After some extensive research, which consisted entirely of listening to Fear of a Blank Planet by the complicated chord bothering prog noodlers Porcupine Tree , it appears that Gen Y are some sort of hive mind of violent, hooded sensation junkies permanently hooked into cyberbinge-pornojunkpod devices. Hum, folk deviltry and moral panic if I be not mistaken (which I be not), fear, not of the Blank Planet, but born from the horrible realisation that your teenage son knows how to work more of the devices in your house than you do. ‘Ahhgh! I’ve handed the controls of the planet to a child, and he thinks Transformers are ‘kinda cool’ and doesn’t like Foghat, we’re all doomed.’ Like, lighten up dude. Kids these days, pah; making friends all over the world, bypassing the conventional media and doing their own thing, where will it all end?

I’ll tell you where… Lilly bloody Allen that’s where... Y, you little punks…