Hello everyone, and welcome back for another episode.

I'm Valerie, that's David and this is our Gen X Pittsburgh podcast.

Tonight, our special guest is Me Lenos.

She is the coauthor of generation X the popular cultur that Defined the MTV generation.

We'll chat about the book well reminisce, and finally put a period on the question when exactly did X starts.

He looks exciting about that book, Valerie?

What?

I'm in it.

Yeah, I kno you've told me like 100 times.

I know, I told everybody.

Right?

I told the mother, my son, my son didn't care, but I told him.

I'm in your book, so.

You are.

So now were equal, right?

So how was your week?

It was good.

I got my hair.

Did good for you.

Looks good.

How is your week?

It was good.

You know, I was thinking before we started the show.

I have worn different shoes on every on every show.

Yeah, I have.

And I could, these are Doc Martens, I can wear different Doc Martens for the next month and never repeat.

Does he seriously have 30 pairs of Doc Martens?

At least.

Really?

And if we're talking tennis shoes, if we're getting into tennis shoes, I could go 60 75 days without repeating shoes.

Let's start a calendar.

Okay.

I think it's worthwhile.

Right?

Shoes.

I think we should.

And here.

How about this?

Most of those shoes were bought to match a shirt that I have.

So I can wear a matching shirt with shoes.

Wow.

I'm very proud.

And I bet your wife is too.

She hates the money I spend on shoes.

I even have plaid ones.

Do you really?

I do.

I have on pair of Doc Martens right now.

That's about it.

I have many, many.

Wow.

Listen, you beat me and my husband thinks I have a lot of shoes.

Kim thinks I have a lot of shoes I can't wait to tell him about you.

Yeah, I won't feel so bad.

Kim has four pairs of shoes and one of them has holes in it but I'm like, no, we can't get you new shoes.

I need a red pair of Doc Martens What's wrong with you, Kim?

That's right.

Oh, dear Lord, I think we're going to have a great show today.

I'm looking forward to it.

Me too.

This is our first official, like.

I mean, with an actual, like, authority, right?

Everyone else has just been.

Whatever, right?

I mean, somebody who's been alive.

Somebody who's who's been in a band.

Right?

But this is now somebody that we can actually talk to about generation X, give us a lot of answers on some of the questions that.

Right.

And probably tell us a lot of things we've said in the first five shows were just absolutely incorrect.

Right, right, right.

We've just been going by th shoe, by the laces of our shoes.

Oh my God, now look at that.

Here we go.

Look at that.

On that note, we're going to take a quick break.

And when we return, Melissa will be up here.

Stick around.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back to GXP Melissa Lenos is in the hous Thanks for joining us tonight Thank you so much for having me.

I, David and I can't wait to kick to get into the book.

There's so much good stuff.

There's a timeline in here for easy access.

This book is incredible.

But before we dive in.

Can you tell us a little bit about your childhood?

Where did you grow up?

Sure.

So I was born in 76, in rural Ohio, to Greek immigrants.

And I my I' in the middle of two marriages, so kind of classic Gen-X.

Like my dad had my older brother, my older sister, I was 12 years later.

So my older siblings are both boomers.

And then my dad remarried and had my two younger half brothers who were both Millenials.

Wow.

So perfect.

Kind of like Gen-X situating in the middle of thi like large span of of children.

Yeah, I grew up on a sheep farm.

Holy cow.

Yeah.

No.

And because I'm so older than my little brothers, I did spend a lot of time not only being a kind of classic latchkey kid, although we were so rural, I don't even think we had key or locking doors at that point, but kind of like getting home from school and helping to get them situated and make them snacks and put them in for our TV immediately.

Yeah, we were pretty working class, so we didn't have cable or like all of my cousins had like a Nintendo way before I had access to one and things like that.

So, that's I feel like I missed out on a little bit, except the thrill of going over to somebody's house and seeing the tech that they had access to.

To me, it was a really kind of seminal part of growing up Gen X, so kind of getting to experience those things as novelties, which is how and how, and a lot of it is.

Yeah.

So then I went to college.

I went to Pitt, actually, University of Pittsburgh, where I studied English and film studie and was kind of really immersed in the arts and music community at that point.

So folks familiar with Peach Pit or with the what was originally Roboto and is new Roboto, I was kind o on the outskirts of all of that, and getting to watch it happen in real time.

Yeah.

Devastated about Hemingway' closing his just like, constant.

Everyone either worked there or we had poetry readings ther and all those kinds of things.

So yeah, I went to The Beehive of a lot and loved Pittsburgh so much so that I went ahead and took six years to get a bachelor's degree just to like, hold on.

As long as I could.

Right.

And then I went to Temple in Philadelphia for my PhD.

Yeah, yeah.

Nice.

Very nice.

But you were.

You are.

Or you were in a band.

Oh, I'm currently in a band.

How's about that?

My band is called the Dewey Decibel System.

Yes.

The response we always hope for.

Kind of are punk, we've been on a little bit of a hiatus becaus as a band made up of Gen Xers, my guitar player occasionally has to get wrist surgery.

So we have to go on hold.

Right.

Yeah, but we play ou and we play Roboto, Government Center, Bottle Rocket, anyone who will have us.

Yeah, I love that Yeah.

It's it's it's very silly.

I love it.

It's kind of goofy music.

We write songs about memes and things like that.

I love it.

But last year for Bottle Rocket thanks, Halloween show where bands played as other bands.

We got to be The Cure.

Oh very cool.

And that was just a dream come true.

Yeah.

So we were talking before you got here.

Valerie and I and we were wondering what made you decide to write this book, and why did you decide?

How did you decide to do it with somebody else?

I mean, how did that happen?

Well, I clicked with Bloomsbury before.

My first book is a like a kind of classic introduction to film studies textbook.

So we had had a good relationship.

Kevin had also written a book with them on 80s pop culture and Kevin Ferguson, hes the coauthor.

Yes.

And he was so sad he couldn't be here.

But he was in Brooklyn and was not.

Oh, sure.

Able to make that commute.

And we kind of hoped that doing a book with a. My first book was with the coauthor, but different because I was a graduate student.

He was a faculty member.

And we kind of being curious about what that process would look like.

Writing a book with a peer and particularly writing a book would appear who's als Gen X, very passionate about Gen X has a lot of opinions about Gen X. Me too.

Yeah.

So when Bloomsbury approached us and said that they were going to add to this series they had a book about boomers.

The millennial book may hav beat us to press, I'm not sure.

We we jumped on it immediately and then proceeded to get spreadsheets from all of the different editors connected to the project, all of whom had literally hundreds of suggestions about what happened.

Absolutely has to be covered in school, and they're all in conflict with each other and none of them aligned with ours.

And so we yeah, it was just even that process of kind of negotiating.

Right.

What gets and so a lot of the introduction is us talking abou how the book becomes very much a reflection of our experience as Gen Xers, which is white, working class and middle class.

I'm from rura Ohio, Kevin's from Louisville.

So it ends up very much reflecting our experiences.

And that's one of the reasons that we were really conscientious of doing interviews with people who were either older or younger, or people of colo who had at different experiences than we had.

Yeah.

And that is just a blast.

It's one of those I don't know if you guys experience this in writing, just like the dread that you feel until you sit down to write and you're like, why am I?

Why am I procrastinating?

This feels glorious.

I always tell my students I don't like writing, but I love having written.

Yeah, sure.

It's like, well, so I'm curious.

First of all, the book is expansive.

I mean, everyone should know that.

That it really does.

I was surprised by all the topics and I was really interested.

And now that you spoke a little bit about your film studies, I'm interested in talking about some of the movies because I love some of the things you said about Singles, right?

I did what I'm assuming everybody does is you start to look to see you know, if your favorite thing is in the book right now.

That being said, I can't help but see what The Replacements are not in the book.

How can you do a book about Gen X and not include The Replacements?

This is every conversatio about the book starts with that.

How do you have a book about Gen X without having that?

Right.

I mean, and that was, The Replacements was absolutely in the spreadsheet of things that just we, we, we had to make a negotiation of making editors happy.

Covering a kind of wide swath of ground so that it can't.

It is primarily intended to be used as a very lower level undergraduate undergrad, or like a high schoo media literacy classroom text.

So keeping it in that scope and and just knowing there are things that are just not going to make it.

I think he and both have things that were just I still have files.

I was checking like my Google Drive, like files and things that I started that I didnt get to include, which is always a bummer.

How long did it take you to write the book?

Thank you for asking that question.

So the dedication is that it's for the slackers because it was four years late, and that is four years later than the due date, whic would have been two years after we began working on it.

Lots of just weird life situations happened.

My father unfortunately died.

I got divorced, Kevin got divorced.

Covid happened.

I changed jobs and moved across the country.

So we just kept having to push it and push it.

So it too far longer than it should have.

Well how did how long did it take you to decide on the final topic?

Because just everybody knows it's not just simply I mean, it's everythin that touched pop culture, right?

But it's not a light,.

and I mean, yeah there's Singles, there's Reality Bites, there's Empire Records, but they're and REM.

But there's also O.J.

Simpson and The Challenger explosion.

Right?

I mean, there are there is.

It really takes a deep dive, I think, anyways, into at least all of those things from the television generation that matter to us.

How did you decide on this?

So honestly, we had finishe the book and sent in the proofs and they came back and gave i had a list of ten more things.

So it was a constant.

I mean, it was supposed to be 100 entries.

I think it ended up 110.

So because w we just had to tell them like, this isn't what you contracted us to do.

Like we're happy to do it, but also we're way beyond the scope, the front section that has the kind of introductory like sort of short conversations about things like Gen X and their experience of public health or Gen X and heteronormative relationships, like the fact that the divorce rate spiked when we were children.

Those are standar for the template for the series that this book belongs to.

The individual entries, We really had a lot of leeway on once we got moving on them.

But, you know, with with th additions of the editorial folks want it.

So yeah, there was but it was really we sat down and we initially began, we came up against this question of, are we writing a book about the popular culture that we experienced and that made us who we are, or are we writing a book about popular culture that's now being generated by Gen X creators?

And I really wanted to talk about both.

So we did negotiate that as well, because I think that th material that Gen X, you know, showrunners and television and filmmakers, I think that the content that they're creating is so fascinating.

And also, when you go back and look at a movie like The Breakfast Clu that comes to mind immediately, that that is a boomer vision of a Gen X community.

Yeah.

And and it's it's like weird kind of idyllic, aspirational.

You know, what the boomers would have liked us to be, right?

Right.

That's a very interesting explanation, though, because I know when I wrote my book, people were saying to me, are you going to have people of color?

Are you going to have immigrants?

And and on the one hand, I understand the urge, the desire to have that because that's where we are.

You know, we've we've moved beyond.

But the fact is, the experience that I had in Pittsburgh in the 90s in the Southside was there.

I mean, were there people of color?

Sure.

But they it there wasn't a lot right at the Beehive.

There wasn't a lot at Slacker.

They existed.

I'm not trying to say that that culture didn't exist.

Right.

Or or but it just was different.

It was primarily still, even though we were the ones I tell my wife all time, I feel like this, right?

Like we were the ones who laid the groundwork for a lot of the LGBTQ plus movements that have happened, the, you know, the trans movements that have happened, the immigrant movements that have happened.

But we were still, like yo said, sort of hetero normal or white suburban in a lot of ways, even if we were living in cities.

Yeah.

And and take that experience and move it to rural Ohio and just imagine, I mean, there were essentially no children of color at my elementary school or my junior high.

I went to a private high school.

So that was a little bit more diverse.

But growing up in my neighborhood, because my dad had a funny accen and my dad was very kind of like classic Greek swarthy, I did not inherit this.

Like the racists in our neighborhood would like look at him like are we should we go get across to burn?

Like who's this guy?

You know where did he, because it was just so isolated and so homogenous.

And I mean, this is the thing that I'm kind of perpetually yelling at my students about pre-internet, right?

So we were not being exposed.

All of our cultural exposure wa whatever we were seeing on TV, which was extremely white and heteronormative, with the exception of things like The Cosby Show and 227 which Cosby in particular, problematic.

And so we wer just not getting the exposure.

I was thinking the other day about Sesame Street and how as a, as a rural kid, just seeing this vibrant, diverse community like, where the hell is this like magi location I never experienced in my life?

I grew up in Canton, Oh Oh yeah, so I know.

So exactly, I know what it was like.

Yeah, yeah, I can't.

My mom took me to the Football Hall of Fame.

Oh, I'm a little bit towards Massillon, but yeah.

Yeah.

And so how many interviews did you do?

I know that I was interviewed, but how many interviews di you do total and were they were some of them incorporate into the topics themselves?

Yes.

So I think we ended up with between 12 and 15.

It was oddly difficult to get books.

I tried to make it as low of a lift as possible, saying, you know, I'm happy to do everything over email.

I can send you the questions in advance and you can, you know, reply at your leisure.

I think, again, because we were getting into that portion during Covid and people were just at their limit, not able to take anything else on.

But what would happen is we would essentially run into people.

I think I came across your book and was like, well, this makes absolute sense.

We Rob Zabrecky of Possum Dixon is in there because Kevin and went to one of his magic shows.

Wow.

And I was like when he was in Pittsburgh doing a whole, like, stint at Liberty Magic.

And I was like, can I buy you coffee and ask you about Lollapalooza?

Because you were.

And he's like, I don't remembe much of Lollapalooza but sure.

So getting that opportunity to kind of like, honestly take whoever we were able to get, I think the woman I'm not going to be able to pull up her name on the top of my head.

The woman whose father was in Dukes of Hazzard.

Yeah.

Kevin knows through New York academic community.

Yes.

And that was when we were really.

I was so hoping that she would talk about just the again, like the complexity of being a middle aged Gen-X hyper literal academic and having your father be in this deeply problematic TV sho Literally growing up on the set of The Dukes of Hazzard.

Just the stories are wild.

Yeah.

Well, so we were very curious.

We're very happy you're here because we want to talk about when did you, in the book decide that Gen X starts?

Right.

Because it can be people will argue 1960, though I know that it's much, much later.

But people will say, well, no, I was born in 1960 and I'm I'm not a boomer.

Right?

It or they try to push it forward more.

When did you decide it was?

We had to do that right away.

That was at one of the first decisions that we had to make, because we wanted to build off of this timeline that the press wanted.

And honestly, we just did a deep dive in demographics research.

We kept it strictly to the US because again, we were writing about our experience.

You know, we have one Australian Gen X who we interviewed, but the the lens of this was going to be extremely US centric, just by necessity of keeping it compact and also reflecting the experiences that we felt qualified to speak to.

And when we dug in all of this demographics research, we just really ran the numbers.

And the most common was 65 to 80.

But is that uncommon?

Aren't most generations 18 years or for this kind of research, are they typically 15?

So get varies and it seems to vary.

I was reading a lot about the the boomer cohort split, and some of it has to do with the impact of a historic event that causes a cutoff.

Okay.

So some some seem to be going longer and some seem to be going shorter.

I think the Zoomers are getting I feel like again, like Covid ended up being kind of a cutoff moment.

So children, you grew up going to school for three years essentially online like that.

That was that's going to be a marker for a cohort because it has to do with the shared experiences.

So when you mentioned The Challenger explosion, that was one of the first things on my list, not because I'm dark, but because I was like, this is a an absolutely formative experience that we have to talk about.

So yeah, I think that some of it has to do with, you know, age, the generation that came before and when they tend to have their children, but also when there are these shattering moments that create divisions that might not have necessarily been there otherwise.

Yeah.

So I really think it's interesting that I don't think you say this in the book, but but I think that television is one of the primary movers of this.

Right.

And I know that for myself.

Challenger.

Yes.

But the first thing I remember from television was the Tylenol scare where they poisoned the pills.

And the reason it made such an impact on me was I was allergic to Asprin, so the only thing I could take was Tylenol.

And I thought, oh my gosh, I'm going to die, right?

And and but but I wouldn't have known about that.

But for television.

And I think that's a, is that one of the primary movers from our generation I guess is the question?

Yeah.

And the thing is, with us and millennials, I think, I think it's going to end up being almost a unique.

Yeah.

I taught a weeklong seminar at the University of Oklahoma a couple months ago on this book, and all of the students who enrolled enrolled so that I could explain their parents to them, which is like, heavy pressure, as a child free woman.

And the thing that I wanted to begin with, with them was, I need a shared text.

I need to know a movie or a TV show.

I need to know something that all of you know.

And then I'll go back to my you know, hotel room and binge so that we can make sure that we can and we couldn't.

There wasnt one really, there was no there was like a TikTok influencer.

I was like, I'm not to like, right?

I just we couldn't get there because they don't have the experienc of having this shared cultural touchstone that you can kind of like all go back to, which, of course, I'm, you know, old and crotchety and I'm like, that just feels like such a loss.

Yeah.

And it's the boomers are really the birth of the concept of the American teenager, right?

We have like, the leisure to not have to send children either, you know, immediately to war or immediately into the labor force.

Also, we are having this economic upswing.

So we have a [bleep] of teenagers then disposable income.

So we're going to start creating media for that, which is so exciting to think about.

You know, we give boomers a lot of grief, but their media texts are really interesting for that reason.

And then we get this expansion with cable.

Yeah.

And then with birth of the internet.

And then millennials have that experience as well.

And that's like it gets by s many older millennials connect so to Gen-X popular cultur because there's a there's like a nice lag there that gives them that context as well.

But then once we hit streaming which is wonderful, right?

We have all of these kind of like niche ways to, to to provide content for audiences who've never had content directed that for.

I am a firm believer that more creators is only better because we're getting more voices that would not otherwise be heard.

It's easier.

It's less expensive to create content now than it's ever been before.

But the loss there is the loss of this core text that you can always come back to.

I remember when Pearl Jam and Radiohead both put out an album withou a record company, and I remember Pearl Jam's manager was interviewed and they said, so now there's no nee for a record companies anymore.

And his response was, sure, you just have to be Pearl Jam or Radiohead first.

Right.

And and I mean, that's not true now, but maybe it should be, right?

I mean, because there's there's so much information available that we didn't have.

Right.

Like, I mean, I understand people use the phrase gatekeepers and maybe they use that as a pejorative, but, you know, you knew when a band got to a certain level, even an indie band, you know, let's just say, you know, the Rollins Band or Black Flag or or R.E.M.

or somebody, I mean, who was really indie, they were still of a quality that you don't find.

No, it's no offense, but when I can set up a camera in my bedroom and just strum on a guitar, there's nobody saying to you because your mom and dad certainly aren't right, that that song sucks, right?

Like, maybe cut the chords maybe move the bridge up, right?

Like nobody does that anymore.

But Gen X, they still had that.

Yes.

And we were still all able to coalesce around, you know, the last Cosby Show or the, you know, whatever news event that was going on.

Right?

These were singular moments.

And I think I and I don't want to keep up, but, you know, that sort of gave way what came after that.

When people start being distrustful of the media, it's because there's no one source anymore, right?

Or three sources.

Now it's getting wherever you get it and.

And hope that it's not AI.

That's exactly right.

Yes.

Yeah.

And the music industry facet of that to me, for me, it's not just the gatekeeping but the loss of independent radio.

Sure.

So the section in here on radio, I just got enormously emotional while writing it, because that momen when Clear Channel just starts.

But like we got rid of thes nonconglomerate media acts, it's everything gets deregulated Clear Channel buys everything.

And and there is essentially no more independent radio, aside from college radio and NPR which is wonderful and I don't kno what we would do without them, but that that loss of the opportunity, you know, for somebody to to hand a CD to somebody who worked at Pitts radio station and be like, play, play my music and then I'm going to go play a show, you know, at Roboto and the and maybe somebody will see me.

I mean, that process is, I feel like also a loss.

I do think that even with the glut of material online, because it's source from the ground up, I think that there's still an opportunity for the quality to punch through.

Yeah, sure, sure it is though.

You are so right.

It used to be tha when you were in college radio, if you were a band, if you could chart on CMJ, then you could probably get o some alternative music station, you know, on the FM dial.

And once that happened, hopefull you're off to the races, right?

That doesn't happen, right?

Yeah.

And I mean, I think the some of the major festivals still do.

They do local band stages anymore even.

When was the last time you went to the Vans Warped Tour?

That's.

Yes.

So it's that that is a loss as well.

Although I do think tha post-Covid the live music scene, at least in Pittsburgh, it seems to be revamping.

It does.

And it is so welcoming and so just mutually supportive in ways that have been delightful for me to see.

The kids are all right.

Yeah.

And so what's the what's the goal with this book?

Do you want it to be taught?

Do you want it to show up in libraries?

Do you want it to be bought at Barnes and Noble?

All of those things?

I mean, what's what's your endgame?

Do not buy this book at Barnes & Noble.

The goal is to get it into libraries.

It is, you know it's from Bloomsbury Academic.

It is the academic press.

Kevin and I are both very we try to write more conversationally in a way.

We both teach undergraduates primarily, so we are most interested in taking complex concepts and making them accessibl to as many people as possible.

So the hope is that, you know, keep telling folks, tell your local library to buy a copy.

Tell if you work with th university or near a university, please ask them to buy a copy, because that is going to be where it gets into the line of sight of folks who might teach it, or students who will use it as a resource text like that's and that's wonderful as well.

What is the Gen X Pittsburgh podcast?

Let me take you back.

Remember when coffee was king and Pizza Bagels ruled on the corner of 14th and Carson at The Beehive?

But how about that tim you stumbled upon Art all night?

How cool was that?

Or when your evening started instead of ended at 10 p.m.?

Yeah, we miss those days too.

So we're bringing them back one giant story at a time.

Join David Rule and I, Valerie Christoffel, as we sit down with the movers and shakers, the artists and the voices who helped shape Pittsburgh back in the early 90s.

Subscrib to the Jenks Pittsburgh podcast.

Welcome back to Pittsburgh.

I have a question for you.

How i What is your opinion on that?

So what's really interesting to me is both that we have wonderful Gen X creators, folks working particularly, I think, in like streaming television, who are creating these reflections of our experiences in ways that are like almost retroactively aspirational.

So I don't kno if either you've seen the show Yellowjackets sample that I really love to think about, because on the one hand, it is just this joyful vision of, you know, teenagers playing on a soccer team in the 1990s, and then they get stranded and there's a plane crash.

And that's less joyful in Africa.

The part that gets very to the core of what I feel like I'm seeing in a lot of these Gen X generated texts is having a show that takes place in that time in which interracial relationships, queer relationships, I mean, are, are accepte and graced by these characters publicly and in a, in a visual in a way that would not have been possible at the time.

Right?

Just because of the limitations of television and mass market media at that moment.

The other on that's really interesting to me is Gen-X medi being generated by millennials.

Stranger things, which again, is this very kind of in some ways oddly nostalgic because it's nostalgic for a momen in which the creators were not either not alive or were too young to be experiencing all of the thing.

And so as a result, we get this kind of like beautiful conglomeration of like, we're going to play d&d and we're going to go to the mall and we've got our Sony Walkman and Kate Bush and things are, you know, they're going to be crotchety people who are like very detail oriented, who are like, these things are not happening in the right, right, sequential order in terms of time.

And, you know, that happened in 1987.

That's not 1983.

And I kind of think thats not the point.

The point is this vision of this moment in time that looks so appealing in some ways, very much who did not experience it.

So I think that some of it is this retroactive social aspiration of, of having a more kind of like, wistful, like, what if what if our childhood had had the freedom and the openness that, that children today have access to, but then also this, this opportunity to expose a new generation to music.

So Yellowjackets there are these like beautiful sequences where people are giving each other mixtapes and for a TV show, it's like, oh, we're spending a lot of time on these mixtapes that are not necessarily an enormous part of the plot.

But again, clearl these artifacts of this moment that we want to share with the new generation.

And then one other angle that comes in is a a creator like Mike Flanagan, who does a lot of horror movies and horror streaming, and he talks very openly about the fact that he pretty much everything he does takes place in the 80s because he doesn't want to have to deal with primarily cell phones.

Oh, wow.

He's like, cel phone is a horror movie killer.

Yeah, cause you're just gonna call the police.

Right.

So if we set things in the 80s, then we kind of get to bypass that.

But again, we also get to have, like, these, you know, fantastic.

Like mom jeans and Reebok high tops.

And again, all of the artifacts that we feel really nostalgic for.

And then again, we have we have a joint nostalgia for the because we all experience them to some extent, either by owning them or experiencing the personally or seeing them on TV.

Also, let me ask you then, and I don't know, this might be something you haven't thought about or explored before, but as you're talking, I'm thinking about music specifically, where each generation seems to draw from the previous generations, right?

Like, I mean, Gen X music, you look The Black Crowes, they're the Rolling Stones, right?

You look at Lenny Kravitz and he's following in Jimi Hendrix, right?

But then you get to now where kids aren't listening to CDs or albums.

I mean, the albums they're buying are brand new albums, you know?

So is that lost?

Does that still happen?

Do you know?

I, I'm I'm curious about that.

When I went to the University of Oklahoma and taught this week long seminar to these 18 year olds, one of their assignments was to make a mixtape.

Yeah.

And I, like went to thrift stores and eBay and I collected all of these tape.

Yeah, players and bought a bunch of cassette tapes and and they were utterly baffled.

They had they one of them started.

That hurts my soul.

Well, no.

One of them started and they came up to me with their tap and they're like, I messed up.

I need a new tape.

And I was like, oh, no, this is so cool.

They just rewind.

Go over.

And the quality is just absolute garbage because they're playing off of like, boom boxes and or pulling information down from I was like use Spotify, I don't care.

However, you can get it done, get it done.

And some of them were extremely in tun with what we were listening to, and it was the students whose parents had been passionate about music, were asking me questions like, have you ever heard of this band L7?

Yes.

This is amazing, right?

So there is I think it again, is because we were a very media savvy, media heavy generation.

Many of us were who had very, very passionate relationships to a pretty limited each of us, a limited number of bands typically.

Right.

And let's you're a rich kid and you could go to like Coconut Records at the mall and buy everything.

You were really limited to whatever you were hearing on the radio, whatever your older brothers and sisters gave you.

Or friends sharing mixtapes and things like that.

So again, it is fragmented for them.

I do think that a lot of the popular artists who they're interested in or now coming up as, again, children of music nerds.

Yeah, I feel I feel like I found out the other day that a fairly popular new artis is like a child of like a grunge Okay.

Like a second or third tier grunge band.

And so again, these kiddos coming up and kind of taking on the mantle.

So the influence I thin is happening in a different way.

Or they hear a Kate Bush song on Stranger Things and then it charts.

Sure, sure.

I mean, it's very strange, but also kind of I mean, yeah, it can be beautiful and depressing at the same time, right?

I mean, I do think, though and I guess that just was you.

You touched upon this in the very beginning that, you know, your parents always seem old, right?

But when I did the math, when my mom and my mother and father got divorced my dad was 26.

Right.

And so, like, I would go to his house on the weekends and he would have MTV playing and Atari.

And I would think this old guy is like letting me watch MTV, you know what I mean?

Which is so for me.

But he was 26.

Of course, he was consuming MTV, right?

I mean, and and now everybody's parents, we we didn't have my son until we were much later in life.

It seems like we've gon back to where we're older now.

Families are obviously more stable.

There's not divorce rate, at least I don't think is is is as high.

Right.

So I'm but is something lost when that sort of stability sets in?

I think it's inevitably going to be lost.

But I do think that we're always going to have teenagers who are going to go and dig.

Yeah, they're going to go and find, you know, the, the, the thing that they heard a piece of and they have to know what it was and it's thank God it's easier to find nowadays.

I talked in here about a friend made me a mixtape, and there was a song on i that I no longer have the tape.

The song is still in my head and I have never found.

And that that again, like in some ways it would almost be terrible to find it now because it it becomes this thing that like, just lives inside my head.

That's what it's for.

But the weird boom right now in vinyl, yeah, is.

Oh, yeah.

Creating a very interesting moment because people running record stores are our age.

Right.

And these contemporary teenagers are going into record stores and having people like this is Depeche Mode, take it out right now.

And so that I think is creating some opportunities for, for other stuff to seep it.

And then again, I don't know if Chapell Roan maybe said something about Kim Deal.

Kevin has kiddos and and they are they are very muc discovering music both through they become obsessed with viny and like going to music stores and buying used albums.

And then I'm giving them like, here's a Pixies album.

And then and then she ha the experience of saying like, oh, you like this band?

The Breeders, that lady Kim Deal put out, so now she's listening to Kim Deals new music, which is wonderful.

It's fantastic.

But I think you're right.

There is there's always going to be a loss and a gap there that I think is primarily because of the fragmentation.

Just the fragmentation of media is going to have these ripple effects.

So.

Right.

All right.

Well we're going to move on to our what do we call this.

Wrap this up.

Well rapid fire questions maybe.

Okay.

We're going to ask you questions.

They're not hard and you just have to answer them.

Its that easy.

This feels like a trap.

Many of these are right up with your level, your area of expertise so you're going to be the first one who I really feel comfortable asking these questions to.

David, you can start.

Okay.

This one is not yeah, Iron City or Rolling Rock?

Iron City.

Three Rivers Stadium or Heinz Field?

Oh Three Rivers.

Favorite Gen X band?

Pixies.

Turner's or Schneider's?

I don't know what that means.

The iced tea.

I only know Turner's, Schneider's took it out of context for me, so I'm only, I only know Turners.

Okay.

What's your favorite Gen X movie?

Reality Bites.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

That was mine Donzi's and Chaunceys or Metrop and Rosebud?

Metropol and Rosebud.

Yeah, that was that kind of a silly question.

Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

Absolutely.

Nirvana or Pearl Jam?

For me, Nirvana.

Okay.

Yeah.

And which character from The Breakfast Club you identify with the most?

Al-Qaeda's Cuba.

Ally Sheedys.

Yeah.

Southside Beehive or Oakland Beehive?

Oakland.

Okay.

Sheer, it was right there.

Yeah.

Okay.

One more question.

What was your greatest Gen X experience?

Oh, my Greatest Gen X experience I think it was going to college, meeting people who were not like me for the first time in my entire life.

Immediately shaving my head.

Getting a toxic musician boyfriend and dropping out of college.

Just.

Absolutely.

That's.

I am not the person I am today without those experiences, other than the boyfriend, I had very much the exact same experience.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, Melissa, thank you so much for joining us.

This has been this has been.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

If I can come back some time with my coauthor.

Oh, definitely.

Yeah, yeah.

And go find the book in your local library.

If she's telling yo not to buy the Barnes and Noble, go find it.

It's not.

And if they dont have it, have them buy it.

Yes.

The Gen X Pittsburgh Podcast hosts are David Brullo and Valeri Christofel.

Executive producer, David Brullo.

Producer and graph designer, Kim Rullo.

Producer, Valerie Christofel.

Video production and editor, Brent Isaac.

Music by NeoStem.