Generational Curse

If millennials are cringe why are we obsessed with indie sleaze?

halleta alemu

May 22, 2023

I remember hearing the term millennial my freshman year of college and being so fascinated by it. I felt lucky, very lucky. I thought we must be the chosen generation because we got to be associated with the millennium.

I loved that word, millennium. It reminded me of that Backstreet Boys album cover splashed with them in all-white. It reminded me of Zenon Girl of the 21st Century. It reminded me of an idea of a future, a far-reaching, idealistic, future, that was somehow within grasp. I felt honored to carry that generational moniker and be the kids who lived out that futuristic dream. I thought we must be extra special to be categorized under that name. Extra, extra special.

That was 2011. Lana Del Rey had just released “Video Games”, Watch the Throne was my album of the summer, and I just had moved to Los Angeles to pursue my dreams of being in the entertainment industry.

Everything felt new, hopeful, yet blissfully hazy. My dreams weren’t quite clear, but a quick Tumblr scroll, or listening to “Bad Girls” by MIA, or “Gucci Gucci” by Kreayshawn, would set off a pure light in me. The world felt like it was mine. That it was merely seconds away from being dropped into the palms of my eager hands.

At that point, I still believed in the systems. I believed Hollywood was right and fair. It didn’t cross my mind that there weren’t many people who looked like me making executive decisions, I only thought that it was my duty to pander to them to be able to succeed. How it would be my moral failing if I didn’t.

The indie sleaze era is considered the pocket of time between 2008-2014.

The term was coined in 2021.

It’s now May 2023.

Hollywood is collapsing and social media algorithms are the new gatekeepers. I scroll through my TikTok as I’m served video on video of indie sleaze thrift hauls, digital camera flash photography, and a rotunda of music from a decade ago.

It’s really, really weird to see younger people resurge an experience that you lived through. There’s a detached awe in their imitation, that would be almost endearing if it wasn’t so weird.

The Y2K resurgence has definitely been weird too, however, since I was a child during the early 2000s, the joie de vivre of that era felt like a distant dream to me. I too wanted to repurpose the image of the early aughts, because this time I could feel it as an adult. I couldn’t be in Hollywood, club-hopping, and wearing Von Dutch because I was in elementary school.

What’s different about indie sleaze though, is that I really lived through that. I was in high school and college and those memories are very real. I wasn’t a fully actualized adult, but nearly so. It was something I very much felt a part of and proud of. I thought of my generation and I looked up to us. Especially, since I’m on the tail-end of the millennial sector. Millennials are individuals born between the years 1981 and 1996. I was born in 1993.

The focus was on us. I felt blessed.

It was roughly a couple of years ago that I noticed an uptick in trending conversations about Gen Z. Suddenly, a newer, more controversial class of young people was coming into age. This quadruply internet-savvy, raised by influencers generation who were now more fascinating than millennials. Who’s attention spans, perspectives, and wallets were more valuable than millennials.

We were being pushed off the generational pedestal to make way for this fresh, youthful barrage of contentious trendsetters. With that, came an onslaught of trashing millennials. How the term has now become synonymous with everything uncool and cringe-worthy. I mean, I was used to older generations condemning millennials but that more so felt like an irritable old man telling teens to stay off his lawn. These days the insults felt sharper.

A new form of self-consciousness began to erupt in me. This idea that my way of thinking, speaking, dressing, or even telling jokes, is part of a wave that has “expired”. Of course, growing up, at times I had felt uncool and like I wasn’t a part of certain trends. But this was different. I had never felt so disconnected from the generation under me, even though we were only a few years apart.

We had lost the spotlight.

But, I thought we were millennials! I thought that meant we would be special forever! That it was something we were granted by being adhered to the turn of the century. It was like everyone aspired to be us and then threw us away. Then resuscitated us as costumes. How are millennials being torched while indie sleaze is reining supreme?

But doesn’t this phenomenon happen to every generation? That this just happens to be my first time experiencing it?

I think this connects to a larger idea of youth. You think everything about the attention you get as a young person will last. You think it’s something you’ve been given that can’t be taken away. Because all you’ve ever known is youth.

And you mistake your youth as something that can’t be replaced. And you think that it’s something you’re granted. How youth with its allure and magnetism, fades. You’re on a moving line, and behind you, more and more people, younger than you, are transiting through what was once your space.

But, I don’t want a mind that stays rigid. That holds limiting, self-constraining beliefs. I want to be elastic. Open to flowing into new forms and ideas. I want youth to be a state of mind outside of being trapped by a physical condition. How the mental, emotional, and spiritual transforms the output of the physical and through this innovation, youth is able to endure.

I don’t want to be someone who denies the beauty of aging. How growing older and having more sense is ultimately a gift. I don’t want to look at myself as a generation that has expired.

I don’t want to feel threatened by Gen Z. I want to be inspired by what doors they’re opening. And if for some reason, they’re opening the door back to a time period where I felt like the world could be mine, I want to re-experience that entrance with them. I want to remember what it felt like when the world felt unconquered. I know I’m only 30, but so much happens to your view of life in your 20s, and if you aren’t careful, you lose things that are very integral.

I want to go back and pick up the things I lost on the way here. Combine them with all the new things I’ve discovered. I’m a lot smarter now, I’m less naive, and I’m not waiting for the systems I once believed in to grant my dreams. Fuck the systems.

One thing Gen-Z has taught me is the freedom of your own niche path.

We get a do-over in a way, at least psychologically. Perhaps only by costume. But anyone knows, the more you posture as something, the more you tap into becoming it, at least in some slight way. And it might seem like everything is an imitation, a facade of what was actually a very real time, but I find the more I indulge in the past and create it into some kind of portal that I blend with the future, something gets activated. My wide-eyed bliss and boldness somehow returns to me. However, this time, without core things missing. My 20s have given me an undulation of lessons. An intense questioning of all systems. An unraveling of what should not make me so naive anymore. Though now I can go back and re-ignite that flicker, that ingenuity, that new wild child on the scene. This sense of, if we got to do it all over again, knowing what we know now, what we do differently?

Listening to The Dare, I find myself thinking I’m back in 2011 or 2014, but his EP came out this year. I’m fascinated by his sound, his promotional rollout, his interviews, and his social media presence. All of it is drenched in the indie sleaze aesthetic, but somehow he doesn’t feel like a knockoff. Something about what he’s doing feels really pure. A really pure glance back at that time. I listen to his music and have to shake my head sometimes because I really do feel transported. It’s like I’m there again. Shimmying into my American Apparel mini-dress, reblogging on Tumblr, and pre-gaming with my dormmates. He’s located this arena of the past inside of the future. It’s infectious and in some way feels revolutionary.

He’s brought us back something we left behind.