“It’s 1 of the big problems with putting all those people under ‘Baby Boomer’ umbrella - they were totally different.”
Yes, the MSM, historians, etc. like when discussing generations to treat whole, big 20 year chunks of babies as the same, forgetting that people are born all the time, and not during discreet units of time. I can sympathize, in that there are shared experiences based on age and too much information swirling around not to cut corners when dreaming up theories. But such block divisions are arbitrary and often unuseful.
Take me, for instance. My parents were Baby Boomers, no doubt, having been born in ‘47 and ‘51, respectively, and living through rock ‘n’ roll, the moon landing, Vietnam, etc., which by definition makes me a Gen-X-er. In addition to frustration at the laziness of recent generation naming—letters, seriously? What happens when you get to Z?—they, or my dad at least, had me and my siblings rather late. So I barely remember the Berlin Wall coming down or Grunge rock ruling the airwaves, and have little to no nostalgia for most 80s music, movies, or tv before ‘87 at the earliest, except stuff like Thriller or Star Wars which remained popular for decades.
Just saying, there’s always more to generations than they let on. Very seldom will anyone bother to mention that the flower children who supposedly ended the war, brought racial harmony, and opened minds to the Age of Aquarius are around the same age, or perhaps were the very same people, who snorted coke in polyester next to lava lamps with Donna Summer records blaring.
The hippies were too old to really be the backbone of the disco movement. They were different people. I distinctly remember hippies condescending to disco types and calling THEM the “Me Generation” (no, it wasn’t Gen X that got that pseudonym 1st) and giving themselves airs that they were the best generation ever, over their forebears AND their successors.
All I can say is thank God we were the children of “Silent” people who still had expectations of duty and class. Unlike the hippie shirkers of the ‘60s who screwed up everything.
Depends when you were born. The Gen-X are the baby "busters" born in-between the Baby Boom and the increase in birthrates as the Baby Boomers began to have kids and settle down in the 1970s.
And while people may have particular favored tastes and ideologies, there was at least at the time a shared experience in the collective consciousness of what people were often exposed to (even if it drove them nuts then/now).
The shared experience in America is becoming a thing of the past. The markets are too fragmented (and not just by niche marketing, but the ability to use the internet to shape your own individual experience with things from the past and contemporary culture). Too many people have unplugged from the MSM for them to sway the overwhelming majority much these days. Most conservatives outright distrust the media. Big labels have seen their market share go down (blamed on downloading but also withered to untracked used music sales as well as untracked smaller label sales).
And while your parents were alive during the beginning of rock and roll, they did not experience the first wave first hand as it was the music of bars and juke joints for adults in 1948-1952. Lieber and Stohler dumbed it down for kids and made it formula.