150. Generation X by Douglas Coupland

Coupland said that the title of his 1991 book was taken from a work of sociology by Paul Fussell called Class, in which ‘Category X’ was used to denote a voluntarily disenfranchised para-class who ‘wanted to hop off the merry-go-round of status, money, and social climbing that so often frames modern existence.’ Maybe so, but Coupland would have been hard put to ignore the fact that by 1991 the phrase ‘Generation X’ already had wide currency, not only as the name of the band Generation X (formed in 1976), but the 1965 book Generation X by Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson that had inspired the band’s name (a copy of it was owned by Billy Idol’s mother).

Hamblett and Deverson’s book had reflected on teenagers in the 60s and found that they were disrespectful, sexually promiscuous and irreligious: with a small tinge of irony, this was the ‘baby-boomer’ generation that Coupland’s disrespectful, sexually nihilistic and irreligious slacker kids were 'rebelling' against.

Consulted:
Coupland, Douglas: ‘Generation X’d’, in Details Magazine (June 1995)

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