#zillennial discourse

[limeadeislife]

Did previous generations do this thing where they joked about being/feeling old when they were only in their 20s? It is objectively a fairly silly thing to say, but at the same time I do understand and relate to the feeling somewhat

I feel like, more likely, it's a Millennial/Zillennial thing, owing to various factors which might involve

-The amount of technological change we've experienced in our lifetimes

-The unique Shit We've Had to Go Through (economy, less of a clear life path after finishing high school, pandemic, etc.)

-The Internet and social media meaning that we're now regularly exposed to people even younger than us, some of whom become well-known and influence cultural trends

[thattrainssailed]

I am going to have to put so much money in the swear jar for getting into a big fandom again. AA is long-lived but it’s nothing compared to the big big ones, especially since I’m used to writing klapollo which is a much smaller niche

Anyway I’m sure this will be fine and I won’t go blind reading posts from millennials horny for Michael Sheen and baby zoomers discoursing

[daisyachain]

My own contribution to The Discourse about Sensible SocDems VS Cosplaying Radicals is that theatre is an essential part of politics. As a person seeking to achieve political goals you must have a reasoned, rational, structurally sound understanding of what you want and why you want it.

E.g. it’s important to root opposition to TechnologyTM in the regulatory loopholes, decimation of labour rights, and borderline illegal corporate conduct enabled by unchecked development of digital shadow industries exempt from the laws governing other industries. Neural Network use for profit is bad because of theft and union-busting, not because it’s Unnatural.

And so it is useless to condemn incremental change in favour of revolutionary change which is unrealistic and unachievable. Better to make a small change than make none.

At the same time, advocating for incremental change is pretty useless. The far right across the globe has seen a lot of success in pushing the Overton Window right and implementing right-wing policies through the use of overblown rhetoric. It’s the insanity of the far right that allows committed right-leaning neoliberals like UK Labour, Macron government, SPD, and US Democrats (08-20) to double down on the erosion of worker rights, erosion of human rights, and empowerment of corporations without getting flack or threats for it.

Part of shaping policy is campaigning for measures more extreme than what you want—advocate for a minimum wage of $20 to get $15, advocate for a 20-hour work week to get 30 hours. The next step after reviewing your beliefs and choosing policy goals is to press for double of everything and Fridays off. Internally, few suburban socialist zillennials ever intend to blow up a pipeline, but shifting public rhetoric to the point where that’s an acceptable idea is one of the ways that pressure can be applied to governments to put in measures that might work. It’s better for a 30-year-old white liberal to write to your councillor to not raise the police budget than to complain about that not being radical enough, but it’s better to write that letter and talk in mainstream settings among wobbly liberals about how useless and harmful police are and to treat support of pigs like a social faux pas.

[spectre-ship]

Thing that drives me completely insane in the news, on social media, and generally in the way people discuss age groups, is how unquestioningly we accept the idea of "generations" as sequential statistical cohorts with distinct cultures and mindsets.

The idea of understanding generations as things that are Named and which follow each other in sequential blocs entered popular culture as what Wikipedia terms "Strauss-Howe Generational Theory", which was cooked up in the 1990s by the aforementioned William Strauss and Neil Howe, for a series of pop-science books. Their books had the, bluntly, extremely shoddy hypothesis that you can trace generations' mindsets in the United States as a repeating four-part hundred-year cycle back to the early modern period, with each generation forming a mindset due to growing up in the conditions created by the previous one.

The premise barely even resembles coherent historical or sociological scholarship, and could at most be generously described as "vibes-based". It's U.S.-centric as all hell; following it out would suggest that the history of Anglo-American generational mindsets is the singular axis on which the world turns, and they themselves essentially argued that the Great Depression and World War II were a "Crisis" produced by American cultural cycles. There is a built-in hole by the authors' own admission in 1844-1860, where they couldn't quite explain how the goddamn antebellum period, i.e. one of the singularly most-studied periods in American history, slots into their narrative. It's broad enough to make Victorian political theorists who saw history as the story of technological and moral progress look nuanced and discerning by comparison.

The real reason for their hypothesis was to pitch the idea that millennials* would grow up to be conservatives and to affirm turn-of-the-millennium conservative fears, claiming that there would be a world-historical crisis on the scale of World War II around 30 years after they published their books, which the emboldened conservative youth would then heroically overcome.† To give you an idea of how cartoonishly obviously these guys were working backwards from the thesis "things are looking up for social conservatism", this is an excerpt from a review of their book Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, from NEA Today in 2000:

Millennials are returning to conservative family values, emphasizing cooperation rather than creativity, and showing a new respect for rules. [...] And today's young people have stricter attitudes about sex than their elders, with virginity being a cool new trend.

In other words, it is at this point objectively bullshit.

All this nonsense might sound wildly disconnected from how the terms are used today but Strauss and Howe have been insanely successful at shaping how people think of generations more broadly--the commentariat is to this day obsessed with talking about "This Hot New Gen Z Trend" and "What Millennials Are Doing Differently Than Their Parents" I think this broader reshaping of how generations are understood is also related to why people argue about these things online so much, why there's constant discourse on what generation things are "nostalgia" of, and people cooking up weird subterms like "elder millennial" and "zillennial". Fundamentally, putting aside the concept's methodological and ideological original sins, breaking people up into these artificial 20 year chunks and erecting walls between them is a really poor way to understand the fluid way age and culture interact. Which is, incidentally, one of the many reasons why practically nobody in the academic historical or sociological communities considers it an accurate or useful way of understanding history or culture.

*addendum: you know how the start and end years of "generations" are frequently wildly unclear, say, how depending on who you ask gen z starts anywhere from 1995 to 2005? according to strauss and howe the last millennials were the people who graduated high school in 2000 lmao

†addendum 2: i have seen some places, including the incredibly credulous Wikipedia page, characterize the COVID pandemic or the russia-ukraine war as the predicted "crisis" formative to gen z, which is both obviously stupid and also pretty on track for the theory that posits a central historical cause of World War II to be World War I's psychological effects on the children of the Americans who served in it

[bread-tab]

I think you really werent an internet savvy smart zillennial

i mean, "internet-savvy" is certainly debatable lol. i meant it in the sense of, i knew how to use technology/the internet growing up. i knew how to google things. i could look stuff up if i knew it existed, even just vaguely

that's the thing though... knowing it existed. realizing it mattered. and you could also say "internet-savvy" involves being integrated with the culture of the internet, which. eh. *hand waggle gesture* i was a homeschooled conservative christian kid with undiagnosed autism and adhd (+ also queer and had no idea). even when i left that environment, somehow i struggled to socialize with my peers! (still processing the trauma ✌️)

—and yeah that included online. so you're right, on that measure, i was often internet-unsavvy and kinda dense. :P

there is a huge christian-centric side of the internet, where the associated conservative politics is normalized. people can spend years there and think it's the normal internet. it's smaller than the normal internet, and the whole internet is getting smaller these days, but i'm certain it's still big enough that you can get trapped in its echo chamber all too easily. i was on forums where people got banned for starting discourse, but not for saying they seriously thought Obama was probably the antichrist (circa 2008). (that was an outlier in terms of unhinged takes, but it was also the background noise of politics there; the fundies had a seat at the table.)

so many people are born and raised and brainwashed in extreme ignorance. including vulnerable and marginalized people. (sometimes they are intentionally targeted.) it is easy to be radicalized. it is easy to be abused and manipulated. it is extraordinarily difficult to escape those things.

there are droves of young adults getting out on their own (at college or otherwise) and starting to unlearn this shit for the first time. there are people of every age rebelling for the first time against the prejudices of the dominant culture for whatever reason. people make moves toward deradicalizing themselves all the time.

i'm not saying i'm speaking from a place of fucking moral purity here. i still have a lot of work to do personally. but i only talk about myself in this context as an example of a wider problem. i went off on the other post a bit (to my increasing regret) because i am so tired of seeing that learning process derailed by people from liberal/left-leaning backgrounds performing their own shock and disgust that ignorance can even exist, or focusing on shaming people for being ignorant in the first place. i am interested in healing the culture, deradicalizing individuals, and fighting the machine—not bullying its victims.

[iampikachuhearmeroar]

ok so this post is like spawned from reading the notes on an age gaps in relationships post, that I just read while waking up today....

I think a big part of the discourse around age gaps in relationships is spurned on by again, the fuckin stupid ass elder millennials vs younger millennials (or even zillennials) and gen z bullshit "war". it's like, in the post I made like last month about a convo at my old work's staff christmas party in 2022, where one of the ladies in the finance team and the newish guy hired in my team (customer service)..... which was all about her being a 1989 millennial "just before the cusp of the 90s so I'm a REAL MILLENNIAL unlike you two (me and new emo guy who are 1995 (me) and 1997 (I think, emo guy)).... you fake-ass wannabe millennials. you're babies!!!! YOU GUYS HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON WITH ME!!!!" like yes we do, sadie. and i'm the cut-off for millennials in 1995. but I digress.

but to me, it's the elder millennials like this woman and even comedians (ie the elder millennial netflix standup special from iliza shelsinger whose 40 but was done in 2017 or whatever) who are breeding the idea that people in their mid 20s, born in the mid to late 90s are "uwu cute lil babies who i have NOTHING in common with, so therefore you are a child (and everyone else your age by extension are children), to me." in age gap relationship discourse.

like sadie, for the love of fuck. there is 6 years difference in age between us. you may be in you mid 30s, yes. so you obvs have a bit more life experience than me, in general.... and actually went through 9/11, possibly understanding the implications of it (which I didn't bc I was literally 5/6 years old in 2001 when it happened; but I still knew what the fuck it was... even though yes, we're aussie.... but this is always used as the major event that younger millennials are "too young to understand and that therefore means that they're not real millennials")..... and again, you really experienced y2k fashion properly; whereas I watched it unravel on TV. but that does NOT make me child, incapable of making my own decisions, according to you. apparently emo guy doesn't know what rent is..... when he was actively moving out of his rented place to move in with his girlfriend's parents (one of whom, we all worked with)???? like make up your mind.

but from the comedian side, particularly the iliza shelsinger special that im talking about, it's the insinuation that as a 1995 baby and the people just under me, like emo guy, have NO IDEA what a landline is???? and that again makes us babies.... children who don't know the ways of the world before our all-knowing smartphones, which are connected to our hands like edward scissorhands. again, of course i know what the fuck a landline is!!!!!! I used one up until about 2009??? when my friends finally started to get their mobiles. of course, it means that I didn't have my own private landline (and hamburger phone, thanks juno) to my own room, which was an expensive must-have, that very people few would have ACTUALLY HAD, in the 2000s.... bc by that time, cordless phones were a thing anyway. and the age gap between me and this comedian is 12 years. she's just turned 40, born in 1983. so, therefore, again, I am but a babe. a mere naive lamb in the world of more knowledgeable, wiley wolves. but you're in your 20s!!!! you DON'T KNOW THE HORROR!!! yes i do!!!! i fully do. bc we literally JUST GOT RID OF OUR LANDLINE PHONE LAST YEAR, IN 20 FUCKING 22!!!!! don't you dare tell me i don't know what it is.

moreover, bro. I am 20 fucking 8 (well, nearly). I turn 30 in two years time. yes, I may have never moved out of home (lol fucked up rental crisis.... and everything else, where the world is falling apart).... but I do pay my own car insurance and car loan (finally). hell!!!!! i BOUGHT my own car last year.... even if it wasn't fully in cash lol. I may have only had my first ever ~real adult~ job last year (kinda... and first job ever, period).... but that doesn't make me a child. I am still an adult, capable of making my own choices.... even if one of my choices is utterly refusing to date people... like, ever.... due to my horrendous past experiences with guys in my late teens. "but!!! but!! both of these women croon, YOU ARE STILL A CHILD! YOU HAVE HOPE!!! UNLIKE MY JADED ASS!!!" yeah. nah. my hope for the future fizzled out years ago. maybe not emo guy's. but mine defs has. and why is feeling jaded like a weird fucking milestone and badge of honour to wear???

in my actual life, one of my primary school best friends just divorced her high school sweetheart a couple of months ago. due to the guy changing his mind on having kids (ie he started wanting them, but he works one week one/one week off and fly in/fly out in the mines.... and since they were in another state, South Australia, they had NO family or friends to help my besite with the kid that she didn't even really want.... and he didn't want to do 50% of the housework and mental work for them). she owns a fucking house and pays house insurance. she works a high-powered government job in sydney now. my other primary school bestie, ironically, just got married to her uni sweetheart, and they're renting in the fucked up rental hellscape that is sydney. we all drive. we all have cars... even if I did take forever to get my full licence and my own car.

what, in any part of the above paragraph, is not a wiley adult wolf, just like both of these 80s babies think that they are???? both of these women who I've mentioned in this post would've had these conversations with past partners, and obviously with their current partners (the comedian had a kid in late 2022 I think, and the woman from work had like 2 or 3 kids, for example). they both own houses etc etc.

I fail to see how 90s kids are "uwu babies" in the eyes of elder millennials.... other than they're making that excuse to treat us like kids when it comes to dating someone with..... a let's say.... 5 to 12 year age difference, at the minimum. why would a 1983 or 1987 or 1990 "elder millennial" date a 1995 zillenial/baby millennial/cusper/whatever the fuck we're called, when *cue the "if she doesn't know X/what X is she's too young for you bro (or chick)! meme*... like "if she doesn't know what *enter a random 80s show here that an 80s kid grew up on* is, then she's too young for you, bro!!!

like who gives a fuck if I have never fucking watched idek Cheers or family ties or ALF or Fraiser (for early 90s) or whatever the fuck else???? maybe I didn't watch them bc I was literally fucking 2 years old??? so i was too young for the re-runs of these shows from 1997 onwards??? I was just vibing with rainbow brite (80s cartoon), dino riders (which was a short-lived 80s cartoon), the disney's gummi bears (late 80s cartoon) and every winnie the pooh movie and power rangers show or movie under the sun. oh, and of course, fucking Lion King and other 90s disney movies! that are all getting those godawful nostalgia cash grab live-action remakes that NO ONE has asked for, really. that for some reason, a lot of 80s babies seem to claim as theirs, and only theirs, for nostalgia and "disney adult" points. i also watched pokemon on VHS!!!! SHOCK!! HORROR!! I KNOW WHAT A VHS IS!!! (and we still have them).

just. my point is. i think some of the age gap discourse, if it's not about like power dynamics/abuse and whatever else.... is coming from this dumb as fuck generational divide of self-declared "elder millennials" who are now nearing 40 or are 40; or somewhere in their mid30s, trying to be so over-superior over the 20 somethings born in the mid to late 90s. (and now early 2000s kids, SHOCK!!! HORROR!!!- gen z... but i get this sometimes im ngl. the fuck you mean the young lawns guy who i had a short-lived crush on last year at work IS 20 FUCKING ONE (21)???? NO. NO IT CAN'T BE HAPPENING!!!! IT- IT- IT CAN. NOT. BE. FUCKING. HAPPENING????!!!!).

just for the love of fuck. get over this utter bullshit about "millennials are the best babies!!!!" bullshit and STOP infantilizing grown ass adults (even if i personally actively NEVER feel like one tbh lmao) just because of an utter bullshit arbitrary age classification used for marketing and sociological research purposes only..... and only because there's between a 6 (for the lady i know) to about 12 year age gap (the comedian) between an 80s baby and a mid 90s baby. we are of the same generation... and we can have successful relationships with people born in the 80s/elder millennials, despite the age gaps. not that i've had one personally lmao. but we all know someone with an older partner or friend or whatever.

but i'm also thinking about it since there's the debate around chris evans finally marrying alba bapitista. when he's 42 (so gen x but who gives a fuck)... but she's 26 (a zillennial) and a college grad.... so apparently SHE has NO rational decision making skills at the baby age of 26. and also around joe jonas divorcing sophie turner.... where he's using his age (34) against hers (27) as a reason to divorce her bc he's "more responsible" than her (eg. he's forced to look after HIS kids while HE is on tour in the US.... while sophie parties after wrapping up a tv show she's been working in the UK on for like 6 months to a year and also finally working.... after taking 2 to 3 years off for her kids and pregnancies.... and the uh.... GLOBAL PANDEMIC????), and bs like that. it's just making me gag tbh.

[wearethewitches]

i wouldnt say 1994 is gen z at all. millenials start around the mid 80s. i am a 1998 baby and i accept that i am on the verge of gen z and millenial (depending who you ask and what book you read) but 1994?? no

meh, it’s a matter of opinion. each generation is marked by a specific event, it seems - but that’s really not possible in this age of technology.

(lolololol i mostly put 1994 bc it rhymed, haha)

[kyn19]

Wait so do Gen Z hate Millennials???

I just got on Byte for the first time in months and I’m seeing a lot of generational beef that I wasn’t aware of. Why does Gen Z hates Millennials???? We love you!!!!! :(

[varietysky]

millennials vs gen z debates on twitter, like doesnt ur mouth get dry talking about the same thing?

[maggot-monger]

that post that’s like “gifted kid discourse is just about realizing you’re not special after being led to believe you’re better than everyone” is technically right but it’s also such a stale smug “zillennial snowflakes kek” take lmao

[jackawful]

I'm already like eeehhhhhhhhhhh on Discourses About Generational Differences but sometimes I just sit back and think about how the oldest millenials experienced 9/11 (one of the things that's supposed to be generation-defining for us) when they were like 20 and the youngest experienced it as literal kindergarteners??? 2008 housing crash & recession was around age 27 for the oldest millenials and age 14 for the youngest? age cohorts are important for a lot of research but I'd think for Non-Scientific Cultural Commentary this would be a nonsense category in most cases (which is probably why we're seeing shit like "elder millenials" and "zillennials").

[feyariel]

That idiotic discourse about AO3 from earlier has been poking around in my head all day (when my attention has not otherwise been occupied, at least). It bothers me that people can be that stupid.

"78% of the user base is white, so it must be unsafe for POC, so it needs better content moderation!"

Where did you get that statistic? AO3 doesn't provide a space (beyond an open text field) for an author to indicate their race. There's no real way you can get an accurate demographic sample off of an otherwise anonymous website.

78% white isn't that outlandish for an English language website, given that 73% of the US in 2017 was white and more users are going to be from countries which speak English as their official or primary language or else from Europe (which tends to have US pop culture marketed to it more than other countries), so it's likely to skew white.

The above does not mean that the place is unsafe for POC; that simply doesn't follow unless you think spaces that are predominantly white ipso facto must be unsafe for POC, which is patently false.

There are a variety of means of making an online space safer for various communities; not all of them involve policing content. AO3 isn't a social media platform like Tumblr or Facebook, but a repository (an archive) of texts which users access through a few screens. As such, the onus of responsibility in using the website is on the user, who has the greatest ability to control what content they read.

But then I realize that not only do these points boil down to a critique of how Gen Zers (and "Zillennials") interact with texts and the Internet (as many people have written about at length before me), but that I'm also deigning to interact with a post that was a whiny strawman in the first place.

So really, who's the bigger idiot: the people who don't understand that censorship is both an evil and unnecessary (and that throwing around fake statistics is wrong) or me for wasting my time reading their drivel, reblogging it with tags that will go ignored, and writing about it now, without any real intent on persuading or educating?

[thesinglesjukebox]

BILLIE EILISH - BURY A FRIEND

[7.76]

Why you always play that song so loud? Oh.

Ian Mathers: Over a series of songs and videos, Eilish has practically offered a survey of fears and bad feelings: spiders, isolation, drowning, physical assault, mental illness, poison, other people as monsters, the self as a monster, etc. and here she leans harder than ever into the horror tropes, both sonically and visually. The sampled dentist drill, lyrics equally evoking the monster under the bed and sleep paralysis, the haunted house/nursery rhyme lilt of the verses, the bravado that at least partially stems from her narrative persona already feeling bad enough about herself that you sure as hell can't touch her, and of course the line that recurs over and over: "I wanna end me." It's the sort of thing you can imagine parents freaking out over, and even possibly the (yes, yes, very young) Eilish looking back years from now and thinking the better of. But, much as plenty of pop music conjures up outsized romantic sentiments that listeners gravitate towards despite not actually wanting to follow through with them in a literal sense, it also feels like the kind of darkness that I know many people who don't struggle with suicidal ideation still identify with in the context of a pop song. I'm not actually arguing for its total harmlessness so much as admitting that I don't think total harmlessness is necessary or even desirable in pop, maybe especially when it is from someone as young and who seems to be as tapped into a new vocabulary (sonic and gestural as much as linguistic) as Eilish is so far. The line and the song make me uneasy even as I love it and feel seen by it, as opposed to (say) Juice WRLD's bullshit which doesn't to me feel like it has any redeeming element at all. Eilish and "Bury a Friend," meanwhile, don't need a redeeming element unless you have a problem with the rich history of darkness in pop (as opposed to the rich history of misogyny in pop). Not for nothing does my friend Jess Burke describe her as "Fiona Apple for a Blumhouse future" and of all the paths to go down, that honestly feels like a pretty great one right now. [9]

Tobi Tella: Billie Eilish is one of the first true Gen Z pop stars, and as someone only a year or so older than her I'm impressed with how fresh her music feels on the pop landscape. The sense of dread that appears in most of her music is in full force here, and while I have found some of her music to be a little "2edgy4me," this works by fully leaning into it. It's unlike anything anyone else is making right now. [7]

Alfred Soto: If "Bury a Friend" is a gesture, an experiment -- as if Billie Eilish said, "Let me show how minimalist my music can be, and put in cool noises too" -- then its failure to be more than this is my failure. She's been tuneful before, which means she knows what she's doing. [6]

Jonathan Bradley: "Bury a Friend" sounds like the product of a musical landscape where anything can be heard on demand and none of it comes with context. Billie Eilish's artless murmur suggests that her roots lie in the DIY aesthetics of bedroom folk, but while her music can be wispy and personal in that mode, it wanders into other realms in which it seems not to realize it doesn't belong. This song is punctuated by producer Crooks intoning Eilish's name like a mixtape DJ's drop, while the shrieks that tear into the dark low-end pulse seem torn from Yeezus-era Kanye. There's even some Fiona Apple in the stops and starts punctuating her phrasing. Like Lorde before her, Eilish is adept at playing up the adolescent's attraction to darkness, and the haunted house atmosphere and lyrics about stapled tongues and glass-cut feet settle into a delicious murk. Perhaps most unsettling and most unexpectedly novel about it all is that Eilish doesn't sound like a paralysed gothic heroine. She sounds like one of the monsters. [8]

Katie Gill: Insert that Marge Simpson 'kids, could you lighten up a little?' reaction image here. It only makes sense that the hot new pop sensation is the musical distillation of nihilistic memes and the lolz I'm so depressed joke culture that's permeated the popular consciousness. To her credit, Eilish has her finger perfectly poised on the zeitgeist. Unfortunately, we've been dealing with the zeitgeist for at LEAST two years now. Such ironic detachment and 'I want to end me lmao' already feels out of date -- the fact that the song seems tailor-made to score an American Horror Story scene only dates it even more (those backing screams were a baaad choice). The main thing this does is make me wish that Eilish leaned in more towards her lighter fare. [5]

Vikram Joseph: I've been a Billie Eilish sceptic, but "Bury A Friend" is, if not quite Damascene, certainly revelatory. It feels deliciously, obscenely engrossing; that minimalist pulse, the mocking, nursery-rhyme motif ("What do you want from me? Why don't you run from me?"), those swift, decisive industrial gut-punches, the breathtaking turns of pace and time-signature tightrope-play. Most of all, it's fun, especially when her vocal affectations come off like a demonic sonic negative of Lorde. It feels like her entire aesthetic coming together, a camp horror-flick dark-pop queen finally wearing the crown she's been threatening to unveil for a while now. [8]

William John: At 28 I feel far too old to be pontificating about Billie Eilish, but what I will say is that if their new formula for chart success is to mine the aesthetic of Róisín Murphy circa Ruby Blue, then I'm ready to submit to our new zillennial overlords. [7]

Iris Xie: I've been hearing Billie Eilish everywhere I go, and her music always vibrates with a moody, dark warmth while I move through thrift stores, coffee shops, and sidewalks. Reclaiming whisper-singing from Selena Gomez is a fantastic move, especially when paired with that slight rhythmic drumming, sudden starts and stops, and that little omnipresent danger that I miss so much from f(x)'s Red Light. Our times are escalating faster to some kind of destruction, but in the air, there is exhaustion and energy of both a defiant joy and a quiet numbness. "Bury a Friend," and her album overall embodies that energy in spades. [7]

Will Rivitz: Jump scares in horror movies suck; they're cheap, calculated cash-ins on human predilection to react badly whenever something threatening pops out from the underbrush. Much more difficult to pull off, and much more impressive in its execution and creativity when it succeeds, is the slow-burn thrill. When a ghoulish, uncertain threat is buried ever so imperceptibly below the surface, it roils adrenaline in the most painfully pleasant of ways, as we fail to put our finger on anything about what's about to destroy us except that, make no mistake, it will indeed destroy us. "Bury a Friend" nails that most sublime skin-crawl. The lowing bass and teeth-scraping industrial synths roll around the aural triggers that make every hair on a back stand up with the cold impersonality of coins circling a hyperbolic funnel forever, the end always implied but never achieved. Appropriate, too, since Billie Eilish's main triumph is capturing the slow-burn existential dread of living as a young person in a world thoroughly ruined by those who won't live to see out the ramifications of their present actions. Obliquely, that's "Bury a Friend," a nightmarish Borges y yo resurrection, endlessly Genius-ready especially given the original story now has a Genius annotation itself. (The internet continues to be bizarre.) Instrumentally and lyrically, it's a warped and terrifying celebration of a muddling and destruction of identity supercharged by the less savory bits of our constant interconnectedness; it is, in other words, the best summary of Billie Eilish she could possibly present to us. Eilish affirms our base fears that things are fucked, we're all irrevocably in shambles, and there's absolutely jack shit we can do about it; we might as well learn to celebrate where we're at, since there's nothing else awaiting us. [9]

Alex Clifton: I can't remember the last time I felt this astonished by a song, nor can I remember hearing anything this sublime. I mean this in the gothic sense -- something beautiful and terrifying and subsiding where you've just got to stand and soak it all in. "Bury a Friend" is every nightmare and melodramatic thought I had as a teenager set to music, the suspicion that I was a monster who was better off dead and everyone knew. It felt so plainly written on my skin. But it's not just dark and monstrous. Billie feels scared and sad on the chorus: when we all fall asleep, where do we go? Something in her voice is so vulnerable that I feel cut open myself just hearing it. I fear some older people may hear "Bury a Friend" and write it off as emo teenage poetry, but it's so much more than that. It's the honesty of Lorde's first album mixed in with the sharp crunch of being a teen in 2019, living in a world constantly on fire with questionable prospects for a future. I would expect nothing less from a teenager to be honest, especially one as talented as Eilish. I just wish I had had the courage to be this dark and messy when I was her age. [9]

Will Adams: So much of the Billie Eilish discourse concerns her aesthetic and how it relates to Gen Z, but it often misses a key part of her appeal: how electrifying her music sounds. Tactile, confronting and claustrophobic, Billie and her producer brother Finneas create music that tightens its grip and refuses to let go, and "Bury a Friend" is as good an example as any. Alternately screeching, skittering and booming with sub bass (like "Black Skinhead" crawling with spiders), it conjures up a nightmare you can't look away from. [9]

Katherine St Asaph: A game that is both fun and great for making yourself acutely aware of how fast the grave is yanking you down is asking yourself, and being honest: if you were a teen today, who would you stan? Would you be an Ariana Grande Teen? A Blueface Teen? A Billie Eilish Teen? The depressing truth is that I probably would've been a Lana Del Rey Teen, but I could see myself reluctantly liking this for its weird drama, its dramatic weirdness. I'm convinced people confused about why Billie's dark music appeals to teens have never themselves been teens, the time of life where you endless-repeat Nirvana (ask Dave Grohl) or Sarah Brightman's cover of "Gloomy Sunday" or "Bury a Friend" and often make it out regardless. The flavor of darkness here is more than a little Tim Burton, in the twisted-nursery-rhyme melody, but there's also more than a little "Black Skinhead" and "Night of the Dancing Flame," and how many teen sensations can you conjure those references up for? [9]

Stephen Eisermann: Billie Eilish, especially here, is the exact representation of what would happen if Lorde pulled a Jack Skellington and entered the portal in the trees to find herself in Halloween Town. The same intriguing vocal tics, off-beat metaphors, and bold production choices -- just decorated with horror-tinged jack-o-lanterns and ghost sheets. In other words, I love Billie and I love this song. [8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: "Bury a Friend" is less a song and more an intentionally jarring collection of phrases -- even Eilish's individual lines sound cut off, as if they've been reassembled from a previously coherent whole. Not every piece works -- Crooks' vocal additions are unnecessary and some of Eilish's longer phrasings in the bridge are too stylized. Moreover, the picture that this collage is supposed to be forming never gets cleared up. And yet there's almost an illicit thrill to listening to a pop song that sounds like this, in all of its chaotic terror and joy. [6]

Edward Okulicz: In truth, this song feels like it runs out of gas, but its first 30 seconds are incredibly arresting. It's not that the rest of it is bad, I mean there's a bit where she sounds exactly like Róisín Murphy and that's never bad. Over the course of a bunch of singles, Eilish has used lots of existing musical tropes in an interesting way and built up a style that's unmistakeably her -- maybe I'm just disappointed she's taken it to complete fruition in half a minute and maybe there's nowhere else for her to go but to do a full-on macabre Glitterbeat thing. She's got fans that'll go with her to any place she chooses. [8]

Taylor Alatorre: I'm inclined to dislike most of the well-manicured teenage dramascapes that make up Billie Eilish's discography so far. Maybe it's the narcissism of generational differences -- sure, I was moody and disaffected as a 17-year-old, but I wasn't this kind of moody and disaffected. You're doing anhedonia all wrong, kids! Yet somehow, "Bury a Friend" is able to dislodge me from this self-consciousness by brandishing its own self-consciousness as a weapon and waging a merry war on itself. It's a staging ground for a bunch of one-off experiments and on-the-nose signifiers and 2spooky vocal tics and vintage 2013 alt-pop tropes, all of which seem to communicate: "This is a song that I wrote, and I can debase it however I want." It's squeamish about its own existence yet sure of its purpose, with a simple driving beat that yields to miscellany while warding off the specters of musical theater. Its high point is an archly written low point: the sneeringly drawn out "wowww." in response to a blunt confession of suicidality. If it turns out that reducing the stigma doesn't always lead to better outcomes, at least we got some good banter out of it. [8]

Joshua Copperman: Huh, I guess we are seeing the beauty at the end of culture. And it's suicidal, it's offensive, it's ugly. Then it's fake-deep, and it's edgy, because Heaven forbid we legitimize the concerns of teenagers. The common thing is supposed to be how, as a teenager, everything feels like it matters, but today's teens are growing up in a political moment when nothing feels like it does, if it ever will again. Okay, that's a bit much -- there's a chance that actual teens aren't like this, and this is what people whose brains have been poisoned by Twitter pundits think teenagers must be like. It can't be a huge coincidence, though, that "I wanna end me," "why do you care for me?" and "I'm too expensive!!!" all wound up in a Top 20 hit by a 17-year-old. Like any good writer, Eilish sublimates those fears into a horror movie song from the point of view of the monster under her bed, a pure Tumblr or r/writingprompts move. But with this many Spotify plays, with this much success, it's hard to shake the feeling that along with the stellar "idontwannnabeyouanymore," Eilish is actually onto something with The Youths. Finneas O'Connor's bonkers production, with dentist drills and the 12/8 "Black Skinhead" bounce, certainly helps this stand out. (Rob Kinelski, too, has crafted a mix more interesting than anything his more successful contemporaries like Serban Ghenea have done lately.) Underneath the grimdarkness, what really separates Eilish is the sense of humor; the nursery rhyme bridge seemed a bit obvious, but after hearing songs like "Bad Guy," Eilish sounds completely aware of the tropes she is using. I have no doubt this blurb will age badly if her music gets worse after this, but who cares when there's not much aging left to do? Lead us into the apocalypse, Billie and Finneas! [9]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[daisyachain]

Shoutout to insta-poisoned zoomers churning out aesthetically formatted x readers without an ounce of passion, zillennials who still engage in “‘q slur’’ discourse while freely describing men as fruity, millennials who post paragraphs in the most condescending voice you can imagine, people who use reblogs to comment, people who maintag their liveblogs, incorrect quotes blogs, people who post generic memes in the ship tag, anyone who likes disney princesses, reylo defenders, and everyone else who makes tumblr both toxic and unnavigable. Without them our lives would be so much better. It’s hard work, but they have to make peace of mind rare and sacred.

[psyturtleduck]

it’s my favorite time time of day: unwanted opinion time!! on one of my favorite topics, the generations! I’m gonna go through how I see the generational divides rn with pretty much no authority :)

(like i said, no authority on this! years for each were taken off wikipedia just bc that’s the general knowledge of these idk)

Silent generation: born before 1945. idk who tf these people are tbh, never heard of this generation. they’re the first ones deemed a generation, so they probably didn’t care all that much about labeling themselves that way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ these people are pretty old now. lots of grandparents and great grandparents

Baby Boomers: born 1946-1964. these are some of the older generation, my parents are included in this but just barely at the end. these are the true people that the “ok boomer” meme applies to! around 55-75ish right now

Gen X: born 1965-1976. the mems seem to forget these people exist and group them with the Boomers !!! theyre a smaller group only spanning 10 years, and, as far as I can tell, aren’t all that different from boomers in behavior. but don’t erase them!! let them exist separately !

Millennial (Gen Y): born 1977-1995. these people are pretty much real functioning adults in their late 20s to early 40s

ok so this is where I start to take some issues with how this generation has split up. when i was in hs and first starting to get online and into social media, gen z didn’t exist yet and so i was considered a millennial. flash forward to college and suddenly they’ve decided the cutoff for millennial is a few years before I was born and I was pushed into the gen z group of people that were largely still children or behaving as such and not sharing any similar experiences with me so this is where I propose a fringe group

Zillennial: born 1996-2000 (honestly, 2000 is pushing it). this name was stolen from someone else that has also proposed such a fringe group. im not original, sorry. this group of people is now all in their early 20s.

Gen Z: born 2000- current/whenever the next cutoff is made for a new generation (as most of the other generations are 10-20ish years, it’s probably soon). by and large, this generation is still adolescents and immature and new to the world and having their own opinions

to me, the big distinguisher between boomers/gen x, millennials, zillennials, and gen z is technology. boomers and gen x were well established adults when modern technology (computers, cell phones, etc) was introduced and implemented in home life. millennials were teenagers to newly independent adults when this was being integrated. They had childhoods without this kind of technology. The fringe group of zillennials were in their childhood when the technology started to be introduced; they had a mixture of experiences with technology before, during, and after integration. gen z grew up after technology had been implemented.

i am not the first to introduce the idea of fringe groups in between the edges of generations. im sure they existed between the other generations as well, but the gen z vs. millennial is the one that im living through and experiencing. it physically pains me to be considered gen z bc they genuinely have no shared experience with me and there are huge differences between me and even college freshmen, and it goes far beyond just maturity

anyway, just food for thought bc the generational divides are very strongly taken and insults thrown at all members (except gen x, don’t forget them!) so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ there’s not really a point, just to think about it when making your memes

[wearethewitches]

Hey dude your gen-z millennial post ryhmes

I know! It’s great, isn’t it?