Born in 1981 - On the Fringe

Were you born in 1981? (or close, within a year or two)
Do you have trouble fitting in or identifying with any particular generation, being on the fridge of all of it?
Are you an 80s kid or a 90s kid?
Are you Generation X or a Millennial?

Do you remember a time before the internet, social media, touch screens, and instant gratification access to everything online, and yet also feel completely at home with these things, since you were young and “grew up” with it as it all developed, yet at the same time feel you could live without all these things if needed (or even by choice)?

@TrabanT brought this up to me and we started talking about it in private, but seems there are a few others of you out there, so we thought it would be cool to make a public discussion and see if anyone else feels the same way.

I personally feel it is a very awkward but interesting time to have been born, to be “just ahead of” the bloom of the internet age, to have watched it grow, and to have grown with it. I don’t feel I fit in with Millennials, I’m too “grown up” for them. Yet I also don’t feel I fit in with older “pre-internet” people. I just “get” computer tech/internet tech in a way that they don’t (as a broad generalization of course).

I used to think it was funny to see a 5 year old with a cell phone, face glued to their Minecraft world, but now it worries me, as it is no longer a rare scene but an all-too-common one. I wonder how dependent they are becoming on that virtual world (not Minecraft, but the internet world, the social media world), and the fact that they are growing up with only that and no foundation of anything prior to it. And I feel that’s a strange statement for me to say, someone who was addicted to MMORPG’s (online virtual worlds) for a long time throughout the late 90s and early 2000s.

On a global, economic, political level also, the world has seen some dramatic changes over the past 20-30 years. Mass shootings and school shootings (here in the US anyway) are becoming way too prevalent. Mass killings of various sorts in other countries, while maybe not with guns, have been equally as devastating and seem to be becoming more common as well. When I was younger I don’t remember this stuff being so prevalent. Yes, something would happen once in a while, but now it’s almost commonplace and expected to see something about some devastating attack somewhere or other. Is this because the attacks are becoming more frequent, or because we have more immediate access to news about them?

From a musical perspective I don’t feel I fit in with any particular musical decade. I can’t say I’m an 80’s kid because I wasn’t really listening to music when I was 6, 7, 8… Yet I can’t really say I’m a 90’s kid because that would include a lot of the later-half of the 90s, where I was no longer a kid. So it’s like I’m a on the cusp, late 80s, early 90s is my “prime” as far as childhood exposure to music goes.

If you are an 81 kid, please contribute your thoughts, whatever they may be!

And sorry of this post is kind of disjointed, trying to pull in the main topics we already covered in private!

Also found a few articles out there about this very topic, interesting, didn’t know it was really a thing!


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I’m an 81 kid, as is my wife.

One thing I have always felt I had in terms of “in between” was an attraction to Star Wars. Wasn’t much into it as a kid.

Like had I been older, I would have seen the films when they came out, and had I been younger, I probably would have had more friends with older siblings that helped expose them to it, and thus me.
But instead, I missed the boat.

As far as technology goes. My mom was a Navy analyst so we had a computer in the house since 1988, and as such internet access very early for most households. I don’t feel much pull there.

I feel more pull toward the pre-digital music era (i.e. vinyl record techno labels, pre final scratch), as I was part of that industry on the tail end. But that’s another discussion about democratization.

That’s all I got. :slight_smile:

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'79 here. I feel the same way about a lot of stuff you’ve said.

I was lucky enough to have a father that was into computers and consoles, so we had an Intellivision and a C64 growing up, which helped prepped me for the tech boom.

As far as music, again my pops played classic rock all of the time and I loved that shit. I didn’t really find myself liking “new” music until Nirvana blew up. 80s music was trash to me. Now that I’m older I appreciate most genres (eat a turd, new country).

Weird how kids now have instant gratification. I would go out and play in the damn woods. I once found a wooden sword in the woods that was still in decent shape, and that was my coolest possession for like, years.

And social media… holy shit. Giving EVERYONE a voice was a terrible idea. I really liked FB in college. It was fun. But now it’s just a reminder of how old, fat, and stupid my high school acquaintances are. There is a grown woman who is posting a hand drawn picture every day to show off her ‘art.’ It’s literally worse than a kindergarten crayon drawing. Most of the time, I can’t even tell what it’s a drawing of. I support everyone who is trying to better themselves, but COME ON.

I work in the tech sector, so I work with a ton of kids. And dammit… I’m jealous that I didn’t have the internet when I was growing up. I’d love to make over 100K a year developing software. I guess I could learn how to code a bit, but it’s just such a daunting task at this point. I don’t want to go back to school. I don’t want more student loan debt. Why the hell did I go to college and spend that money in the first place!?

Ok, soon to be old man rant over.

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Dec 23 78, two years and a week… :smile:
Does that count? :thinking: :smiley:

Do xiennials dream of electric drum machines?

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Every minute of every day.
We were born when they were. They are our sisters and brothers.

606 was an 81 kid!

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Hey that’s actually an interesting point about Star Wars. That does seem to be a big defining cultural thing for a lot of people and we were kind of “just late” on it. I saw them at a young age because my dad worked in a video store and “pirated” lots of stuff :wink: but it’s not like it was a big deal to me either, if someone asks if I’m into Star Wars, it’s like, “ehh, I know them… I know the stories, kind of grew up with them… but don’t really care about them or identify with them much either”

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Sorry buddy, you’re a Gen X’er. NOW WHO’S AN OUTSIDER, AAAAHAHAHAH
(sorry, got carried away)
Here’s some tests you can use to figure out if you belong with us or not:


(EDIT: Actually maybe this isn’t such a great list, seems like some of the questions relate to a “just slightly older” generation but funny anyway)

I think what’s interesting for us as music producers, is that many of us came of age at the dawn of computer music. That is to say, music made solely on a computer with no external hardware. For myself, I ended up spending 15+ years making music on a computer before going out and getting hardware. That’s why this whole overbridge delay is a bitter pill to swallow. I want to make music more intuitively with hardware, but everything I’ve done is incomplete loops without the assistance of a DAW, and I can do full songs on a DAW, but they are lacking the human touch.

81’er. I fit in with my friends, and that’s all that really matters in the end.

After high school I worked in a print shop for 7 years, then went college. I feel like that helped straddle the generations, but I’ve never really considered myself part of a specific generation (to the extent that a label can encompass the entirety of all people and their perspectives in an arbitrarily wrapped timeframe). I don’t ever feel like I was a excluded from anything. I think more than anything it’s beneficial seeing the beginnings, development, and fallout of some seriously world-changing technologies in such a short amount of time.

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Also, we’re the generation that grew up with and without the internet.

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Made my first song with this and Acid 1.0

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Late 79 here.

Grew up in an extremely insular religious community that many people have described as “cult-like”. Only ever attended the church-run school and while it was actually quite good in an academic sense, it was mostly full of other kids that were just like me. To add to this, we lived 20-30 km out of town in a regional area.

So yeah, I didn’t have much exposure to popular culture beyond what was on the local radio station or occasionally watching videos at a more secular friend’s house. I might’ve been wearing some rather colourful clothes, but most of those 80s cultural icons didn’t even raise a blip.

Definitely noticed the 90s though. Discovered grunge through a highschool girlfriend and other forms of alt-rock through my brother who ended up at a state school. Plus our town got the nationally syndicated youth radio station when I was 14/15 and we actually moved to a real city when I was 16! Got the internet a few years later and generally caught up with whatever I felt I’d missed.

So as far as shared cultural connections go, I have more in common with teenagers from the 90s than pre-teens in the 80s.

As for the internet. It’s been kind of amazing watching it grow from something that only that geeky kid in your small town who nagged his single mum until she got him connected had to everyone carrying a network device in their pocket. At the same time I’ve become a little bit wary of it - yes it’s a really useful tool and I don’t want it to go away, but I’m becoming increasingly aware that unfettered access may not be such a good thing for me.

Me too!

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I’m sure if Steve Jobs were alive right now he would of said “shut it down people you don’t deserve this technology”:grinning:

You guys are like the old myspace music. Most of the times I read your thread and listen to the our music thread and write music when I can. A community can only be so big before it’s saturated with cross talk.

Old man rant over

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You kids were just a twinkle in your old man’s eye when awesome shit like this was goin down

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These generational labels are the domain of marketing asshats trying to understand consumers so they can sell them shit. They make no sense and fail even the slightest scrutiny.

To say that you don’t fit any of these labels handed out by The Man is a good thing :+1:t3: and I for one wouldn’t be worried about trying to sandwich myself into a “micro-generation” just so I can feel I “fit in”. Seriously? Kids these days… :grinning:

All those crappy Star Wars prequel/sequels = Case in Point. Some Marketing Wizard went to George Lucas and showed him a pie chart with some Xenialls and Millenials on it and told him he could make a pile of cash. Great job Xenials - ruined a great story.

Fun Fact - 37% of people who went to the opening nights of The Last Jedi were 25 years old or younger - the marketers nailed it.

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1980 here. No issues. Change is constant. The minute we start complaining about how things are or were, well then that’s when you become ‘old’.

Anyway it’s true, these generational labels and such are meaningless.

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81 here too.

I’m very grateful to have grown up in the old school computer time with things like BBC micros and Ataris and C64’s and stuff. I listened to synthesiser music compilations when I was like 7, and I think the synthesiser always felt like the instrument of the 80’s, at least to me it did. It felt futuristic, and everything before the millennium kindve felt that way, edging toward something and the way Silicon Valley and 3D computer graphics really came about during that time. Although I also feel a real tackiness during that time, particularly the late nineties and into the early 2000’s. Looking back on the Y2K bug things seems kinda silly.

I think it does give us a wisdom being born in that time that we shouldn’t take for granted, and maybe pass on if we can, but I think u can basically say the same thing about anyone born before that time, just because they’re 65 now doesn’t mean they haven’t seen the crossover too and have the same feelings about things we do.

Because through all the beginning of the internet there was always chat rooms and email lists and MUCs and forums as well. The internet has been just as addictive as it always has been. What has changed I think is the old internet used to be much more anonymous, people weren’t themselves online so much as they were a personality or avatar. Things like Facebook really enforce accountability by making you sign up with your real name and phone number etc. I think that has repercussions on what the internet can be - which is potentially a more neutral identity space rather than something that’s quantified.

While I am a bit worried about the amount of tech in kids faces, things have a way of coming around. And it may be in another 10 or 20 years there’s a whole other technology that’s in place. I also look forward to a revolt of sorts, the way a lot of people are very ‘anti-TV’ I wonder if there’s any value to being ‘anti-Net’

And people before us probably watched way more tv as a kid and made phone calls on the landline all day.

Me personally, being 81 has always made me feel like the 60’s and 70’s are the ‘olden days’ - and something culturally I associate more with my parents than myself.

Like King Crimson and Tangerine Dream and all that stuff while pretty interesting feels pretty old school to me.

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