I am a Gen Xer, but I wasn’t always. As it turns out, the periodization of time is rather arbitrary and not always consistent. In my late teens or early 20s I read an article in Newsweek or Time that put the latest birth year of Generation X at 1976, one year before I was born. In my 30s and early 40s, media scrutiny shifted away from Gen X to Millennials, which often included those born in the late 70s, though many of us didn’t really identify as such. I briefly thought of myself as an Xennial, but I came to own my Gen-X-ness after reading an essay by writer Alex Pappademas that acknowledged and embraced the unremarkable forgottenness of our generation. Yes, I thought, this is my generation!
But a few days ago I heard a song that would make me rethink Generation X and its contributions. Four girls ranging in age from 10-16 belted out “Racist, Sexist Boy” from the stacks of the Los Angeles Public Library. Overnight, the Linda Lindas became a household name and ultimately scored a record deal. I was among the many for whom their sounds of righteous rage resonated, sounds that made me think of my early teen years in Seattle. A quick glance at their Twitter profile confirmed their riot grrrl influences.
A confession: I wasn’t actually part of that scene or any other that made the Pacific Northwest distinctive in the 1990s. I had plenty of rage (and still do), but I was nowhere near cool enough to be not-cool (i.e., alternative), nor did I have the means or inclination to acquire the accoutrements and soundtrack of that culture. I was and am bland. I did have ears, though, and enough friends or acquaintances who were part of that scene to be reminded of it when I heard the Linda Lindas’ song and then their whole set.
After I watched it, I fell down a rabbit hole trying to learn more about this band that struck such a chord with me (pun intended). I watched a movie they were in, Moxie, which is full of nostalgia for a cultural moment of the 1990s, a moment when some women expressed their rage specifically through punk. After watching Moxie I listened to Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl,” and I recalled the rage I had felt in my adolescence, though I had not expressed it in the same manner. I never intentionally listened to 1990s alternative rock during the actual 1990s—it’s only some thirty years later that I am now engaging with that cultural moment, and only thanks to the Linda Lindas, whose members are young enough to be my children (my oldest is the same age as their youngest). But their music transported me to an era of “girl power,” exemplified by bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy long before the Spice Girls screamed it from a double-decker London bus.
It wasn’t their sound alone that arrested me. It was the combination of their Asian American identity and their music that took me to that moment in the past and carved out a place for me in it. The group is half Latinx too, but it was their Asian half that I saw myself in. These girls were shredding the racist stereotype of the “model minority,” and I was here for it as a Korean American with more than a little rage at the particular blend of racism and misogyny experienced by Asian women in the United States. A young girl-band of the 2020s brought me home to my 1990s youth, their Asian Americanness situating me comfortably in that youth three decades after the fact.
As a scholar of ancient Greek and Roman literature, I turned to my academic training to find the interpretive tools for understanding this circular journey. Specifically, I looked to classical reception studies, the study of how the cultural artefacts of ancient Greece and Rome have been depicted and adapted in their transmission from antiquity. In reception studies, it’s often the ancient text that is used to illuminate the later one; Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example, might be mined for traces of ancient Greek or Roman epic to explain where the later English epic drew its inspiration. But the illuminative effect is reciprocal; that is to say, the later text—and specifically the way the later text pays homage to but varies from the earlier one—can shed new light on its source. Case in point: Luis Alfaro’s Mojada reimagines Euripides’ Medea as an immigrant story, which helps situate the title character and her experience in a modern American context. But Alfaro’s adaptation also helps us see the strains of otherness that permeate Medea’s story in Euripides’ play, which come to light as we consider the two works together. Plenty of people have made this point about the reciprocity between modern and ancient revealed through reception studies; I’ll direct attention to just a few (see here and here).
Though we are not dealing with ancient Greek and Roman texts here, the intertwinings of the Linda Lindas with the sounds of my adolescence gave me a concrete example of the cyclically illuminative power of reception studies. The Linda Lindas directed me to a 1990s subculture that inspired them. Listening to the original riot grrrl bands deepened my understanding of the Linda Lindas, who in turn added an antiracist layer that made the 1990s more meaningful and inhabitable for me personally. Both cultural experiences exist together in my 43-year old Asian American female consciousness, entwined and inseparable, their differences and similarities meshed together yet still perceptible. I can’t fully appreciate or even fathom the one without the other now.
I no longer think of Gen X as forgettable or unaccomplished since at the very least it gave rise to a feminist punk rock movement that would influence the strong, self-assured voices of the Linda Lindas thirty years later. Gen X didn’t give us the Linda Lindas. But it did give us a sound that inspired them, and it’s through them that I connect with my teenaged past. The Linda Lindas link my present with my past, and give me, in my middle age, a soundtrack to my adolescence. They translate the music of my Pacific Northwest youth into an updated version, a 2021 renovation of its 1990s architecture. I suppose we can think of reception as a form of time travel, a way of converging past and present through creation and adaptation.
A teenaged girl-band of the 2020s helped me fully appreciate my Gen X roots and inhabit that identity, but I don’t want to idealize the past or overcredit it. I’m still with Pappademas when he says, “let us be the first generation to opt out of building monuments to our rightness. Let’s build no monuments at all. Let’s lord nothing over anyone. Let’s expend no energy explaining ourselves and what we stood for to younger people who could not care less.” It’s just that I now recognize the potential of Gen X’s cultural contributions, but it’s potential that wasn’t fully realized (for me) until the Linda Lindas’ adaptation and renewal. In causing me to look back, the Linda Lindas have pushed me forward, by articulating and reincarnating the righteous and necessary anger of my youth.
*Thanks to Sarah Bond, Kinitra Brooks, and Dawn Hamilton for reading and commenting on drafts of this.