SC two years ago:
Does this sound familiar? An author discovers that 20 and 30-year olds often like to be pretentious, think they're too hip to be like their parents, and maybe slack off a bit before settling into the usual middle age routine.
...
The fact that this idea keeps popping up every few years suggests that maybe there's something meaningful being expressed. But it's too vague to acquire a particularly permanent label. So aspiring pop sociologists just pick a few points to be more salient than others -- sushi-eating, coffee-drinking, anime-watching (maybe the real story is the post-WWII takeover of American culture by Japan?!?) -- and, voila, instant category to be studied. All you need after that is a temporarily catchy name, and you've got yourself a book.
That was in reference to a book on something called "urban tribes", about people who "spend the decades between early adulthood and middle age going out together, bonding and gossiping with their new extended family, earning money by freelance means, and drinking a great number of leisurely coffees."
From a New York Magazine article linked to by Arts and Letters Daily:
Let’s start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f) decide that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house; (g) wear sneakers as a fashion statement; (h) wear the same vintage New Balance sneakers that he wore on his first day of school in the seventh grade as a fashion statement; (i) wear said sneakers to the office; (j) quit the office job because—you know what?—screw the office and screw jockeying for that promotion to VP, because isn’t promotion just another word for “slavery”?; (k) and besides, now that she’s a freelancer, working on her own projects, on her own terms, it’s that much easier to kick off in the middle of the week for a quick snowboarding trip to Sugarbush, because she’s got to have some balance, right? And she can write it off, too, because who knows? She might bump into Spike Jonze on the slopes; (l) wear a Misfits T-shirt; (m) make his 2-year-old wear a Misfits T-shirt; (n) never shave; (o) take pride in never shaving; (p) take pride in never shaving while spending $200 on a bedhead haircut and $600 on a messenger bag, because, seriously, only his grandfather or some frat-boy Wall Street flunky still carries a briefcase; or (q) all of the above?
This is all in the service of supposedly describing overgrown teenagers called "grups" (after a contraction of "grown-up" from an original-series Star Trek episode). The author knows it looks like he's ripping off the history of making up labels to engage in pop sociology concerning the same group, and tries to explicitly disavow it at one point: "This is where the Grup diverges from the bobo, the yuppie, even the yupster." But it doesn't matter -- when you look at all the commonalities between them, it's just more of the same. Which isn't to say that history is repeating itself entirely; whereas all the previous iterations of this phenomenon ended in books, this one (so far) ends in a magazine article.
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