Maybe I’m just getting old, but it seems like recent decades don’t have a distinctive culture in the way past ones do. 40s, 50s,60s,70s,80s,90s etc all had an aesthetic and musical influence.
However ever since around 2007, I’ve felt that the internet/memes/gaming has supplanted pop music as the expression of a generation. And on the internet, you can be part of whatever weird interest or politics based subculture you want. Any obscure genre of music or w/e (this is also how you get weird political and conspiracy communities like the alt right, flat earth, tradcath, even leftypol itself). While you do have occasional GenZ icons like Tekashi, etc. These are nowhere near the “voice of a generation” type icons like Cobain, Jackson, Elvis, etc.
There is no mass youth culture like you had in the past. The meme of generational warfare and indeed generations themselves were started by a culture clash between the boomers and their more conservative parents, but people of all ages are being filtered into subcultures based on race, gender, etc. But mostly shared interests. This balkanization of youth cultures really means we have to abandon the idea of generational conflict, because “generational consciousness/zeitgeist” is really an american meme of the 20th century that now lives on long after its zombified corpse has become irrelevant.
The youth can consume media from both past and present, essentially obviating the function of media as the components of the zeitgeist of an era. While you cannot think of the vietnam war without credence clearwater revival, the music of today is the music of all times and all places. Past and present are collapsed into a single culture vortex through the internet. An ironic 21 year old anarchist shitposter can make a meme video on the Syrian conflict to the soundtrack of Queen, despite the fact that Freddie Mercury died long before he was born.
Also themes and tropes of decline and disintegration are very prominent in not just pop culture (post/post-post apocalyptic movies, etc.) but in general attitudes on both the left and right. The right sees cultural decline of traditional gender norms, religion, white majority etc. While the left sees the decline of wages and protections for the working class. Arguably the right-populist wave that has been sweeping the globe in the later half of the 2010s is a result of the confluence of both these interests.
There is a subconscious idea, which is expressed only in whispers and under seven layers of lacquered irony, that the neoliberal world we inhabit is a mild form of dystopia. A combination of economic inequality, the insatiable drive of neoliberalism to subject all forms of culture and aspects of life to the ruthless logic of the market, and mass technological alienation has produced a world in which the youth struggle to survive. The 1980s dystopian corporate controlled futures portrayed in movies like ROBOCOP and BLADERUNNER really have come to pass, but instead of just wall street types in suits, you can add to that robber baron billionaires such as Musk, Bezos, and the Zuck.
