Despite risking mock, derision, and scorn, I must admit something: I enjoy stomp-clap-hey music – here I stand (and stomp, clap, and hey), because I can do no other. The Icelandic band Of Monsters and Men with the epic and hopeful Nordicism of their 2011 “Little Talks;” the discography of the Lumineers who go so far beyond their 2012 hit “Ho Hey” (which gave the genre its nickname), especially their 2016 theme album Cleopatra which sounds somehow both propulsive and heartbreaking; even – even – Mumford & Sons’ first album, 2010’s Sigh No More.
When it comes to all the hate these sorts of bands get, for all of their cringey aesthetics and the optimistic pablum, I get it, Zoomers, I really do get it. I can understand why people turn their noses up at music that sounds like it was prepared by artisanal bartenders in straw-hats who charge $22 for a farm-to-table hamburger with faux-gras that’s listed on the menu as a “sammie” (I’m cognoscente of the fact that the name of this column sounds like one of those restaurants). The thing is, I don’t care. I unironically love much of the music from more than a decade ago performed by mustachioed hipsters in suspenders and bowler hats, in part because it reminds me of when I was younger (ah, nostalgia!), when the world appeared briefly hopeful during the height of the Obama years, and also because much of the music slaps, not in spite of all the banjos and clapping but because of it. “When we were younger we thought/Everyone was on our side,” sings Wesley Schultz in a track off of the Lumineers’ self-titled debut, “Then we grew a little bit,” and yes.
2025 isn’t 2010, and as the Millennial generation firmly enters middle-age, subsequent generations have mocked the culture of their elders, as it ever must be. Reels and TikTok comedian Kyle Gordon did a pitch-perfect parody of a stomp-clap-hey ballad this summer with his track “We Will Never Die,” including all the necessary elements of the genre, from the outer-borough scenery of the music video to the synchronized clapping and heying, the fashion from Anthropologie to the rusticated props from West Elm. “You ever have one of those nights?” sings Gordon in faux earnestness, “Those nights you know you’ll live forever?” and it sounds just like the band fun. What I’m saying is that Gordon really got our number, all of it – the weird exuberance, the nonsensical optimism (once upon a time), the corniness.
Former academic Sam Colt at his Substack describes this music’s “dreamy, folksy atmosphere, but in an urban setting” performed by “skinny trust-fund kids,” the result of the same normie liberalism that made Lin Manuel-Miranda a star and launched a thousand Parks & Rec memes. In our current era of obvious climate catastrophe and economic freefall, pandemic and authoritarianism, it’s the optimism of stomp-clap-hey that’s maybe the most galling to the current generation, of Gordon singing “Let’s get stoned on life tonight/Stop adulting for a while/Check your laptop, did you see the news?/Because our love went viral.” The denouement of this season of Millennial-hate was when a social media ratioed consensus emerged that Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes’ 2009 hit “Home” was the “worst song ever,” and despite the annoying June and Johnny spoken word portion at the end, I’ll admit that I’ve always loved that track as well.
Millennial optimism, it should be said, was always a cope more than a worldview. This was a cohort of women and men who entered college with 9/11, the job market with the Great Recession, started families with the election of Donald Trump, and middle-age with the pandemic. History keeps happening to Millennials not necessarily in a way that it didn’t for Boomers and Generation-X (well, not the later honestly), but in a manner where the systemic inequities of the post-Cold War neoliberal consensus made it impossible to personally recover from that history. Loan debt, wage stagnation, recession, housing cost, all of it has contributed to the reputation and reality of Millennials being the first downwardly mobile generation in U.S. history, with less net worth and less wealth accumulation than their parents. According to the College Board, Millennials have 300% more student loan debt than their parents’ generation did, they’re half as likely to own a home today than people their same age would have fifty years ago, fully 20% of the 75-million-person cohort lives below the poverty line, and the predicted minimum age of retirement for the average member of the generation is 75.
Journalist Allison Morrow at CNN in 2024 describes the broken “American dream for Millennials” while Michael Hobbes at Huffington Post (where I found the data listed above) bluntly writes that “Millennials are screwed.” If the economic reality wasn’t dire enough, Millennials face a number of epidemiological hardships that deviate from previous generations, including increases in diabetes, hypertension, and obesity, as well as a mysterious 5% increase in terminal pancreatic cancer, all within a cohort less likely to have a personal physician and health insurance. That’s before we include the numbers as they relate to depression and substance abuse disorder. Woodstock remains a halcyon memory to Boomers who traded that utopianism for Reagan, two Bushes and Trump, while Generation X thinks of being a latchkey kid as equivalent to storming Normandy, but the graphs don’t lie when it comes to the downward trajectory of those between the ages of 29 and 44. So, you can forgive Millennials their avocado toast and NetFlix.
Forever in high school to the Boomers and always lame to the Zoomers, the curse of the Millennial is that ours is a transitional generation, the last group of people who can remember the time before the internet came to dominate every aspect of our lives, which even if that reality isn’t responsible for the abysmal economic, social, and cultural reality of the present (though it’s also not entirely unrelated) at least explains the odd psychic space for those born between 1981 and 1996, albeit more so for the earlier years of that spread. Those are the so-called “Xennials,” which includes me. I’ll be honest, I only discovered I was a Millennial relatively recently and chaffed for a long time at embracing the designation.
For years I assumed that I was the youngest amongst Generation-X, and growing up in Pittsburgh where David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was still “new music” when it was played on the radio in 1998 did little to dissuade me of that misapprehension. After all, I attended high school in the ‘90s, didn’t grow up with the internet, and in fact only got an email address when I started college, not to mention that I unrepentantly drove through campus the other day booming Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill. Yet the numbers don’t lie, and as unhelpful as generational markers are in describing the experience of a vast and disparate assemblage of human beings, it’s true that the stations of the Millennial Via Delarosa (9/11, stock market crash, Trump, Covid) map onto the same broad life-events for me that they do for others in this cohort. And so, as an act of generational solidarity, I’ve come to accept and even embrace the designation, for at the very least it’s technically accurate.
There has been, in tandem with the (often deserved) mockery of Millennials, a new introspection that has come back just like low-rise jeans and cargo pants. Collete Shade (born 1988) in her debut essay collection Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything provides a personal, yet political, consideration about coming-of-age between 1997 and 2008. Ranging from the burst of the dotcom bubble to the 2008 housing crash, Y2K looks at the exigencies of the cultural superstructure through Smash Mouth’s “All Star,” sexual politics in Ludacris’ “What’s Your Fantasy,” and the turn-of-the-millennium mania for a blobby, pale, futuristic design style manifested in everything from the iMac to puffer jackets. Publicists’ copy compares Shade to Jia Tolentino and Chuck Klosterman, and not without reason, yet there is a more subtle argument in Y2K than in, say, Klosterman’s The Nineties. Unlike in that book, where Klosterman whole-sale buys into narratives of the September 11th terrorist attacks as being an axis mundi upon which history rotates, Shade explicates how all that came after – the War on Terror, Afghanistan and Iraq, the Great Recession, and the Rise of Trump – was due to the decisions of politicians rather than inevitable forces of history.
With Francis Fukuyama’s infamous 1989 declaration in mind, Shade writes that the “Y2K Era was defined by two things: the End of History and the rise of the internet.” Both of those phenomena are intrinsic to Millennial self-identification, for in our youths we were promised a “new millennium [that] would be full of innovation, of technologies we couldn’t even imagine yet,” but what we got were pocket supercomputers that high-jacked our neural-cortexes. Having written high school papers on typewriters and called my friends on a rotary phone (having gotten their numbers from a phonebook), I’m in the final generation that will have any memory of a time before continual digital connection, the women and men who saw humans transformed effectively into cyborgs melded with their smartphones. That materially, by every major metric, whether environmental, economic, social, or political, the world has objectively gotten worse, only compounds the irony. Whether or not there would have been less to doom-scroll a few decades ago is secondary to the fact that you couldn’t have even engaged in that nihilistic activity even if you had wanted to.
This is the major difference between Millennials and those younger than us, that they at least have the psychological benefit of always knowing that they’d be fucked, we’ve got the baggage of having at one time believed that we wouldn’t. We are, if anything, the disillusioned generation. Naturally there are cultural implications to all of this, reflected in the art which Millennials produced and consumed. In his upcoming Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century (the title is a reference to the Tay Tay song, of course), W. David Marx (born in 1977, a Generation X-er) provides overview of the last two-and-a-half-decades of literature, music, television, film, and so on, trying to diagnose the cultural malaise that marks the new millennium. With endless sitcom reboots and over bloated Hollywood franchises in mind, Marx writes that “Where society once encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention, there is now a blank space.”
While the author’s far-more famous predecessor with the same name marveled at how modern capitalism meant that everything which is solid would melt into air, today we’ve noticed that there is still a lot of melting (some of it of the glacial kind), but that everything still seems to pool into the same undifferentiated mass. For as much as Millennial nostalgia might reclaim flip-phones and Polaroids, the reality is that the rate of cultural change does appear to have stagnated. Compare a photograph of a street from 2000 to 1980 – the clothes look different, the cars look different, even the people look different. That gulf is but a crack from 2020 to 2000. According to Marx this is precisely because of the flattening effect of the internet, itself defined by algorithmic dictates, ever content to mix-and-match endlessly until the apocalypse. Even stomp-clap-hey music – maybe especially that benighted genre – apes older forms, and not even in conscious homage.
Mark Fisher (born in 1968, total Xer), the much-missed theorist of the cyber-dystopian now, coined the phrase “capitalist realism” in 2009 to describe the all-pervading sense that it’s become impossible to imagine a different means of social arrangements, where all of our art and culture is arrayed to preclude even thinking of structuring things in radical ways. The irony is that history didn’t end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but in some way our propensity for radically different art and culture did. Mainstream culture always required an avant-garde to vampirically regenerate itself from, but now that the avant-garde is dead, mainstream culture has developed an ever-waxier pallor.
Today the currency is speed, not the experimental. “Immediacy’s propensity to quiver with extremities minimizes art’s capacity to imaginatively break with the merely given,” writes literary critic Anna Kornbluh (another Generation X-er from 1977) in Immediacy; or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism. Again, this is another way in which Millennials are a transitionary generation, hearing from our older siblings about the possibility of radical breaks from the past, but having no such inheritance to gift to our younger brothers and sisters, for authenticity is deadest of all. And yet – and yet – there are moments of utopian yearning over the past three decades, whether in the political form of Occupy and the Bernie movement, or the cultural sphere, even if all of these were necessary reformist overtures at the margin of a collapsing empire. At the very least, more than half of Millennials didn’t vote for Trump, which is better than Generation X or Zoomers on either side of us. We’ve sadly given the world dorks like J.D. Vance, but we also can claim Zohran Mamdani (who has a better beard). Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg is in our cohort, but so is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
To return to my introductory conceit, there were some good tunes along the way, with music critic Chris DeVine (born in 1984, a few months after me) in Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion crafting encomiums for Radiohead, Iron & Wine, the Strokes, the National, Bon Iver, MGMT, the Postal Service, Neutral Milk Hotel, and LCD Soundsystem, writing about the Millennial coming of age to “prestige pop music,” whereby “an insular subculture can be something else entirely.”
Here is the thing, for while the influences on those bands are obvious to anyone familiar with music (same as it’s ever been), their soundtracking our current apocalyptic moment de facto makes them different from what came before. The robotic twitchiness of Radiohead on OK Computer and Kid A, the cracked Americana of Iron & Wine, the sad-white-guy mopping of the National and Bon Iver, the hermetic intricacies of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the electronic utopian exuberance of MGMT and LCD Soundsystem. Of course all are products of global capitalism, obviously. Yet there are glimmerings of at least a sense of something after this moment has passed, when new generations can imagine new ways of being, can restore a hope that died sometime in the early 21st-Century. “So can you understand/Why I want a daughter while I’m still young?” sings Win Butler on Arcade Fire’s 2010 album The Suburbs, because “I want to hold her hand/And show her some beauty/Before this damage is done.” There are worse things than hope, especially against the odds, especially if it’s not for yourself.
