A best friend and I cemented our sisterhood with matching tattoos. Being a neurotic obsessive about design, my body art, and everything in general, I created a Powerpoint presentation for the tattoo artist.
I’ve done this for my usual Portland artist, the fantastic Brian Wilson at Scapegoat, and it’s been absolutely perfect. However, this was Seattle, and a new shop/ artist/ scenario. My sisterfriend in body modification laughed for about twenty minutes as I showed her my Powerpoint. What?! I needed to express a concept.
Anyway, we agreed that the Powerpoint was go, and we took it to a shop in Seattle’s Belltown to get our work done. For some reason, things did not run as smoothly as you’d expect.
Pretty straightforward, right? After some discussion at the tattoo shop, we decided that, in the interest of time, the two girls would become one girl. The artist asked for an hour to draw, and we went to get lunch. Post-lunch, the artist was still working. After two and a half hours, we got the big reveal:
ha. ha. ha.
no.
I looked at my friend. She looked at me.
“What do you think?” asked our artist.
Diplomacy failed me. I ransacked my brain for a way to say, “This is not what we described and how did it take you, as a professional, nearly three hours to fail at a drawing based on an artist who mainly traced his images?”
Girlfriend saved me. “I think you should draw it,” was all she said to me. The guys at the shop laughed.
“You would have to draw it in like, twenty minutes, for me to get it done today.” Wow. Okay. Not a problem. I grabbed a pencil and some tracing paper. Five minutes later:
A little cleanup, and we have new tattoos and a ridiculous story:
It sounds awful. It’s awkward to play. Looks like it would de-tune pretty easily. The overdrive as power button is clever but not conducive to playing a real song. The guy who makes these is clearly not a guitar player, but a n00b, tinkering with classic rock riffs, poorly designed mods, and 8-bit dynamite: the Nintendo Entertainment System.
I’m not trying to mock this kid. But I have a different connection to the NES. I was a first generation-Nintendohead. Mario-freak. Duck Hunt queen.
Yep, I had the orange zapper– signifier of first-gen adoption and a turn-on for certain nerds of a certain age.
I have a deep connection to Nintendo– something I recently realized by my uncontrollable adult emotions of rage and sadness when I found out a little sibling had somehow destroyed my old box. By hacking an iconic NES to create a sub-standard piece of musical equipment, this kid took a groundbreaking piece of technology off the market.
If people keep ruining them for every pointless mod they can think of, there will be less and less original units left. (And before you say it, many units that people think are already dead can actually be fixed.)
There are some (unauthorized) NES architecture clones being manufactured and sold in the Third World now, but there are no more genuine originals being made. At the moment there still may be a fair number of originals available, but not if crap like this continues.
People, stop looking for random things to shove in classic systems. If you’re incapable of actually appreciating them for what they’re supposed to be, what they actually due WELL, give them to people who can.
If you had a Ford Model T, would you turn it into a crude, ungainly rowboat? It’s not creative the thousandth time someone decides to shove [random object X] into a classic system case to make an awkward combination. Anyone who was actually a real fan of the systems wouldn’t do this stupid crap.
I’ve noticed a lot of young people these days affecting a nostalgia for systems they never actually played as kids — the systems’ heydays were actually five or more years before they were born. If your pseudo-enthusiasm gives you ideas like this, just sod off find some other stupid trend to follow.
Would you turn an Eames chair into a toilet? Alter an old VHS or cassette tape to decorate your neck? Wear Legos as jewelry? Maybe not. But these kids did.
Younger Millennials are like this. Instead of the Breakfast Club-esque vision of high school where people were grouped, labeled, and locked into a social identity, we’re seeing a new kind of self-expression, in which kids pull icons of the past together into visually, conceptual amagamations of identity. Items that were formerly used by cliques to represent “in” status, a clear signifier of belonging to a team, now are repurposed to represent a passing interest of a Millennial teen.
So kids are dressing up in the past. What does this mean for the future?
Creativity is the new currency
High schools of the past hosted groups of kids largely connected by the social status of their parents. Preps vs. burnouts. Socs versus greasers. Squares versus drapes. TV and movies reinforced those sterotypes, and due to social class /economic circumstance, some kids could simply not afford to buy into certain scenes. While low-income kids will always have a harder time procuring money-focused status symbols, identity isn’t driven by following a group anymore— creativity drives identity. Full-on Abercrombie & Fitch or even a head-to-toe punk look isn’t cool. It’s the definition of your personal style that every kid is constantly seeking. And they’re using Facebook, Tumblr, and Chictopia to express it.
Dilettante Nation
The Internet gives us access to a wealth of cultures, iconography, and deep subculture in a way no human or teenager has ever seen before. When information is always at your fingertips, why go deep and focus? Most kids don’t. They spread their cultural expertise wide and thin. Don’t be fooled by the term “digital natives.” While Millennials are familiar with consumer technology, most are unsure and overwhelmed when they try to search for information online, streamline their Internet experiences, or understand code. As Wired proclaimed, Web 2.0 is dead. And I see the future of 3.0 as a simplistic app-based connective social function. Who are you, where are you, how do you connect to me? This leads to…
Millennial anxiety
The constant connection to the digital sphere induces a hyper-awareness of “OTHER.” Pressured to be the best by helicopter parents and a desperate job market, Millennials seek to be everywhere at every moment. We’re constantly in the game. The life of an accomplished CEO is now the social evening of a 16 year old: taking calls, managing their online presence, dealing with drama, facing pressures of money and time. This generational nervous shiver ultimately derails production. We’re busy all the time, but nothing seems to come of it. Beware the prescriptions, the Ritalin, the Klonopin, and the generic depression.
It’s lovely to find a simple video, like the one by our Nintendo-modding friend, to illuminate a host of insights about a single generation. But there’s more to the Millennials than a simplistic summary… there’s a host of other implications, and my favorite: the backlash!
