In an interesting essay in Harper’s magazine, writer Justin E. H. Smith explores what he describes as "an annihilation of almost everything that once oriented us." Smith is talking about Generation X, those born between the middle of the 1960s and 1980. According to Smith, the world he grew up in has become so unrecognizable he has to see a therapist to handle the dissonance.

Everything is digital, and there is no critical integrity or guardrails anymore. Smith laments "the widespread philistinism and prissiness" that prevails now among younger people in regard to art. Millennials and Gen Z have "an inherently authoritarian" attitude towards music , film, and literature . Challenging artists like the Cramps, Robert Crumb, and David Bowie would today be considered "problematic." "Problematic," Smith observes, is "a weasel word employed by people who lack not only the courage of their convictions but also anything beyond convictions, any of the aesthetic or moral virtues that engagement with art was, for some centuries, believed to be essential to cultivating: taste, curiosity, imagination, fellow feeling with the wretched and the fallen."

Smith celebrates the excitement of the art of Generation X, calling David Bowie’s tour in 1976 a kind of "Year Zero" for the forthcoming decade of thrilling punk and New Wave music. Now that Generation X has left the scene, claims Smith, there is nothing to stop anybody from "selling out." Algorithms and clicks are all that matter. "We tried, and we failed," Smith laments, "to save the world from our parents." They allowed their cultural revolution to become sneakers and beer commercials.

Smith is wrong on that last point. A lot of Generation X had no desire to save the world — indeed, one of our defining characteristics is an antipathy towards the utopianism of both baby boomers and Generation Z. I worked in a record store in the 1980s, and while there was some grumbling about bands "selling out," many bands, particularly minority acts, were glad to sell tickets and be featured in commercials. The socialist gatekeeping was for rich kids.

Also, Bowie had serious influences that shaped who he became — his music and act were fresh and innovative, but he had arrived there through an immersion of Western art and literature. We liked the shock of the new, but Generation X had respect and admiration for artists who preceded us. In the book Bowie's Bookshelf: The Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie's Life , author John O’Connell lists some of the books that shaped Bowie’s vision. They include works by William Faulkner, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Camille Paglia, libertarian Robert Heinlein, and Aldous Huxley. O’Connell makes a fascinating observation about how Bowie used art to create a performance: "What’s interesting is how Bowie bought into ‘that modern avant-garde stuff’ not to secure world peace or undermine capitalism but as a sort of mood board, a dressing-up box he could raid at will … he never got off on revolutionary politics. He just wanted to channel these mostly high modernist influences, artists, and writers he admired for their daring and their extravagant sense of spectacle, into a new, knowing type of pop performance."

One of the great bands of the 1980s, Talk Talk, was led by a musical genius named Mark Hollis. Hollis discussed Debussy and Shostakovich in relation to his creative process and cited Otis Redding as a vocal influence and praised John Coltrane and Burt Bacharach. Hip-hop would not have been as powerful had they not freely sampled from older artists, particularly James Brown. Radiohead has been influenced by Dante as much as by the Beatles.

Where the real rupture has occurred is in the last couple decades and the metastasis of "wokeness" from the academy into the culture at large. The Year Zero was not 1976 with Bowie. It is happening now with the imperious and intolerant young Left. In an astonishing 2018 essay, Washington Post pop critic Chris Richards argued that musicians should self-censor themselves to avoid "cultural appropriation."

Generation X does not want to save the world, but the idea that an artist should self-censor over politics is anathema to us.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil ’ s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.