Birth rates in America were sagging low in the mid-70s… in raw numbers, they sunk down near three million newborns a year. They were cresting relatively high around 1990, with raw numbers topping four million a year. You don’t exactly have to be a sociologist to notice that the sheer size of this age cohort makes its members’ lives, and their relationship with pop culture, a little different from others’. People born during a dip in the birth rate grow up consuming a lot of culture that’s aimed at someone older than them. People born during a boom do not do cultural apprenticeship, because everything is quickly aimed at them; they watch the things that appeal to their age group bloom and succeed, whether anyone else is interested in it or not. This is why some Americans have spent decades clutching their heads as the Baby Boom generation makes big chunks of our world revolve around itself: Large cohorts have a large gravitational pull.

Nitsuh Abebe wrote this great column about someone who called My Chemical Romance my generation’s Nirvana, our boom of MySpace bands, and how Skrillex is a weird outgrowth of that.