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Five Crazy Pop Culture Urban Legends Generation X Kids Actually Believed
My whole childhood was a lie
I have mentioned before that I’m a proud member of Generation X. It’s a stance that is part default response to our well-known fatalism (I can’t change the generation I was born into, so I might as well embrace it) and part acknowledgement that, with apologies to Tom Brokaw and the men who won World War II, we are the greatest generation. Fight me about this in the comments all you want; I’m not going to respond.
All that said, our greatness does not mean we weren’t (and aren’t sometimes still) a bunch of gullible knuckleheads. Long before Twitter and Facebook and “fake news” made urban legends and pop culture myths an everyday occurrence, we were buying into outrageous lies hook, line, and sinker. But before getting into the stupid things we did believe, I need to mention a few we never did.
Despite the best efforts of Fundamentalist preachers and crusading government officials, we never believed that heavy metal music, video games, or Dungeons & Dragons were Satanic in any way (right, Eric Pierce?). Those black and white stickers on albums that said “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” didn’t deter us; they actually made it easier to pick out the best new music. In that one way, if in no other, we were exactly like every…
