Millennials: remember the ‘00s, when skinny jeans came into style and we swore off flares for life? Remember when massive sunglasses–covering most of our face–became vogue and we scoffed at ever wearing small frames? Well Gen Z has brought back everything we hated about ‘90s style and, dare I say it, made us rethink our fashion vows. As a reformed flared pants-hating Millennial, Gen Z’s random, diverse and ironic “style” is probably my favorite aspect of the generation.
In a recent interview with The Cut, Queen Latifah argued that the connection between Gen Z and the ‘90s is more than paralleling fashion.
“I think it’s great and so cool that Gen Z is rediscovering the ’90s and my work from that time — including [‘90s sitcom] Living Single,” Latifah said. “We put so much effort into being creative, and I think Gen Z does that as well, so they connect with being imaginative and coming up with new things.”
Latifah believes that people “building their own brands” and “defining their own identities” was just as important to Latifah and her pals in the ‘90s, as it is for Gen Z in the ‘20s.
“With hip-hop being a burgeoning form of music, we just had to prove it wasn’t a fad first,” Latifah said. “We knew it wasn’t, but we had to prove that to the world. It’s inspiring to young people to see how we hustled, and it gives them something to look back to, because we were teenagers and in our early 20s when we made it happen.”
But is the 2022 trend of hyper-focusing on micro-identities and self-branding through social media the same as identity in ’90s hip-hop? There’s a difference between articulating the classes or categories you actually belong to, like being a woman and/or lesbian and/or Black and/or disabled, through art like hip-hop, and creating micro-labels like “demisexual” to “identify as” – when lots of people don’t like to sleep with strangers.
What Latifah refers to is the importance of articulating your actual identity–who you actually are–in your art or business. You can, like with ‘90s hip-hop and the Black community, make fixed parts of your identity, and their cultures, a part of your business or brand. If anything, that reflects authenticity in your art. But is that similar to micro-identities that exist for the sake of uniqueness in 2022? No.
Arguably, the difference between self-identification today and expressing cultural identity in ‘90s hip-hop is the difference between subjective and objective. In 2022, people make which political party they vote for, which football team they barrack for or which car they drive a part of their identity and subsequently defend it as if it’s as material as their biology. Choices are conflated with what’s unchangeable.
Black identity in ‘90s hip-hop was not about self-identification. A white person can’t be a Black hip-hop artist for obvious reasons. Namely, because being Black is a material category of people, not something we can feel is part of our identity and choose it. ’90s hip-hop was about expressing the real experience of an unchangeable element uniting a class of people.
In 2022, class definitions and criteria are often viewed as “gatekeeping.” Boundaries are “exclusionary.” The focus on micro-identities and self-identification among Gen Z today does not make as much sense, and is not as meaningful, as the act of expressing material identity in ‘90s hip-hop. What makes no sense, and serves no productive purpose, is dangerous – not cool.
