Repetitive Beats, Unrepeatable Culture
Updated: Jul 20
Why rave, not grunge, is the key to understanding the most underserved consumer generation in the market
There’s a specific laziness when it comes to referencing Gen X that drives us so mad that it became one of the (many) driving forces behind FITH. It’s “Gen X means grunge”.
It wasn’t just grunge.
And when it was grunge, it wasn’t that grunge.
Yes, Nirvana happened. But “Grunge + Mix tape = Gen X” is an over-simplified formula for a generation whose cultural landscape is vastly more complex and - more specifically - European than a Seattle record label.
Our Tribal Heritage
Underneath all of it, earlier, louder and more genuinely cross-cultural than anything grunge managed, was rave. What actually defined this generation was happening in fields off the M25 in warehouses with no address and a sound system you felt before you heard it.
Before rave, British Gen X youth culture was an elaborately genred tribal landscape: casuals, goths, new age travellers, indie kids, to name but a few. Andy Weatherall and Paul Oakenfold remixing Madchester for the rave crowd meant Indie Kids and Soul Boys finding themselves on the same floor as the Terrace Casuals embracing Chicago Jack and Balearic Beats.
A specific, unrepeatable cultural (and chemical) confluence.
When We Became One
It wasn’t that everyone became a raver, but something had shifted permanently. A cross-tribal fluency that hadn’t existed before. In Britain, rave was a kind of truce. It runs through the DNA of an entire generation and still does.
Grunge is the footnote.
Just a side bar here; the same is true with early 90’s fashion. The reference that keeps getting wheeled out is Perry Ellis S/S 1993. Can we please stop doing that? Joe Bloggs aside, our dress codes owed more to the deconstruction and inverted layering of the Antwerp 6 and Martin Margiela, than anything Marc Jacobs got fired for.
Importantly, British Gen X youth were also shaped by the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, proscribing music “wholly or predominantly categorised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. It became a political joke. It also became a radicalising force for people who’d previously had limited interest in civil liberties.
After Castlemorton inspired the Criminal Justice Bill, three mass protests took place in London in 1994, the last of which, known as The Battle of Hyde Park, drew an estimated 100,000 people, ending in a full confrontation with riot police.
Gen X, it turned out, literally would fight for their right to party.
The Return To Rave
Alongside Berlin’s techno scene achieving UNESCO cultural heritage status, there’s a respect for the rave era that’s creeping in to the cultural discourse (ignoring *that* John Lewis misfire).
Recent exhibitions are looking to capture Gen X’s authentic experience. For example Rave On at Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery earlier last year used photography, archive footage and public memory submissions to document the faces and spaces of Liverpool’s rave scene from the late 80s through the 90s.
Then there’s In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, an award-winning immersive VR experience that recreates the specific ritual of tracking down an illegal warehouse party in 1989: the answerphone message with the location, joining the convoy just off an A-road, the anticipation building to that moment when the bass found you before you found the party.
Finally getting its release in May 2026, Free Party: A Folk History covers the same territory from a different angle. Spiral Tribe were one of the sound systems at the heart of the free party movement, powered by four-and-a-half-kilowatt rig, maybe a few chemicals and their ‘never stop’ ethos.
Rave is Good for You. Research is Proving It
“All you had to do to ‘get it’ was show up, maybe pop an E, and dance with the beautiful boys and girls… It wasn’t about scoring; it was about group organism. If everything went right — and usually everything went right — there’d be a moment, or maybe even a whole hour, when it just clicked into place. All the individual dancers would experience themselves as this single, coordinated being. Evolution was no longer competition, it was a team sport. Fuelled by music, chemicals, motion and, most of all, empathy.”
Graham St John in Rave Culture and Religion
What the ravers found, psychology is now confirming. Released in April 2025, We Become One by AlphaTheta explores the science behind what everyone on a dancefloor in 1990 already knew. In the documentary, neuroscientist Dr. Julia C. Basso explains how, when people are dancing to the same music together, specific parts of their brains are stimulated simultaneously, creating a feeling of unity among the crowd: “That whole social network of brain areas is lighting up, firing together, so there’s a lot of inter-brain synchrony that’s happening.”
While phone-obsessed crowds may inhibit other generations, Gen X were the last cohort able to dance without fear of being documented. To counter this, new research backs the banning of filming in clubs suggesting it intensifies the experience that people really want.
“Phones,” commented Dr Tim Hill, from the University of Bath and who collaborated on the study, “prevent that shared experience from intensifying and climaxing over the course of an evening.”
He adds: “Because these moments of deep, emotional synchrony and climax require people to get on the same page. It requires them to synchronise emotions and behaviours in a large crowd of people. And phones ruin this”.
Rave On
“The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour,” says academic Nancy Pachana, speaking in The Times. “The stereotype is that you become more conservative with age, but if you were voting for the Greens at 30, you’ll be doing it at 80. If you really like sex, you still will at 100.”
The global EDM market was valued at $11.8 billion in 2023 and Gen X are continuing to attend EDM events well into their middle age and beyond. According to the Night Time Industries Association, 41% of those aged 45 years and over go clubbing at least once a month.
Similarly, post-pandemic, live music attendance among the 50+ age group is also up 30%.
Furthermore, a University of Leeds study found that older women are turning to EDM-based dance nights specifically for mental health benefits. Surveying over 130 female clubbers aged 40-65, the study found that EDM participation played a central role in mental and physical health, providing social connectedness, self-expression and release from the pressures of daily life.
Which brings us back to the commercial blind spot.
Gen X will spend $15.2 trillion globally in 2025 - and if treated as their own economy, would represent the world’s second largest consumer market, according to NIQ. By 2035 that figure reaches $23 trillion.
And yet:
Only 5% of influencer marketing budgets are directed at them.
Some 88% of women over 50 say they are poorly represented in advertising.
Two thirds of women over 46 feel marketing no longer speaks to them.
Gen X only appears in 4% of ads, despite representing 31% of the population.
By contrast, 76% of TV ads include someone aged 19-49.
Unsurprisingly, only 13% of Gen X feel represented by the brands supposedly targeting them.
That’s a lot of money being left on the table.
When fewer than 5% of advertising employees are over 50, the cultural references, casting decisions, music choices and tonal register of campaigns all get filtered through a generational lens that mis-sells the night and simply doesn’t match the audience.
Gen X notice. Have you?
P.S. Grunge or Rave? Mosh Pit or Podium? Let us know.
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