May 30, 2026

by Hazel Cills

NPR Music editor Hazel Cills, sitting in for your regular newsletter author Ann Powers, considers what definitive song speaks to the millennial generation.

Anna Webber/Getty Images

Depending on what thinkpiece you read, of which there were so many published in the 2010s you could surely wallpaper a sizable suburban home with them, the millennial generation is entitled, lazy and selfish. They’re narcissists who can’t grow up, are afraid of leaving voicemails and actually hate even being called millennials, okay?

Millennials are also, as of last year, according to The New York Times, “officially old.” Or really I should say I’m officially old, since I am a millennial, born in 1994. (Could you tell by how I immediately made this paragraph about me?) But seriously, reader, I do feel old. I feel old every time I refuse to trade my white, corded Apple headphones for Bluetooth earbuds. (What if one of them falls down a storm drain or something, what then?!) I feel old when I go to some cool bar with my friends and we have to leave after 15 minutes because it’s too loud to hear each other. But I really feel old when I hear a song that dominated my teens and 20s, some cutting-edge synth pop hit that soundtracked Myspace profiles and sweaty grade school dances, and am hit with a mixture of nostalgia and disgust by how dated it plays, how completely millennial it sounds.

I’ve thought about my reaction to such songs a lot over the last few weeks, after reading a viral Bluesky thread earlier this month by the user Tyler Huckabee in which he tried to identify “the definitive millennial song.” “The rules are intuitive but basically the song should be something nigh-universal for millennials but that didn’t really escape our generational cohort,” he added, in addition to rattling off choices like the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Maps,” The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” or The Strokes’ “Last Nite.” Those choices struck me as skewing far too indie (“Such Great Heights” is absolutely not a “nigh-universal” pick for millennials, and I say that as someone who owned Give Up on CD) or anachronistic. In the replies, hundreds chimed in with suggestions for songs, from massive R&B hits to pop punk one-hit wonders.

To me, a definitive millennial song can’t just be a song that failed to reach listeners beyond my specific generation (those born between the years of 1981 to 1996, to pick one of the possible date ranges demarcating the cohort). It also can’t simply be a hit that was popular with a huge swath of millennials. For a song to be definitively millennial, it also has to speak to the millennial identity. Millennials have been saddled with many of those simplistic stereotypes listed above, but also a lot of harsh realities. We grew up in the shadow of 9/11, and at a young age were witness to the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis, but also a 24/7 celebrity tabloid culture that celebrated popping bottles in the club, designer clothing and excess.

The music culture that defined our coming of age, from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s, went through its own massive disruptions that influenced not just listeners but also artists: the rise of illegal downloading and the streaming culture that came after, social media platforms like Youtube and Myspace that birthed a new generation of stars, the invention of MP3 players like the iPod and the explosion of festival culture. Millennial music, regardless of genre, embodies the collision of these realities.

On this week’s episode of All Songs Considered, I joined host Robin Hilton and fellow millennial NPR Music editor Sheldon Pearce in an attempt to crown the defining millennial song. We brought a selection of hits that have been largely fossilized and dated to that era — songs that might not have resonated with or possibly just straight up annoyed the Gen Xers who came before us, and are also relatively obscure (and perhaps equally grating) to the Zoomers who came after us. In our discussion, it became clear to me how so much millennial music is really the sound of anxiety and ecstasy intertwined — surveying a world in crisis, and choosing to escape it all in the form of clubby R&B, or aggressive EDM or emo music. So put on your shutter shades and a flower crown and press play, why don’t you?

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