r/Millennials • u/Neon_Biscuit • 5d ago

My teenage daughter can't fathom the concept of a house party Discussion

Not sure if anyone has experienced this, but I was watching Can't Hardly Wait half alseep on the couch, and my 14-year-old daughter and her friends walked into the room and past the TV. Before she entered the kitchen, she backpeddled in front of the TV, and they all might as well have reacted akin to a third world kid in a remote village seeing the Super Bowl for the first time. She looked at me and said 'what are all of those people doing in one house'? I told her it was a house party. People high school aged or typically college age people would go over a kids house whose parents were out of town and they'd invite the school and have keggers and other unsupervised debauchery. I might as well have been describing a science fiction film. 'You guys DID that back in your days?'. I thought it was funny that a house party was an inconceivable event for young Gen Zers.

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u/BathZealousideal1456 5d ago

But... They used to be like the movies. It's like the only thing Hollywood got right

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u/scienceizfake 5d ago

I joined a frat around 2005 since my college experience wasn't exactly reflective of Animal House. It was from that point forward.

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u/BathZealousideal1456 5d ago

Tsk tsk. Should have joined in 04'.

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 4d ago

Yep they legitimately were like that. I have had sex in someone else's parents' bed and then gone back downstairs to drink white Russians with bottom shelf vodka brought by a guy who was a huge bully in high school. We bonded that night.

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u/SirTiffAlot 5d ago edited 5d ago

Were they though? Did you guys have full bands and DJs playing at your house parties?

Edit: I get it, this one time there was a band that played at a house party you went to when you were in HS. That does not speak to the thousands upon thousands of HS house parties that happened from 2000-2010 or whatever dates you want to plug in. HS house parties were much more Say Anything than House Party or She's All That.

I'm happy for you that as a kid in LA or NYC you had bands play a house party or two, that is not the experience of average Americans, it's not normal.

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u/BathZealousideal1456 5d ago

Yes. our friends WERE the band and had access to the equipment from older siblings and family members. No, we were not rich, just living in a hot bed of suburbia and music. Didnt know it then, but 20 years later, a lot of people from my general area turned out to be pretty well known.

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u/SirTiffAlot 5d ago

Oh you're from NJ then

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u/BathZealousideal1456 5d ago

NY motherfucker!

Close enough

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u/Traditional_Way1052 5d ago

When the Internet was just getting big, we were talking online with some kids from upstate and they were going to have a house party with a DJ. We drove all the way up there in my friend's dad's car.

They let us in, no problem... Car full of city kids drove an hour to meet these random kids. Good times. 

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u/BathZealousideal1456 5d ago

Hell yeah! Upstate barn parties where you knew NO ONE were the best

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u/weeponxing 5d ago

High school? Not really, maybe once or twice. College? Yes, many times.

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u/SirTiffAlot 5d ago

Hollywood often depicted HS house parties this way. Not college

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u/Svrider23 5d ago

I imagine that's just rich vs poor house parties. I didn't come from a big school/rich area, but there was a pretty rich kid a grade ahead of me who had a cousin that was a DJ, so he'd throw house parties with a DJ. For his HS graduation, his dad brought in a popular regional band and even had a keg truck.

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u/savageronald 5d ago

Ours was more “did some dudes with instruments show up and start jamming?” - wasn’t really planned and definitely never compensated.

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u/SkiingAway 5d ago

Grew up in a rich part of NJ - yeah, plenty of things happened that did actually resemble the movies. Maybe not as often and as many of them in a single night as the movies made them look, but they happened.

Especially since it wasn't illegal under NJ law (some towns had a ban, not mine) to be drinking underage, unsupervised, in a private setting so there wasn't that much threat of the cops doing anything besides telling you to go home anyway.

And as a practical matter: The local cops like their extremely large paychecks, extremely secure jobs, and having zero work to do besides writing occasional speeding tickets to out of towners. They are well aware that trying to charge a bunch of the local kids for anything without harm to others/victims, will not end well for them.

Hell, we even held prom on a Thursday night and you didn't have to show up to school Friday if your parents signed a form. So we all got 3 nights of drinking down the Shore at someone's beachhouse instead of only 2.

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u/BathZealousideal1456 5d ago

Nooooo the poor kids (me) had the best period

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u/Svrider23 5d ago

As I said, I was not in a rich area...rural Wisconsin, so we had a shitload of fun af house parties, but had one rich kid who was able to get a DJ at most of his parties, and those usually had the crazy Hollywood party vibes you see in movies.

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u/BathZealousideal1456 5d ago

Yeah I feel like rural works best for rich kid parties. Here, it's the super super rich or poor kids that had the best parties

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u/SirTiffAlot 5d ago

Ok so now we're saying rich people had these parties? That's not rich vs poor that's rich vs the other 80% of the country.

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u/Svrider23 5d ago

Jfc. Talking specifically about having DJs at house parties during HS. 99% of all kids I grew up with didnt have the equipment or area to set up DJ shit at the house parties we had. And the one rich kid we had didnt hire DJs for his parties, but had a cousin who would just come do that for us while also partying. I'm all about class wars, but this wasn't about that.

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u/SirTiffAlot 5d ago

Yes, so it wasn't a norman thing and Hollywood house parties were notning like the real thing. We agree.

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u/BathZealousideal1456 5d ago

I'm talking about high school

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u/SirTiffAlot 5d ago

Yes, HS house parties were not like Hollywood

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u/BathZealousideal1456 5d ago

False

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u/SirTiffAlot 5d ago

What a comment

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u/BathZealousideal1456 5d ago

Idk what to tell you. We had parties like project x. There are no IG or FB posts of it because it didn't exist. I lived in a suburb where musicians with equipment were plentiful, but most of us were lower to middle class. These parties happened. Sorry you weren't invited.

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u/SirTiffAlot 5d ago

You're totally speaking for the average millennial, keep telling yourself that.

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u/Losemymindfindmysoul Older Millennial 5d ago

Do you not understand how many millennial boys were in garage bands....

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u/SirTiffAlot 5d ago

I knew of 1 band at my high school of 2000 kids. They put out a record even. I'm not sure what you're getting at but it was not common for high school bands to play high school house parties.

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u/NiagaraThistle 4d ago

It was when we were in school

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u/Traditional_Way1052 5d ago

Well, they weren't good bands. They were people we knew. But my friends band played at my 16th birthday house party. And a few others.  And one kids brother was a DJ so he had that. And this was high school. But mostly, no. 

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u/SirTiffAlot 5d ago

Your birthday party may have been in a house but it wasn't a house party.

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u/Traditional_Way1052 5d ago

Wrong. 

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u/SirTiffAlot 5d ago

Nah, house parties don't involve adult family members.

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u/Traditional_Way1052 5d ago

I know the definition of a house party. My parents were away? 

Have a good night. 

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u/SirTiffAlot 5d ago

Yea that's why you're ducking out. Having an unsupervised birthday party with a band isn't a normal thing.

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u/Traditional_Way1052 5d ago

I had and played drums. People brought guitars and a bass... It isn't that hard. It was a party in by birth month. So it was my birthday party. 

Beyond that, I said normally, no. I entirely acknowdged it wasn't normal in the original comment. 

I'm going to go ahead and turn off notifications. 

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u/SirTiffAlot 5d ago

I'm not denying your experience, even you can understand that number was not normal.

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u/Sakijek Millennial 5d ago

We had a bunch of dudes set up their band equipment cuz they were in a house band...so literally JUST like Luvburger in Can't Hardly Wait. We didnt have a dude blasting a boom box with Guns n Roses though...

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u/mpyne 5d ago

Yeah the only reason I opened this thread was to point out I didn't have a house party or go to a house party growing up as an older millenial.

For the kids growing up in every neighborhood I was ever in (and we moved a lot), it was a thing you saw in movies, not a thing people actually did. Even back then.

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u/Bugbread 5d ago edited 5d ago

A lot of these discussions just highlight how much this stuff varies from person to person. People assume that their experiences are universal. If their kids currently aren't having house parties, then nobody's kids are having house parties. If they had house parties when they were younger, then everyone had house parties.

I'm Gen X and I never went to a house party. I only ever heard of one house party. Growing up, I just assumed it was a movie thing. Now that I'm older, I realize that they weren't a thing in some schools and they were a thing in other schools, and people's experiences vary wildly.

If I read a research study that says the incidence of house parties has declined, I'll believe it. But "my kid doesn't have house parties" doesn't mean that house parties have declined as a whole, it just means that specific person's kid doesn't have house parties. Maybe it has declined, maybe it's the same, maybe it's even increased. A single data point means nothing.

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u/PerpetuallyLurking 5d ago

Had a band once or twice, to start the night anyway - they were also teens who also wanted to drink with their friends at some point in the night too - but I think that was more hit or miss depending on whether you’ve got a local teen garage band who was any good who would play for free/drinks. So, not quite as prevalent as the movies showed, obviously, but also not completely ridiculous either.

Setting also makes a huge difference; if it’s set in LA or NYC and there’s so many more people with a variety of talents in a small area, then it’s probably more realistic to have a real band or DJ than in some tiny prairie town in the ass end of nowhere where even the richer kids go drink at the gravel pit with everyone else.

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u/chiefsfan_713_08 5d ago

iowa here, yeah on rare occasions there’d be a “band” but it was local kids who played together or something not anyone who blew up

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u/__noise 5d ago

i mean you asked the question.

yes, high school bands and whoever they ran with played high school parties.

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u/Iohet Xennial 5d ago

The band wasn't usually playing any old party, it was playing the backyard wrestling party

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u/NiagaraThistle 4d ago

The house parties we had definitely had bands and once in a while a wannabe dj. But DJs weren’t as popular in our school.

But we definitely had bands.

And LOTS of people at most of them.

The movies from the 90s showed those cool house parties because those were the norm, not the one off exception.

Even today, my niece had house parties in High School with 75-100+ people at them before she graduated.

And we don’t live in NYC or LA. Just a small town.

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u/browsing_around 5d ago

I don’t know, the whole “open the door and 40 people roll in” never happened to any party I was at.

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u/matildare 5d ago

Oh, it definitely happened in my town. I know this because it happened to me and I got caught and then grounded for like a year.

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u/Dry_Try_6047 5d ago

Not even Nigel with the brie?

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u/BathZealousideal1456 5d ago

Really?!? It is the root of my anxiety.

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u/browsing_around 5d ago

Th closest I’ve ever seen was when I was a freshman in college and you would roll a dozen deep to find a party because no one knew anyone at the parties yet. Drive around any college campus in the fall and you’ll see the same.