I occasionally visit the musicians’ forums at www.harmony-central.com. This morning I popped in to check up on a thread I’d posted when one of the message headings caught my attention. Some kid was asking for advice on how to best nag his parents into furnishing him with a cell phone. Being a Luddite, my first response was to respond and tell the kid that he didn’t need no damn cellphone. Upon opening the thread, I found that a good number of folks had already offered the very same sound advice. My second instructive tidbit (”Get a job and buy yer own damn phone.”) was also well represented amongst the already posted. In short, it appeared that all was right with America on this particular April morning. Reading deeper into the chain of responses, I saw that the original poster had made some additional points in his own defense — the most memorable one being something like “You guys sound like a bunch of antisocial dudes who grew up in the ’90s.”
Yikes.
I’ve been 30 for a week and I’m already untrustworthy. Basically, I’m old and afraid that wolves will eat me. I am out of touch. I don’t *get* it. My gut response to the existential pain of this poor young consumer was essentially “Suck it up and get a job.” I’ve changed, maaaan. I mean, just look at this recent photo.
All kidding and sarcastic self-pity aside, was I ever THAT youthful? I’m thinking not. I was prolly more of a self-righteous pain in the ass. I was prolly more awkward and self-conscious. And petulant. Can’t forget the petulance. Of course the era of my teenness were also self-righteous, awkward, and petulant. The youth culture of the 1990s is (in the popular memory) marked by a certain sullen seriousness, an indignant moralizing tone inherited from the more puritanical underground youth cults of the embattled Reganite ’80s.
Let us consider the big-dog tide-turner album of the 1990s. Not the “Teen Spirit” album — we’re talking about the album turned highschools across the country “alternative” forever and ever. That’s right, I’m talking about the annoying, now uncool, unit-shifting Vs. The album sold 950,378 copies in its first week — I bought mine on cassette — and pretty much ruined “alternative rock” by making it as the dominant teen music in white suburbia. Vs. was the album that was different-sounding enough to be “alternative” but classic rock or hard rock sounding enough to push backwards-looking classic and hard rock purists like my buddies and me into the now. Vs. was my first foray into mass youth culture or liking what everyone else liked.
In junior high (Fall 1990 – Spring 1992) I started regularly purchasing music on my own. I’d always listened to my dad’s stuff as a kid — Neil Young, Jeff Beck, Springsteen, R.E.M., U2, the Who, Hendrix, etc. — and subsequently developed a taste for rock music that was a little “old” compared to that of my peers. When I started buying tapes, I got into Van Halen and Aerosmith and Ozzy and Zeppelin. These bands appealed to my already whetted appetite for classicist rock while having enough “metal” cred to ingratiate me to my poser rocker dude junior high friends.
I was already sneaking some R.E.M., Matthew Sweet, U2 and other assorted “wuss rock” bands on the side, but I didn’t admit it to my Slayer- and Metallica-worshipping friends. When Nirvana hit in 1991 I came *this* close to checking out Nevermind before I reaffirmed my proper rocker tastes and cozied up to the new Def Leppard release. Chicago was then and is now classic/hard rock territory, and I was too big of a weenie to cast my lot amongst the weirdo bands that were starting to crop up on Headbangers’ Ball between the “November Rain” and “No More Tears” vids. I’d had some exposure to the Replacements and local alternative sensations Smashing Pumpkins via WXRT, but for the most part I wanted my rock orderly and decked out in the appropriate signifiers of rockingness.
I spent the better part of my freshman year of highschool listening almost exclusively to the White Album. I’d heard that it was an important record, so I decided spend some time with it. I credit the Beatles’ self-titled with expanding my notions of what is acceptable within rock music. By the time I started my sophomore year in 1993, I’d picked up the Breeders’ Last Splash and Westerberg’s 14 Songs – both technically part of the alt-rock boom, but kind of marginal, semi-popular records.
I remember still being slightly skeptical of all of the alternative business swirling around — the messy sounding rock, the girls with kelly green combat boots and cough-syrup colored hair, the idea that you could just be a weenie or a nerd without having feign a macho pose to get by. Basically, my initial response was to reject all this stuff that challenged what I thought everyone else thought was “normal” or “cool” — even though I liked a lot of what I was seeing and hearing.
My conversion to the church of ’90s alternative youth culture came oddly enough during afternoon religion class (I went to a private Catholic highschool). I forget the context, but one of the girls played “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town” for the class and led a little discussion about it. I can’t remember he name now. She was incredibly tall, willowy with lots of sparkly, smudgy eye make-up. She smelled like cigarettes. She was the kind of older-seeming hard ass girl who scared the crap out of me when I was young — I was the token bookish “good” kid whose smart mouth got him in with the “bad-ish” crowd. (We all attended a suburban parochial school after all.) I remember her relating how the song reminded her of her dead grandmother, and she started crying. I bought my own copy of Vs. a few days later, no longer worrying how liking a certain band would make me seem.
Confession time — I don’t listen to Vs. that often any more. When it comes time for some Pearl Jam, I typically reach for one of the double-disc official bootlegs or all-time, all-time favs Vitology and Yield. A lot of the standouts from Vs. are now live show (and thus bootleg) staples. When I decided to give the album a spin the other day, I recalled the other reason why this one tends to stay on the shelf. I can’t listen to Vs. without having my adolescence rush back on me. Some of the songs are a bit strident and obvious now. “Glorified G” and “W.M.A.” are very earnest, very well meaning, very sophomoric songs. They’re kind of embarrassing.
I (like lots of folks) tend to use songs mentally to soundtrack random clusters of sense memory. This album is intensely sunny in my mind, like a lot of the “alternative nation” records of my early highschool years. Despite the dourness of a lot of the alt-rock bands, I remember the time as multicolored and energetic and most of all sunny — perhaps believing that you’re indestructible and that your self-satisfied, free-thinking goodness will prevent you from ever selling out makes every memory seem like a glorious late-summer afternoon. As I’ve become more cynical, I suppose that I don’t always feel up to re-experiencing the ardent, finger-pointing soundtrack of my naive teenhood.
Bringing this all back home, the whippersnapper who didn’t get why antisocial old farts like myself didn’t see why he needed a cellphone was prolly “right” on some level. When I was 17, you called folks and tried to catch them at home to make plans. Or you drove around in circles with a couple friends looking for something to happen. To pass the time, you listened to the radio or dropped by a record shop and scoured the used racks for something you’d heard might be cool. And when my parents or school or marching band or work interfered with driving around and shopping for used CDs and blowing money on fries and coffee at Denny’s, I’m sure I was a royal shithead. I certainly didn’t turn to the internet for reasonable advice. I prolly argued the rightness of my situation and stormed off to sulk, as was the style at the time.
As a “child of the ’90s,” I should remember what it’s like to be talked down to by a generation of moralistic know-it-alls who think they are cooler than and more self-reliant than any other group that has previously or will subsequently grace the planet. Sorry, kid. Or whatever…
