I am currently unemployed. Don’t worry – I planned on it. Part of the whole relocating to KC plan factored some time spent out on the asphalt flats stalking a new job. Plus this relatively short bout of joblessness has given me a chance to get back to my roots as a ‘90s-style slacker. It’s been enlightening in a way to soak in my own stasis. I’ve been reminded that I don’t do “nothing” very well. After a week or two of late hour showers, judge shows, and refrigerator pizza, I’ve started to get a bit rammy. I did manage to devote a nice chunk of yesterday to Beavis and Butthead on DVD – so apparently some things can still switch off the Type A for a bit. I’ve also been working at overachieving on some stupid online RPG. Like I said, I’ve been reliving my ‘90s adolescence. I’ve yet to spend six hours shuffling around the mall, and I haven’t eaten any Taco Bell. Obviously, I need to do tweak the nuances of my personal time travel techniques.
Perhaps it’s turning 30 or an ongoing narcissistic obsession with the ephemera of my stupid adolescence, but I’ve noticed that the Record Desk has been particularly ‘90s-centric since we set sail on the seas of sound a couple months ago. I’d like to blame all this crawling-up-my-own-ass-to-spelunk-my-way-back-to-fifteen-years-ago on some kind of critical personal failing, but really I’ve not found anything new that quite pulls my trigger lately. I admit that *maybe* I’ve wusstastically retreated back to the snuggly and secure past where everything makes sense to my sorry old self. But in reality, I think what I’m up against is a world that is less fun and more sucky than the ‘90s.
Like any good Xer-identifying X/Y-cusp kid, I realize that one of the great crimes of the boomers was their wholesale inability to get beyond the warm rose-colored glow of the whole “Spirit of the ‘60s” thing. And it seems that I myself am dancing perilously close to the flame of “You had to be there, dude.”
I suppose that I’ve been dwelling on that dumb, rotten, abominable Weezer record. Yesterday I was perusing the AV Club’s Best Songs of 2008 So Far feature, and they provided an embedded version of the “Pork and Beans” video. Being a glutton for punishment, I decided to see what kind of video shenanigans were in store for Weezer circa 2008. As I’m sure you savvy folks all know, the video features a goodly number of wacky YouTube people doing their shtick as part of some Weezerific po-mo jumble. I had NO first hand experience of these YouTubers, mind you. They were all just things I’d read about or glanced briefly at out on the fell blog-swamp of the internet. And that’s when I realized that Weezer (and by extension the whole ‘90s self-referential, pop-culture-addled sensibility) has outlived its usefulness, morphing into something even more quirk-obsessed and self-congratulatory than even the smuggest *wink-nudge* Mike Myers “Hey, did you get my joke” bit. Rather than mere Happy Days pastiche or even a Muppet Show tribute, the “Pork and Beans” video is a riot of “Hey, you remember this thing from last month’s internet, right?!” It’s all light sabers, dancing bananas, geographically-challenged beauty queens and crying, Britney-defending guys.
“Pork and Beans”
UPDATE — The video is no longer available as embedded content. Click here to link out to the video.
Basically, now that the whole “Royale with Cheese” bit is more than a decade and a half old, comedy by way of smugly mentioning things that people have heard of has mostly worn out its welcome. I can’t so much claim this realization as my own. In fact, I ran a much smarter-sounding but dumber-in-reality hypothesis by my wife who set me straight. Basically her argument about the ‘90s is that once upon a time some meta-flavored, referential-type things were kind of new and funny and charming. Then teenage boys (or perhaps boys in general) glommed onto this style and ran it into the ground by quoting snippets and self-involvedly repeating tales of their own boy-type exploits as if they were just as clever as their beloved movie snippets.
And I was all like, “Well, what about that time Matt kicked Byron square in the ass and we were all like ‘Um, you kicked his ass. Heh, heh.’” My wife rolled her eyes, and admitted that I pretty much “bent my wookie” in this attempt at smartness and insight. In short, I am part of the problem – because I am a boy and because I often mistake my own knowing about and mantra-like repeating of garbage that ANYONE can rent or download for some kind of towering personal achievement.
I suppose that I lazily attribute my tremendous Simpsons-quoting and Star Wars-joke-getting abilities to coming of age in the fat and meaningless Clinton years. I mean, I *am* a product of the ‘90s. I *had* to become this particular kind of terminally adolescent, intellectually-lightweight dillweed. If one buys the overall cultural myth, me and millions of semi-smart guys like me were basically pumped full of the mental/emotional equivalent of Twinkie filling before being pitched into the fearsome sea of dread that is Geo. W. Bush’s Amurrica. Of course, my gut tells me to blame the boomers – to blame them for slathering me in advertising and action figures, to blame them for setting unrealistic expectations of youth culture groundswell, to blame them for accepting a way of life that forces me to park my ass in a little beige cubicle, pretending to work.
Convinced of my own specialness and of my own generational victimhood, I decided to go back to *the* album that most reminds me of my beloved 1990s.
For the record, I absolutely love Monster. It hit me at a time before I was overly concerned about whether or not a given album was “the band’s best” or was “well received.” It’s an album that I love viscerally. I know every fuzzy, feedback-drenched cranny. Each vocal inflection is burned into my brain in orange and black and violent green. I can feel each drum fill and bass whump coming about eight bars away. I can’t even begin to estimate how many times I’ve heard this record. I expected that a really close “reading” of this very ‘90s album would reveal all manner of referential ‘90s-style disingenuousness.
I apparently heard this album so many times that I forgot what it was about. I’d mixed it up with my own teenaged rememberings, my own lousy personal mythology. Obviously, “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” references a specific attack on Dan Rather, but not as a winking sort of smartipance thing – more as a springboard for a trip down the rabbit hole to a place where pop culture is a sprawling, confusing canker. The album is obsessed with poses and manufactured identity and sexual politics. It’s an attempt to retain authenticity and self in a world that demands artifice and self-aggrandizement.
“I Took Your Name”
I’ll be your albatross,
devil dog, Jesus Lord
I don’t wanna be Iggy Pop,
but if that’s what it takes
Even “Let Me In” (a.k.a. the song about dead Kurt Cobain) is an honest plaint – not a coy rockstar move. I suppose I forgot that much of what the ‘90s were about was the at times embarrassing expression of raw emotion – the so fucking what/everything matters dichotomy outlined ever so subtly in the 1994 film S.F.W. All that “whatever, nevermind” aloofness was a cover for hurt feelings and unsureness and general existential dread in a world where one wrong decision or flunked test could ruin your chances forever.
In a way R.E.M. was a special band for me because they were older and seemed cooler and their songs were oblique enough that you had to work at figuring them out. They operated according to a different set of rules than regular long-haired rock bands. They seemed smart. And they offered a way out and through. They were non-conformist but not self-destructive. Essentially, they were a model of how you could grow up without dumbing down or ignoring stuff that was grey or troubling. I guess I got that intuitively when I was a stupid teenager. And now that I’m older, I suppose my tendency is to worship my own stupid teenage behavior – a trap that will leave me as lame as “The Red Album” if I don’t watch it.
I guess that my wife’s reminder that boys are stupid and yesterday’s Beavis and Butthead marathon was a swift kick in the pants. I shouldn’t ever get too pleased with my own cleverness. Cleverness is almost always a cover for some kind of gnawing uncertainty or hurt or dissatisfaction – a smart and sensitive version of the macho strutting that “alternative” culture supposedly dismantled forever and ever (or at least until Fred Durst showed up).
If the ‘90s had a central thesis, it was that people mostly kind of suck because they are stupid and hurtful and wounded and pretentious. This kind of misanthropy has fallen out of favor because it requires that folks employ uncool things like political correctness and “awareness,” admitting that we might be assholes ourselves. It’s tempting always to be the clever bastard with a snappy comeback. But deep down, we know that this kind of arrogance leads nowhere good.
“Irony is the shackles of youth.”
