As a person passes into middle age, it is only logical and natural that they begin to spend time examining their past; after all, there’s so much of it that keeps piling up. For me personally, this involves a lot of examination of formative influences and circumstances that contributed to the person I am today. Lately, what I’m finding is that a lot of the person I am today is a result of conscious decisions in the second half of my life to turn away from a lot of the things that were significant cultural influences during my youth.
This puts me at odds with a lot of my peers, who raged against the machine early, then, viewing the past through the misty, rose-colored lens of nostalgia and societal pressures, mostly just become exactly what they rejected early on, settling into lifestyles that don’t differ all that greatly from the machine they were raging against in their teens, except for the soundtrack of the advertisements used to sell them things.
I suppose this is the unique plight of those of us who mostly skipped over teenage rebellion and only truly came into our contrarian hipsterism after we hit thirty, and having arrived at this outlook gradually, through careful and thorough consideration, don’t see it being just a phase delayed a decade or two.
In any case, this is the frame of mind through which I read Amanda’s April Fool’s letter of longing to young adulthood in the 1990s, and was rather surprised to come to the realization that I’d been on this particular path for much longer than I’d realized.
The stereotypical mainstream 1990s youth lifestyle Amanda describes in jest, while being a remarkably spot-on description of life as experienced by scores of my peers, was never mine, any more than it was hers. I suppose this makes sense, given that in other contexts, I’ve always considered the period when I started attending university, in the early 1990s, as the time when I finally started to figure out who I was and what I wanted to be, and began to give up simply trying to conform to the expectations of those around me; nonetheless, the revelation surprised me; I’d never quite made the connection.
Amanda, rightfully, focuses on the music of the period; since the advent of widely available recordings and radio broadcasts, the music of a given era can’t help but become a common touch point for that era’s youth. The seminal tunes of the 1990s from artists like The Dave Matthews Band, The Verve Pipe, Third Eye Blind, and the host of others that made up the soundtrack to the era’s Zima-soaked frat parties and anonymous sorority hook-ups then, and constitute the bulk of “hot adult contemporary”/secretary rock corporateradio today, the format favored largely by the aging douchebag sales guys and well-coiffed soccer moms who made up the guest list at most of those parties in the ’90s.
The thing is, though, those experiences weren’t mine. As I look back, it becomes obvious was already beginning to forge a different path for myself.
Demographically, I should be in the whole target market for the 90s nostalgia thing, having spent half the 90s at university, but I was never part of that stereotypical lifestyle people call “College™.” I never bothered with frat parties (or the greek system at all, for that matter, finding the whole business kind of sad); I was more comfortable hanging out with a small group of friends watching The X-Files or Star Trek in a crowded dorm room while trading Monty Python quotes back and forth. That’s not to say that I don’t know and genuinely like a few people today who came out of the more stereotypical scene, but they’re simply not “my people,” the way, say, the folks I’ll be hanging around with this weekend are*, and the connection we form will always be a little tenuous, simply because we don’t have much at all in common, not then, not now.
Musically, I spent the bulk of the nineties following indie roots rock bands around the beer halls and music festivals of Central Pennsylvania (the years when that particular region had something of an original music scene), listening to then obscure Canadian pop bands, and wading, somewhat embarassingly, into the “hot country” format (thankfully, I got better). I never really fell into mainstream 90s music, and never really “got” grunge, other than it’s insistence on the copious wearing of flannel. (edit: To bring this point home, about half an hour after I originally posted this piece, I saw a mention on the ‘net that today is the anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain, and it had about the same impact on me today that it did in 1994. It sucked that a successful guy with a wife and baby killed himself, but I never had a deep emotional connection to his music the way so many other people did.).
Thus, today, my nostalgia reflexes are a little different; although I wasn’t totally divorced from 90s musical culture (I did go to Lilith Fair on my honeymoon, though it was more for the Indigo Girls and Suzanne Vega than Sarah McLachlan, and I once paid good money to see Hootie & The Blowfish), I don’t get the same warm fuzzy feeling when a track off of “Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” comes on. Strangely, I tend to reach farther back to stuff I didn’t even listen to when it was popular – my particular retro fix these days is IRS-era R.E.M. or the Replacements; stuff I missed because I was too invested in hair metal, the genre I thought was most likely to boost my social standing at the time (perhaps that’s the reason why I don’t go back to that well much today**).
I’m not as nostalgiac about the music of my youth as many of my peers are anyway***; part of it probably has to do with the fact that I’m so much different than I was in those days, but really, it’s because there’s still so much interesting stuff out there, both new things and stuff I missed the first time around, that I can’t see any point in deciding to stop seeking out new sonic experiences and just keep listening to “Blood Sugar Sex Magick” over and over again for all eternity.
So yeah, I guess I’ve been on the path to my current misanthropy for longer than I’d realized, which, I suppose, I find kind of comforting. I’m not quite the same person now that I was then, but I wasn’t necessarily the person so many other people were convinced I was, or had convinced me that I was, either.
I think we can all agree, though, that I’ve always been the kind of person that never thought that Matchbox 20 was ever a good idea.
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* Yeah, I admit the sci-fi con crowd doesn’t obviously correspond with the pop music thing, until you consider how much overlap there is with the Jonathan Coulton audiences I’ve had so much fun with the last few years.
** well that, and the fact that somewhere around 1995, Bon Jovi simply forgot how to rock.
*** according to my cursory scans of music-related facebook posts by people I went to high school with. And if those are representative of my “generation”, Tesla is, and always has been, the most popular band in the universe.
