The 90s

Recollections on every decade I’ve been alive.

The 60s is here.
The 70s is here.
The 80s is here.

There was no “this marks the end of the decade” moment initially. Nothing like Altamont killing the 60s hippie dream, or Reagan killing the 70s middle class dream. The 80s rolled into the 90s and nobody really noticed for a new years……until Nirvana killed Mötley Crüe and Poison et al with 4 power chords.

To be fair, the hair bands needed to be put out of their misery. The ozone layer had been permanently damaged, and one more power ballad might have triggered a final bombardment of UV rays. There was simply too much 80s in the 80s, and a backlash was inevitable. There were still way too many bands that didn’t get the jokes in Spinal Tap.

For much of the 1980s I had been dressing like Kurt Cobain. Tattered jeans. Flannel shirts. Ratty Chuck Taylors. I had no idea I was being iconic. And now all of a sudden I was called a bandwagon jumper. Rude. The flannel I was wearing (and still have) until it could stand up by itself was now selling for $75 in boutique stores. The times they were a-changing.

The closest thing to a demarcation line was the premiere of the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video on MTV a few years into the decade. The song was like a magnet being waved over the 80s hard drive. I didn’t know anybody who looked like Nikki Sixx, but I knew lots of dudes who looked like the guys in Nirvana. The narrative swung from debauched, gorged rock stars to malnourished, consumptive oddballs who slept under bridges. Or so the story went. Cobain never slept under a bridge, but that didn’t stop him from vaguely suggesting that he had, nor did it stop pilgrims from trekking to the bridge in question to soak up the vibe. It was a good story, and the 90s never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Cobain was an elegantly wasted mess who somehow found the vein that everybody had been unsuccessfully jabbing at. That he was soon heralded as the “spokesman for a generation” for writing a song that nicked the chords from “Godzilla” must have fucked with his head just as much as Courtney and his unrelenting stomach pain. If he hadn’t come around, somebody might have had to invent him.

The 90s were the sound of all the promises of the 80s NOT coming true. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” killed the Gordon Gekko mystique just as much as it drove Tommy Lee into making a rap album featuring a song called "Proposition Fuck You". “Grunge” was nothing more than another wave of punk rock. They just gave it a new name so music writers didn’t have to interview John Lydon again. It was the revenge of the nerds. Bands once again looked like their audience. Nirvana reset the board the same way the the Ramones did. Kids were making noises with guitars again. Garages came alive. Other great bands followed but more importantly, Nirvana shone a light on the ones who were there all along. “Teen Spirit” held the door open, and everybody from the Pixies to the Melvins to the Smithereens walked through and were finally able to pay their bills.

Over in England bands like the Stone Roses and Oasis mined a different, poppier, yet still guitar-heavy vein, while at the same time doing more cocaine than the Medellín cartel. The Gallagher brothers and the Roses may have been more outwardly hedonistic than the grunge bands, but they at least pulled back before they killed themselves. The Oasis classic “Live Forever” was supposedly Noel Gallagher’s response to Cobain’s dark side. The Gallaghers embraced fame, while Cobain hid from it in $25 a night motel rooms a few miles from his brand new mansion. It was the difference between writing “Rock and Roll Star” and “I Hate Myself and I Want To Die”. Quite the contrast. But the pop sensibilities of both bands were the same. Make all the noise you want, but make it hummable.

The 90s were pretty heavy. They were Columbine and Oklahoma City and Waco and the corner of Florence and Normandie. It was the time of Bruce Springsteen’s “other” band. It was OJ and the Persian Gulf war timed to start in prime time. It was the end of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the Clintons. It was Nelson Mandela finally coming home. It was a decade of “prosperity” and balanced budgets and the most famous blow job in the world. The 90s were blood and circuses.

And of course, it was those endless AOL CDs showing up at your house, and the squawk of the dial up modem, and the “you’ve got mail” notification that was as exciting then as getting a check in the mail is today. You had the sense that this technology might fuck things up a LITTLE, but nobody (except maybe Lars Ulrich, bless his heart) had any idea what was in store. It was the beginning of the end of a LOT of things, including newspapers and magazines and phone and cable companies, and the music business as it once existed. In “connecting” us, the internet made things a little too familiar, and thus drove us apart. I remember my very first time in a chat room. It was wondrous for about 10 minutes, and then I realized that the place was filled with fucking weirdos. The anonymity of it all took getting punched in the face out of the equation. Our national discourse hasn’t been the same since.

I “grew up” in the 70s and 80s. The 90s was the first time I couldn’t use the “I’m just a kid” excuse. I fell in love and stayed there. I got married. I became a father. I released my first record. I let go of some dreams, and acquired some new ones. I made lots of mistakes but kept on keeping on.

I became a hoping machine.

I could never imagine Kurt Cobain being as old as I am now. Even in retrospect, it seemed inconceivable. But Noel Gallagher? That dude is gonna live forever.

Bring on that Y2K bug, bitches!

In a bit…

—tf