I’ve always been a fan of the music that came out of the ‘90s; perhaps even more so in the last decade then when I had been growing up with it. I don’t think I was particularly angst ridden (anymore than a teenager already is), but a lot of the music that I listened to had a very cathartic and awakening feel to them, an outlet to channel out the frustrations built up over the course of dealing with day to day inanity. I think it’s why nineties music makes for such great music in karaoke.
Anyway, for several years I’ve been mulling over what really draws me to the genre, whether it’s a byproduct of acoustically having a blank slate when grunge/alternative music came to prominence, it being a consequence of built up emotional repression (a function of me not being able to articulate my feelings well), the music itself having an unparalleled quality to it, or some hybrid of the aforementioned reasons. Helping along that thought process I’ve come across two pieces in the past couple of weeks that I felt compelled to post.
The first is on All Songs Considered on NPR – “The ‘90s Are Back, Or Whatever…” Bob Boilen et al discussed their favorite songs, albums and some of the worst part of the music in the 90s. They start off the podcast featuring the “Dream of the ‘90s” clip from Portlandia (above). Interestingly, Carrie Brownstein, the cast member in the show that isn’t Fred Armisen, was a former contributor to All Songs Considered (Monitor Mix). I love it when worlds collide! I also totally want to move to Portland now.
The second is a ten part series on the A.V. Club entitled “Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?” A long read that could take hours, depending on how much you like to indulge in the comments section (I do, but each part has at least 700+ comments). I haven’t gone through them all, in part because even I’d feel bad about abusing my paid to surf online privileges at work, and also because I wanted to unpack each section with a bit of time in between. The author, Steven Hyden, is no longer enamored by the genre (at all, it seems like), but goes back to the music of his youth to rediscover what drew him to alternative music when it still enchanted him. I was feeling a bit disconnected from the first part until I read this paragraph:
I always hate that moment in documentaries about social movements where somebody insists that whatever incredibly exciting and revolutionary phenomenon they were a part of could never happen again, because the world has inevitably changed for the worse, and today’s kids are just too jaded or clueless to do what they did. What they’re really saying is that it will never happen for them again, because they’ve reached the age where they’re too jaded and clueless. When you’re young, whatever you’re doing feels revolutionary because the world is opening up for you in ways that will never be more exciting than they are right now, in this moment, forever and ever.
That said, I honestly wonder if the rise of grunge and alternative rock in the early ’90s will be the last time that a musical movement has that kind of impact on youth culture. With the Internet, we know about every promising band seemingly from the time it records its first demos. By the time the album comes out, the backlash has already kicked in. Now the challenge is to not be informed; surprising people has gone the way of putting current events on newsprint. It’s almost like we don’t want to be surprised anymore, because that means we’re somehow out-of-the-loop, or not savvy enough to be there first, which seems to be of the utmost importance when it comes to music these days.
It’s an interesting point that the All Songs Considered podcast also mentioned. We’ve changed the way we access music so much that there’s no longer any common genre we all coalesce around. Grunge wasn’t only a music genre; it was a cultural/social movement that influenced that way we dressed, our attitudes [turned apathy] and became the voice of a generation. I think it could happen again, but it’s interesting that what’s arguably today’s most dominant youth movement (hipsterdomism?) is so anti-mainstream that anything that gains any kind of momentum is killed by a backlash against its own success.
Anyway, I’ll post more after I finish reading through the A.V. Club series if there’s anything worth posting about.
