I miss the 1990s. Remember when you could walk down the street, say hi to someone, and they could hear you because they weren’t listening to an iPod? Granted, I was a huge proponent of the Walkman (my first tape was Sting’s “Fields of Gold”), but the headphones were so foamy and useless I could interact with the world and still have Sting’s husky British voice as the soundtrack to my life (He taught me at an early age, “If you love somebody set them free.” Sigh, thank you, Sting.) Damn, it was nice to not have an online profile. I had room to grow and change in the real world instead of digitally defining my interests and then attempting to fulfill them in reality. As it turns out, being cool is stressful.
The 1990s was a time of glorious foresight. The Internet was exciting, instead of life-sucking and brain-numbing. I read books instead of PDFs, which is much softer on the retinas if you ask me. Pop culture was still ridiculous but amazing (Nirvana, Backstreet Boys and Tupac all in the same decade?!), and it retained a droplet of innocence as it swam through a bursting fountain of superficiality hydrated by marketing and product placement. Communications found new eyeballs with little green money signs flashing in them, but hadn’t yet saturated the world with media.
Remember when playing pretend was P.C.? I swear I was pretending to be a lone wolf on all fours at age nine, howling at the glowing yellow tetherball during recess… Maybe I was more socially awkward than I originally thought… The kids I occasionally baby-sit don’t pretend. They have an Elmo toy that does cartwheels, so they sit there and watch it cartwheel over and over again. Then they eat Cheetos and touch me with their orange fingers. Also, one of them knows all the lyrics to Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps.” Is this normal?
Fergie, in my opinion, could be worse, but still, she’s not all that inspiring. The bad girls of the ’90s were actually talented, too. Like Winona Ryder or Lauryn Hill; those girls were badass with class. When I pick up US Weekly at the Recreation Center all I see is scarily white smiles plastered on the tipsy faces of girls (actors, singers? Remind me again what Nicole Ritchie does?), and even the semi-talented singer Jessica Simpson may be the scariest person I’ve ever seen. Her face actually sends tremors down my spine because it epitomizes her transformation from real human being to walking human billboard. But I’ve actually got to give props to Nicole Ritchie for being famous without a talent. That’s actually kind of amazing.
On the talented side of things, indie bands in the 1990s weren’t parodies of themselves yet. Stephen Malkmus and Liz Phair were actually independent, lo-fi musicians trying something new. Now being labeled an indie band can turn out to be as ironic as Avril Lavigne’s punkness. So where have all the cowboys gone?
It turns out there are far too many cowboys for anyone to possibly lasso, because new musicians and interesting artists pop up around the world daily on the Internet. In a world saturated with plastic pop figures, subcultural creations prove just as frustrating. Trying to keep on top of the newest talent loses you the satisfaction of fully consuming it.
This isn’t a anti-technology column, mind you. It’s more of a self-analysis as I watch myself sucked into the increasingly self-centered trends of the new millennium. This needs to end now, because I just received an e-mail that my roommate posted pictures of me online. Got to make sure I look good, you know?
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What happened to the glory days of the ’90s?
Daily Emerald
April 11, 2007
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