Had this article ever appeared while JP was alive, we would have spoken of nothing else for days and days. Kurt and Courtney were our rock myth, our role models, the all-consuming story into which we submerged ourselves as only art-struck twentysomethings can.
Reading this now just seems like a cruel joke. Frances Bean has been raised listening to crap bands (her favorite, according to one article, is Good Charlotte--a cheap ripoff of early Green Day); Courtney is a punch-line for every late-night comic and morning-drive radio zoo; and Billy is widely seen as being in the throes of a nostalgic delusion that the Pumpkins will rise again.
I miss the early 90's. I miss our innocent cynicism, our naive conviction that we'd seen and done everything, the feeling of been-there-done-that as a new and exciting sensation. Twelve years later I feel like we -have- been there, we -have- done that, the novelty is completely worn off and there's no fun to it anymore. The game of I've-seen-it-all,I-was-there-first has become deadly serious; the excitement of being the first one to find a new band or a new book has become the drudgery of being the ten-trillionth person to view "The Evolution of Dance" on YouTube. Happy accidents have become "viral marketing", and anything new is immediately pounced on by the media--both old and new; fed to us on a hundred different spoons, and then stamped out as inferior copies. "Lazy Sunday", a moderately-funny SNL skit, would have spawned a few imitations, maybe a couple of t-shirts in the early 90's; the people who had seen it could feel like they were part of a secret little club, the kind of pop-culture virtuosos who pride themselves on catching obscure references to hipster in-jokes. But now every Joe Schmuckboy and his great-aunt Maude can go around yelling "Chronic-WHAT?-cles of Narnia"; half of them have their own version of it on their MySpace page. Things that would have been outrageously hip in 1994 now become memes in a couple of days. And I guess that's natural; I guess it's just the evolution of the media...
...but I miss the old ways. I miss the secret clubs; I miss the feeling of belonging to things that not everyone knew about. And even if everyone knew about it--like Nirvana--there were still little details that only the true devotees knew. Mostly I miss the feeling of being relevant, of feeling that the things that mattered to me also mattered to the people who mattered to me. I miss 1994. I miss JP.
It really sucks, this getting-older thing.
I'm going to reframe this a little...yes, it was cool to be cool when you were younger, but now that you're older you can really do what you WANT to do. I can't tell you how often I censored myself because I thought that other people would think that I was a geek. Now I embrace the fact that I'm a geek!
ReplyDeleteAhh... I too miss all the goodies from the early 90's... Every time I hear the old pumpkins, I get nostalgic.. Every time I hear someone say "Nir-what-a" I want to destroy...
ReplyDeleteAhh the 90's
:-*