I can't like Dazed and Confused anymore. It was a big thing in my teenage years because everybody was getting stoned and the '70s retread (before the economy went to shiat) was a big deal. We wanted to live those halcyon days where you could just hang out, get high, and it was no big thing.
But it's an illusion. Just like the movie itself, it's just a reflection of the sad state of suburbia. Nothing has really changed despite the world moving on and rural America remains in this turgid bubble. Nothing changes, nothing ever grows. "If these are the best years of my life, I'm going to kill myself" is the only true line in the movie because it reveals the paradox of being an adult and being trapped in responsibilities of wanting to go back to being a child and wanting the idea of freedom but in more of a locked down fashion. And it's still true today, politically: a lot of the nation is in love with the idea of freedom and the word itself, but we all hunger for more locks and controls. In a way, this showcases our national attitude: not only do we crave for the false freedom that childhood provides, we see ourselves as only being free when we are young enough to have possibilities of anything but not old enough to act upon them. We crave to be under the thumb of an authority figure, which throws every myth and idea about the '70s into severe doubt and skepticism.
Maybe the movie has some purpose still. But honestly, it's just hard to watch. At the very least we're watching a fashion trend that has come and gone. At the very most we're revisiting a nasty bit of Americana that seems unavoidable.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Die, die, the hipsters must die.
I think it's time we put the '90s into perspective.
A recent article lamented the aging of Generation X. For the longest time I've considered myself part of Generation X, simply because it seemed to fit. In my youth, I rocked flannels. I grew up during the '90s with all the culture that went with it. Technically, I am part of it: I was born in 1978, right at the tail end of the 1961-1981 time limit.
But the idea of generations is a stupid one, especially in a complex world. My mother is two years out from being a member of Generation X. I'm in the same generation, more or less, with my own mother (she had me when she was 18). How does that work again? In reality, it doesn't: she considers herself a hippie, a side effect of the Woodstock/'70s Free Love styled thing. But this realization of generations (especially how they neglect those who come at the end as some sort of weird addition that was along for the cultural ride) made me realize just how fucked up our ideas of the '90s were, and how monocultural they were.
Or rather, how sickingly white they are.
To hear people talk of the '90s today, you get a very good idea of how the culture was in 1991-1994. To hear Gen Xers talk about it, the '90s died when Kurt Cobain's head was blown off. Truth be told, I didn't know who Cobain was until he died. I knew what Nirvana was--a sadder version of the arena rock/metal scene that labeled itself Alternative but was just part of the cultural malaise that came from the excesses of hair metal. It was a way to purge our nation (well, the white/rock part of it) from the homoeroticism of the '80s by adapting a really strange sense of masculinity. Leopard-print tights were replaced by flannel shirts. Thundercat pastel boots were swapped with Caterpillar or Doc Martens. But the '80s labeled such excess and mock feminization as masculine, so the '90s attempted to label their traditional masculinity as 'ironic.' They were trapped between two gender ideals so they chose to play to masculinity but 'not really.' Suddenly the homoerotic gayness of David Lee Roth dancing around in a rainbow of colors with a perm that would make most people blush was distilled down to a Kurt Cobain douchiness that took away the spectacle but reaffirmed it as a joke. Or rather: it was 'real' but a joke if you were in the know. Which is like saying 'I like this, but I only like it as long as you're not mocking me, then it's a joke."
It's a forced irony that doesn't have the strength of its own convictions. In a way, that's what most of the '90s were like: it was trying to have it both ways. The pomp and excess of the '80s combined with the ability to realize you were being watched yet still maintain the detached idea of being cool. In a weird way, it was really like the '50s paranoia. No, I take it back: it was like a Jane Austen novel where everybody conforms and can be ruined by the everpresent threat of rumors but relies on a bizarre system of conduct where everybody is pretending to pretend. It's a weird system where we're all so detached that nothing really means nothing. At least we got the postmodernism part right but were missing the true, sad point of it.
Bizarrely enough, the 1991-1994 idea of the Hipster '90s is very white in hindsight. The execution of our '80s homoerotic selves (and shamelessness, come to think of it) was the real purpose of Alternative Rock, and the culture that came from that can hardly be considered iconic of the decade. The real icon was the invention of the Internet, the antithesis of the image we like to think of the '90s. Instead of having our celebrities play a violin for their irony (using a straight razor and an arm instead of a fiddle and a bow), celebrity became a culture where everybody can play. Free access to everybody was the name of the game and it made everything else fairly obsolete. The hipster culture was deriding the idea that there was nothing new while the Internet showed that the celebrity culture, as a whole, was pointless and retreading old ground while a goldmine was in the audience themselves. While celebrity culture went on antidepressants, everybody else was realizing how awesome everybody else was. But my real point was that the hipsterism of the '90s wants to define a coffeeswilling, flannelwearing, terminally depressed state of being that was hardly the case for anybody. People speak of the '90s as some kind of Alternative Rock paradise. The biggest hits were Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer. Revisionism that places Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder as the king and queen of some mythical '90s ball is just that: Depp didn't come into his own until halfway through the fucking decade while Ryder bombed out at nearly the same time.
In short: anybody who relates to 'Reality Bites' as the embodiment of the '90s is possibly still recovering from overmedication. If anything, it was a complex decade that was full of variety that a lot of people are now trying to gentrify. It was a weird decade that was effectively split into two parts: pre- and post-Internet. People are trying to exaggerate the pre-aspect because they don't want to give up that illusion of white dominance. Remember the LA Riots? That doesn't exist in the Depp/Ryder idea of the '90s. Remember Tupac? Biggie? 'Friday?' This Depp/Ryder '90s doesn't even adknowledge Sayles or Spike Lee in the madness, nor the meaning behind their coming to be. If anything, the idea of a hipster '90s is inherently racist at its heart. It's when a lot of angry minorities--rightfully angry, mind you--started making a lot of angry music. You're not going to see Hot Chocolate or Funkadelic in this vision of the '90s, mostly because Ice-T was taking over metal's demise to make 'Cop Killer' or a variety of black artists breaking the subservient roles and really making their names known.
So, in short, the idea of a hipster '90s still pisses me off. Mostly because I existed in a sphere that was only that. And it wasn't fun or cool being miserable like that. It's inherently bigoted and ugly, a sort of penance for something that didn't need forgiveness. It was opposition for its own pointless sake, and it's just there to put forth a singular view for a decade that did a lot to break boundaries. It was more than Cobain blowing his head off, Courtney Love appointing herself Queen of What-the-fuck-ever, and a bunch of white people moaning and whining and making depression a fashionable trend. It was also a time of a lot of cool and important things happening, and the lens that a hipster views the antidepressant decade seems to remove all color from a complex portrait of how it was to be alive in that time and place. It's nothing more than a brand of white suburban fear that erased the 'usurpation' of a dominant white culture into something wholly different by margainalizing everything that isn't white-friendly. It's like someone is trying to relieve a dire past by turning down the color knob and pretending the world is as stark as a monochrome picture without realizing (or wanting to realize) that more stuff was happening than they could ever imagine and preferring to live in that Zanax-riddled delirium.
A recent article lamented the aging of Generation X. For the longest time I've considered myself part of Generation X, simply because it seemed to fit. In my youth, I rocked flannels. I grew up during the '90s with all the culture that went with it. Technically, I am part of it: I was born in 1978, right at the tail end of the 1961-1981 time limit.
But the idea of generations is a stupid one, especially in a complex world. My mother is two years out from being a member of Generation X. I'm in the same generation, more or less, with my own mother (she had me when she was 18). How does that work again? In reality, it doesn't: she considers herself a hippie, a side effect of the Woodstock/'70s Free Love styled thing. But this realization of generations (especially how they neglect those who come at the end as some sort of weird addition that was along for the cultural ride) made me realize just how fucked up our ideas of the '90s were, and how monocultural they were.
Or rather, how sickingly white they are.
To hear people talk of the '90s today, you get a very good idea of how the culture was in 1991-1994. To hear Gen Xers talk about it, the '90s died when Kurt Cobain's head was blown off. Truth be told, I didn't know who Cobain was until he died. I knew what Nirvana was--a sadder version of the arena rock/metal scene that labeled itself Alternative but was just part of the cultural malaise that came from the excesses of hair metal. It was a way to purge our nation (well, the white/rock part of it) from the homoeroticism of the '80s by adapting a really strange sense of masculinity. Leopard-print tights were replaced by flannel shirts. Thundercat pastel boots were swapped with Caterpillar or Doc Martens. But the '80s labeled such excess and mock feminization as masculine, so the '90s attempted to label their traditional masculinity as 'ironic.' They were trapped between two gender ideals so they chose to play to masculinity but 'not really.' Suddenly the homoerotic gayness of David Lee Roth dancing around in a rainbow of colors with a perm that would make most people blush was distilled down to a Kurt Cobain douchiness that took away the spectacle but reaffirmed it as a joke. Or rather: it was 'real' but a joke if you were in the know. Which is like saying 'I like this, but I only like it as long as you're not mocking me, then it's a joke."
It's a forced irony that doesn't have the strength of its own convictions. In a way, that's what most of the '90s were like: it was trying to have it both ways. The pomp and excess of the '80s combined with the ability to realize you were being watched yet still maintain the detached idea of being cool. In a weird way, it was really like the '50s paranoia. No, I take it back: it was like a Jane Austen novel where everybody conforms and can be ruined by the everpresent threat of rumors but relies on a bizarre system of conduct where everybody is pretending to pretend. It's a weird system where we're all so detached that nothing really means nothing. At least we got the postmodernism part right but were missing the true, sad point of it.
Bizarrely enough, the 1991-1994 idea of the Hipster '90s is very white in hindsight. The execution of our '80s homoerotic selves (and shamelessness, come to think of it) was the real purpose of Alternative Rock, and the culture that came from that can hardly be considered iconic of the decade. The real icon was the invention of the Internet, the antithesis of the image we like to think of the '90s. Instead of having our celebrities play a violin for their irony (using a straight razor and an arm instead of a fiddle and a bow), celebrity became a culture where everybody can play. Free access to everybody was the name of the game and it made everything else fairly obsolete. The hipster culture was deriding the idea that there was nothing new while the Internet showed that the celebrity culture, as a whole, was pointless and retreading old ground while a goldmine was in the audience themselves. While celebrity culture went on antidepressants, everybody else was realizing how awesome everybody else was. But my real point was that the hipsterism of the '90s wants to define a coffeeswilling, flannelwearing, terminally depressed state of being that was hardly the case for anybody. People speak of the '90s as some kind of Alternative Rock paradise. The biggest hits were Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer. Revisionism that places Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder as the king and queen of some mythical '90s ball is just that: Depp didn't come into his own until halfway through the fucking decade while Ryder bombed out at nearly the same time.
In short: anybody who relates to 'Reality Bites' as the embodiment of the '90s is possibly still recovering from overmedication. If anything, it was a complex decade that was full of variety that a lot of people are now trying to gentrify. It was a weird decade that was effectively split into two parts: pre- and post-Internet. People are trying to exaggerate the pre-aspect because they don't want to give up that illusion of white dominance. Remember the LA Riots? That doesn't exist in the Depp/Ryder idea of the '90s. Remember Tupac? Biggie? 'Friday?' This Depp/Ryder '90s doesn't even adknowledge Sayles or Spike Lee in the madness, nor the meaning behind their coming to be. If anything, the idea of a hipster '90s is inherently racist at its heart. It's when a lot of angry minorities--rightfully angry, mind you--started making a lot of angry music. You're not going to see Hot Chocolate or Funkadelic in this vision of the '90s, mostly because Ice-T was taking over metal's demise to make 'Cop Killer' or a variety of black artists breaking the subservient roles and really making their names known.
So, in short, the idea of a hipster '90s still pisses me off. Mostly because I existed in a sphere that was only that. And it wasn't fun or cool being miserable like that. It's inherently bigoted and ugly, a sort of penance for something that didn't need forgiveness. It was opposition for its own pointless sake, and it's just there to put forth a singular view for a decade that did a lot to break boundaries. It was more than Cobain blowing his head off, Courtney Love appointing herself Queen of What-the-fuck-ever, and a bunch of white people moaning and whining and making depression a fashionable trend. It was also a time of a lot of cool and important things happening, and the lens that a hipster views the antidepressant decade seems to remove all color from a complex portrait of how it was to be alive in that time and place. It's nothing more than a brand of white suburban fear that erased the 'usurpation' of a dominant white culture into something wholly different by margainalizing everything that isn't white-friendly. It's like someone is trying to relieve a dire past by turning down the color knob and pretending the world is as stark as a monochrome picture without realizing (or wanting to realize) that more stuff was happening than they could ever imagine and preferring to live in that Zanax-riddled delirium.
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