I was born in 1973, which puts me square in the middle of Gen X. It also means that the 1990s - ages 17-27 - are my most distinct decade. What did the 1990s look like? For me, they looked exactly like this.
The era has come to be defined with Nirvana/Pearl Jam grunge and Liz Phair DIY rock, I somehow missed most of that. I was even late to the Cure and the Smiths. Instead, I was still listening to Slow Children, Black Randy & the Metrosquad and a bunch of Paisley Underground bands like Alien Sex Fiend and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. These were bands a brother, nine years older, was into.
My first memory of college in 1991 was blasting “The Throne of Agony” by Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel from my bulbous Sanyo CD boombox in the dorm while I unpacked. Snyder Hall was full of jocks, but also wannabe chemical engineers like me. I was 17, having skipped a grade along the way, and when a bulgy man with sandy blonde hair who resembled a young Ted McGinley stomped in, hit stop, then silently waved his finger at me, I didn’t react, but I sure didn’t turn it back on.
Pop Will Eat Itself’s “Cure for Sanity” came out in 1990, and it was always in my 12-CD car wallet. I definitely put “X, Y and Zee (Sensory Amplification)” on repeat, which was the 7+ minute version that closed the album. Listening to it now, it’s clearly more of a salad than a stew, with Depeche Mode beats, Run DMC phrasing and some Ministry industrial loops. The effect is that even when the songs are catchy and danceable, the effect is more like walking through a city’s club district and sorting through vibes.
There was always a well-meaning quality to this era. PWEI is British, but this was true of a lot of late Reagan-Bush/Thatcher era music, where you feel the need to push back against the right wing. Thing is, in a pre-social media age, ignoring the AIDS crisis, continuing Nixon’s push against social programs and generally looking to route as much money as possible to white people was easier to ignore, so the messaging got a little vague. Hence the random children in the video.
Oh, I was part of this kind of thing. A song lyric of mine from the time:
It’s capitalism’s third wave
Let’s use a bank for a rave
This was to be part of a ska song. I lived in Boston at the time, and my roommate was in a ska band. I couldn’t get them to play it.
I also had a Zine. I worked at Copy Cop on Boylston Street in Boston (it’s an Apple Store now), running the color copy department on the overnight shift. My Zine was called “Marbits” and the gimmick was that I’d publish anything if it fit on a page. Because I had access to the color machines, I could even run photos.
I created copier art for the Zine. Back then, color copiers would copy by scanning in four passes: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. You could swap things onto the glass between passes if you were fast enough to get some effects I thought were pretty neat. (The were not. They looked a lot like this frame.)
Some PWEI lyrics for y’all to parse:
"No pop, no style"
Is a phrase out of phase
To praise what's worthwhile
After Bush, we got Clinton, and I ceased to care about politics for awhile, focusing instead on helping friends paint a stolen picnic table for their kitchen, or spray painting “Free Mumia” on a JP Licks.
One thing that’s crazy to me is that I never used any drugs. I hadn’t caught the alcoholic bug in the 1990s; instead I spent all my spare money on books of poems by Thomas Lux and Louis Simpson. I found potheads dull. I loved to dance, but no one ever offered me ecstasy.
Instead I rode my bike, keeping my overnight shift hours on weekends. I ate eggs at least two meals per day, sometimes at the Pig & Whistle, sometimes at Dolly’s, sometimes at the Pour House. I nursed a crush on a coworker, an artist who mostly painted images of herself nude, then in a fit of despair, shredded them all with an X-acto knife. She had asked her family what they thought of her work and no one said a word.
What film and video transitions looked like in 1991
Gen X is a famously ignored generation. Latch-key kids who were 35 when they were 10, and still 35 today. I remember visiting Gina at her rental, a former dental office that had been painted a glossy white, but not renovated in any way. She had a receptionist area in her own home. The paintings were ghostly, often naked canvas outlined by reds and limbs, sort of a Jan van Eyk hell.
I bet Gina could have used a couple likes.
I loved this. Very evocative. My music tastes were also shaped by a very older brother. He put a cassette tape of the breeders “last splash” in my hands when I was 12 years old and said “here. you should be listening to female fronted rock.” What a hero.