Kids today don't know how it used to be

I was thinking recently about all of the things that I experienced as a teenager that no teenager today will ever experience. I started to keep a mental list. (Not a mentalist, though. It is probably illegal to keep one of those on the premises solely on the basis of helping me to remember where my mind was yesterday.) Here is what I have come up with so far.


• Watch television on a black and white set

• Change a channel without using a remote

• Change a channel using a pair of pliers because the knob had fallen off of the TV set and you were forced to improvise

• Listen to the audio of the Playboy network while hoping that the scrambled signal may momentarily give you a glimpse of what might potentially be a body part.

• Be able to record only one thing at a time

• Having to run out to Walgreens to buy a VHS tape

• Keeping a VHS tape ready at all times while watching MTV in an attempt to record your favorite videos

• Enjoy an hour flipping through the racks at a record store

• Hanging out at a record store at midnight on a Monday night in order to be one of the first people to buy a new release

• Making an actual mix tape

• Recording a song off the radio or TV by holding a cassette player up to the speaker and hitting record

• Write a letter and send it in the mail

• Be able to fully spell the word “you” in a sentence

• Diagnose computer problems by listening to modem noise

• Create a DOS boot disk

• Spend time on an internet newsgroup (though I believe that Usenet still exists in one form or another)

• Sit in the front seat of a car before being called a tween

• Walk to the store by yourself

• Walking through the aisles of a video store looking for something to catch your eye

• Experiencing the indescribable emotions associated with entering the “back room” of a video store

• Dial a rotary phone

• Use a pay phone

• Experience a time where it was not possible to be in constant contact with everyone you know

• Not having your life automatically documented and spread with the entire planet for all eternity whether you wish for it to happen or not. (High school must be horrible now. I mean, I see high school cliques on Facebook and I am twenty years removed from high school.)

• Watch Australian Rules Football on ESPN because that is the only sport available to watch across any media

• Spend a lazy morning watching five hours of game shows. I don’t even think you could do this now if you watched the Game Show Network.

• Grab a newspaper in the morning to read Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, Bloom County, Peanuts and a host of other incredible comic strips. That is an entire literary format that has essentially disappeared in my lifetime

• Attend a concert without trying to simultaneously record it or dealing with a dozen people around you who have decided to watch a concert through their phone



That is my starting list. I’ll keep on adding to this as the weeks go on.

Forgotten MTV Personalities: Volume One

Inspired by the book “I Want my MTV” I am starting a new recurring feature in which we examine some of the legendary characters of the Golden Era of MTV…

VJ’s always came in different shapes and styles. There were always the cute girl next door types or the comedian or the guy who is best known for his hair (few people know that widescreen TVs were invented solely to fully capture the glory of Adam Curry’s mane.) But only one WV existed solely to be the grunge DJ and that is our old friend, Steve Isaacs.

Featuring a look that screamed either “Seattle” or “That guy who sits in the fourth row of your English 103 class” Steve Isaacs ushered MTV into an era of Pearl Jam and Nirvana and left once we reached the era of Bush and Silverchair and completely disavowed all knowledge of the network by the time of Limp Bizkit. He was an example of 120 Minutes becoming mainstream as we no longer require a British accent to denote what was cool or not. Even if that was by having a kind of goofy, skinny guy with long hair act as the representative for an entire generation.

I have to be completely honest here, before reading I Want My MTV I could not for the life of me remember this guy and certainly not his name. But I guarantee that once people my age look at his picture we all immediately remember him. That was one of the wonders of MTV where even the minor celebrities became an integral part of our lives because they were always there. But more accurately, Steve Isaacs was probably the first VJ that I can remember who I legitimately thought that I could know in real life.

Because that really was the way a group of us were in the early 90’s. Ok, maybe I did not have the long hair and I wore less flannel but the idea of being young and really into this new type of music and having an almost childlike enthusiasm about it. We hung out at record stores at 11:55 on Monday nights just so we could get the new releases at midnight because we just had to have that new Breeders CD immediately. We made mixtapes and spent our free time rummaging through used CD racks trying to find some hidden gem. We thought we were unique but really we were just enjoying the thrill of youth and experiencing life on our own terms.

So cheers to you, Steve Isaacs. Once Pearl Jam no longer required MTV neither did you or any other member of Generation X. And who could sit through a Bush video anyway.

Wednesday Night Music Club: I’ve been listening to a lot of Jason Isbell recently. He is a former member of the Drive-By Truckers and might be one of the best songwriters around today. Give him a listen.

MTV: The First 30 Years (Part Two)

The second half of the top ten icons / shows / events in the 30 year history of MTV. Well, actually just the next three so there is a third half coming tomorrow.

Tabitha Soren: Since MTV is one of those constants in the life of every teenager / twentysomething over the past thirty years the network has an interesting commonality: every member of Gen X and Y had a young crush on one of the personalities. If I was a little older it would be Martha Quinn but know, Tabitha Soren is the one that stole my heart. From the moment she first appeared (as one of the girls in the party in the Beastie Boys video “You’ve got to fight for your right”) to her place at the side of Kurt Loder (making him even more of a creepy old man) she was smart, cool, hip and everything that college me wanted in a girlfriend. Yes, I fell for a news reporter who ended up marrying the guy who wrote “The Blind Side”. I was a rather troubled youth in retrospect.

MTV Animation (Liquid Television / Aeon Flux / Beavis and Butthead / Daria / The Head / The Maxx and maybe Clone High): I hate the fact that MTV now has nothing to do with music. Here are the shows that I can name that are on MTV right now: Real World, Real World / Road Rules Challenge, Jersey Shore, Teen Mom, 16 and Pregnant. None of those shows screams Music Television to me. Yet some of my favorite MTV shows of all time had absolutely nothing to do music. They were just really good cartoons.

It all started with Liquid Television, which was a rather bizarre show when you think about it. Airing on Sunday night it was just 30 minutes of short animated sketches some of which were pretty avant garde. They didn’t relate to music or much of anything. They existed just to be cool. The show gave us Aeon Flux, an anime type show with no dialogue and the heroine seeming to die at the end of every single statement with no explanation of what the hell was going on. It was just people being shot over and over again. Needless to say it was super cool.

It also gave us Beavis and Butthead, a show I should not even need to discuss. Even better, Beavis and Butthead gave us Daria, which was probably the smartest show on television in the late 90’s. Add in the one offs of The Head (a guilty pleasure of mine) and The Maxx (closest thing I’ve ever seen to a graphic novel on screen) and you have something that it would take Cartoon Network a decade to figure out how to do it with Adult Swim. It may have set the network on the wrong path in terms of getting away from music but it hit the mark in terms of quality entertainment.

(Oh, and bonus points for showing old Speed Racer episodes at one point in the early 90’s.)

120 Minutes / Alternative Nation: Over the past few years I’ve continually written about Gen X and alternative music, whatever that means. In reality what I am mainly focusing on is that the music that I wanted to hear in high school and what I could actually find on MTV were two completely different things. If you watched the wonderful show Dial MTV (which was Total Request Live with Adam Curry playing Carson Daly and wasn’t live) all you would see is Bon Jovi and Def Leppard and Poison and Motley Crue and maybe even New Kids on the Block. I know that people have all of this nostalgic love for these bands and post on Facebook how thrilled they are to see them in concert but let’s face it: they sucked then and they suck now. That music just meant nothing to me.

But for two hours on Sunday night MTV played music that did mean something to me. Or at least I thought it should mean something to me as British guys with bad hair who were also wearing makeup for some unknown reason must have something important to say. As someone who wasn’t the popular kid in school and was never going to be I turned to music that was unique, was different, was something else. That is what drew a crowd to 120 Minutes and its genre of music.

Then Nirvana broke and the entire scene became popular and suddenly Kennedy was hosting Alternative Nation and we were forced to listen to Bush videos and I had to become a fan of old timey country music to keep my uniqueness. Sigh. Here is an old R.E.M. video, which is probably the high point of the idea of 120 Minutes and also the epitome of a band where you were pissed that the guys who beat you up in the hallways liked the same band that you did.

MTV: The First Thirty Year (Part One)

So MTV turned thirty years old yesterday and as someone who was seven when MTV first went on the air that makes me a) highly qualified to discuss the societal impacts of MTV and b) really freaking old. Anyway, so I’ve decided that I will list, in no particular order, the ten moments / shows / events that epitomized MTV for Gen X. Five tonight, five tomorrow. Here we go.

Live Aid: This is still the only major concert event of my lifetime that I actually remember sitting down and watching because it was “important”. It was the absolute biggest story of the summer. People were expecting to see a Beatles reunion with Julian Lennon taking the place of John. Yes, that would have been horrendous but cool nonetheless. It was the highlight of the year of charity songs from the good (“Do They Know It’s Christmastime?”) to the bad (“We are the World”) to the really, really confusing (“Ain’t going to play Sun City”, which was difficult for a 12 year old to fully grasp as playing a gig at a South African resort wasn’t on my list of regular events.)

So most people remember the event, raising money for Ethiopia and making Bob Geldof famous for something other than the “I Don’t Like Mondays” song but not for the show itself. The thing is, it was actually a pretty good concert. Status Quo opened the show, a band you know as the writers of “Matchstick Man”, which is now a Target commercial after previously being the only Camper Van Beethoven song anyone ever remembered. In England you had great sets by Queen and U2 (Bono jumping into the crowd to dance with a woman during “Bad”) and an ending with pretty much everyone in British music on stage. Philadelphia had Madonna, Tom Petty and a Led Zeppelin reunion. There has been no other time where everyone was focused on a charity concert in my lifetime and MTV was the way to see it.

Kurt Loder: Ah, the face of the network. One of the most amazing things about rock music is that the people who cover rock music are the least rocking people on the planet. As a result you end up with someone like Kurt Loder, who looked like your buddy’s kind of dorky dad, on the air twice an hour to give you updates on the release of Whitesnake’s new album. Add in an hour long “Week in Rock” (because there is so much music news it needed its own recap show) and you slowly begin to realize that Kurt Loder was the Walter Cronkite of Gen X. He was the one who told us that Kurt Cobain was dead. If Kurt Loder said it than it had to be true.

Remote Control: Dead or Canadian? No game show will ever have a better category, setup, overall concept or run than Remote Control. Hands down the best game show I’ve ever watched and if you put out a DVD of the episodes I would buy it and watch them all. Taking place in the late, great Ken Ober’s basement you have three college students sitting in Lay-Z-Boy recliners with a bowl of popcorn in their laps answering trivia questions. Sometimes they had to sing along with Colin Quinn, sometimes they had to complete a math question while a bishop raced around the studio (Beat the Bishop) and once LL Cool J came out just to help out one of the contestants. If you lost your chair went flying through a wall. Adam Sandler and Dennis Leary would play random characters. It was insane and funny and the best half hour you could spend in an afternoon in high school.

But what I really want to write about is the game’s bonus round, which is probably the most challenging thing I have ever seen on a game show. You are strapped into a Craftmatic adjustable bed and are facing nine different television screens, all of which are at different angles. Each screen has a different music video on it. To win you had to name all nine bands in thirty seconds. This was a perfect competition as you got to play along at home while the contestant has it worse because I don’t think that I could recognize a Cinderella video that was being played upside down.

Julie and Becky from The Real World (Season One): The reality show that started it all. I am not talking about the show in general as I believe it is now essentially just “throw seven people in a space and encourage them to sleep with each other in various combinations so we will have more contestants for the inevitable Road Rules / Real World challenges.” The first season, particularly Julie and Becky, is what made the show.

The first season of the Real World was the only one that was actually real. Of the seven people, six were actually from New York with Julie being the innocent girl with a nice southern accent trying to make it in the big city. Everyone looked like they belonged in NYC. You could see Becky trying to be the uber-hip artist, singer-songwriter or Andre leading a rather pathetic alternative band named Reigndance. I just finished my freshman year of college when it went on the air and if you asked me what it would be like to be living in New York after I graduated that would be precisely what I pictured.

That is what was great about the Real World. For a time period (for me it was from the first season through London) the show was precisely what you were going to. There were guys on the show that I wanted to drink with and get to know. Who wouldn’t want to hit a bar with Dominic from LA or Neil from London? There were the girls (Julie and Becky, obviously and also Kat from London) who you wanted to date. The show hit exactly what you were living. Then as I got older the show lost its meaning and I no longer knew the people by name but as “that drunk girl who is naked all the time” or “that douchebag who is going to probably end up being a congressman from Wisconsin”. Now I’m frightened to even turn the show on. Maybe it still speaks to a 20 year old. If so, I am simultaneously scared for our future and glad that I grew up when I did.

Pearl Jam and Neil Young playing “Keep on Rocking in the Free World” at the 1993 MTV Video Awards: This is my favorite performance in the history of MTV and the one that I can point to as a turning point in music. This is the end of MTV’s biggest show of the world and it features two performers that wouldn’t even have been broadcast on the network three years earlier. Hair metal was dead and grunge / alternative music was dead. As someone who never could relate to Motley Crue or Poison or any of the bands whose music seems to exist to play behind a stripper I was thrilled to finally have music that meant something to me take center stage. Even if meaning was just having the song end in a blare of feedback. Because that is what was going on in my head at the time. This song is just rebellion and strength and self preservation and everything that made the early 90’s great.

Shane McGowan must be spinning in his grave and/or gutter

Nothing saddens me more than when television reminds me of just how incredibly old I am. One day you are the king of the world and the next day you are a nonsubstative demographic. And there is nothing that makes a Gen Xer feel quite so old as watching a commercial that uses The Pogues to sell minivans.



It wasn’t always this way. For one brief moment (roughly from 1992 to whenever the Spice Girls topped the charts) Gen X actually ruled the pop culture roost. Heck, even later on we still had some market power. We were a small generation but a rather prolific one from an artistic standpoint. Plus we all got rich from the dot com boom (or so the news media would lead you to believe) so we all had money to spend. Now we have all become hockey moms.

I know this sounds as though I am going a little overboard given all this really means is that someone in an ad agency decided the Pogues would make good background music but it is more than that. First of all, as opposed to how Moby songs are always placed in commercials to the point that you don’t recognize the song this commercial literally uses the first two verses of “If I Should Fall From Grace With God” precisely as they were recorded. The song is the focus of the commercial. But, even though it is the focus, there is absolutely no connection between the song and what is happening in the commercial. I’m pretty sure that Shane McGowan did not have little kids playing hockey in mind while writing the song. In fact, other than the use of the word “boys” repeatedly in the song I can’t think of a single connection between the song and the commercial.

No, the real reason they are promoting mini-vans with The Pogues is the simple fact that those of us who listened to The Pogues are now at an age where we need to buy mini-vans. This song was released in 1988, when I was a sophomore in high school. Pretty much anyone who was influenced by this song when it was first released is now seriously thinking about having a roomy third row seat.

Part of me wants to stand up and scream and yell that this isn’t true. That Gen X has not reached the point where we are all going to settle down and live happy little suburban lives. That is not what our generation is about. But then I get to thinking that I will be getting married soon and I will be the last, or at least close to the last, of my high school class to get married. Hell, I’ve probably been lapped in terms of the number of marriages. Thanks to Facebook I know that classmates of mine have kids in high school already. I hate to admit it but if you owned a Pogues cassette tape in high school you probably do need to look into investing in a mini-van right about now.

I’ve always wondered what drives a mid-life crisis. I’ve always assumed that it is the realization that your life is conceivably half over and you haven’t accomplished anything that you set out to do or even come close to becoming the person you envisioned. It might be worse now. Today your midlife crisis is driven by having the cultural of your youth served back to you in order to sell you products for your adulthood. Thirty years from now I am going to hear Nirvana songs used to sell me on retirement property. I’m not sure there is a convertible that I could buy to make that existential ache go away.

So before the song gets inevitably tied to little tykes skating here is The Pogues performing If I Should Fall From Grace With God the way it was meant to be played: raw, raucous and with the unnerving suspicion that Shane is so drunk he cannot see the crowd in front of him.

Deciphering the 80's: Beastie Boys Edition

In order to keep the generous federal grant that I receive for writing this blog (thank you, mindless beauracrats of the overspending Obama administration) I must occasionally provide an educational service in, as my grant proposal puts it, “Developing a deeper understanding of the art and culture of Generation X.” Or more accurately, deciphering the lyrics and music videos of the 1980’s. Tonight we will address the Beastie Boys classic “Fight for your Right to Party”.



Side Note #1: Did everyone else grow up hearing the rumor that one, or possibly all three, of the Beastie Boys died of a cocaine overdose after this single was released. That was definitely the story in the halls of every grade school and high school that I know of. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it has to be true. If not, how the hell did these guys get to be friends with the Dalai Lama?

Video Note #1: The video starts out with three people who look surprisingly like I did in the late 80’s discussing the makings of a party. For the record I only wore tape on my glasses when they were broken and it was going to take a week to get a new pair. Also, what is wrong with having soda and pie at a party? Who the hell doesn’t like pie? And yes, it is sad that throughout this entire video I am going to be identifying with the nerds.

Video Note #2: It appears that this video takes place in the exact same apartment where Cyndi Lauper wanted to have fun. In reality the only thing that would make this video even more awesome is a Captain Lou Albano appearance.

Kick it
I wish they would be slightly more specific about what it is we are supposed to kick. Are we kicking out the jams? Are we kicking the can? Are we kicking the door down as the video implies? Could we ask for at least a little specificity out of our rap lyrics?

You wake up late for school – man you don’t wanna go
You ask your mom, “Please?” – but she still says “No!”
I’ve always taken that this song is addressed towards high school students as a result of this opening couplet. Only a high school student would ask their parents if they had to go to school and then actually follow the given advice. A college sophomore probably doesn’t feel that way about Geology 101. Or more accurately they just would stay in bed hungover from the Jager shots the night before.

Also, why does waking up late for school make you not want to go? If you had woken up on time would that make you want to go to school? Wouldn’t you rather not go to school regardless? True, there is the sense that by being late you might be able to turn it into a sick day but the logic of needing to sleep late in order to have the right to party seems a little strained.

Video Note #3: For a bunch of nerds they have a surprisingly large number of attractive women at the party prior to the bad people arriving. And setting fire to a Popular Science magazine is just blasphemy.

You missed two classes – and no homework
This line has always troubled me. Ok, you missed two classes but you didn’t miss any homework. Isn’t that a win win? You got to sleep late and you don’t have any homework to do tonight. Sounds like the start of the best day ever in my book.

But your teacher preaches class like you’re some kind of jerk
Love the double meaning of class here as it can reference the physical act of attending a session of learning or the more ethereal sense of style and sophistication.

You’ve gotta fight for your right to party
I was always upset that Thomas Jefferson did not include the right to party in the Declaration of Independence. The right to pursue happiness just isn’t the same thing. We need a specific constitutional amendment guaranteeing our right to throw a bitchin kegger whenever we have a need to. I would fight for that right.

Video Note #4: I love that the video has a cutout segment to indicate that the punch is being spiked with Spanish Fly; a reference that kids today might not get. Also, apropos of nothing but why is it that at every wedding I now attend people are forcing me to drink punch? I don’t want to drink punch. If I’m thirsty I am going to want either a) water or b) beer so why offer me a third choice that just makes me wish I had one of my first two options. I propose a punch ban at weddings for precisely this reason.

Your pop caught you smoking – and he said, “No Way!”
That hypocrite – smokes two packs a day
Again this has to be about teenagers because who else gets yelled at for being caught smoking. Though smoking back in the late 80’s was not as much of a social stigma as it is today as it is now illegal to smoke in offices, bars, restaurants, or basically anywhere outside of a 100 foot radius circle in central Wyoming on alternate Thursdays. No, I did not sneak cigarettes as a teenager. I had my first when I was 29 and my last when I was 30 thus making me the oldest person in history to succumb to peer pressure. Also, I wouldn’t even want to imagine what a two pack a day habit would cost you now given all the taxes.

Man, living at home is such a drag
Another double meaning here as drag could reference the inhaling of a cigarette or the fact that living under your parents’ roof is a bummer. I bet most people never thought that this song had such lyrical depth.

Now your mom threw away your best porno mag (Bust it!)
I must explain this lyric to the youth of America as due to the internet era I don’t believe that they will understand the reference. Being a male teenager in the late 80’s meant two things: 1) a desire to see pornography and 2) the maddening difficulty of obtaining pornography. With the internet anyone with a connection can see whatever they want at any time. Even obtaining a DVD is a rather simple process and today’s teenager has a DVD drive on their laptop or gaming system. While VHS was available in the late 80’s the average household had one VCR, connected to the main television set in the living room, and thus was unable to be used without the parents’ knowledge. Thus led the rise of the “porno mag”, a printed material consisting of images that some might deem erotic or kind of sad depending on how you view such things. Yes, they actually used trees to make these things. Horrible, I know. I apologize for all generations after Gen X for the fact that global warming is directly a result of the printing of Swank.

You’ve got to fight for your right to party
Much like the request to kick it I really wish the Beastie Boys would be more specific in how we are supposed to fight for our right to party. Is it a call to take up arms? Should we have protest marches and sit ins until our right to party is achieved? Or would a simple petition suffice? You’d think that given how stridently behind the party movement they are the Beastie Boys would have given us direct instructions on how to help the cause.

Video Note #5: At this point the nerd is getting some in the bathroom that we know is a bathroom because it has a hand written sign on it that says “Bathroom.” This implies that either a) in the house that this video takes place they have a need to indicate the bathroom with a handwritten sign or b) that we the viewing audience need to be aware that this is the bathroom as opposed to the bedroom or coat closet. Sadly, I think the answer is A.

Video Note #6: Also, this is the point in the video where the pie fight starts. No one will believe that this is true but this song and the Beastie Boys in general were essentially banned due to being viewed as obscene. In my little suburban world they were the most dangerous band in existence. Yet there video features people throwing pies at each other. Maybe the 80’s were a little nicer than I originally thought.

Don’t step out of this house if that’s the clothes you’re gonna wear
I’ll kick you out of my home if you don’t cut that hair
Personally if I lived in this house I would wear the offensive clothes and not cut my hair thus putting my parents in an utter paradox to the point where I become the Schrödinger Houseguest. Also, these lyrics are perfectly applicable today as the clothes you’re gonna wear references Ed Hardy or Affliction t-shirts and that all of you kids with those damn emo haircuts should cut your hair.

Your mom busted in and said “What’s that noise?”
Aw, mom you’re just jealous – it’s the Beastie Boys
I never quite understood the meta reference here as the band is referencing a teenager listening to the band when this single was their very first release. Thus no kid could actually have been listening to the Beastie Boys when they recorded the song because the Beastie Boys did not technically exist as a commercial act. It creates another paradox in a song that is littered with them. Also, I wouldn’t think that the mom would be jealous. More overly concerned with the noise pollution.

Video Note #7: At this part of the video you get to see my favorite hidden gem of any music video of all time. In the final party scene one of the partygoers is a very young Tabitha Soren. She’s in the center right by the table sporting some awesome mall hair. I know that teenagers today will not get the reference but given that every guy my age had a crush on her due to her continual appearance on MTV News the fact that she partied with the Beastie Boys just made me fall for her even more.

You’ve got to fight for your right to party
So at the end of the video we see that a party is defined as loud music, some random hooking up, the destruction of an analog television set with a hammer and a pie fight. While that is something I would certainly fight for the right to having because again who doesn’t like pie but doesn’t this seem like a rather lame party? Would you leave this party thinking it was the most epic event you had ever attended? Ok, the guy who randomly hooked up with Tabitha Soren would but what about everyone else? And who is leading the anti-party coalition? I need to know who we are up against.

This ends our lesson. Any requests for the next subject?

The five random CDs for the week:
1) The Get Up Kids “Something to Write Home About”
2) Toad the Wet Sprocket “Dulcinea”
3) The Subdudes “Annunciation”
4) U2 “The Joshua Tree”
5) Dave Matthews Band “Live at Red Rocks”

When you wake up feeling old

In between going through my random CDs I tend to listen to the radio when I am in the car. Before I bought my new car that pretty much just meant listening to NPR as I had been unable to find a radio station out here that caught my interest (and I just can’t deal with sports talk when most of the talk is about teams that I am totally indifferent about.) But since my new car has satellite radio I have been searching that for something interesting to listen to and I have found it in the grunge channel.

It is pretty much exactly what you would think it is. Songs from the alternative nation era played with no commercial interruptions. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, my beloved Belly, and for some reason a surprising amount of Sublime. Basically it is just like being in my college dorm room again except without all of the posters of half naked women on the walls. For the first couple of times that I listened to the station I felt that this was the greatest thing ever. I loved every song I heard and nothing makes going to work more enjoyable than doing it while listening to Rage Against the Machine. Except that this past week I have come to a rather horrible realization.

I am listening to an oldies station.

I know that sounds bizarre, especially if you are my age, but hear me out. When we listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit we are listening to a song that is 18 years old. Do you know what we would have been listening to if we played an 18 year old song in 1991? “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando and Dawn. Or maybe if we were lucky Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock.” Either way that is what you would have been hearing on an oldies station at the time and now that is what I have become listening to my grunge station.

This isn’t just my usual rant about finding out that I am growing old. That is no longer a revelation and is now simply fact. High school was half a lifetime ago and no matter how many people try to become my friend via Facebook I have to admit that that portion of my life is meaningless to me now. I’m happy with my age, I’m ecstatic with where my life is at the moment and I feel that I am going to be one of those people who get better with age. No, my problem is with grunge becoming oldies.

Some music is meant to be eternally young. Punk rock is young. Its stepchild grunge is young. Frank Sinatra’s music was old even when he was young. I just don’t want to see grunge tied to nostalgia. I don’t want to see hip kids wearing flannel as some sort of ironic statement of detachment. I want to protect my memories and not have them turned into a format that will segue us into easy listening ten years down the line. It just doesn’t seem fair.

Corey and Lindsay: Parallel Lives

For the commenter on last night’s post: I do agree with the fact that it is definitely possible to parse out a generation between Gen X and the Boomers. Generations are vague things and while I typically stick with the Strauss and Howe definitions (in which case I should be using 13th Gen as the official distinction) but I can see the point. In reality, as someone born in 1973 I consider myself to be the heart of Gen X as I was 18 when Nevermind was released. Cobain was 24 at the time while Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall were 23. I think that all puts us in the Gen X category. But you’re right, St. Elmo’s Fire is not a Gen X film while The Breakfast Club most certainly is even if they may star the same actors.

Interesting timing that I wrote about Gen X last night while this morning we lost one of the Coreys. Yes, Corey Haim passed away this morning and as someone elegantly put it, he now has a license to drive in heaven. Corey Haim was an interesting celebrity as he was one of the first people to be famous because he was famous more than anything else. True, he starred in Lucas and The Lost Boys but that really isn’t enough of a resume to warrant such attention years after his biggest bouts of fame. He is remembered more for being a party boy and dealing with drug addictions than anything else. It is a strange legacy.

Speaking of people with strange legacies that will be forever linked with substance abuse My Beloved Lindsay is back in the news with possibly the worst lawsuit ever. It is one of those things that you have to read to believe. She is suing eTrade over my new favorite commercial in which one of the talking babies asks about “that milkaholic Lindsay.” Apparently, in My Beloved Lindsay’s mind this constitutes defamation of character, infringement on her good name and is worth $100 million in damages. Let’s examine this one, shall we?

First of all, the ad utilizes talking babies. It is highly likely that at this point Lindsay believes that babies can talk and that they are reading from a script. In fact, some of her comments seem to imply this as she talks about how horrible it is to have one year olds act out these scenes. I don’t believe that one year olds act per se. More like they exist. They don’t trade stocks either but that is an argument for another day.

Her big argument is that her first name is synonymous with her in the same way as Madonna and Oprah. Two huge flaws in that argument as a) she isn’t as famous as either of those two and b) her name isn’t as unique. I’ve never met an Oprah in my life though I have met a Madonna (she went by Donna). I’ve met several Lindsays and even in the past few weeks the news has been filled with stories about Lindsay Vonn. It’s tough to claim that your good name is being sullied when it isn’t even a direct reference to your name and being called a milkaholic really isn’t that bad of a thing.

The worst part of all is this is the claim for $100 million dollars as this commercial has ruined her good name and has caused untold pain and suffering. Now as someone who still has a lawsuit pending against the creators of “Everybody Hates Chris” I understand her point but come on, her name isn’t worth that much. Lindsay Lohan has no career at this point. She’s not even worth Playboy paying money for a pictorial. No one would hire her as an actress, she looks horrible and randomly suing large corporations isn’t a strong sign of mental stability. I’m wondering who the hell her lawyer is because I wouldn’t want my name associated with this lawsuit.

At one point in time Lindsay was a talented actress with huge potential. People said the same thing about Corey Haim at one point. Sadly, I feel that both stories will end up in the same place.

Molly and me

I’ve been thinking more and more about the John Hughes tribute during the Oscars. It is the only moment from the ceremony that I find memorable but more importantly, I really see it as a touchstone moment in the history of Gen X. It really marks the moment where we are all forced to realize that we are adults.

To put this in a little perspective: Molly Ringwald is five years older than me so while she would not have been in high school with me (unless my parents would have relented and let me skip a few grades) but she would have been a classmate of one of my brothers. Same with Anthony Michael Hall. Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez are a few years older than that and Judd Nelson is fifty, which is just frightening. So the cast of The Breakfast Club are slightly older than me but not by too much. And Molly and Anthony Michael really are in the core of Gen X.

That is what makes their appearance at the Oscars so important. In part this is almost an acceptance that my generation gets a seat at the big kids table now. Sure, we have our own awards over the years but now we are called upon to honor a director who exemplified our generation. It wasn’t a Spielberg on stage honoring a colleague; it was people my age. I can’t quite remember something like that before.

Even more important though is the fact that this moment showed that we are all adults. One of the wonders of film is that certain stars will always remain a certain age. Molly Ringwald will always be a teenager in our minds and to see her as a true adult, beautiful and confident, takes us a back a little. We all have our own mental age, which is what we feel we are in our heads. For me it is something like 23 or 24. I’m continually in that just out of college stage. But Sunday night showed that is not the case. Anthony Michael Hall looks old in the sense that he looks like me and all my friends. We are old.

But even though Gen X is now old we have created this whole environment where we are perpetual teenagers. The majority of my Facebook status updates come from people I went to grade school and high school with otherwise known as people I have not seen or talked to for nearly twenty years. Most of them I would have no clue who they were if I passed them on the street. But thanks to Facebook I am constantly returned to high school with all of the bad and good that that implies thanks to their comments. I’m not alone on this. We are the John Hughes generation and we never left high school.

It’s strange to think that we have no voice in Gen X that I know of to lead us into adulthood. The boomers made their own show Thirtysomething to deal with it. We have, uh, Cougar Town? I don’t know of any good, mid 30’s television show out there. The voices of our strident college years are all gone, several of which by their own hands. The only music act that is still relevant from my college years is Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder does one hell of a job putting up the good fight (Just Breathe may be as touching and meaningful as anything that I have ever heard.) Still, Dylan always spoke for the Boomers and we seem to have lost or maybe even never had that type of voice. We are a small generation that is no longer a target market. Media doesn’t care about us anymore.

Maybe that is my last take on the group of them standing onstage at the Oscars. They were successful but unsteady, for the most part unsure in their own skin. They all knew that they were adult members of society but the fancy clothes just felt wrong even on someone like Matthew Broderick for whom this is second nature. I think Gen X is scared of taking that step into adulthood. I know I am.

Manufactured nostalgia

Interesting question posed to me in the comments last night. So we are faced with an A Team movie, a remake of Red Dawn, a remake of Melrose Place and every other show includes at least one vampire. Has Hollywood run out of ideas? And more importantly, how much nostalgia can be mined until it becomes meaningless.

Let’s start with the remakes of classic franchises. Seemingly every show from my youth (except for Alf for some reason) has been made into a feature film. Transformers, GI Joe, Brady Bunch, Speed Racer, Lost in Space, Flintstones, if you can name it they have probably made a movie of it. Even worse are the relaunches of television series with Melrose Place, Knight Rider, and 90210 all being prime examples. This is a phenomena that needs some further analysis.

First off, one of the reasons that Hollywood is sold on remakes is that it takes zero marketing dollars to tell people what the show is about. I have seen no commercials or adds about the new Melrose Place series but I can describe in perfect detail what the typical plot line will entail. Compare that to a show like Flash Forward, which I still don’t quite understand and I have read up on it. It is cheap and lazy to create remakes but that is what Hollywood thinks that people want.

That is another aspect of it. Remakes offer no intellectual challenge to the viewer. Now I have no problem with brain dead entertainment. I still watch pro wrestling for the sheer fact that I have no need to think while watching it. But remakes take even the most minimal requirements of attention to detail on a new show and throws them out the window. The viewer doesn’t have to pay attention to what is going on because they already know the story. We don’t need to think as to why there are giant robots on earth. The good guys are Autobots and the bad guys are Decepticons. Everyone knows this.

But if you pay attention you’ll notice that remake shows never last as long as you would think. The shows get cancelled, the movies make less money and all in all they are less successful each and every time. That is because Hollywood has completely misjudged the idea of nostalgia. I am not nostalgic for the shows of my youth. I’m nostalgic for my youth. Yes, I remember sitting on the couch watching the A Team as a ten year old and you know what I want: to go back to being a ten year old without a care in the world. My longing isn’t for a show featuring Vietnam vets who were unjustly prosecuted and now work as underground enforcers. All I want is to be a kid again. We enjoy the memories of the shows for who we were then; not for the shows themselves. And remaking the shows only causes a brief return to those moments and then we are thrust back into our boring, everyday lives.

Is Hollywood out of ideas? That seems to imply that they had any to begin with. I think they have a strong feeling that the average consumer is an idiot and they produce their products appropriately. If you hate the fact that mass media is treating you like a moron you know what you do? Ignore mass media. There is a whole lot of great art being made out there if you take the time to look. We all have hundreds of cable channels at our disposal and broadband lines capable of bringing us nearly anything that was ever made. Find what you like and tell Hollywood to take a hike. Enough people do that and they will get the message.

Instant nostalgia

The whole John Hughes death thing has brought an interesting idea to my mind and that is what we have decided to feel nostalgic for. Mainly that the early 90’s have yet to be a time period that has been taken advantage of for its nostalgia. Which is odd because we are talking a time period that is 15+ years ago and should fall under the realm of what we can look back upon but for some reason we don’t.

I’ll explain it this way. When I was in college you could go to a disco theme party celebrating a time that ended 15 years before that day. Well I mean you could theoretically go to a party. I was never invited to any so I am just going to assume that is what all the other students who were enjoying their college years were doing. Anyway, we could celebrate disco or hippies or punks and feel perfectly fine about it.

Today the late 80’s are fair game. It is why people go to Motley Crue and New Kids on the Block reunion shows. No one is there for the actual music. It is mainly an excuse to play dress up for the night. Break out the ripped jeans and the big hair and live in the moment of excess. But even though the early nineties and the age of grunge is just a few years later I don’t see anyone going nuts for that time period. I don’t expect that college kids today are breaking out their flannels and listening to Mudhoney songs ironically. In fact, I think that entire time period is almost ignored, which is a shame given that it was one of the prime moments of my life.

Even more so I just do not see a whole nostalgia industry being built up around that time at all. Maybe it is a little too recent musically in that Pearl Jam and Dave Matthews are still top acts and some other bands like Counting Crows still draw large crowds for reasons other than fond remembrance of the past. The movies they make from television shows can’t draw as was shown by The X-Files movie. The only pure nostalgia play that I can think of is Saved by the Bell and that actually skews younger than Gen X. Sure, we watched it because TBS showed it every single day but we weren’t the target audience.

That is the strange fate of Gen X and especially the people in my age range (their mid-30’s.) Their entire college era seems to have been forgotten. This is what happens when you are a small generation. The focus has moved on to the millenials or remains with the Boomers. (Yes mass media, I know it is the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock. No one cares. Outside of maybe the members of Sha Na Na who continually tell people “We played Woodstock. Really.” We might as well celebrate 10 years of Woodstock 99 and the fact that people no longer listen to Limp Bizkit.) In a way, I am happy that the highlight of my pop culture life remains my own. The media is not going to change what I remember and that is the way I want it to be. I’ll take my Dinosaur Jr. records and be on my way.

Wednesday Night Music Club: Can’t believe he salvages a par on this hole. Like I said, I’m on my way…

Dinosaur Jr. MTV Music

Maybe a heart shaped box would be too ironic...

Here is what I call an ominous start to your day. I had a dream last night in which I was convinced that I had a paper due this morning that I forgot to do over the weekend. I ran through my class schedule and realized that I completely overlooked a two page report for religion class. I realized that I could probably bluff something together at the last moment if I was able to sit down at my laptop and start typing.

I woke up and was literally halfway out of bed and on my way to my office when I realized the following. 1) I’m no longer in school. 2) I haven’t had a paper due for a religion class in 17 years. 3) Even if I had a paper due, I’ve earned a number of degrees since then so I doubt that my completing this assignment is really that big of a deal. But I swear I was convinced for a second that I needed to work on a class I am not taking. I don’t know if I can take this as a good sign.

However, when I did actually get to my office I was able to see a lighting strike a block away from me. It was cool as all get out. I had the blinds open (as this is probably the only time in my life when I will actually have an office with a window) and just saw this massive flash out of the corner of my eye. Turned to see black smoke start rising from behind a building across from me and a rumble of thunder that shook the building for a good twenty seconds. I just find it amazing that this is nature and we don’t really pay any attention to it. Sure, nothing wrong with giant bolts of electricity to come rocketing out of the sky at random moments. No issues with that at all.

Switching gears, did everyone hear the story of Kurt Cobain’s ashes being stolen? Well, it is currently being assumed that they are stolen. There is certainly a measurable probability that Courtney Love simply misplaced them. However, like most people I am quite concerned that Kurt’s final resting place was within a pink, teddy bear shaped handbag. I’m not making that up. That’s where the heart of Generation X was placed.

Maybe we can use this as an analogy for Generation X. Not only did our generation have an all too brief moment in the sun (roughly late 1991 to 1994 or 1995) but our remnants were placed in an all too cute bag and placed in some disregarded corner. Everything that we stood for, all of the pride and righteous anger, discounted and turfed in favor of something cute and innocuous. People look back at Generation X and think primarily of flannel and the start of coffee culture. That’s if they remember the generation at all. For the most part we’ve been lost and no one even noticed that we are missing.

But we are all still here. We’re in our thirties and forties now. Graying around the edges maybe but we’re still out and about. We just are lacking a spokesperson. Someone who people recognize as being from our age and caring about our issues. But spokespeople have never been our style. We’re a quiet generation. We do our own thing. We take care of ourselves. We keep few friends but those we have we will go to the wall for no questions asked. It’s tough to organize that type of generation.

I hope we find Kurt. I hope we find ourselves. I certainly hope that we end up in something other than a pink teddy bear. I think we deserve a better ending.

Say Anything in an iPod Age

I should just be excused from having to write on St. Patrick’s Day. I mean, this is totally unfair. Many of my friends are bartenders. Not only do I live down the block from a bar but I am able to, on the busiest day of the year, get waved in to avoid the cover, be given a coveted seat at the bar and get free drinks. Sometimes membership has its privileges. Anyway, I’m just going to apologize in advance if this post contains misspellings, grammatical missteps, or paragraphs that end with my drooling into the keyboard. It’s been one of those nights…

However, I did prepare for this eventuality by writing down a topic this morning. Here is reason number 257 as to why technological progress is a bad thing: the loss of the Say Anything move.

If you are a Gen X’er like myself then the Say Anything move is the backbone of our romantic arsenal. Despite the fact that no one in the history of the planet has ever been able to successfully pull off the move we all believe that this very act will cause the woman of our dreams to forget all of her misgivings and fall madly in love with us (well me but I’ll use the plural here). For those who have forgotten this legendary scene from the late 80’s John Cusack, at the end of his romantic rope, determines that the only way to truly express his emotions for Ione Skye is by standing outside of her house holding a boombox over his head blaring Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” If you are my age this is an unforgettable moment.

(If you are in college right now and read that sentence your response would be “What the fuck is an Ione Skye?” Damn kids, know nothing about history.)

(Oh and yes, I do consider myself to look like John Cusack if he had forgotten to put in his contacts and had slightly too much to drink. It’s not a bad thing.)

So while I have lived my entire life with the belief that this is all I would need to do to seal the deal it has dawned on me that this scene does not translate to the modern age. Let’s start with the boombox. They don’t exist anymore. Certainly none with tape decks and even if you did find one with a tape deck no one actually sells cassettes anymore. So I’m now down to standing outside her window trying to play my iPod really, really loudly. (Yeah, I own a Zune but if I’m going to make this big, last ditch effort to win someone’s heart I might as well try to look cool while simultaneously being incredibly foolish.)

Given that she probably won’t be able to hear it through my headphones I am now down to trying to find one of those stereo systems where you drop in your iPod. That’s great but I don’t know of any that are battery powered so I’ll have to run an extension cord to her house. So, right now I am trying to hold up an iPod and two speakers that are being powered by a bright orange extension cord that is running through her lawn.

Now what’s worse is that I can’t just go out and use Peter Gabriel all over again. That wouldn’t show any creativity on my part. But because of the death of popular music I can’t express my emotions through a hit song anymore. Somehow I just don’t think that Justin Timberlake or Blake Lewis can adequately express the depth of my emotions. Knowing me I would be blaring an Arcade Fire song, which might not be romantic but would at least sound cool.

So I would like to thank technology for completely screwing over the only way I know of expressing myself to women. All I can think of now is to just send her an mp3 and save myself the whole “where can I find a boombox” issue. Where’s the fun in that? How can I risk being made a fool of not just in front of the girl of my dreams but a large number of random strangers who will be very upset with my waking them up with “Keep the Car Running” at five in the morning? Next thing you know people will be recommending that I express my emotions by actually telling the girl that I care about her. Yeah, like that’s going to work…

No Depression Week: Last fall, when I momentarily thought I had met the girl of my dreams, I had the opportunity to try to win her heart through a music recommendation. My choice was Josh Ritter, an incredibly talented singer-songwriter from Idaho who writes what can only be described as poetry. The choice was brilliant as she went out and bought his CDs. My follow through left a little (ok, a lot) to be desired. I promise you, I’ll always pay for dinner from now on. That said, please listen to this track just so you can see how incredible this guy is. This is what the No Depression scene was all about, just a guy with a guitar and incredible lyrics.

The Trouble With Nostalgia

I had an interesting decision to make last night. There were two concerts competing for my attention. I had to choose between a) paying 20 bucks to see the Lemonheads or b) accepting free tickets to a radio station’s Christmas concert featuring Jackyl. I was greatly tempted by the latter as free is always good and I couldn’t believe that the members of Jackyl were still alive much less touring. I just assumed that they were all killed in some freak onstage chainsaw accident. But, I knew that I had only one choice to make. It was time to put on the flannel and see the Lemonheads.

Now I’ll admit that I am not that big of a fan of the band. In fact, I only know three songs and they are the exact same three songs that everyone else knows: Into Your Arms, It’s a Shame About Ray, and the cover of Mrs. Robinson. Still, this was one of those uber-present bands of my college years. Every magazine had an article about Evan Dando. It wasn’t that he was the most important artist of the day; he just happened to be really photogenic. In fact, all I can remember about him is that he seemed to date every musician in Boston and seemed to be a screwup on many levels.

But I had to go. How else was I going to relive my youth?

I had a strange feeling even looking around the crowd. Sure, some people there made sense. There are few places where wearing a Juliana Hatfield shirt looks normal and a Lemonheads show is one of them. But other people were much too young. I can’t imagine anyone under thirty wanting to go see this band. Is there now some degree of post-modern ironic coolness to the early 90’s? Do the art kids today wish they were in school with me like those idiots I went to school with who thought that the 60’s were awesome? That’s my first problem with nostalgia. You never want to experience someone younger than you feeling nostalgic for your own life.

Things didn’t improve when I mistook Evan Dando for a guitar tech. Honestly, I could have run into him at the grocery store earlier and would never have recognized him. Now it’s not fair for me to say “wow, has he aged” because it’s been fourteen years since the glory days of 1993. Compare what I am today to the pictures of me back then and I’m not sure if I’d come out any better. I’m fifty pounds heavier with graying hair and acne that will go away once I finish puberty, which is probably when I turn sixty. But still, he didn’t look like a rock star. He looked like some guy who was happy to have a gig on a Sunday night.

What really got me though was the music. I didn’t have any technical problems with it. Sound was great, band was tight and people were bouncing up and down. It was more a matter of the songs not making sense any more. Take the song “Into Your Arms”, which I posted the video for last week. That is the ultimate post-adolescent love song. It’s what you put on a mix tape when you’re a sophomore in college (in fact, I’m pretty sure that I did.) It’s about how you can feel that nothing in the world can bother you as long as you have someone by your side. When I listen to the song it doesn’t touch me as being eternally true, it just seems to be the way foolish kids think. It’s made worse by having it sung by a guy in his forties.

See, you don’t view love the same way at 34 as you do at 20. In college it is this wonderful experience that you truly believe has never happened to anyone else but you. It solves every problem and overrides any and all possible concerns. But time makes you view love as being so much more complicated than that. You realize that it isn’t simple and it isn’t a cure all and sometimes no matter how much you care about the other person it just doesn’t work out. I’m pretty much a hopeless romantic and even I feel this way. So while Into Your Arms is still a great song and it makes me think about the past it has no meaning to me in the present. It’s almost non-sensical now. And that leads into what I consider to be the real problem with nostalgia.

Now it is clear that I love the music of my college years, especially given that I scour YouTube for videos every week. I’ll fight to the death about how it was a period of great bands and meaningful music. However even I have to admit that my feelings toward the music have less to do with the bands and more to do with the time in my life. When I think about Jesus Jones’ “Right Here, Right Now” I’m not liking the song because of some great musical epiphany. I like the song because Mike Murray and I rocked out to it during a high school assembly. I’m not nostalgic for music; I just use music to remember people. That’s the problem with nostalgia. It makes you pine for the wrong things. I didn’t see the Lemonheads to see the band. I went to see the band in the hope that all of my friends from college would suddenly arrive and we could have fun again.

For a few people reading this there is an obvious parallel to our nostalgia for the Backer. While it is still my favorite bar ever always remember that it isn’t the bar itself that we are nostalgic for. The Backer is just a bunch of stools, a few beer tabs, a sticky floor and a popcorn machine, which probably took more years off of my life than the alcohol ever did. We don’t miss the place. We miss the people in the place. We miss the staff and each other and knowing that you could just walk in and meet someone you knew. It was a moment in your life where you were surrounded by the coolest and smartest and nicest people you have ever known. Just remember that when you talk about nostalgia you tend to focus on things: places or events or songs. That’s not what you really miss. You really miss the people.

I went as Rudolph for Halloween

Best of 120 Minutes: This is one of my favorite songs that I a) don’t own a copy of and b) never even really heard that much. For some reason using a violin to duplicate Status Quo’s feedback driven guitars in the original version just has me bouncing up and down. Maybe not the best version of the song ever but hey, I can only post what I can find.

Got a few more random rants to unleash tonight. Here they go…

I saw my first house with lit Christmas decorations last Thursday. Is it a Thanksgiving tradition to egg houses? If not, can we make it one? Seriously, what the hell? It’s November 15th do you really need to have your Christmas decorations up and lit? I can understand the putting them up while the weather is nice but would you go ahead and light them? It’s a week away from Thanksgiving so you’re jumping an entire season. Just bizarre.

A friend of mine had a similar rant on her blog on this topic focused more on stores already pushing all of the Christmas stuff. I can at least accept that a little, corporations don’t have souls and only answer to the brutal hand of market economics. If it makes Halls money to have their Christmas tree up in September well damnit, that’s what they’ll do. Even if it is the dumbest thing in the history of the planet. But your own house? Wouldn’t you at least have enough sense to wait until you at least cooked Thanksgiving dinner?

Seriously, Americans have a really big problem with embracing the moment. We are either focused on making the future perfect or reminiscing about a past that never technically existed. We celebrate holidays before they occur for no reasons that relate to the holiday. VH-1 creates instant nostalgia for past decades without ever focusing on all of the crap that took place then. Apparently the early 80’s consisted solely of bad Hall and Oates videos, which isn’t how I remembered it. No one lives in the moment anymore. We don’t live with a sense of wow, just with a worry that tomorrow isn’t going to live up to what yesterday should have been.

Switching topics: Wow, I just looked at Christian Slater’s filmography in an attempt to determine his third best film after Heathers and Gleaming the Cube (assuming we toss out Pump Up the Volume). I didn’t realize that his career tanked so quickly. I’m forced to pimp “Untamed Heart” as his third best film and I consider that to be one of the worst films ever made. A character convinced that he is unable to love due to the fact that he has a baboon’s heart? Slater and Tomei making out at a hockey game and not getting beer thrown at them? I think at one point I declared it to be a horror film.

On the plus side, we do have another Winona Ryder sighting. She is going to be playing Spock’s mom in the new Star Trek film. This is of vital importance to, uh, guys who are even geekier than I am. I mean, even Star Wars geeks look down at Trekkies. Ooh, watch out, they have phasers. What a bunch of nerds. But, Winona’s getting work so that is a good thing.

ND football stories tomorrow as I am still recovering from sitting out in the rain for hours. Apparently all they needed to win was to have me in the stands. I apologize for my lack of effort in this season’s end result.

The five random CDs for the week.
1) Cowboy Mouth “Word of Mouth”
2) Lyle Lovett “Live in Texas”
3) Caitlin Cary “Waltzie”
4) Joe Henry “Fuse”
5) Natalie Imbrigulia “Left of the Middle” (hangs head in shame. I must have been really drunk that night.)

They turned all the great themes into theme parks

I find it very comforting to know that I can reference a somewhat obscure Christian Slater movie from 1990 and immediately have people replying with phrases from the film. It shows that I know my audience as we are all a bunch of non-conformist slackers who are essentially too lazy to conform.

I actually own Pump Up the Volume on DVD as I saw it for like five bucks at Best Buy one day. I watched the film incessantly as a teenager and watching it now my thought is mainly, “Wow, it really is just a Jack Nicholson impersonation.” That and I’m still trying to figure out why there are only six teachers in the entire school. Also, it was nice to know that at one point the government felt that the biggest threat to our country’s safety was pirate radio stations.

What does it say about Generation X that the actors and actresses of our youth have essentially disappeared? Well, that’s not entirely true. Johnny Depp has gone from being on 21 Jump Street to being a pirate, I guess that is a step in the right direction. But Christian Slater has been lost to the mists of time. Winona Ryder is struggling to find work and Molly Ringwald hasn’t had a meaningful gig since The Stand in 1995. That’s the strange thing about our generation, we were so small we will disappear from modern culture in a blink of an eye.

That disappearance is going to happen really soon as well. I often claim that I am at the heart of Gen X. Born in 1973 I was 18 when Smells Like Teen Spirit was released. I am as Gen X as they come and next year I will be 35 and no longer important to any marketer. As part of my job I was looking at trends for 18-34 year olds and I realized that in ten months this will no longer apply to me or anyone I went to school with. Imagine that, popular culture will no longer have to address the slacker culture. It’s a sad state of affairs.

I’m still not sure what our mark on the overall culture will end up being. We certainly created a great deal of good music as well as paved the wave for the mainstreaming of hip hop. Indie films took off, especially the introspective life studies that everyone with a Super 8 camera and a lot of free time discovered that they could make. There are some good writers but I don’t think that our cultural impact is going to be measured by what culture we left behind. I think it is going to be our attitude towards the world. We saw a world that was ruined before we got there and went, “Well, what’s the point?” I’m still asking that question today. People are now running around talking about climate change and I wrote papers about that twenty years ago. No one listened to me then and it’s too late to fix it now. Maybe that will be the epitaph for Generation X “We knew what was wrong, they just wouldn’t listen.” That or “Dude, have you seen my flannel?”

Completely changing subjects: I found out about the website www.ask500people.com where you can pose questions to the internet at large. I’ve of course signed up and posted the “Who should pay for dinner” question because I want the entire world to weigh in on this one. If you want you can hit the site, click through and vote for my question to be asked. Look, we all want to know the answer to this one so help me out.

The current state of Gen X (part one)

(Publishers note: As opposed to previous statements, I sadly will not be able to post the top 20 Simpsons episodes of all time tonight. This is in part due to yesterday’s events pushing my writing schedule back a day. Mainly it is due to the fact that there are an effing lot of Simpsons episodes and to do this write is going to take some effort. It’s kind of like when I dressed my dog up like Boba Fett for the science fiction convention, it always takes a lot longer than you’d think.

What? Doesn’t everybody do that? What else would I dress him as? C-3PO? A freaking hobbit?

Anyway, on Sunday you will get the top 20 episodes with quick summaries and great lines and all of that fun stuff. Now, here is yesterday’s post today.)

“The shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper; but all these did not really minister to much delight. Young people wore out early – they were hard and languid at twenty-one…the city was bloated, glutted, stupid with cakes and circuses, and a new expression “Oh yeah?” summed up all the enthusiasm evoked by the announcement of a new skyscraper.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are a lot of reasons as to why I admire F. Scott Fitzgerald. Partly it’s because he lived a life that I would be proud to lead. Midwestern boy goes out to the east coast, makes it big, writes the greatest novel ever written by an American, marries a beauty queen who ends up being quite insane, and ends up drinking himself to an early grave while writing bad movie scripts in Hollywood. That is called having a full, if rather short, life. But mainly I’m drawn to him because we are both of the same period. The Lost Generation and Generation X mirror each other in American history.

I first started studying the idea of the importance of generations in college when I came across a book called “13th Gen” by Neil Howe and Bill Strauss. It was the first true sociological view of Generation X (or what they dubbed 13th Gen as it is a) the 13th generation since the constitution was signed and b) an unlucky generation) and looking back at the book today I am amazed at how accurate it is. It’s worth digging through a library to find a copy. It was written in 1993 at the height of grunge so some references may not be wholly relevant but as I’ll show there is one section that stayed with me forever.

I’ll just write about two parts tonight and maybe will touch on some others next week. The first is the interesting question of what makes up this generation. They define it as anyone born between 1961 and 1981, which puts my birthday in 1973 right in the heart of the group. That is why I unabashedly identify myself as a member of Generation X, Nirvana released Nevermind right when I turned 18. Kurt Cobain killed himself a few months before I turned 21. Those two events are the major happenings of my generation.

That’s why I have some issues with those dates. Basically I think they could be shortened on both ends. If you were born in 1961 you were 18 in 1979 and could theoretically go to a disco while disco was still vaguely cool. When Wall Street came out in 1987 you’d be 26 and could be one of those bankers and I don’t think you could connect slackers with greed is good. On the other side, a kid born in 1981 entered college in the heat of the dot com boom and exited into the war on terror and that is just a whole different world from me. I’d be happier with a 1964 to 1978 time frame.

The other part that amazes me from this book are the predictions of what my generation will encounter. Here they are

1) Over the next 15 years, the festering quarrel between 13ers and Boomers will grow into America’s next great generation gap.
2) Thirteeners will never outgrow their bad image
3) The 13th will become one of the most important immigrant generations in American history
4) Early in life, the most successful 13ers will be risk takers who exploit opportunities overlooked by established businesses
5) Reaching midlife, the 13ers economic fears will be confirmed: They will become the only generation born this century (the first since the Gilded) to suffer a one generation backstep in living standards
6) Thirteeners will restrengthen the American family
7) Reaching their fifties in a mood of collective exhaustion, 13ers will settle into the midlife role of national anchor; calming the social mood and slowing the pace of social change.
8) Throughout their lives, 13ers will be America’s most politically conservative generation since the Lost.
9) As they reach their turn for national leadership, 13ers will produce non-nonsense winners who will exceed at cunning, flexibility and deft timing.
10) Before 2030, events will call on pockmarked 13ers to make aging Boomers get real and perhaps, to stop some righteous old Aquarian from doing something truly catastrophic
11) Throughout their lives, 13ers will neither ask nor receive much assistance from their government
12) As mature leaders and voters, 13ers will favor investment over consumption, endowments over entitlements, the needs of the very young over the needs of the very old.
13) Thirteeners will make caustic, independent yet self-effacing elders.

Think about how much of this has already become true. We’re still the slacker generation. We’ve been immediately bypassed by the marketplace of both commerce and public opinion in favor of the cuter millenials (no surprise as those are the Boomers favorite children.) We’re the ones who built the internet from message boards to Amazon and eBay and Google. And you know, for years I’ve always remembered prediction # 10 and more and more I feel that that is going to be the case. Heck, we may have missed our shot.

I’ll go into this in more detail next week but I want to get people thinking about this. If you want to understand American culture and the American marketplace you have to understand the power of generations. It really is the driver behind everything.

Have a great weekend everyone.