I Think We Forgot How Odd the 90's Were

I recently experienced two events that drop-kicked me into a sentimental time machine. The first occurred while visiting my sister and having to explain all the old photos of me to my girlfriend. I gave up saying, "I guess you really had to be there" and then drove her all around my hometown. The second is that I watched Empire Records again. And while all of those actors are playing teenagers even though they're in their 20's, those of us who were teenagers at the time believed that's what teenagers should be like. So, you know, pretty heavy on the nostalgia there. I noticed when I was confronting this evidence that my memory was a little rose tinted.

1.) Anachronistic Jobs

This goes back to Empire Records. I can't name a single friend that still works/is trying to work in a record/movie store. That used to be THE cool job to land. And we all wanted to be friends with the people who worked there, even if you were that stuck up bitch that laughed at me in high school and only rang up my purchases condescendingly. Whatever.

I don't want to give anything away, but I was a huge nerd.

I can't even think of the last CD I purchased in a store. I think it was back in 2006. That's five years ago. Back in 1997 I couldn't go five days without setting foot in a record shop. And you'd better believe those stores were some of the first places I visited once I could drive. These temples of cool were cultural touchstones. You have plenty of movies like High Fidelity and Clerks to take as examples.

What happened? Napster changed everything, but not in the way you think. It wasn't that we could all download gigs of music for free that mattered so much as the means by which it was done. Digital distribution is hottest thing in media retailers. It's taken almost a decade for new systems to be put in place, but I'm willing to bet you spend your time downloading and streaming most of your media. The digital divide was much wider back then and internet connections were slower than a summer car trip.

Plus dial up had that awesome song when it connected.

Couple that with archaic computers with extremely limited storage (my first desktop had a just a single gigabyte of hard drive storage BEFORE Windows 95 was installed) and there just wasn't any room for growth until the industry caught up. Speaking of...


2.) What the Fuck is This "Internet" Thing?

This seems laughable today, but people had no idea what to make of the web back then. It was all over the goddamn place and I don't mean the network's physical presence. I mean that people were totally in the fucking dark when it came to implementing it. All we knew was that it involved phone lines and we got to add "cyber" to the front of every word to make them sound more awesome.

Tada! It's the Cyber E-World Web or whatever!

Up until the past few years, you could still find sites that could be viewed as text only. That isn't functionality that anyone needs anymore. Period. But it was important back then and a lot of devices required it for use. Tiger Electronics released the first hand held game console with internet connectivity, but it only displayed pages as text.

This dinosaur right here.

True, you had to connect it to a hideously large external modem and it was monochrome, but you could do it. My family even had a word processor that could do the same thing. Do you guys even remember word processors?

People even tried to inject the internet into refrigerators for fuck's sake. Although the most hilarious attempts at shoving the net into our lives were via movies. The Matrix seemed totally plausible, The Net scared the shit out of Luddites, and people believed hacking was done by kids with 'tudes, wearing roller blades and VR headsets.

Hacking, apparently.

3.) Severe and Prolonged Identity Crisis

The 1990's were extremely transitional. On top of the technological revolution, you have to remember that the Cold War had just ended and we'd lost a lot of our cultural identity along with it. And we went looking for it again like a pack rat rummaging through their closet looking for an old yearbook. For those 10 years it's like society's parents had gone out of town for the weekend and we just ran buck ass wild. Imagine the recklessness of the Twenties, but with ecstasy.

We recycled everything we could find value in, no matter how small or esoteric. The Eighties were still a little too fresh on the mind, but the Seventies had a huge comeback. And we were unapologetic about it. Lazy, even. When envisioning a new TV program, we collectively said "fuck it" and just named it "That 70's Show." We had movies like Dazed and Confused and Boogie Nights. The Sixties had their shot, too, with Boomers celebrating the anniversary of the clusterfuck mudfest that was Woodstock and the release of the Beatles Anthology albums. Tie dye shirts got pretty big. Singer songwriters got a break, too.

How else can you explain Tori Amos?

But that wasn't enough for us, fuck no. We even went and threw in some damn swing dancing in those last couple of years. That didn't even make sense. But we collectively couldn't care less. My point is, if you spent any amount of your formative years in the 1990's, you had absolutely no clue about your cultural identity. It's like if you were adopted, tracked down your birth mother, and found out she was the biggest groupie slut ever.

Take that, Liv Tyler!

4.) Cartoon Shows Went Off the Fucking Rails

I remember waking up from orthognathic surgery and being totally out of it. I guess "remember" is the wrong term, but I am theoretically knowledgeable of the event. I was in a world of hurt and pumped full of enough painkilling narcotics to make Mark Renton blush.

Sorry, you weren't eating lunch, were you?

But, I had nothing to do except layabout in my drug stupor. So, of course I tried to watch TV. I know they try to make the television controls simple by only having one button to turn the TV on, off, and change channels, but that's really confusing for a person who's so fucking high on medicine that they think all of those tubes and IV's might be transforming them into a Borg.

"Paging Dr. Third-of-Five."

So I played TV roulette and it landed on Pokemon. I was pretty sure that Japan had vomited directly into my eyes. Later, after my reconstruction was complete, I tried watching that cartoon again and it still made just about the same amount of sense. And this kind of madness was going on everywhere. What are you explanations for "Aaahh!!! Real Monsters!," "Ren and Stimpy," "Rocko's Modern Life," or "Every-Show-Ever-On-Nick?"

"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" had a large part to play in this Saturday morning bedlam. After you invent reptiles trained in martial arts, all bets are off. They opened some kind of Mutant Pandora's Box and the world was forced to watch sanity and creativity take a back seat to "WTF?" Wanna make a cartoon about intergalactic leather-clad rodents? Sure, we'll call it "Biker Mice From Mars."

Don't want them to ride motorcycles? That's cool, we can go with a anthropomorphic space rabbit named "Captain Bucky O'Hare."

Fuck it, let's just mixed sharks and gangs and see what the animators can shit out.

I give you "Street Sharks."

I guess you could make a case for this insanity in other decades, but all I know is that Saturday morning cartoons completely disappeared after the turn of the century. In much the way that Batman & Robin killed the franchise until Batman Begins, the Nineties exploded cartoons.


5.) The Colors, Oh God, The Colors!

Actually, the Nineties exploded a lot of stuff. Everything had to extreme, to the max, if possible. This extended as far as the color palette of everyday life.

It was a bad time to grow up with astigmatism.

We were insatiable hedonists and we reveled in day-glo vibrancy stretched across spandex. We invented raves just to have a place to put all of the goddamn new colors we invented. Remember when I mentioned Pokemon earlier? They colorized the shit out of it so hard it gave people seizures. I'm not linking to a video of it, so it's on your hands if you go searching for the offending clip.

But we all did it and thought nothing of it. We did it to Play Doh, even.

Every kid needed to be extreme. They need to be extreme so bad, that we developed a new spelling, "X-Treme!!!" Those exclamation points aren't a personal addition by me. You just yelled a whole lot back then. Like, all the time. For no fucking reason. Those videos I linked to were for a soda. A soda that is now defunct, possibly due to it's over X-Treme!!! nature. People were just all like, "Fuck, yeah! Soda rules, motherfuckers!!!" You don't need to think about rioting when you drink a soda.

6.) I Thought I Was Kind of Cool in a Loser Kind of Way

This is the one of the best things about the argument "Pics or it didn't happen." My yearbook presence is extremely minimal and no one had digital cameras back then.

This is what we took on school field trips.

So there's about zero proof of how absurd I was back then. I am able to tell you that I wore, in public mind you, corduroy cut-offs, mismatched soccer socks, combat boots, a chain wallet, a Sailor Moon T-shirt, a flak jacket, and spiked "Atomic Turquoise" hair.

Ha ha, suckers! That shit isn't on the internet!

Look, you had to be there.

LP out.