I’ve been reliving my youth courtesy of YouTube. There are MTV Unplugged shows, vintage music videos — it’s awfully cool. YouTube hasn’t been on my radar until recently, but it’s a nice incorporation into my life. So, for nostalgia, I watched the Stone Temple Pilots MTV Unplugged show, and, as I will be transitioning from “thirty” to “thirtysomething” in a couple of weeks, I thought I would pause and reflect.
Here is “Plush” Unplugged.
Usually YouTube comments are impossibly inane. I, of course, am not the first person to note this:
But I was oddly heartened by an exchange on the comments page:
Wrestling BC: It sucks that I have to be in my 20s during this shitty decade. I would gladly give away anything good about this time period … which is basically only the advancements in technology, if it meant I could go back in time an see these guys and others in their prime.
Calicsta: I feel just the same. I would give everything to be a part of this x-generation.
Years ago, I saw a defense of people of my generation. The argument went like this: “We might not understand Woodstock, The British Invasion, free love, LSD. But there’s plenty of stuff Boomers don’t know about: Tina Yothers, TrapperKeepers, etc.”
And I thought: “Yeah. That’s not a very good trade.”
But that, of course, is not the real legacy of “Generation X”.
When “Generation Y” was first introduced some years back — I first encountered it in maybe 1995 — I thought it was kind of odd. It bins my brother and me into different generations. I’m at the tail-end of Gen X, he’s at the head of the subsequent generation, and that seemed somewhat ludicrous to me, even though it was reassuring to a teenager to be told there was a fundamental generational gap between you and your younger brother.
I was born in 1978. I went to college when I was 16, which put my classmates as 1976ers, and the upperclassmen more solidly into Gen X. Thirty is young to be reminiscing, but when I started college, we were one of the first classes to have email. We used pine on a DEC Alpha. Google? Hell, there was no Altavista. No one had heard of Amazon.com. Yahoo! was run by a staff of volunteers. Internet Explorer was but a gleam in a predatory company’s eye — I remember transitioning from Mosaic to Netscape Navigator. There were people sincerely wondering whether “The Internet” was better than AOL. Cell phones? Blackberries? Gah. But, no, that’s not the biggest generational gap, either.
I graduated college in 1999. My brother started college in — help, Dave? 2000? I was a working adult when 9/11 occurred. High school and college had been spent under Clinton, when American thought that a scandal was a blow job in the Oval Office. My brother — Generation Y, remember — was 19 when the Towers collapsed. His college days were drenched in Bush, in the worry of international terrorism, in illegal wars and unlawful presidencies and all the scary, scary shit that will take well into Generation Z++ to undo. And, of course, there’s instant messaging. There’s that.
So the X/Y division seemed oddly … prescient. If it wasn’t real at the beginning, it sure as hell was true when the inhabitants became adults. Dave, agree?
Back to music. I’ve wondered over the years if this weren’t generational bigotry, but my first year as a teenager, here is a partial list of albums that were released:
- Nirvana “Nevermind”
- Pearl Jam “Ten”
- Guns ‘n’ Roses, “Use Your Illusion I” and “Use Your Illusion II”
- Metallica, “Black Album”
- REM, “Out of Time”
- Queensrÿche, “Empire”
- Tori Amos, “Little Earthquakes”
That’s. Partial. I’ve tried to convince myself that anyone’s albums when they were 13 would seem as seminal, but, no, sorry. This was different. These were seminal. And — oddly, utterly oddly — grunge was a fad, which brought celebrities with bipolar disorder into public consciousness more than at any time since, maybe, Chopin.
Rant, here. If you look back on grunge as a fad: bless you eternally. For real. You are truly blessed. I’m bipolar. I have been for lots of years — as usual, symptoms showed up when I was a teenager, years before it was diagnosed. If you listen to Nirvana’s “Lithium” and think, “cool bassline!” rather than “wow, Kurt, you fucking nailed what being on lithium is like”, seriously — utterly seriously — good for you. It really isn’t our fault that people with severe dopamine disregulation problems find that strong opiates work better to make us functional than anything that’s been approved by the FDA for treatment. If you listen to Stone Temple Pilots’ “Atlanta” and it doesn’t immediately occur to you that Scott has nailed what trying to stop opiates as a bipolar feels like — well, I’ve said it. Bless you. It’s a blessed accident that I didn’t become a heroin addict, and, frankly, it’s still something I have to be super-careful to not do.
I don’t think that intrusion of mental illness into popular culture has really been duplicated. Do people with rage disorders think, “wow, nu-metal legitimizes us”? Do despicable homophobes think Eminem (gods, that man is talented, I just wish I didn’t have to delouse after The Eminem Show) stands up for them? Well, maybe. I don’t really know.
So, I’m switching from 30 to 31. I just had my ten-year college reunion. I’ve been married, and been divorced. I watch the Unplugged shows and think, “Holy shit, I’m older than all of these guys, and, holy shit, I used to think their hair was long” (mine has now passed the middle of my back again). And — yes — I still look in the mirror in the morning, with somewhat-ratty long curly brown hair, jeans, a rock band t-shirt, and an open flannel, and think, “Hey, I look good”.
Hey, do you know what? I think I do. I may be stuck back in 1991. But, seriously, there are worse times be stuck. Grunge forever. Better bipolar medications now. I’ll shout both from the rooftops. I hope you’ll join me.
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