Two years is a long time…practically forever in Internet-land, but that’s how long it’s been since an entry has been made in this series.
If you’re to new to the site, and/or a shut-in with mobility issues, you can begin with Part 1.
Or catch up on the last few entries here:
This Used To Be My Playground, Part 17: Nine Inch Fails — You Want To What Me Like A What??
When I first started these musical reminisces five years ago, it was intended as a quick skim through a few songs that I felt culturally encapsulated a very important decade in my life. Well…300 songs. The Holy Bee has always been an ambitious blogger. Ambitious…and verbose. The little capsule reviews of ‘90s songs and a few funny/sad memories to go with them swelled into a rambling autobiography, and it stopped abruptly at a particular time — the split between myself and my high school/early college girlfriend, Emily. I now realize that was the point to which I was writing. Once I got there, it was like lancing a boil, or vomiting up something that had sickened me for far too long. The whole damn thing was not about music at all, but about heartbreak. And when I purged, I lost interest in continuing.
Looking back on the first seventeen entries, I am both proud and somewhat embarrassed. I was honest — too honest, sometimes. I included some real names I should have changed, some incidents best left unreported, and some thoughts best left unexpressed.
So I’ve gone back and changed a few more of the key names, including Emily’s. Why? Anyone who knows me from back then knows the real name(s), of course, and those who don’t wouldn’t be aware of who they are anyway. But I’ve just grown increasingly uncomfortable typing those real names, especially the girls (now middle-aged women long past caring, but it still feels intrusive.) The only person guaranteed to keep his real name is McKinney. Leaving his name attached to my memories is my inadequate tribute to his legacy as a genuine character.
I suppose I could stop the whole thing right here, but I feel I should see it through. The web is littered with abandoned blog series, and I refuse to join them. There’s still a few stories left to tell, and even a little music to remember.
One thing that will make it easier for me to continue is that “The Nineties” as an era, not a set of calendar pages, really ended for me in late 1997, and that’s when this series will pretty much end (probably with a quick 98-99 epilogue). Your mileage may vary, but I think unfocused anticipation (fear?) of 2000 shortchanged the last few years of the 20th century. So, if I keep it brief, I can see the end of my Nineties from here.
Decades are much more of a cultural span than a rigid group of numerical ten-year blocks, overlaid with very personal associations for those who experienced them. Culturally, the decade known as “The Fifties” was much more than Jan. 1, 1950 to Dec. 31, 1959 (add one year to each of those for you mathematical sticklers out there.) It started with the Baby Boom and the Cold War just after WWII, and continued well into what the calendar told us was the 1960s. Depending on your point of view, the turbulent “Sixties” began with the assassination of JFK or the American arrival of the Beatles (the two events took place eleven weeks apart). The Sixties “era,” too, lingered into the 1970s. A recent book called What You Want Is In The Limo by Michael Walker made a good case for the cultural “Seventies” starting in ‘73.
The Holy Bee, looking typically morose, late ’94. Form an orderly line, ladies.
…So my Nineties felt a little short. It got rolling only in late ‘91 when Nirvana shook up a bloated and complacent music scene, and ended for me in the fall of 1997, for a few reasons. 1) I discovered I was going to be a father in 1998. I would have to be a grown-up from then on. 2) I began feeling the autumn breezes on the crown of my head a little more than in previous years, and the contents of my hairbrush and shower drain confirmed the physical (if not emotional) aging process had truly begun for me. 3) I lost touch with the music that was on the charts and on the radio. It began targeting a different audience (younger and dumber, in my opinion), and I became [sigh] “hipsterized,” for lack of a better term — interested in digging for the non-mainstream, the obscure. What little was left of the musical mono-culture crumbled into sub-genres and sub-sub-genres, “event” albums that everyone owned (and even albums themselves) would soon cease being relevant, staring as they were down the barrel of mp3s and new ways to consume music. Not necessarily bad ways, just not Nineties ways. The New Millennium was already eating its way backwards. Like the Fifties, I feel the 2000s (“The Oughts”?) began a little early, and lingered a little long. In fact, have the 2010s established an identity — a “feel” — even now?
Where were we? Oh, yes. It was August 1994, and I was a mopey 19-year-old college student and video store clerk who had just been dumped. Wispy early attempts at facial hair came and went according to my whims. I was spending a lot of time holding down a barstool at Mahler’s coffeehouse, where the coffee was gratis thanks to the counterman Caspar (an old high school acquaintance), and fellow regular patrons Audrey (Caspar’s girlfriend) and McKinney were allowing me a semblance of a social life again… Continue reading
