Ahhh.... to be a teenager in the nineties. What a time to spend the last days of your youth. Has there ever been a moment in history more tailor-made for the existential irr of adolescence?
“I am awkward, hear me roar!” It was practically the battle cry of the nineties. We took not taking things seriously VERY seriously. It was all tongue and cheek but it was an inside joke that you had better get or else you were somehow part of what was wrong with this crazy world. Men wearing dresses with Jackie O sunglasses and combat boots to somehow illustrate to the world in a shocking fashion that they support... or are against.. umm... something. You had to be there. Eddie Vedder’s spastic passion was the expression of a tortured soul pentup by society’s oppression of true human expression. Kurt Cobain’s “I don’t care but I care the most” unrefined swagger was accentuated by his barbarous screams for attention, steeped in the angst of the typical nineties creed of “Am I really so different? Stop staring at me!”.
It was a time to embrace conflict, both inwardly and outwardly. We were all raging against the machine! Somehow, the absurdity of the punk rock movement of the late seventies had been intertwined with the solemnity of the protest songs of the late sixties. We were loud and proud to be loud and proud. It was the birth of today’s SJW, the hipster, the 21st century man that goes into the forest and carves out furniture from hardwood with his bare hands but is still brought to his knees in tears and fits of joy at the sight of a double rainbow.
In hindsight, perhaps it was the evergrowing problem of addiction and the pandemic of steeply rising mental health issues that this country is now having to take a long hard look at that was driving this movement but who really cared. We were all too busy dancing to the siren sounds of Nero’s fiddle to put all of this raw emotion into something that made sense. We were mesmerized by the fires of the burning empire. We warmed our bodies with the heat of the blaze.
We were rebbles with an intangible cause and the fight was what made life so vibrant. Like dogs chasing cars, we wouldn’t know what to do with it if we actually caught it. We were soldiers of misfortune fighting a war in the streets that had been set in motion so long before we ever enlisted to truly understand it. We understood that time was of the essence and the target must be taken down but we were never certain of what the target was. We had identified so much with the ethereal yet palpable struggle that to gain victory would also mean our defeat. The death of our enemy would be the death of our distinction from the enemy. This was a price too heavy to pay. Our egos could not bare the loss of achievement.
So, like John Rambo, we sought to find our own quiet hermitage to pay our penance for the messy battles we waged against the world, only to discover that there is too much fight left in us to traverse the sea of adversaries on the journey to our retreat. Some of us died fighting along the way. For some of us, time took its toll and the exhaustion of years of exertion put us out to pasture. Some still fight and continue to recruit the young and the restless, directing their vigor towards the ghost of oppression.
You can still spot the remnants of the nineties’ soldier in today’s insurgents. Their Rivers Cuomo-esque bespectacled baby faces hidden behind a rugged Pacific North-Western beard and blue collar wardrobe snazzied up with the fashionista stylings of the urban North-East and the swagger of the great street philosophers of bygone Greenwich village fame. They’re ready to fight those who submitted to flight. It is as though the preditor’s threat had fractured the prey into warring factions of equally natural responses to the hazards of existence. We are at war with ourselves by being at war with each other. We will never win and we will never lose. The soundtracks and accoutrements are too attractive to our identities to ever find peace through compromise . So the battle wages on, to the delight of those who sell the uniforms and manufacture the accessories.