#22: Welcome to the 90's
Even though the most important question of the week is ‘Who bit Beyoncé,’ everyone is nonetheless talking about the Roseanne reboot, which, according to Roxane Gay is funny but also really, really not funny at all. That’s enough for me. Despite my boundless appetite for television thinkpieces, I’m going to opt out of the copious inches dedicated to whether or not the show is an accurate reflection of contemporary American society.
Instead, maybe I’ll just wait for the forthcoming Murphy Brown revival, recently announced by CBS. The world in which then-Vice Presidential candidate Dan Quayle admonished (fictional character) Murphy Brown for choosing to become a single mother seems in some ways quaint and distant, and in others very timely indeed. According to this article in Time, “(t)he day after the Murphy Brown reboot was announced, Republican Senate candidate Courtland Sykes released a public statement proclaiming that “I don’t want [my daughters] to grow up into career-obsessed banshees who forego home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she-devils.”
Yikes. I guess that makes it a good time to check in on the fate of the sassy heroine of Clarissa Explains it All. Apparently a reboot of the show, which ran from 1991-1994, is in early development at Nickelodeon, with Melissa Joan Hart set to reprise her role twenty-odd years on, most likely having grown into a career-obsessed banshee, another nasty woman pushing forty.
***
As the world turns, what’s old becomes new again, and it’s time to face the fact that the 90’s are old. Cards Against Humanity has launched a 90’s nostalgia deck, Urban Outfitters is selling Caboodles, and zines (particularly foodie zines!) are bigger than ever.
In the first of series that could not be more straight up click-bait for unabashed 90’s nostalgists (read: olds) like myself, author Rebecca Schuman unpacks, or in her words, eulogizes the slacker boyfriends of our youth, epitomized by Ethan Hawke’s Troy Dyer in Reality Bites.
Schuman, backed up by this 2014 takedown by the always-awesome Lindy West (how did I miss this piece?!) basically points out that the shenanigans of this ambition-less yet superiority-complexed shithead dude would NOT fly with young women today. I won’t say that 17 year old me wasn’t at least a little swooned by Troy’s grunge-era Holden Caulfield philosophizing, but personally, I’ve always been way more drawn to the Lloyd Dobler school of life.
***
Admittedly it’s weird to be on this end of the generational pendulum, as my parents must have felt when I was obsessed with wearing bellbottoms and worshipping Jim Morrison in high school. Writer Sara Tatyana Bernstein, in two separate essays discusses the time-traveling mash-ups that came to define 90’s subcultural (aka ‘alternative’) style:
There was no eBay or Etsy, only secondhand stores where ’70s bell bottoms, ’50s circle skirts, and ’80s sweaters might be jumbled together with World War II-era uniforms. And every style we created from cheap leftovers was co-opted and sold back to us at higher price.
Having spoken with a number of forty-something women, Bernstein argues that for those of us who expressed a kind of rebellion and dare we say, irony when we paired fishnets and Docs with frouffy vintage prom dresses scored at the Salvation Army (I mean, didn’t YOU?), our sense of style has actually evolved very little in our adulthood relative to previous generations. This, she says, can be attributed to the imposter-y, fake-adult feelings that sneak up on us even as we move into middle age.
Speaking for myself, I couldn’t agree more. Sure, I’ve got more money now, but somehow my personal style remains an uncategorizeable moving target. Case in point, today a friend called my blouse (a voluminously-sleeved black silk embroidered Dries van Noten number) ‘minimalist flamboyant.’ Tomorrow, who knows? I caught myself eyeballing some massively clunky Fluevogs the other day, and fishnets still play a not insignificant role in my wardrobe, so…
***
While GenX has lost more than its fair share of icons and iconoclasts, a good number have managed to stick around for a second act. Take, for example one of my personal favorites, the (remarkably persistent) Breeders, led by the indestructible Kim Deal, who days ago delivered another timelessly cool performance on Conan O'Brien's stage.
If lovelorn angst was your thing (um, yeah it was is) you can catch Boston-based Buffalo Tom on their 25th anniversary tour for 1992’s seminal Let Me Come Over. As a matter of perspective, frontman Bill Janovitz is also a successful realtor in the Cambridge suburbs representing some killer mid-century modern homes...
Make what you will of this, the aptly and unironically named ‘I Love the 90s’ tour, featuring Vanilla Ice, Coolio, Salt-n-Pepa, and even Color Me Badd, which will be hitting an amusement park concert stage near you this summer.
I’ll leave you with this Vulture interview with the Beastie Boys' Mike D, who, with his bad self running things, captures what feels like a sensible ethos for GenX’ers moving into their (our?) next stage: “I’m interested in trying to do things that I feel like I have no business doing.”
***
NB: And just for the record, the Pew Research Center has finally cleared up the ambiguity of the generational thresholds, once and for all, so you can take your Xennial bullshit and shove it. Oh, and btw, hipsters are over.