When I was 14, I was the kind of kid who liked songs about hospitals and anything that could be described as a “cult favorite”. I guess you could say I’m lucky to have grown up to only like that stuff ironically, not only because those are terrible things to be a fan of; but also because I grew up in Arizona and it’s kind of impressive that I never died of heatstroke from wearing so many black sweatshirts.
The music I listened to probably had a lot to do with how weird I was, but it also was undoubtedly the thing I most enjoyed about being weird. By the time I got my driver’s license, I had already seen Panic at the Disco! in concert multiple times, and to this day, if you want to take my copy of “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out” from me, you can pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
The time has come for us, the children of the nineties, to admit that PATD! is our The Who. Fall Out Boy is our The Beatles. Eminem is our Aerosmith. Our Rolling Stones? That’d be Kanye West.
As much as we all like to pretend that we are children of the nineties, if we’re honest, we don’t remember much in the realm of pop culture besides the cast of Sesame Street and the deeply philosophical Backstreet Boys versus *NSYNC debate (let’s all agree that JT won that one — sorry Nick Carter). When Monica Lewinsky was banging the president, we were still years away from the birds and the bees.
Yeah, I’ll admit that it would be cool to be the Kurt Cobain generation, but that’s just not the hand we were dealt. For those of you who find this reality tragic, take comfort in the fact that people 10 years older than us were the ones hit hardest by the recession, and that they will die before us (let’s face it: they got the better music; it’s all we can do to cling to our youth). I say embrace it. Embrace how terrible the slew of Myspace music, post-punk boy bands really were. One day, when our children hear them on the oldies station, they’ll act like their generation sucks because they can’t decipher the slurred lyrics. It’s ok that none of us actually knew what the All American Rejects were saying in “Swing, Swing;” it can be our “Dirty Little Secret.”
The music of the early 2000s is our bad hair. Instead of the mullet, we got “Guess Who’s Back,” which was just as offensive to Moby as mullets were to everyone who had to live through the late 80s.
Yeah, it kind of sucks that our Michael Jackson was the pedophile version of the pop superstar, but who can deny that it made for a lot of great half-baked jokes with predictable punch lines in elementary school?
I guess what I’m saying is that it’s time to be honest. We didn’t have great music in our formative years. We didn’t have a John Lennon or Kurt Cobain to lead the alt army out of the darkness. We were weird kids, but we can’t live any longer in this fantasy land where we were raised on the music of Nirvana.
Haven’t you people ever heard of closing the Goddamn door? No. It’s much better to face these kinds of things with a sense of poise and rationality.
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