October 13th, 2004 1:44pm by rusty-halo | 31 Comments »
I haven’t been reading LJ, um, pretty much at all, lately. (Profuse apologies, please don’t hate me, etc.)
I’ve been steeped in this wierd fit of nostalgia for the past couple weeks. I guess it really hit me that an era of my life is OVER, and an era of culture that felt like MY era is over, and there’s no going back.
I’m 22 and I feel so OLD.
I have this tendency to live in the past, and to brood on it endlessly. I tell myself to be like Spike, but my natural tendency is to be like Angel. Sitting in the dark and mourning the past instead of getting up and moving forward. (I hate that about myself.)
Back in the day when I was an 11-year-old Anne Rice fan, reading “Interview with the Vampire,” I remember being really struck by the way she described the feeling of time going by, the world moving on without you, being stuck in the past. Lestat, it seemed, get could over that, move forward, and continue to live in the world, but Louis couldn’t. And as cool as Lestat was (and as irritating as Louis was), I totally would’ve been Louis.
I mean, I can barely even read books that cover several generations, because I get so upset as the time passes and leaves people behind.
It’s just, I don’t know, MTV is all crap now, and the radio isn’t even worth listening to. I walk into the record store, page through the music magazines, and don’t have a clue who any of these people are. (Except, Scott Weiland is still alive, and in a band with Guns N Roses?? What??)
I miss the days when “grunge,” or whatever stupid name the media wanted to call it, was on top of the world, and I couldn’t imagine it not being there. Music with integrity and passion and honesty and darkness and beauty. I miss the overflowing sincerity of young Eddie Vedder, and Chris Cornell back when he had long hair, and Alice in Chains promising to prove their detractors wrong and last a good long time. I miss cassette tapes, and pouring through tiny lyric booklets and album notes, and NEW records from my favorite bands. God, I miss knowing that a new CD by a band I loved was coming out, and going to the record store to buy it on its first day, and listening to it for months memorizing every sound. I miss the fascinating articles and photos of my favorite artists that I’d find in every single issue of Rolling Stone or Spin. I miss radio DJs who played the music I liked, and knew what music news I would want to hear. I miss being part of a community just by turning on the radio. I miss Alice in Chains on Rockline, and Pearl Jam doing Self Pollution Radio. I miss the boy I had a crush on wearing a Mad Season T-shirt and drawing this amazing picture of Alice in Chains on his Spanish book cover. I miss talking about this music for hours with my best friend Danielle, and writing parody stories about Pearl Jam as a bunch of gang members. I miss falling asleep listening to my favorite records, and waking up every morning to a room covered in these musicians’ photos, and pulling out my sketchpad and spending hours drawing them, while listening to them on the radio, and listening to them on my headphones on the way to school, and writing their lyrics in my notebooks, and drawing their pictures on the back of my school papers. I miss collecting t-shirts, ordering from those mini-catalogs you’d find in magazines like Hit Parader, and then getting their big catalogs in the mail and paging through them for hours. I miss waking up in the morning to choose which XL band t-shirt I’d wear that day, along with my ripped jeans and Converse sneakers. I miss the NIRVANA necklace that I wore every day for years. I miss, every time I found a cool band photo, being able to tack it up on my wall in the huge collage that was my room. I miss dreaming about these bands every single night, and having the songs that played in the background as I slept become incorporated into the dreams. And then exchanging dream stories with Danielle, and spending our lunch hours interpreting each others’ dreams. I miss going to Princeton Record Exchange and spending hours looking through the LPs and import CDs and trying to figure out how to ration my allowance out. I even miss Headbanger’s Ball and Alternative Nation and Kurt Loder on MTV News. I miss staying up till all hours watching MTV trying to see older videos by bands I loved, the absolute joy that came with seeing a video that was new to me. I remember the squee of first seeing AIC’s “Grind,” or Pearl Jam doing “Porch” unplugged and Eddie writing PRO CHOICE on his arm, or watching Nirvana unplugged over and over and over and over….
THAT was my era, and it’s really totally over, and I miss it.
I was actually talking about this with my dad, strangely enough. He loves the New York Yankees, so I asked why, and he said because he loved them when he was seven or eight years old. And when you love something at that age, you lack the critical screen that you might have as an adult, so you REALLY love it, and you’re so young it’s like it gets imprinted in your brain, so you grow up loving it, like loving it becomes a part of you. He pointed out that I’m the same way about Star Wars–if I saw it now, it’s highly unlikely that I’d be such a devoted fan. (Which is true, though I’d probably still like The Empire Strikes Back no matter what.) And I guess the same is true with the music I grew up with.
It sucks because I don’t think I’ll ever experience that again. That formative growing up stage is done. I’m too critical, too picky, there’s a wall there, a critical distance. I’ll never love something so passionately and with such devotion again. Yeah, there’s music or movies or TV that I like now, but it’s not even close to the same level.
It was also, like, that was the first time I was really breaking away from my family and building my own identity. Being a teenager, growing up, and listening to that music are all intimately connected in my mind. I’m so grateful that that is the music that influenced me, and was there for me, during that period. My parents never talked to me about personal integrity, or about standing up for what you believe in, or that it’s important to be yourself and not conform. The musicians I loved taught me that. Kurt Cobain taught me about gay rights, and Eddie Vedder talked to me about feminism and being pro-choice. It was him talking on Self Pollution Radio that got me to read Ms. Magazine. There was a quote I read from Eddie Vedder in early 1994 in Spin Magazine, something like “Just decide you want to be a certain way and go on. You end up being a little more free because of it. In doing so, you’re expressing yourself as an individual–not necessarily as a group. It may produce rage and happiness but it will keep you alive inside.” I was 11 years old, and no one had EVER told me anything like that before. I learned that there was this whole other world out there, that suburban conformity wasn’t the be-all and end-all of life, from these guys. And when I was angry or hurt, when I hated my family and hated the phony suffocating conformity of where I was, I could put on this loud angry passionate REAL music and feel better.
It’s not that I was blindly following them, it’s that these were thoughts that I’d had already but hadn’t developed. I didn’t know anyone else felt the same way. Then I found these people who did, and who were using their position of power to help others, to try to make the world a better place.
Man, this all sounds so cheesy and lame. I don’t think I’m explaining it right. Whatever–got to go back to work now anyway.
Sidenote: last night I was watching this tape I got off Ebay, and it had about a minute long clip of an interview at a RIP magazine party from ‘91 or ‘92. It was EDDIE VEDDER, LAYNE STALEY, and CHRIS CORNELL. All together, talking and joking. Quite possibly the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
Tags:
high school,
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lonely & 
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