The 90s

by Tom Minkler

In the movie “Flashback,” Dennis Hopper says, “Compared to the 80s, The 90’s are going to make the 60’s look like the 50’s.” In reality (which sometimes bites), the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s made the 90’s. Period. Seems we can’t think of anything new anymore; everything’s a new twist (see?) on an old fadshion. Did we enlighten ourselves with so much evolution that we’ve burned out before it’s over? Blaze of glory; end of story? The millennium - not just the decade, not just the year, not just the century - the millennium, is almost over, and what have we got to show for it? Well quite a lot, actually; particularly in this century, just not much in the last 10 years. It’s as if we went through so much in the rest of the century that we’re all innovated out. We had the industrial revolution and the electronic revolution and the sexual revolution and the evolution revolution all in one century; learned to drive, learned to fly, WALKED ON THE FUCKING MOON and LANDED ON MARS for God’s sake, went from handmade to bandmade mass production, women got the right to vote, blacks can actually use the same bathroom as whites (not that they’d want to, mind you), we realized it’s OK to get a divorce before you kill your spouse or your children, OK to admit you’re wrong, drunk or gay and proud of it, to share how it made you feel to be molested. We no longer have to suffer in silence, suffer in violence; future shlock has come to pass, we’ve pierced our tongues and our privates and actually reached a level of technological advancement so finely honed that we can actually SUCK FAT RIGHT OUT OF OUR BODIES with a vacuum-like device. Try and sell THAT door to door. Or all night on TV.

I mean the 90s are so bereft we’ve even tried to surf on snow. Snurf?. What, skiing’s too good for you? (Speaking of retro) just ask Sonny Bono. What’s next; trying to surf and ice skate on parking lots? Oh they already tried that? Are we going to make baseball a full contact sport? How many re-makes and “retro” albums and compulations are we going to have? Call me spentimental; at least half of the hip hop and rap (make that ‘pop’) songs are completely dependent on the main lick from some obscure 80’s "new wave” pop hit or 70’s afternoon delight, as if hip hop = rip off. Don’t get me wrong, hip hop has been a cool J phenomenon, brought the beat of the street to the rest of the fleet, naughty by nature, salt and pepper de la soul; at least it was until its best proponents hit on another 60’s pastime, smoking pot (now they fittingly call ‘em ‘blunts’). Now hip hop is slip stop in the pit pot, or is that pity party? Although if you think about it, white musicians have stolen from blacks for so long now, why begrudge the creators from borrowing from each other? We’ve revisited surf music and rockabilly, and PUNK, of all things. Even DISCO and LOUNGE! Saturday lite fever.

How many remakes of old movies have we seen? Let me rephrase that, how many bad remakes have they made? Pretty soon they’ll remake “The Wizard of Oz.” Oops, did that. Then “Gone With the Wind.” It’ll be a TV miniseries, with Anthony Edwards as Rhett Butler and Sharon Stone as what’s her face, and McCauley Caulkin will be added as the cute little brat (kid from a first marriage, single mom and all that). And Kramer will play the wacky neighbor. We’re even revisiting anti-trust and conglomeration legislation (taking a hard line with Microsoft), soon to be called the “Microsoft laws.” And we’re revisiting child labor laws, except now we’re enslaving other people’s children, not ours. And we’re revisiting what our army should do, now that we spend our spare time keeping or should we say enforcing the peace, and now that white men have finally allowed women and homosexuals to die right along with them (as long as they don’t tell). And we’re revisiting affirmative action; or is it “infirmative reaction”? We’ve even revised “duh.” D’oh! And speaking of cartoons they’re back in prime time! Beavis and Butthead meet the Flintstones. It was said by someone that we’re only afraid to die because we weren’t paying attention to life; we feel like we missed something. Did we not appreciate these things while we had them? Or weren’t they that grand in the first place? I just want to know when they’re going to bring back tube tops. Then nothing else will matter.

So Retro THIS.

Maybe our nation is finally growing up, maybe the civil war was the terrible twos, just say “no,” where we grew teeth and started to walk, toilet-trained ourselves, then we started growing up faster and faster, broke our arm riding downhill too fast on our bicycle built for blues in 1929, finally realized we should get an allowance for our chores and that we could begin to stick up for ourselves in the 40s, then finally realized we were mad as hell and couldn’t take it anymore, blooming and exploding into puberty and adolescence in one blasted decade, the 60’s, and we’re now realizing we don’t know what to do with our collective soul, that is, what to do with our lives now that we’re graduating from ‘high’ school. Seems like we’ve grown so fast; where did the time go? Where did the dime go? Where did the centurion and the grand old gang go? We’ve been the big man on campus; the bully of the block and now we’re moving to an age where we’re going to meet a bunch of other kids from other schools who’ve grown up along with us while we were too busy looking in the mirror. It’s time to go to collage and there’s a whole wide world out there. It’s time to stop masturbating and start seeing other people. The world’s a smaller place, a faster pace, we haven’t even learned what to do now that we can say what we feel. How do we feel? Now that kids are realizing it’s all bullshit at a much earlier age (instead of having to wait until they’re adults), what do we do with them? Or should I say what do they do with us? Or what do we have to do with each other? Can the bastard offspring of wretched refuse finally see the light?

Folks say we should go back to the way things were in the "good old days," when if you were molested you took it like a good little girl or boy, where you couldn’t find out if you were sexually compatible with someone until you were married and then it was too late, when you were too afraid to get a divorce even if you hated each other, when it was better to throw plates than unseal your fate; where husbands and wives slept in separate beds on television but not always in real life, where ‘bad’ girls who got pregnant went ‘away’ for awhile but everyone knew what happened but no-one could say anything (STUPID, STUPID, STUPID!), when if you wanted an abortion you did it the old-fashioned way, with a coat hanger, when they told you not to sleep with just anyone but when you finally found the one, they said not THAT one; a time when women couldn’t vote and we burned witches, a time when………hey wait a minute; if the good old days were so damn good, they wouldn’t have resulted in THIS! Now, it’s like, duh, like, “My Mom says get a job, but she don’t like the one she’s got” (just emphasizes my point if the best quote I can come up with is from a Green Day song) and we can admit it. We think if we ignore the problems they’ll go away. We think those problems were caused by a breakdown in the system, but it’s the system that CAUSED those problems. We’ve met the enemy and they are us (ruh roh, retro). Now that we can admit we’re here, we can fix us. If we want. Have we learned anything from the silence of the lambs to the slaughter? Sons and daughters, are you glad you came?

Anyway, back to the future. As I was saying, is that all there is? Do we have anything left for the rest of the 90s? Maybe it’s just a natural tendency to reminisce, to revel in our past before taking on the future. One last prom night before going away to college, and you know it’ll never be the same again. But who’d want it to be? Of course even if Jesus was born in exactly the year zero, the millennium isn’t over until the end of the year 2000. But hell we don’t even know if Jesus was really born in 0 (A.D. or B.C.?). What if he was born a few years later, then we have a few more years to think it over. Or what if he was born a few years earlier; hey wait a minute I wasn’t ready! Let’s assume we’re right, and that the world won’t end yet since God doesn’t give a damn about round numbers, then are we ready? When our grandchildren think to us as we sit by the hydrogen glow in our levitating chair in our self-sustaining ecobubble on Ganymede, the only moon of Jupiter found capable of supporting life, luckily just before the asteroid hit earth and turned it into Mars, “Wow you were around at the turn of the millenium?! What was it like?” Will we be able to tell them we knew? In the meantime, to fill out the rest of the century, there’s always electronica…………I rest my case.