Nevermind turned thirty in the last week. I was eight years old when it was released, and so can’t claim to have been all over it at the time. I do distinctly remember a school dance in Year 7 when Smells Like Teen Spirit played and clearly that stuck with me for a reason, but largely I didn’t really appreciate Nirvana until ten years after their day.
I recently watched Woodstock 99, a HBO documentary exploring the disastrous music festival, where the 1990s died at the hands of Fred Durst, a lot of angry young men, and corporate exploitation.
The 90s started off with a cultural bang of creative energy and by the time the decade ended it felt like everyone had played a game of telephone and spat out an entirely different violent and misogynistic message at the end. I’ve added In Bloom to this month’s playlist, since it basically predicted this very situation.
But aside from all of the above, I was reminded of how bizarrely walled off and tribal Gen-X music goers were from one another – attaching a fierce cultural identity to their taste in music. The attitude of “if you listen to something from the sixties, you suck” or “if you like a top forty artist, then I hate you as I hate them” and the passive-aggressive “I like music which uses real instruments”. It’s a curious attitude which still seems to persist to this day in many of the generation above me.
I can’t help but wonder if these same types have now attached a political cultural identity along the same lines.
Lockdown is over in just a few days. Here’s some tunes!