THE SHOT LEAVES ME GAGGING FOR THE ARROW
Megan and I have this idea for a mid-90s jukebox in our house, wherever we'll live next year. It would have all the songs that the alterna stations played when we were in seventh grade, which was probably the last time either of us really listened to the radio. Listening to the radio used to be an activity unto itself; I like to think this was before Clear Channel took over forty (or is it sixty?) percent of the airwaves, but it probably wasn't. All of the radio crud that's popular today seems so weak in comparison to the songs that were popular then, but I'm sure that, if I had been 19 in the mid-90s, I would have felt the same way and scorned Garbage and Belly in favor of Echo and the Bunnymen or Husker Du.
But nothing sounds quite like the things that you associated with the older kids, the ones who wore skater jeans and smoked cigarettes on the drive home from school. It was impossible to figure out what to say to them, and it probably still is. Did anybody else make tapes off of the radio during snow days? When we were in seventh grade, that was all my friend Bridgett and I did. I can't remember any of the lyrics, but I do remember thinking hard about the 7 Mary 3 song my crush Ben Sands liked the best, and dancing whenever they played "Blister in the Sun."
I want to cultivate that feeling of remembering a time when coolness was so evasive, not because I think of myself as cool now, but because I know too much about how high school is bunk and I can't really care about it anymore. Is this the reason everybody else is so 1994 nostalgic? Or is it just because the eighties trend, despite our protests to the contrary, took seed anyway? I find it impossible not to think about these things.
Megan and I have this idea for a mid-90s jukebox in our house, wherever we'll live next year. It would have all the songs that the alterna stations played when we were in seventh grade, which was probably the last time either of us really listened to the radio. Listening to the radio used to be an activity unto itself; I like to think this was before Clear Channel took over forty (or is it sixty?) percent of the airwaves, but it probably wasn't. All of the radio crud that's popular today seems so weak in comparison to the songs that were popular then, but I'm sure that, if I had been 19 in the mid-90s, I would have felt the same way and scorned Garbage and Belly in favor of Echo and the Bunnymen or Husker Du.
But nothing sounds quite like the things that you associated with the older kids, the ones who wore skater jeans and smoked cigarettes on the drive home from school. It was impossible to figure out what to say to them, and it probably still is. Did anybody else make tapes off of the radio during snow days? When we were in seventh grade, that was all my friend Bridgett and I did. I can't remember any of the lyrics, but I do remember thinking hard about the 7 Mary 3 song my crush Ben Sands liked the best, and dancing whenever they played "Blister in the Sun."
I want to cultivate that feeling of remembering a time when coolness was so evasive, not because I think of myself as cool now, but because I know too much about how high school is bunk and I can't really care about it anymore. Is this the reason everybody else is so 1994 nostalgic? Or is it just because the eighties trend, despite our protests to the contrary, took seed anyway? I find it impossible not to think about these things.
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