May 2019

1994 Was a Prison of My Own Making

We tend to recall the past not on its own merits but in terms of what it lacked in retrospect. Virtually the entire period of planetary existence is lumped into the condescending unit “before Christ.” Our hominid ancestors are described not as astonishing animals that harnessed the destructive force of fire, but “prehistoric” — people…

Evan Dando Knows He’s Lucky

Evan Dando is dead. Those rumors were floating as far back as 1996, when heroin was chic, grunge was a thing, and Mr. Dando, the troubled 29-year-old lead singer of the punk-pop band the Lemonheads, seemed destined to follow Kurt Cobain to an early grave. On the face of it, that narrative seemed odd. In…

It Smelled Like Gen X Spirit

Every once in a while a fragrance comes along that causes a rupture in the history of olfaction as we know it, and suddenly it is clear that the scent of the world will never be exactly the same. Such was the case in October 1994, when CK One had its debut. It was the…

All Black Everything

For those of us who grew up black in the 1980s, going to the movies meant picking a character to identify with and pretending that person was black. It was a great era for film: There was “The Breakfast Club” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Back to the Future” and “Top Gun.” But black people…

Stuff Your ‘Rules’

It was the worst of times; just trust me on this. It was a time when almost every single movie ended with a wedding, no iota of nuance to be found anywhere, even if the woman in the movie had just spent 83 minutes prior making a case as to why she didn’t want to…

Actually, Gen X Did Sell Out, Invent All Things Millennial, and Cause Everything Else That’s Great and Awful

What is an X? An empty set, a place-holder, a nothing that fills a void until an actual something comes along. For the members of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, that was never us. “They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own,” wrote Time magazine in a 1990 cover…

When Grunge Made Blue-Collar Culture Cool

There were many reasons for a 16-year-old boy to love the noisy, brooding music known as grunge, but here’s a personal one: The bushy-bearded, drowsy-eyed guitarist for Soundgarden, Kim Thayil, looked like my uncle George. My father’s younger brother had been a sporadically employed welder and pot smoker who wore a ponytail, which was a…