A couple things this week sparked my memories of the 90’s. I started the 90’s in middle school and ended them in college with Y2K. It was a truly amazing decade, except, looking back, the following.
The 90’s started off great for music and then turned into the worst steaming pile of garbage ever created. Rap and Grunge exploded, R&B was at an apex, Metal was redefined and even Country got huge with popular America for the first time. Then everyone just gave up in the mid 90’s. Boy bands and jailbait girls took over pop, rappers got killed, heroin and suicide took out Grunge and rock was taken over by Creed and Limp Bizkit. When I was in college, I could stick my head out the door and hear five different Dave Matthews Band CD’s going at once. It’s like someone in 1997 got a voodoo doll for good music and set it on fire.
Internet? Sort of. The internet was here!…until your sister picked up the phone. Good bye internet!
Pagers. Before cell phones, I got a pager. Three scenarios. My buddy paged me at my parents’ house instead of calling me…I called him back in an unnecessary move. Other one, my jerk friends would text me a girls’ number, which I would awkwardly call and realize I got pager trolled. Or lastly, mom paged me to call in, which meant party over. Pagers sucked.
CD player destroyed CD’s for every pothole. I had to buy the same CD’s two and three times. Also, almost everyone I know got a CD stuck in their player for weeks. I had Charlie Daniels Greatest Hits stuck in mine and I nearly went to therapy. Four weeks later, I got it out and almost had Charlie Daniels withdrawal like a Stockholm syndrome sufferer. I almost tossed it back in out of habit.
Butt cut. About 3/4 of the guys I hung out with had a butt cut. Mine was a shortened version, but with bangs blended in. Plus the shaved head with bangs only is the worst guys’ hairstyle of the last 50 years, hands down. It looked like your head was set on fire and only the bangs made it out alive.
It wasn’t all bad, to give a little hope to everyone that lived through that time. No social media meant my generation escaped cataloged embarrassment excepting disposable cameras and we didn’t get political posts from sort of friends of friends every five minutes. No one texted – texting has its place, but I’ve literally seen entire tables of people on their phones not talking to each other. Heroin wasn’t destroying every town under 40,000 people in America. They invented the 30 pack of beer. I’ll stop there, that really was the best achievement of the 90’s, sorry internet, here’s your runner up trophy.