The Truth Behind The "Boring" Fad That Is 90s Nostalgia

"There's a lot of like: 'How could someone so young know about (the 90s)?' And it's like, well there would have to be some type of tool available to people with a computer where you could search things."
- Tavi Gevinson (15-year-old youth website editor)

"But I can't get this feeling off my mind"
- Yuck (two-year-old indie rock band from London)

I was just recently reminded of the fact that I am not normal. This is a fairly weird thing to happen when you're in your thirties - you've already developed a decade's worth of instincts designed to keep you alive in a world dictated by normal people, so the minute you step back from the rat race and remember that you're not one of them, never was one of them, and will never be one of them, you get so paralyzed that you just want to lie down and curl up listening to "Wish Fulfillment" by Sonic Youth because that's what you used to do in 1992, when you were fourteen, back when pop culture was still filled with things that made weird and uncool people feel comfortable.

This widely unread blog has never ever been about the zeitgeist, but recently my musings about the 90s - the decade of my puberty and adolescence - has been right smack in the middle of the zeitgeist. The 20th anniversary of Nirvana's "Nevermind" was recently marked by the release of a 4-disc commemorative edition. Cameron Crowe is about to release his Pearl Jam documentary covering the band's 20-year career. R.E.M., a band born in the 80s but peaked in popular culture in the early 90s, recently called it quits, prompting a deluge of tributes and an onslaught of nostalgia.

Ah, nostalgia. The zeitgeist has also been all over that word lately. Chuck Klosterman recently wrote a characteristically unsentimental deconstruction of the current nostalgia trend. Other thoughtful pieces, namely from Slate, and Pitchfork describe the 90s nostalgia through the lens of postmodernism; suggesting that this particular nostalgia isn't really directed to what the era was really "about" but through some other clouded construction. This is a very intelligent, graduate student-y way of seeing things. Unfortunately, it's also inaccurate.

* * *

I recently just discovered this band called Yuck and have been playing their eponymous debut album incessantly thoughout the week. I never really do that anymore. But Yuck sounds too much like early 90s Dinosaur Jr., Teenage Fanclub, and Sonic Youth that they inspired me to revive my listen-to-this-daily routine from that same era. This doesn't mean that their songs take me back to a place I yearn to return to, blah, blah, blah. It's because they've already infused that ache in their music. Instead of inspiring nostalgia, Yuck's music already sounds the way nostalgia feels.



I love that in their song "Get Away" Daniel Blumberg sings the line "Summer sun says get out more I neeeeeeed you...I waaaaaaant you" like he's screaming at someone or something that makes him really happy but he knows he won't have. I love that most of their songs have that lurking exhiliration and hope underneath the melancholy because that's exactly how it felt like to be a teenager in the early 90s, when everything was boring in its pre-internet stasis and you had no outlet for your energy, your weirdness.

What's really remarkable about the band is that they sound nostalgic for an era that I'm pretty sure they were too young to remember vividly anyway. Then you get to read about someone like Tavi Gevinson and you realize that this actually makes more sense than it should.

* * *

Tavi Gevinson is not your average 15-year-old and she's unapologetic about that fact. She's very smart and ironic for age. She is the editor of rookie.com, a highly intelligent website for teenage girls. She has a post-naive understanding of media and technology that makes her think more like Chuck Klosterman and less like Taylor Swift. She writes very funny and insightful pieces that makes 15-year-old me sound like a four-year-old. She models herself after 90s cartoon character Daria and has a random thrift-store DIY fashion sensibility straight out of that same era.


In short, she's not normal. And the fact that she's fixated with 90s culture has everything to do with this, because the 90s was the last era to celebrate weirdness and individuality. All of those social and media critics who look down on 90s nostalgia are right - we miss the days when culture was still homogenized by passive (as opposed to interactive) media. What they're failing to remember is what thrived because of that homogeneity.


When youth culture got tired of being dictated by traditional tri-media, it went further and deeper into the fringes. That's how the independent music scene in the 80s happened, and how the 90s "Alternative Music" exploded in the midst of all the Michael Boltons and Whitney Houstons and Mariah Careys of that same era. Now we finally have what we always wanted: democratization of pop culture - we download what we want (iTunes Store, torrent sites, etc.), say what we want (blogs, twitter) and project an image of ourselves that we want (facebook). But this supposedly utopian setup has had the same effect on culture that Communism had on Marx's ideals: it was better on paper than in practice.

All that the internet and social media have done is make everyone aspire to be "liked". Yes, it's true that there is no more paradigm but this hasn't translated into more individualism; it just multiplied the ways to be "accepted", to be "normal". The freaks, the geeks, the weird and uncool people weren't liberated. High School only got bigger and the cool, popular people are still in charge. Even if they have a hundred different music genres on their iPods.

Tavi Gevinson is the sort of girl I would've fallen in love with 18 years ago. She's the sort of girl I would've happily played Yuck songs for. I would've dedicated the lines "You could be my destiny, you could mean that much to me" to her. I obviously can't be in love with her today because that would be creepy and illegal. But I can be and am in love with the idea of a kindred spirit, the feeling that not being normal shouldn't mean you're a horrible person, that the goal of existence is not to be "accepted" but to be authentic. So I don't care what anyone else thinks of my admiration for some pubescent girl who likes coloring her hair blue and wearing granny glasses. They can all go fuck themselves.

Tavi Gevinson and Yuck are nostalgic for an era they never witnessed. But they've heard about it and read about it and listened to bands that were a part of it. And what they saw was a place where they were welcome.