Identity Crising Hard Here, Folks. Crising = A New Word I Invented.

I gots a problem, folks.  I got a conundrum in my head.

I'm not sure if I'm a real 90's kid.

Please, please!  I assure you, this doesn't do anything to mar my credibility as a 90's-music enthusiast/blogger-dude!  So I implore you, before you go out and burn all your Thomas Gumbel paraphernalia, please... hear me out.

That's what all you birthers are on about, right?

I love 90's shit to death, as you know.  90's music?  Well... obvi.  Cartoon Cartoons?  Oh my bloody fuck yes.  90's games?  Please, please just stop.  90's movies, such as sci-fi epic The Matrix?  I SAID STOP IT, DAMMIT.

Here's that shit I don't like: all the goddamned "Herp derp if you were a nineties kid you'll totes remember this but if not you like Nicki Minaj and Lil' Wayne and hurr durr durr" posts.  That's a very long descriptor.  I know.  But goddamn it, if you have a Facebook, you know I'm right.

To all you who make those posts and just won't stop: I get it.  Nineties were awesome, nineties were different, nineties produced an arguably (VERY arguably) more well-balanced generation of kids than this generation has so far.

Also to them peoples, I posit to you: how much of the 90's do you actually remember?  I mean yeah, I remember all the toys and the existence of the shows and stuff, but I sure as fuck wasn't a conscious enough human being to put it together into one cohesive decade of experience.  Part of that's because I didn't experience the whole damn nineties.  I was born two whole years before Kurt Cobain ate gunsmoke.  Shit, I was eight when Y2K didn't happen.  I mean like, the computery business and the nuke-launching, not the turn of the century.  Cuz that like, totally happened.

Hardy har har.  I'll have you know I moved out from there several months ago.

Get it?  Cuz I was living under...  Oh forget it.

Anyways, I'll tell ya right now, the oldest person I saw post one of those things, since they were "the thing" to post, is maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe mAyBe maybe m.a.y.b.e maayyyybbeeeeee maybemaybemaybe MAYBE ah say MAYBE twenty-four now.  That's compared to my current twenty-one.  I was born in 1992, so yeah, the oldest person I see screaming in everyone's faces, "REMEMBER THE NINETIES, GUIZE??!!" was born in 1988.  That's... okay, I guess that's fine.  You were well on your way out of middle school when you were holed up in your basement with crates of Twinkies, canned soup and bottled water, your dad guarding the door with a double-barrel.  I'm sorry, you'll have to speak up a bit.  What's tha- What do you mean "just you"?!  I...  Okay, whatever, quirky family get-togethers notwithstanding, you see what I mean?  Everyone that actually remembers the nineties, those who lived and breathed that particular zeitgeist, who actually had ups and downs during that period beyond 'ow I scraped my knee' and 'wah I can't find my Happy Meal toy' - I had a way to end this sentence.  Something about them not doing that.  Well.

Hey, I'm sorry.  I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.  Okay, here, to make you feel better:

We sure as fuck ain't this generation.

...Criminy, I'm sorry.  I had better images in mind, but I guess Google decided to get rid of every fucking image that makes fun of kids these days.

Here's the stickiest part of the wicket, folks.  We ain't exactly 90's kids.  Sorry, that's the double-truth, Ruth.  But neither are we 2000's kids.  There's no decade between 90's and the oughties.  So uh... what the fuck are we?

Shit.  I blew my own mind there.  Gonna go think about this for a while.  Might do a follow-up post where I actually answer my own questions for once.

Fuck Happened to Green Day?

Sorry guys.  It had to be asked.

Exhibit A:
(not that I'm gonna keep with the theme of various "exhibits" of evidence and whatnot; I just wanted to say "Exhibit A")

See that?  That's old Green Day.  Like Green Day from when I was a tot.  I'd chill with those motherfuckers if I could.  They'd probably still be dicks, but they'd be hilarious dicks whose pastimes include drive-by moonings and raging with chicks with tattoos and daddy-issues, things I'd gladly participate in, preferably while wasted.  Shit, mah hurr used to be the same color as Billy Joe's as of like, a year ago, looked about as dope.

Okay, so far I haven't really said much about their music.  The guys above, sure, they were your standard Nineties Sapiens, kids that looked like they dressed by jumping into a dumpster full of hand-me-downs while covered in honey.  Honey that turned their hair funny colors, for some reason.  They played the latest evolution of punk.  Nothing intrinsically special, but they did it better than most.  You could tell they had potential, as a lot of their songs had real hooks and an attitude that welcomed the alienated rather than the alienation.  Don't get me wrong, Green Day was never one of my favorites, but I've got a real soft-spot for the old stuff. Shit, Brain Stew was the first song I ever learned (on a stolen guitar on Halloween, half-naked on the back porch... and I think I just got another idea for an entry).

Well anyway, then this happened.

Is that Pete Wentz's dad and his two work buddies?

I don't even...  Really, I have no idea where to begin.  I guess first I'd have to make the obligatory "lol they're wearing guyliner" comment, but...  remembering who these guys once were, it's really not that funny.

So uh... I guess they branched out?  There's that.  Given, it was to middle-schoolers and other types of people who put their fingers in their ears and hold their breath when people start talking about how the grown-up world of politics and business and global events and economics actually works.  No, I'm not bashing all people that don't have an in-depth understanding of all those things, because, well, I fall into that category.  I'm bashing those whose uninformed (and uninformative) opinions tend to show up in modern-day Green Day lyrics.  "One twenty-one guns, lay down your arms..."  Seriously?  These guys went from the kind of dicks that'll spooge in your beer to the ones that'll drunkenly corner you into a conversation about how "legalizing pot would totally save the economy, bro" while he smokes right into your face.  Weirdly, I'd way rather deal with the first type.

I know a musician's head getting bigger as their music gets worse isn't exactly a new thing, but Green Day has one of the worst cases I've seen.  Remember that little Usher fiasco?  Yes, I get it.  Dick move on Usher's part; if you're that big of an act, you don't pull that shit on the people you share a bill with.  But then what, you... you throw a fucking tantrum?  You're over forty, dude.  And I don't wanna hear shit like "you're never too old for punk" or whatever, because that was probably the least "punk" thing I've ever seen.

Once again, I've depressed myself into not wanting to finish with any real point.

You know what?  No, fuck that.  Here, Green Day.  Here's punk.

That kid's probably never heard the word "punk" in the context we're talking.  His mother was probably casting the gentleman on the left wary looks, saying "No no, keep walking, don't ask the man why he's covered in spikes."  Now the kid knows about something new.  He can put it with a friendly face, he knows it's about finding a weird kind of solidarity in a not-so-solid world.  Not in those words of course, but he knows it's about dressing how you want and cutting your hair all goofy and doing it with your friends, and not hiding it from the world, whether they want to touch your spikes or ask why you did that to your hair.  Maybe it changed that kid's life, got some kind of gears turning.  Cuz punk's not the fucking attitude, it's not breaking instruments and giving the finger (of course, those things are all in good fun if it's not to assist your bitching) and moshing while you're covered in mud and beer.  It's the ultimate safety net for the bottom of the barrel.  You lose your job and your place and your girlfriend? Throw out the fucks, shave your head, start from the ground up.  DIY, motherfucker.  It's a world of do-what-you-need-to-do-or-don't-doesn't-matter-let's-get-drunk-and-keep-the-neighbors-up.

That's something I feel like they used to get.  And they may have moved on, but they sure as hell didn't grow up.

A Wild Serj Appears... It's Pretty Fucking Effective

I couldn't tell you when I first became interested in nineties music and, more importantly, what it represents to me.  First nineties band I really listened to consistently was System of a Down, which all started with, of course, Chop Suey.  I was at an "Eighth Grade Lock-In".  In case you, dear reader, don't know what that is, it's exactly what it sounds like.  Unless it sounds like a bunch of eighth-graders being locked in somewhere and hunted down one by one, which would have been awesome, but that's not what happened to us.  Unless it sounds like an eighth-grader with locked-in syndrome, which is not very awesome, and is actually tragic and horrible.  That also didn't happen, thankfully.  Unless you think it sounds like being locked into the body of an eighth-grader, which would also be fucking terrible, especially if you couldn't control what the eighth-grader was doing and you were forced to just watch through their eyes as they ran around being retarded eighth-graders.  The "Eighth Grade Lock-In" was not this either.  What it was, and what I'm pretty sure it sounds like, is the eighth grade gets to stay at the school overnight and there's a fuckton of sweet activities.  Actually, a couple of them were pretty lame, but they were fun because everybody was there, friends or otherwise.  It was... a really surreal night, because of this.  Not so much because everyone was there, but because everyone was there AND, for once in our eighth grade lives, no one was a dick to anyone else.  For that reason alone, what was basically a guided activities fair was made awesome.  Or, shit, maybe I'm just looking at this all through rose-colored glasses and it was actually pretty abominable.  I really can't remember.  Relating to the first sentence of this obnoxiously long paragraph, my memory has more holes than... than uh... something with a lot of holes in it.

So when the hell did I hear Chop Suey in any of this?  I'm glad you asked!  One of the activities, which took place in the band room, was drumming!  Not on a real drum set though.  We all got these different sorts of tribal drums, which was pretty cool.  We were seated in I think three semi-rings around the front of the band room, where there was a real drum set.  Seated behind this real drum set was an alum of our middle school, who was now in high school.  Oooooooooo.  Some dude who I think taught at her music school introduced the activity, told us who she was (I don't remember her name at all; not like I'd put it up here if I did), and allowed her a demonstration.  Then this random chick drummed to Chop Suey.  And it was fucking awesome, and I probably got a boner, cuz that girl, who I'm pretty sure was like a solid 6.5 in my eighth-grade eyes (my standards were ridiculously high back then for no good reason) rocketed up to a 9 because, let's be real, playing an instrument alone, no matter the kind of music, gives you a one-point-minimum bonus.

Unfortunately, we didn't get to drum along to Chop Suey, even on our silly tribal drums (like we could have).

So the night wore on and we dicked around there was a dance and shit and stuff happened, I don't really remember/care.  That's a lie, I do, it's a good memory, it's just important to the general thingus of this entry.  I slept through the next day, since I hadn't caught a wink the night before (not that I'd wanted to).  All through this, through the way-too-much soda, through the bouncehouses in the gym and the dance and the next day's power-nap, I remembered one phrase in particular: "my self-righteous suicide".  Soon as I woke up, I was googling it.

And holy fuck was I confused.  I kept getting results for "Chop Suey".  What the fuck?  Bitch, I'm trying to look up the title to a world-thrash masterpiece.  I am clearly not interested in Chinese food.  Not at the moment.  That's how powerful this song was to me (well, still is).  My constant interest in a heaping, steaming plate of General Tso's was temporarily put on the backburner by this one goddamned song that I needed to find the name of.  Seriously, it was starting to get to me.  The links I was clicking on kept talking about putting on makeup and putting keys up on tables and I knew for a fact that the song I'd heard had no mention of Chinese food, nor could it be about that.  Actually, knowing System of a Down, that could very well be the case.  They're quite sneaky.  Like a song about pizza called Chic 'N' Stu.  Who thinks of that shit?

So I must not have been reading the full lyrics it showed online, because for whatever reason, I didn't see/notice the "self-righteous suicide" that all the kids were talking about.  Finally, I relented and plugged this "Chop Suey System of a Down" into the YouTubes.  And lo, it was the first taste of nu-metal and ergo the nineties that my pubescing angry mind had been secretly searching for this whole time.  After listening to Chop Suey at least a dozen times, I wiled away the rest of the day listening to whatever else YouTube had to offer me in the way of these four Armenian gentlemen that wrote what is, to this day, some of the most arresting and ball-grabbing music I've heard on more levels than just "Hey, this is pretty heavy".  I wasn't a happy kid in middle school.  But for once, I'd managed to have two great days in a row.  And that was a wonderful feeling.