Who Am I To Disagree
I like when conversation devolves toward homonyms, when people agree from opposite angles. It’s like a lunar eclipse. A person says “I am opposed to Obama’s health-care plan because it is too socialized.” Another person says “I am opposed to Obama’s health-care plan because it still leaves people out.” In a dataset these two people agree while not actually being in agreement.
Scott Ian was tunelessly talking today in LA Weekly about how he hates Coachella, because it’s for cool kids? I don’t know. I don’t like Coachella either but it’s not cause cool kids. It’s cause everybody else. This is also what I’m talking about.
Marisa Tomei, in The Wrestler, is talking to Mickey Rourke about how great music in the eighties was. He says “then that Cobain pussy had to come along and ruin everything.” Besides being a better epilogue to Prozac Nation than the one Lizzie Wurtzel actually wrote, this is interesting because I actually agree with that premise, that music in the eighties was better. Except not because of Ratt and Cinderella; because of the Smiths, minimal wave, and the embery half-life of disco. Mickey Rourke and I hold identical opinions with grotesquely different DNAs.
The nineties were the greatest that pop culture ever was—the most tormented, the most trenchant, the most genius. When meaningful celebrities died there were no meaningless rumors beforehand. Kurt Cobain’s suicide showed up in Christian songs. I heard about Diana’s death on a car radio in the Deep South and wrote melancholy fiction about it. From Standing In A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand to The Doom Generation, a lively desolation settled over everything like the mouth of all light. For the first time there were grown-up conversations about why it was so weird to be a kid.
Much of this was in the music. Moby, right behind Noam Chomsky for most cited source ever, once said he noticed a lot of musicians skipping the nineties entirely for inspiration, and that he didn’t blame them. I know he said it at the height of Interpol, but if grunge never really got you, the nineties feel sore in retrospect. Nirvana isn’t most analogous to the JFK presidency because of a fallen hero; it’s analogous because of truncated rule. In both cases the touch was Midasian but abbreviated and we never got the full story. Parenthetically: no band with Dave Grohl as a creative partner should ever have been taken that seriously.
Of course it was the most vital period of hip-hop. And in the UK, garage took care of Britpop with pitch plaster and garbage bags. Oasis you shoulda never been, bros.
After The Wrestler came out the critics liked to talk about that exchange of Mickey & Marisa and how for certain kinds of people the nineties really were sad and terrible. Never mind that every decade after your best one is probably sad and terrible.
Moreover, no decade is ever good while it lasts. Only since about June of 2009 has is it been really fun and interesting to sit down with Hotel LaChappelle and get all conjunctival with those colors that no longer exist in nature.
