It was an album by the band Gin Blossoms in the nineties. And so was Definitely Maybe by Oasis, an oxymoron that represented the slacker mode of unmotivated and pridefully bitter twenty-somethings.
This was the decade of gloom, where pessimism derailed eighties optimism and the machine of Reagan era excess broke down with a plume of smoke billowing from distant Baby Boom in the fields of Vietnam. Desperate to claim an identity of their own, the youth willed this freight train of counter-culture into a lather of angsty music and anti-fashion. And through these mediums of expression, these wayward young adults, fraught with pre-millennium tension, were intent on making their own claim to a proper rebellion, and ultimately, some meaning to a jangled life littered with disillusionment.
Where the parent’s sixties revolution was largely fueled by the discovery of psychedelic drugs, theirs was more about communing through the artists that did the experimenting for them; modern martyrs who expressed their feelings through guitar feedback and lyrics about the disenchantment of adulthood and their frustration with authority’s hypocrisy. And nothing could represent the struggle better than one iconic photo on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine with Kurt Cobain’s plain white t-shirt noticeably scribbled upon with the words Corporate Magazines Still Suck.
Then, like all movements spurned by the young, it reached a zenith and faded as the inevitability of time quelled their once tumultuous energy. And the hangover hit with the arrival of the year 2000. Brittany Spears and Backstreet Boys topped the charts.
And there’s been nothing important since.
So, what will define the next culturally conscious empowerment of the people as 2020 looms? New Wonderful Experience?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free