Most golden ages are not obvious at the time. I lucked out being in high school in a moment where grunge matured, hip hop got amazing and edm started to rise.
Smells Like Teen Spirit exploded freshman year. The grunge wave got east soon after that. On the other end of the parking lot Wu Tang was played again and again as Biggie and Tupac battled. And the skaters were shifting from punk rock to this new vibe they heard at warehouse raves as techno was escaping from the lab in Dallas and NYC.
The movie Kids catches this time really well. Words don’t quite do it justice.
2d ago
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I think I am on board with your assessment @ACTUALLYASLEEP
Four reasons:
* stylistic diversity: punk was born and commercialized at one end, hip hop at the other. We take this for granted today but at the time the jaggedness of going from the Clash to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the Treacherous Three, and ESG (all of whom they collaborated with at one point) was exhilarating. The sheer confluence of everything was unprecedented.
* MTV as a cultural force: I mean, it was called Music Television 😉 and this was its finest hour. The assumption was that music mattered more than everything else, otherwise why would you watch it?
* legacy icons: Prince, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Bruce, Bowie. I could go on. You may not like them all but you’ve gotta respect the bodies of work over decades.
* the roots of indie culture were born then: bands like R.E.M., Husker Du, Replacements, the Smiths and a million others were blazing a trail (radio, live DIY tours, etc) that created “College Rock” and ultimately indie and here we are today staring in awe at what they made from scratch.
The Reagan era sucked to live through but a lot of great music came out of the struggle.
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Mar 14, 2025
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being young is hard, you’re full of intense and volatile emotions, the world is an overwhelming and scary place, adults often lack patience or compassion for the intense experiences of youth, and music makes people feel less alone.
when i was in middle school/high school, people would make fun of me for listening to “wrist cutter music” (this was over 10 years ago). emo/alt rock/pop punk was pretty big then and a lot of it was pretty angsty and/or sad.
grunge was huge with young people in the 90s, and that was a pretty angsty/disillusioned movement too.
i’m not sure i see this as a new trend? i think the music itself changes but the appetite for art that speaks to these big feelings remains.
Apr 21, 2024
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The year itself sucked ass, of course. but I always argue that 2004 was the year we fully and totally switched over from Gen X to Millennial mass culture and became fully submerged in millennial zeitgeist as the default. Highlights include:
-Mean Girls and Napoleon Dynamite (Mean girls for Boys) come out, forever ousting the Road Trip/American Pie Gen X comedy dynamic
-The Simpsons and South Park fading as Adult Swim style anti-comedy comes into focus
-George Bush reelected, solidifying millennial callousness towards most federal institutions
I guess the "rec" is just paying attention to these kinds of longer-term tidal changes in culture. It makes me feel like a wise man of the mountain when I tell 20 year olds about shit from before they were born
Aug 7, 2024
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This is a cookbook with no recipes that will teach you how to cook everything. It covers everything there is to know about food -- from how it was discovered, how man changed it, how it is grown, how it is harvested and how to prepare and cook it. It dramatically changed my cooking life.
Jun 11, 2024
May 1, 2025
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Travel is about getting along with strangers. Being kind and generous tends to pay off 10x.
Also never book a connecting flight if at all possible. Takeoff and landing are your only points of failure don’t multiply them.
Aug 8, 2024