Maybe it’s a lyric. Or a guitar solo. Or the bridge. Whatever it may be, there’s always small parts to songs that you remember. Taking inspiration from a 2004 Retrocrush post, I’m giving you a list of some of my favorite song parts. From classic tunes of the 1960s and ’70s to R&B breakdowns of the ’90s, there a lot to listen to. Maybe you’ll think of some of your own!
It’s been more than a decade since I wrote about it, but my high school had some random elective courses and the one that I have some random memories of was You and the Law. I took it thirty years ago durin gmy junior year, and it was one of those classes that existed to give me a break from APs and a nightmare of a physics course. We went to the Suffolk County courthouse in Riverhead to see some proceedings, and we visited the county jail where we could get yelled at my inmates–I mean, “scared straight.”
I say to you idols of carefully studied disillusionment
And you worshipers who find beauty in only fallen things
That the greatest Grace we can aspire to is the strength to see the wounded walk with the forgotten and pull ourselves from the screaming blood of our losses to fight on undaunted all the more
Kilcher, Jewel, “I Say to You Idols.” A Night Without Armor, HarperCollins, 1998, p. 52.
Though it’s more of an artifact of 1990s pop culture these days, Jewel’s poetry collection A Night Without Armor was a New York Times bestseller when it came out, with more than a million copies sold. While big sales of a book connected to a popular singer aren’t out of the ordinary, sales of poetry books rarely ever hit this level and if they do, they’re from well-known poets, poets who are currently making or have made a big impact on our culture, or classical bards like Homer and Virgil. Even Jewel said she had a hard time getting a publisher to print it despite being huge at the time.
If you remember A Night Without Armor, you probably remember a few things: first, its success; second, its mixed reviews, which range from praise to balanced criticism to insults*; and third, that moment with Kurt Loder.
Though the individualistic teenagers I teach might be loathe to admit it, they all wear the same clothes. Oh sure, they all find ways to express themselves, but self-expression via nonconformity in clothing has been de rigueur for adolescents since they first gained a sense of purchasing power in the 1950s or 1960s. They may all say they aren’t one of the sheep-like masses, but look in their closets and you’ll find a hooded sweatshirt, a pair of stretch leggings, and a beat-up pair of jeans in the same way my generation had an array of flannel shirts, alternative band T-shirts, a beat-up pair of jeans, and the Lands’ End Squall Jacket.
First introduced by the Dodgeville, Wisconsin-based clothier in 1983, the Squall is a medium-weight nylon jacket with a fleeced lining that is suitable for the majority of autumn, winter, and early spring when the weather is cold but not the Ice Station Zebra conditions that make you bust out your Lands’ End parka. The company says that it “best exemplifies all of our know how. Popular for its classic style and versatility, it’s reliably warm, and made from durable windproof waterproof fabric.” That definitely appeals to the parent in me who wants to make any $50-100 jacket last as long as possible, and Lands’ End definitely knows I want dependability when it comes to my purchase at least according to their explanation of why the jacket is called “Squall”:
Reminiscent of our nautical past, the word ‘squall’ usually defines a sudden gust of wind bringing on storms of rain, snow, or sleet. Not the most comforting of images, is it? But at Lands’ End, Squall has come to define dependable warmth for generations … you might not be a captain sailing a ship through the choppy ocean but you certainly weather your fair share of storms throughout the day. Unlike a typical squall, our winter jacket may not be the cause of the storm will certainly be there to keep you cozy, dry, and protected from whatever is brewing on the horizon.
(source: Landsend.com)
I know that’s a lot to say about a jacket, or any article of clothing for that matter but the Squall jacket earned that pretense. My parents bought me my first Squall jacket sometime in the fourth or fifth grade; it was blue and I’m pretty sure that my sister got a red or pink colored one, and they were pretty much permanent fixtures during the transitional seasons all the way through high school, not just in my house but in my school and town as a whole. It was, in a sense, part of the suburban uniform of the 1980s and early 1990s. Those of a certain vintage and upbringing may remember going outside in the late winter and early spring, riding around on your bike in search of a friend to play with, and once you found them trying to figure out what to do because both of your moms kicked you off the Nintendo and out of the house. Sometimes, you got a bunch of other people together and played a rough game of touch football; other times, you just kept riding around while carrying on a conversation about whatever kid or teen topics came up. The specifics really didn’t matter, to be honest; you just remember that you were wearing the jacket.
As another year draws to a close, I’ve been reading a lot of list-based blog posts and articles, most of which are about books, movies, and music that I more than likely missed this year because I have no idea how to pay attention to any of it anymore. I miss the glory days of Entertainment Weekly because while I was a regular reader and subscriber, I at least knew what was out there even if I didn’t always see, read, or listen to it. And you could say the same for sports, which I have been watching more of lately but still have a problem following. I don’t know what it is, but since I don’t watch SportsCenter anymore, I can’t seem to remember to check standings or keep up with what’s going on in various leagues. Shit, I can barely tell you who the major players on a number of the teams I follow.
This was always kind of true, even when I was younger. My parents did not get the newspaper and we didn’t have cable, so the only way for me to keep up with scores was the local news; I often missed standings and stats, though. But I knew a lot of what was going on in the world of sports because I had a subscription to Sports Illustrated.
Of course, that’s nothing unique among teenage boys in America in the 1980s and 1990s. Sports Illustrated was one of the most subscribed to magazines in the country and so iconic that getting the cover could be a blessing in a “cover of the Rolling Stone sort of way” or a curse, depending on how your team was doing (Long before the “Madden Curse” was the “SI Cover Curse” where a team or player was on a hot streak, got themselves on the cover of the magazine and immediately started to slump). I can’t tell you how much of it I read on a weekly basis–although it’s not hard for you to guess that I spent a lot of time looking at the swimsuit issue every year–but I can say that it was a formative piece in my “sports education.”
It’s once again the Christmas season and as I’m writing this, I’ve already had one “Christmas” because my parents and sister came to visit last weekend and we opened gifts. There wasn’t anything unusual about the gift giving or anything, although I did find myself chuckling at how often someone opened a package and my mom said, “Well, it was on your wish list.”
When you think about it, it’s an odd thing to say to someone after they have opened a gift. Why explain to them that you bought something that they asked for? I have to think that this is a version of something my parents (and their generation, really) have been doing for decades, which is offering an explanation or detailed story as to the history of the gift or the rationale behind it, maybe so that you won’t make a face or seem ungrateful when you open it with an less than enthusaistic response. And I understand how you can have anxiety over someone opening something they bought for you–I’m in therapy for a reason, after all–and therefore preempt an unwanted response with some sort of explanation, self-deprecating talk, or even pointing out that the gift receipt is attached. But we’ve all been putting together wish lists for years, even before Amazon made it a feature. So why the worry?
I am sure the blame for this doesn’t rest squarely on the shoulders of Amazon, but I can say that having an online wishlist where you simply have to click a button in order to get something that someone wanted instead of planning a trip to Toys R Us like you’re in a heist movie has exascerbated the “greedy asshole” attitude that we all have each Christmas season when we don’t get what we want. And I say that we all have it because we do all have it; it’s just that we all express the attitude in different ways. Some of us thank a relative for the $50 gift card and mentally make a list of things that were on our wish lists that we didn’t get and will now buy; some of us make passive-aggressive comments; and yes, others of us throw temper tantrums.
And when those people get an off-list gift? Holy shit.
I can’t say if I had a good or bad attitude about opening gifts as a kid. I will claim that I was always grateful and polite, but I think that we all know that anyone who claims that is full of shit, so let’s just say that more often than not I had good manners. Then again, most of the time, I got what I wanted and if I didn’t, it was usually something that was either hard to find or a moonshot of a gift (the G.I. Joe aircraft carrier, for example). Usually when I got a gift that wasn’t on my list, it was clothes (which even as a teenager I rarely, if ever, actually asked for) or a small-sized toy or game to keep me busy while at my grandmother’s like travel-sized Hi-Q, some Matchbox cars, or yet another deck of cards. They came from my great aunts and uncles, my parents’ cousins, or friends of the family (whom I rarely, if ever, saw) and even as a kid, I knew that my parents probably didn’t mail them a photocopy of my Christmas list every year, so I just rolled with it. Besides, surprises were fun and every once in a while, an off-list gift would wind up becoming a personal favorite.
Like what? Well, I’m so glad you asked.
In the spirit of the season, and because I really have nothing better to write about right now, I’ve decided to do a rundown of some of the most random and most cherished “off-list” Christmas gifts that I received from the time I was a kid until the time I was a teenager.
Set at the end of the 1980s, Déjà View is a coming of age novel with a supernatural elements, and joining me for this episode is its author, Michael Thomas Perone. We sit down to talk about his novels Déjà View and Danger Peak and the inspirations behind them.
My look at nostalgia-themed movies continues! This time around, Amanda joins me to sit down and talk about a formative movie for the two of us: Dazed and Confused, the 1993 Richard Linklater film that takes place during one night in 1976. We look at the movie, its soundtrack, and the book published alongside it as well as share our memories about watching it many times.
“We had no timeouts. It was a belt and you better not cry for long.”
“Most of us drank or smoked by the time we were 14.”
“There were no safe spaces. There were no trigger warnings.”
“We were the latch key generation.”
I’ve been seeing a lot of this on TikTok over the past couple of years regarding Generation X, especially when it comes to pushing back against the current generations of twentysomethings and teenagers. With all of us being middle-aged, it seems like thumping our chests about our childhoods as a response to getting dragged (or Gen Z TikTokers wondering why we aren’t getting dragged) is a favorite sport. And why not? It shows our inherent strength and our ability to be resilient as well as get things done, especially when nobody is looking. And for a generation who spent its formative years either being ignored or dismissed as “slackers”, it’s as good a response as any to our parents and their generation, who decided that we were a vast disappointment and our younger Millennial siblings were worth more attention.
An image from Reality Bites. I chose this because it is literally the image that accompanies the “Generation X” entry on Encyclopedia Britannica Online.
There is something that really bugs me about this, though. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have as much of a hardscrabble, feral, latch-key kid life as some of my friends and peers, but Gen Xers posting videos where they say these things makes them sound like the Baby Boomers we have all grown to loathe. Isn’t “We were feral” just a different version of telling the kids that you walked uphill both ways through a foot of snow in order to get to school? I could have sworn that at some point, we told ourselves we weren’t got to pull that sort of toxic shit when we got to be our parents’ age. But here I am, seeing it on TikTok, in memes, and in copy/pasted Facebook ramblings from former classmates. Why are these people acting like they survived The Great Depression when they were simply a bunch of middle-class suburban white kids who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s?
Well, to answer this question, I’m going to break down what I quoted at the top of this post, starting with …
“We were the fuck around and find out generation.”
This is one I actually like, although credit where credit is due, we weren’t the original “fuck around and find out” generation. Our Greatest Generation grandparents, after all, fought a war against Fascism; equally important to our society were their older siblings, the Silent Generation. That generation–which actually makes up a good portion of the older set of Generation X’s parents–started or led the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1950s and 1960s. We learned from their example that risks were worth taking. Now, some of our risks were mundane shit like flying over concrete on a skateboard without wearing a helmet or any other protection, but many other risks we took were significant. My peers and the older members of my generation have been vocal for environmentalism, LGBTQIA+ rights, and a number of liberal and progressive causes and reforms since we came of age during and at the end of the Reagan era. We’re not without our problems, of course, but being shoved aside by Boomers who sold out and were fucking around without a care of what would happen to future generations led to us calling upon other past examples and taking a stand,. We are passing that on to our Generation Z children.
But then there’s …
“We were the latch key generation.”
“We raised ourselves.”
“We were the last generation of feral children.”
Did we forget that “latch key kids” was literally a “concern topic” for talk shows like Donahue back in the 1980s? Now, I didn’t “raise myself” and in fact could have done with more independence because I have a major permission complex, but these statements aren’t always the flexes people think they are. The lack of parental supervision for many of us contributed to our resourcefulness as a generation, but forced maturity was not entirely beneficial. Some of my friends in junior high and high school spent a lot of time “raising” their younger siblings and keeping their households running smoothly. In most cases, that was out of economic necessity and I can’t faulty their parents for working as hard as they did to keep everyone’s head above water, but let’s recognize that this made childhood tougher and shorter. I wonder if some of my friends wish they had some of that time back or if they have even fully processed it as they raise their own kids. Which brings me to …
“We had no time outs. It was the belt and you better not cry for long.”
In defense of the TikTokers, a number of videos acknowledged how fucked up this was. In one video, a woman addressed how a lot of us have never fully come to terms with this because we suppressed our feelings and solved it by “moving on”. This led to us having pretty dark views on the world as well as very dark senses of humor (which I think is a slightly positive side effect). But I’ve also seen this expressed a number of times on social media as a point of pride and each time I see it that way, I’m puzzled because in my view, it’s not. My generation was one of the last where spanking and other forms of physical punishment were considered acceptable. I’m not saying that Millennial and Gen Z-ers didn’t get hit, but during my formative years there was a massive debate over spanking that led to it falling out of favor and largely out of practice.
As it should have. Hitting your kids is horrible and I’m not going to debate it. I have memories of getting yelled at and smacked with a wooden spoon as a kid. The hitting stopped early on, but getting yelled stuck around for a while. I don’t think I have fully processed all of it and I can’t tell you if I am ready to do a deep dive into it with my therapist either. I don’t classify is as abuse even though it was traumatic, because some people I grew up with were actually abused by their parents in an “I’ve seen this on an After-School Special” sort of way. These are the types of things that leave scars that never fully heal because when it came to our mental health as a generation, nothing ever got addressed. We were taught “not to talk about these things.” And therapy? Well, that might reflect poorly on our parents, so it never entered the conversation. Even if we wanted to get help, we didn’t know how. This led to …
“Many of us drank or smoked by the time we were 14.”
I will come out and say that this was never me. I didn’t have my first beer until I was 17 and aside from a couple of cigars in college, never smoked anything. Okay, I tried pot once and didn’t like it, but my dad did me a solid by quitting smoking back in 1987. However, my teetotaling as a teenager was because of a combination of not being popular enough to drink and being deathly afraid of the consequences of getting caught drinking. There’s more to that sentence that I’m not going to get into; instead, I’m going to address the statement above because while it is a bit of a brag, it has a very sharp other edge.
Drinking has been hugely glorified in television and movies for decades, with the party scene being a teen movie staple. With this glorification came a lot of destructive behavior and the amplification of toxic masculinity and rape culture, especially in the Eighties. As the Eighties became the Nineties, we learned more about rape and more women began to speak up about their experiences, but my generation still has a horrible track record when it comes to sexual violence. In fact, the current generation of youth appears to be learning from our mistakes; there’s certainly work to be done, but what I see on a regular basis has me optimistic.
But if we weren’t chasing the Platonic ideal of Animal House’s toga party, many in my generation were drinking and smoking by the time they were 14 because they were self-medicating. Like I said, nobody landed in therapy, and when they did it was for substance abuse because they had turned to alcohol and drugs to cope with their mental health issues. Some of my classmates went through rehab before they graduated, some eventually got help as adults, others wound up dying way too young, and a number of them continue to struggle. While I am sure the majority of my peers have a healthy relationship with alcohol, bragging about getting drunk at 14 simplifies this to the point where it ignores the very serious issues. But I think that for some of these TikTokers, it’s kind of the point because of one more line I want to discuss …
“There were no safe spaces. There were no trigger warnings.”
Now I know why my Spidey Sense tingled when watching these videos. I’m not sure what the political leanings are of every TikToker I watched, so I can’t lump them all under one umbrella …
… BUT …
… complaining about trigger warnings and safe spaces has become a favorite pastime of right-wing trolls for the better part of a decade. The image they like to conjure up is a kaleidoscope-haired, multi-pierced, multi-gendered, pride-flag-bedecked student at Berkeley or Oberlin frothing at the mouth about a professor assigning a short story where the main character gets a hangnail without warning them about said hangnail because reading about the hangnail made them curl up in the fetal position as they flashed back to the time they got a hangnail in the third grade.
I’m kidding.
Sort of.
Right-wingers are fucking insane when it comes perpetuating fallacies about the fragility of young people who refuse to go along with their ideals, and a number of these Fox News-viewing, QAnon-following choads are Gen Xers. This should surprise absolutely nobody; despite MTV’s efforts in the early 1990s to frame Generation X as largely liberal, we’re not a monolith because no generation is. But I can still be disappointed by the number of people my age or slightly older who agree with Tucker Carlson or Alex jones and were led that way by social media algorithms. I’m not being ridiculous; it’s not hard to go down the rabbit hole that begins with “Kids these days …” and ends with a membership in a Moms for Liberty Facebook group.
To quote one of our generation’s heroes: It’s a trap.
I mean, all of it really is. Generational discord is a construct that exists for media hits. I have fond memories of the decades in which I grew up and I love reveling in nostalgia for the simplicity of my childhood, especially on the days where the problems of the world are overwhelming. We should all be able to do that. But as a generation, it’s our duty to avoid the trap it presents. We’ve done a good job at starting to break cycles of toxic behavior and culture; let’s be the generation to break the cycle of losing perspective in favor of mythology and ego.
It’s the first part of an EXTRA-SIZED CROSSOVER with Fire and Water Records! Ryan and Neil, The Brothers Daly, join me for a look at cover songs. What makes a good cover song? Which covers are iconic? What covers have surpassed the originals? Which ones do we personally love? Join us as we each go through a list of five cover songs and talk about what makes them stand out. Then, in May, go over to Fire and Water Records to listen to part two!
Pop Culture Affidavit 