Hah! It made me depressed to think you were half a year younger than me, Amanda. Like “What have I been doing with my life.”

I know lotsa girls with the riot grrl ethos-aesthetic thing going on, but they do often tend to congregate in certain urban areas, like San Francisco. (I’d think Austin would have some of that going on too, but San Francisco has a lot of the Burners and Steampunk/Makers as well, and there’s certain common crossover elements.)

Still, I remember stomping around my community college in blue hair, goggles, combat boots, and mechanics overalls and nobody giving me crap for it. Ah, thems was the days.

(Also, as a Tank Girl fan, I liked the movie. I know a lot of people decried it as different than the comics, but I still loved it. And I have the soundtrack too, although I take my email tagline from Devo’s contribution.)

I think I’m the same age as you, so damn that whippersnapper Cody, damn her to hell…

Anyway.

I live in California, and when I got here it astounded me how much of a split there was between men and women.  Back east, when I grew up, we were all one big happy family, nobody treating each other differently because of bits and pieces, etc.  I blamed it on California being weird.  But I just got back from a trip home, and damned if everyone I know isn’t getting worse and worse about stereotyping everything to hell and back.  I guess all those good vibes may have been a product of time rather than place.

That said, everything seems to go in 20-year cycles, so maybe we’re due for a another dose over the next decade.  And California is still completely weird, no matter what I can or can’t blame on it..

Lotsa people call my shoes ‘combat boots’ because I wear size 13 shoes.  So my most recent pair are steel toed ‘cause I just gave up looking for something that wasn’t.

...And I’ve come across a couple pairs of pink converse in my size since.  o-o

My spouse wears goggles and brightly colored hair now, though she was into the hippie natural browns and stuff in the 90s…

how often do you see women just out there kicking ass and it’s not A Statement?

Oddly enough, in Hong Kong action flics (which were Tarantino’s inspiration).  I have never quite figured this one out, but the profoundly sexist Hong Kong routinely produces films about women kicking ass.  Michelle Yeoh, Brigitte Lin, Joey Wang, and Maggie Cheung (all excellent actors) made their reputation starring in films where they seriously kick men’s asses.

What happened, Pandagonians?  Where did it all go wrong?

With respect to popular music, Clear Channel bought up every radio station in the country. At least that’s part of it.

As for MTV, the iPod and YouTube killed it.

I was thinking almost exactly the same thing while I was catching some Star Trek TNG reruns. There is no way something like that could go on the air nowdays. It’d be infested with explosions and T and A.

I like watching anime because even if the characters have wacky proportions (or are robots), a lot of the time they are female and kicking butt.

Watching films from the 30s and 40s makes you realize how crappy the dialogue for women has become. Women actually say stuff! And not always to men!

Of course MTV had a bad case of network decay even before those technologies became popular, but they sent it off the deep end. Why show music videos when your audience can just watch whatever music video they want on YouTube or their iPod, any time they want? So you just turn into a lowest common denominator reality show network.

I don’t think it’s gotten worse, just that the backlash has gotten more focused media attention. Right after riot grrl came the oh so hated “anti-pc” movement of white men trying to claim it was counterculture to be an old square hater of change and the media scared of the angry girls and fags and blacks jumped on the bandwagon as fast as they could and so that’s been dominating the headlines.

I think the energy is still out there, especially in the dyke community which always seems to have the political edginess and raw feminism, but yeah, I think a generation of girls had to be reminded again just how much the haters hated them and we’ll be seeing another wave of feminist expression under Obama just like riot grrl and the lot came out of the toxic mess of the 80s. Already more people are realizing that hating women does make you a bit of a douche and maybe the feminists were right about condoms and shit, but of course, we’ll be held back by the continued “anti-pc” false-edginess shit.

It probably doesn’t help that female artists in general are under a general sort of blacklist because of male studio heads and record managers. I mean when Warner Brothers has a blanket ban on any movies seen as having a “girl’ audience, you’re only going to have so much great feminist-friendly work.

The culture is oddly enough further along, but you’re right that culture, i.e. the music and movies that surround us slipped back, though I would argue that we’re seeing a resurgence albeit in film and television.

Joss Whedon is regarded as the king of the geeks, Mad Men is the hot show, and the networks are feeling pressured to do shows like the Sarah Connor Chronicles and Bones which feature kick-ass competent women.

It’s also worth noting that riot grrl owes itself not only to the inness of feminism and the politics of punk, but oddly enough “macho” metal of the 80s whose defining bands liked to promote girls who rocked hard like Plasmatics and Girlschool because they were personally more egalitarian than their impression.

Yeah, what Ben said @5.

Clear Channel and backlash in the studio leadership to blacklist radical and feminist voices. Same reason the news got even worse even faster, monopoly and orders from the top to prevent the revolution from being televised so to speak. As I said, a lot of the energy ended up going into the dyke community again, the rest sort of diffused into getting people more comfortable with the victories so far before being reminded once again of the enemy.

Also, Tank Girl is still one of my all-time favorite vegging movies. Proof you can have a silly, low-thought action movie without pouring on the testosterone and crippling gender dynamics. KA-POW!

I think you’re viewing the 90s with nostalgia goggles.
The 2nd half was ok, but burn the first with fire.

The 2nd half was ok, but burn the first with fire.

Really? In music I’d go with the exact opposite—the early ‘90s were ok, the late ‘90s in music was complete garbage (foreshadowing the even more rotten garbage of the 2000s). I think 1997 is the dividing line, both in rock and hip-hop.

Progression, reaction, progression, reaction.

Tank Girl was so incredibly awful yet so incredibly good all at the same time. I think I’ve probably watched it at least 50 times. My other favorite riot grrrl-esque 90s flick was “Foxfire” loosely based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel, with a young Angelina Jolie, where the girls beat up the teacher for sexually harassing them.

Today I actually saw the trailer for “Whip It!” the first time, the new movie about roller derby starring Ellen Page and directed by Drew Barrymore, and it had the real great 90s “girl power” feel and “Peaches” plays in the trailer and the cast is pretty rad with Har Mar Superstar, Ellen and Drew, Eve, Juliette Lewis, and Kristen Wiig.

I’m hoping it’s good, because girls who are teens right now so badly need a good “girl power” sorta film. I can’t imagine being a teenage girl right now, I barely made it out alive during the riot grrrl 90s, if I had to do it now I’m not sure I’d survive. Our current culture is downright poisonous to girls.

Be of good cheer: These things come in cycles: consider the late 70s/80s produced the Bangles, the Go-Gos, the Runaways, Cibo Matto, and Shonen Knife.

Oh, Tank Girl.  How I love her.

TV is surprisingly woman-friendly right now; there are comedies like “30 Rock” and tons of action shows and dramas with tough female leads.  But that’s partly because the film industry has become so aggressively anti-woman that a lot of major actresses are bailing to do television.

My husband and I enjoyed “Inglourious Basterds” so much we immediately rented “Death Proof,” which we’d missed when it was out in theaters.  As the three heroines were kicking the shit out of Kurt Russell, I commented, “Quentin Tarantino is a great women’s director, like George Cuckor.”

I was only half kidding.  I can’t think of another major American director today who seems to like women.  Tarantino loves to film women fighting, which is rare, and women talking, which is even rarer.  (Among foreign directors with a strong feminist bent, I’d put Mike Leigh way up there.)

As for the ‘90s…I’m your age, Amanda, and sometimes I get nostalgic too, not to mention sick of all the knee-jerk sexism in the mass media.  I think the 2000s were a backlash decade, and we’ll be seeing a feminist revival over the next few years.  I hope the music gets better, but don’t forget that even at the height of the 1990s, the Billboard chart-toppers were Ace of Base, Boyz II Men, and Celine Dion.

RE: The Spice Girls.

Again, 1997. That was when things took a turn, in just about every genre of music. In hip-hop it was the year when all the “bling bling” horseshit started, it was when rock music became neutered and boring, it was when Disney manufactured boy bands began to take over pop music, etc.

So what’s the plan then? I’d love to help, but I’m not sure what a small-time TV producer from Cape Cod without a regular paying job can do.

The belief that things were different when we were younger is, in part, the perverse clarity of nostalgia.

But even accounting for that, there was a big swing back in the last ten years.  Part of the legacy of 9/11 was that the right-wing absolutely and totally dominated every single aspect of public culture.

And, too, the swing back to caveman days is more apparent than real.  The right-wing gets more and more shrill because they know, in their guts they know, that it’s over and they lost.

As for MTV, the iPod and YouTube killed it.

And nothing of value was lost.

Part of the legacy of 9/11 was that the right-wing absolutely and totally dominated every single aspect of public culture.

The public emotion I most associate with 9/11 is relief; relief from having to work all the time to understand a confusing and evolving world with its climate change and hyperaccelerated global economy and The Intertubes and all these different groups demanding equality and having to learn all these different languages just to buy some pasta, let alone watch a music video.  All that complexity was discarded overnight, and you could hear the relish in their voices.  9/11 was a celebration of the Anti-Moderns finding each other.

I’ve got a poster of that Tank Girl flaming-crotch-shot on the wall of my computer pit. Jaime Hewlitt has been one of my favorite artists for a long time.  Looking at it my eye is drawn to the right where my Love & Rocket’s Locas poster is hung (another Jaime!). And as much as I would love for the strong female characters of Los Bros Hernandez’s work to reach a broader audience, I get down on my knees every day and thank God, Allah, Quirinis and Zeus that nobody ever got the film rights to it.

The Ghost In The Shell poster to the left? Strong female character, sure. But Japanese sexual politics are… complex. Translated to the screen a hell of a lot better than Tank Girl did though.

“The right-wing gets more and more shrill because they know, in their guts they know, that it’s over and they lost.”

True, but who or what won?

I think you’re viewing the 90s with nostalgia goggles.
The 2nd half was ok, but burn the first with fire.

You’ve got it totally backwards. It’s my personal theory (which is mine), that “The 90s” actually covered the period from about 1988 to 1995. After that, “alternative” meant Bush or Everclear or Matchbox 20 or Alanis Morissette, and then eventually rap-rock frat-choads. Prior to then, you had the 80’s college bands, and the first wave of alternative bands that had been inspired by them. R.E.M., Pixies, CVB, Dead Milkmen, to the Breeders, (mainstreamish) Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Bikini Kill, etc.

Tank Girl was a kick-ass comic book long before it was a movie. And it kicked roughly 1139% of the amount of ass kicked by the movie. Y’all did read it, right?

mythago—Well, of course.  I’ve never seen the movie.

Mythago: Probably could have been clearer but yes, I did read the comic.

If you liked Tank Girl comics, then there is a reasonably good chance that you’d like the manga Black Lagoon.  People might also want to watch the first two Patlabor movies.

GitS SAC holds all of the kickassedness of the GitS franchise.

I agree that there was a concerted push towards emo dude rock and crunk by around 2000.  Also, it’s just a cycle thing.  Girl musicians just gets past their peak.  For instance, Tori Amo’s last good album by my lights was To Venus and Back, which was published in 1999.  Other groups like Portishead had long slumbers.  Also, in the 90’s there was just a bunch of groups that gave more women a chance on songs, like say, Anna Domino doing a stint doing Snakefarm, and there aren’t so many fluid opportunities for women to shine.

Is Lilith Fair still going on?

It’s my personal theory (which is mine), that “The 90s” actually covered the period from about 1988 to 1995.

I’d say the ‘90s, culturally, went from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11. The later half was different from the first half culturally, sure, but they had more in common with each other than the later half did with the cultural shift that happened after 9/11, which is a whole other universe.

We’re probably already in the 2010s culturally as we speak. Started after the financial crisis, IMHO.

outside of the lonely blog world, I fear that feminism isn’t as mainstream as it seems it was in the 90s.

The problem with this is figuring out what “mainstream” means.  Almost everything you cite is stuff that crossed over from indieworld—but the mainstream of the “mainstream” 1990s vis-a-vis women and pop culture is much more along the lines of Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts and Shania Twain and Mariah Carey and _Ghost_.

The late 90s had a lot of good things about it, musically. You get a real rise of indie pop starting to eclipse “whiner rock.”

Really? In music I’d go with the exact opposite—the early ‘90s were ok, the late ‘90s in music was complete garbage (foreshadowing the even more rotten garbage of the 2000s). I think 1997 is the dividing line, both in rock and hip-hop.

Agreed.  At least in the early ‘90s, you had good acts like Soundgarden, Cranberries, Green Day, Offspring, Coolio, etc.  Then around ‘96, when Oasis started becoming overplayed in most college dorms,the trend towards more crappiness began which was epitomized by the Spice Girls and boy bands like 98 degrees. :p

as i recall, the 90s even had its undoing towards the end, with the advent of boy bands,

Umm…did you forget Boy Band type acts like New Kids On The Block, Vanilla Ice, or even Heavy Metal in its death throes? Unfortunately, they ushered in the 1990s and damn….that was one minor aspect of the ‘90s whose quick demise I was supremely grateful for.  My friends and I mecilessly mocked and laughed at the metal heads, fed up with Vanilla Ice’s atrociously bad debut album being blasted by some classmates, and some of us were scarred by having gullible siblings who thought NKOB was the height of “cool” by incessantly blasting crap like “the right stuff”.  *Gag* :p

Then around ‘96, when Oasis started becoming overplayed in most college dorms,the trend towards more crappiness began

Oh, I think the crappiness was well in hand by then.  One word:  Hootie. 

Of course, crappiness is always well in hand.

The late 90s had a lot of good things about it, musically. You get a real rise of indie pop starting to eclipse “whiner rock.”

Tyro,

Weird.  My impression was that “whiner rock” got stronger and more popular in the late ‘90s as epitomized by Oasis and bands like them.  Thankfully, Chumbawumba was a welcome, though unfortunately too temporary respite from that crappy trend.

Oh, I think the crappiness was well in hand by then.  One word:  Hootie.

Weirdly enough, I kept hearing about Hootie and the Blowfish, but they didn’t seem that popular on the college campuses I attended/visited in the ‘90s.  On the other hand, however, Oasis and bands like them were constantly being played on those same campuses, especially that damned song “Wonderwall”....one epitomization of “whiner rock”. 

Crap.  Even reminiscing about this is staining my mind so much I suddenly feel the need to bleach it by playing Green Day’s “American Idiot” and “Basket Case”, The Cranberries’ “Dreams”, and Offspring’s “One fine day”......

I miss Sassy something fierce.
I thought then, and still do, that Tank Girl would have been much better as an animated movie.
The short animated sequences in there were far superior to Lori Petty’s gurning.
YMMV.

and some of us were scarred by having gullible siblings who thought NKOB was the height of “cool” by incessantly blasting crap like “the right stuff”.  *Gag*

I will defend my pre-pubescent love of NKOTB to the death, thankyouverymuch.

Being a pre-teen NKOTB fan and being super into bands on labels like lookout and kill rock stars aren’t mutually exclusive, if one hit puberty at just the right spot.

I have nothing of value to really add (just got home from a long, long day of work) except to say how excited I was to see Tank Girl on a post. Last year at Comic-Con I bought issue #2, mint condition, and it was one of my best finds.

And I was a wee one for the first half of the 90s but have a great fondness for it. I was in high school when the whole boy band/girl pop trend broke (LFO, *gag*) but I do think it was a more positive time for women and you could get away with a lot more experimental stuff then. Working in this industry now, there’s no way in hell something like Tank Girl would be green lit, unless it was heavily changed to the point where it was Tank Girl in name only.

Not to wish years away but I will be happy when the trend swings back, that’s if it ever can.

It got co-opted, as these things often do: “sisterhood is powerful” and “the personal is political” became “you go girl!” and “feminism” became “girl power” and was colored pink.

I wouldn’t despair, though; feminism is as strong as it ever was; and if it got coopted, that’s because it was making an impact. It will keep coming back, just as old standard songs endure while lame covers eventually die away. 

I would say right now that with Bitch and Bust magazines, DIY, and the innumerable feminist voices on the internet (to name a few), that there are actually many more feminist voices out there than there were in the 80s/90s and they have a wider audience. They are only blips on the media radar, but that doesn’t mean they’re not having an impact on young women today just like Tank Girl did then.

Ahhh, those were the days. I loved L7 in Serial Mom as the band Camel Toe (or was it “The Camel Toes?”), the classic Smell the Magic t-shirt from the same-named tour, and Bust the ‘zine. I hearted the Lunachicks, who the Parliament/Funkadelic of the bands not in that they brought the funk, but in that you could never tell how many would be onstage and each had some personal costume and headspace working.

They were also the funniest. To anyone who says otherwise:

Donchya fuck with us.
We will follow you
Onto the bus.
Fart
Right
In Your
Face
Have the last laugh!

I will defend my pre-pubescent love of NKOTB to the death, thankyouverymuch.

Being a pre-teen NKOTB fan and being super into bands on labels like lookout and kill rock stars aren’t mutually exclusive, if one hit puberty at just the right spot.

jessilikewhoa,

Nearly everyone I knew or knew of who was into NKOB tended to be exclusively into cheesy pop dance music and boy/girl bands and little else.  Then again, kids who were inclined to listen to music on labels like Lookout Records were exceedingly few and far between at my high school. 

A part of that may have been the perception among some self-proclaimed punk fans I encountered in NYC during the early ‘90s that no self-respecting punk would have been caught doing things such as attending a public magnet school and aspiring to do well to get into a decent college as that was considered a form of “selling out”.  Correspondingly, punk rock was dismissed by most high school classmates as noisy music for lazy anti-intellectual failures…..which was far more indicative of their prejudicial ignorance and snobbish mindset towards the punk/hardcore genre than anything else. 

It was a toss up between classical/jazz snobs, heavy metalists, pop/dance/techno, top 40, hip-hop/R&B;, and a large portion of those who ignored music for the most part.

Nearly everyone I knew or knew of who was into NKOB tended to be exclusively into cheesy pop dance music and boy/girl bands and little else.  Then again, kids who were inclined to listen to music on labels like Lookout Records were exceedingly few and far between at my high school.

I think it really is a very specific age group. I was in fifth grade when “Nevermind” came out and it changed my world completely. I was at the age where I had outgrown NKOTB but hadn’t yet gotten into music otherwise besides a lifelong love of surf rock and my parents old hippie music I had grown up with. I was so young when “grunge” hit that it was really just part of my puberty. I imagine NKOTB fans a few years older than me would have already moved on to more teen oriented music by the time “grunge” hit so were probably already firmly entrenched into pop by then.

It helped too that I was a complete loser in junior high. Like “Welcome to the Dollhouse” level of loser,  getting spitballs and food thrown at me and popular girls threatening to beat me up calling me a “dyke” level of loser. As soon as I heard Nirvana I bought every book on them I could find which meant reading about bands like Black Flag which led to me befriending punk rock kids from nearby areas via AOL chatrooms and spending my high school years going to shows and digging through record and thrift shops and shaving my head and all that good stuff.

Most of my female friends in the same age group also went from NKOTB to “grunge” and punk. For an idea of the age group I mean, I was born in 81 and fall right on the cusp of Gen X and the Millenials, but consider myself to be a Millenial and really relate to that groups collective memories, experiences, and outlooks more than those of Gen X. As in, I have no idea how anything got done without Google. I have hazy memories of life pre ubiquitous internet, but those memories are as hazy as my memories of life before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

My school was all hessian metal heads, 4H farm kids, and football heros, but punk rock saved my life and kept me from shedding this mortal coil.

It’s my personal theory (which is mine)

I see what you did thar.

I wish I had something more intelligent to contribute to this discussion, but I don’t.

A part of that may have been the perception among some self-proclaimed punk fans I encountered in NYC during the early ‘90s that no self-respecting punk would have been caught doing things such as attending a public magnet school and aspiring to do well to get into a decent college as that was considered a form of “selling out”.

I didn’t consider doing well and going to college “selling out,” but school wasn’t much on my radar, I was more into hanging out, having sex, drinking, and doing drugs. I almost flunked out of high school and I still think I should have been a credit short of graduating (luckily my teachers and guidance counselor all really liked me despite my being a grade-A fuck-up) but I think some authority figure fucked with my file so I wouldn’t have to be held back. It took me almost a decade of living aimlessly before I went back to school, but now I’m in my second year of college credit-wise and I can’t fathom not getting straight A’s. Your experience makes perfect sense, as most of my friends from my super punk rock days never bothered with college, or didn’t finish, or are just now going back like me.

The period 1990-1997 gave us :

The following bands and artists with at least one female : Tori Amos, Breeders, L7, Sarah McLachlan (and Lilith Fair), Concrete Blonde, Offspring, Erasure, Pixies, Veruca Salt, Skunk Anansie, Smashing Pumpkins, K’s Choice, Bangles, Max Sharam, Hole…..

And that’s just off the top of my head

And things in popular culture like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and the books of Clive Barker.

I’m just about the same age as you, and while I don’t think I ever thought of it like this until I read this post, I think you’re spot on. And it makes me really sad that that moment and those ideas and that sensibility is not around for girls today.

I think you’re right on that even in its not-particularly-feminist moments, the culture was “not anti-girl.”

I’m thinking of how even the skater boys who didn’t listen to any female-fronted bands had the hugest crush on Kim Gordon, even though she probably was old enough to be our mom.

I’m thinking of how at all the little DIY shows, I could jump in the pit and never worry that anyone would grab my breasts or my crotch. These guys weren’t paragons of feminist sensibility. They just figured that I was there for the same reasons they were and didn’t feel entitled to take advantage to cop a feel. They let me just be in the pit, the same way they were.

And it really makes me sad to think what a difference it makes to be in a culture that is not actively anti-girl. The bar is so fucking low, and we can’t clear even that little hurdle.

And even when you throw in musicians that aren’t explicitly punk or riot grrrl or whatever ... You had PJ Harvey with Dry in that era and even someone like Liz Phair, who is kind of pop in her sensibility and more feminine in her presentation, but the stuff she sang about? Holy shit.

I was in fifth grade when “Nevermind” came out and it changed my world completely. I was at the age where I had outgrown NKOTB but hadn’t yet gotten into music otherwise besides a lifelong love of surf rock and my parents old hippie music I had grown up with. I was so young when “grunge” hit that it was really just part of my puberty.

My family didn’t play music at home when I was growing up save some old Chinese records from the 1930s and 40’s on the rare occasions their friends brought a portable record player and records.  The only way I kept tenuous touch with mainstream US music trends growing up until college was from listening to my friends’ music collections, hearing the music on the streets/parks, and encountering random music fans from different genres growing up in NYC.  Childhood, most friends listened to Whitney Houston, Beastie Boys, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, Bobby McFerrin, Madonna, various forms of hip-hop/R&B;, etc.  Heard a lot of Michael Jackson though for some reason, that was viewed as music for the “older kids” by friends in my grade.  By the time I hit high school, it was mainly more of the same along with listening to mix tapes of 60’s music mixed with other genres that my friends’ hippie dad made, introduction to underground rap, along with listening to spoken word CDs by people like William S. Burroughs. 

By the time I earned enough money to purchase my first walkman, blank tapes, and CDs and secured a hallmate’s stereo to dub those CDs onto tapes when I started college, grunge music like Nirvana was already on its way out and Alternative/pop-punk like Green Day, Offspring, and The Cranberries were in. 

but punk rock saved my life and kept me from shedding this mortal coil.

Though I wouldn’t go that far in my case, listening to Green Day, Cranberries, and Offspring gave me the energy, drive, and necessary confidence to override my initial doubts in college as I was in the middle of trying to make sense of the fact I was transitioning from a high school graduate whose class standing was similar to Senator McCain’s from Annapolis to being a B+/-A college student on scholarship at a well-respected liberal arts college within the course of a year and for the rest of my undergrad career. 

It allowed me to not only ignore many upper/upper-middle class classmates who intimated that their upper/upper-middle class backgrounds and private/suburban public school educations gave them a leg up on those of us who went to regular public schools or worse, urban public schools….....but to even take some joy in tossing their patronizing attitudes back at them when they found their overconfidence was unwarranted to the point of being dropped into remedial classes, flunked out, or having to pay money to have me tutor them because they were on the brink of flunking and/or academic suspension/expulsion.

The only way I kept tenuous touch with mainstream US music trends growing up until college was from listening to my friends’ music collections, hearing the music on the streets/parks, and encountering random music fans from different genres growing up in NYC.  Childhood, most friends listened to Whitney Houston, Beastie Boys, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, Bobby McFerrin, Madonna, various forms of hip-hop/R&B;, etc.  Heard a lot of Michael Jackson though for some reason, that was viewed as music for the “older kids” by friends in my grade.  By the time I hit high school, it was mainly more of the same along with listening to mix tapes of 60’s music mixed with other genres that my friends’ hippie dad made, introduction to underground rap, along with listening to spoken word CDs by people like William S. Burroughs.

I can’t imagine what it was like growing up in NYC. While I lived 6 blocks outside of Chicago city limits when I was really little, by the time I was getting into cultural and artistic products/movements I was living in a rural area that was functionally 3 or so years behind major US cities in music and styles hitting. From my piecemeal memories of my urban early childhood I remember everything being so much more vibrant diverse and interesting. My childhood memories are so much brighter in my mind than later in my life. Even though I’ve grown to love the quiet and the anonymity of rural life, I envy people who had urban teen years.

Your experience makes perfect sense, as most of my friends from my super punk rock days never bothered with college, or didn’t finish, or are just now going back like me.

Interestingly enough, punk rock…or pop-punk/alternative actually played a critical part in my being able to graduate college with flying colors. 

Not only was it far more effective than coffee in waking me up and facilitating my ability to remain attentive for hours in classes and long study session in the library/dorm, the music itself was a great motivator to push forward without caring what anyone else thought about it.

The following bands and artists with at least one female : Tori Amos, Breeders, L7, Sarah McLachlan (and Lilith Fair), Concrete Blonde, Offspring, Erasure, Pixies, Veruca Salt, Skunk Anansie, Smashing Pumpkins, K’s Choice, Bangles, Max Sharam, Hole…..

I don’t think The Offspring has any female members as far as I know.  On the other hand, the Cranberries’ do have at least one female as a member, their lead singer Dolores O’Riordan.

even someone like Liz Phair, who is kind of pop in her sensibility and more feminine in her presentation, but the stuff she sang about? Holy shit.

The subject matter which influenced Liz Phair’s music is not too surprising if one knew that she is a fellow alum of my radical-left progressive oriented undergrad….class ‘91.

One of my favorite memories of the 90s was a double-decker boat cruise down the Milwaukee River and into Lake Michigan with L7 playing in the stern of the boat.  Definitely one of the best shows I’ve ever attended.  In the middle of the set they all stopped playing, jumped up on the railings, dropped trou, and mooned a yacht that was going by.  Best. Fucking. Show. Ever.

Ah, Riot Grrl.  Still remember taking my Huggy Bear 7” from Brixton Academy back to my home in leafy Hertfordshire.  I might’ve got mugged on the way but they didn’t get that, believe you me.

And ‘Revolution Girl Style Now’.  Alright, musically it was pants, but I sure did enjoy thinking about getting it.

And ‘Shove’ was the apothesis of cool.

Having said that, ‘Tank Girl’ the film?  Srsly?  It was complete tosspocket.  Haven’t you ever read ‘Deadline’?  Dearie me.

And nuts to this.

Where did it all go wrong?

Among others, I don’t remember no AM @ Pandagon in the 90s.  So I don’t see how you can say with a straight face that it’s got worse.  I say that the presence of people like yourself makes the discourse better.

I am reasonably sure I can find people to back me up on this

28- Of course. Tough, I read it after I first saw the movie when I could finally find the graphic novel versions at Comic Con. I absolutely adore them, though I’ll admit to liking Hothead Paisan more (only a little).

43- This. While the outer culture may have gotten co-opted, direct day-to-day life and the movement in general has been, despite the impression, getting stronger. Now a lot of it may be because of the people who grew up under riot grrl and the like growing into their own, but there’s a number of strong unapologetically feminist voices including a good amount on the internet an in growing numbers on TV.

I still maintain a lot of the perception has been the active backlash and how it’s gone out of it’s way to scrub out “unintended” voices and “rough edges”. But the public is still hungry for that energy and passion which is probably why we’re seeing 90s nostalgia to begin with.

I suspect the 2010s will start having as much 90s nostalgia as the 2000s had fucked up bad 80s nostalgia and that that might be powerful enough to break through some of the barriers. I mean, it’s not yet getting as much response as his other works but Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse has some of the most in-depth feminist analyses of any of his other works. Give him the usual year or two of polishing to hit that capstone season and we’ll see something as transformative as his Buffy.

mythago, the difference is that the comic book is underground, but the movie is mainstream.  That was the point of this post.  Underground cultural feminism I’m not so worried about—-it hasn’t gone anywhere.  Mainstream is a different story?

Good call on TV, though. It’s definitely where the best female writers are flocking.  Marc and I started watching “The United States of Tara”, and yep, again another female-dominated writing staff and another fun show.  Sadly, though, Diablo Cody is often 10% too cute.  Tina Fey has her occasional off notes, but Cody always has to have them.

The Lunachicks!  They’ve got one of my all-time favorite stories of exactly that sort of male support that I’m talking about, the non-condescending, completely sincere male friendship/support.  They opened for NOFX on some tour, and one show, some male audience members revolted at being subjected to a female-heavy band before NOFX went on.  The members of NOFX responded by playing their set in dresses, as a big fuck-you to those audience members.

The rape-fest that was Woodstock ‘99 really was a moment like the Disco Demolition Night of 1979—-a crowning moment when the forces of intolerance rose again and violently claimed straight white male dominance in the culture.

One reason that TV is in such a watershed moment is that its ranks of writers are starting to be dominated by people who came of age when what I describe above was mainstream youth culture.  But for young people, it seems there’s not much out there.

What do people have against Oasis?  I agree that “Wonderwall” was played about five million times too much, but really, you can’t blame the band that their song gets overplayed.

But, then again, I’ve never really been into music snobbery.  I still get the urge to listen to Spice Girls every once in a great while, and intellectually I know their music is crap.  But, it’s still fun.

The following bands and artists with at least one female : Tori Amos, Breeders, L7, Sarah McLachlan (and Lilith Fair), Concrete Blonde, Offspring, Erasure

Erasure is Vince Clarke and Andy Bell.

I gotta agree here.  I’m 25, and I recall that when I was in my pre-teen and early teen years, I felt like things were pretty good, and that the cultural narrative included me.  And then that went away.  I also agree with what someone up there said about 9/11 being the de facto end of the 90s.  Cause before that we though the Bush administration and it’s base were a laughing stock, and mostly harmless, if irritating.

Maybe #63 means Elastica? (I don’t know much about Erasure.) Luv’d Elastica’s war with Hugh Cornwell / The Stranglers. I forget whether it was over Peaches or No More Heroes.

I also fondly memory-mosh to The Muffs. Fun to see. Fun to hear.

I really do think it has a lot to do with the general right-wing backlash that came with the authoritarian Republican takeover of the country when the Bush administration appropriated the 2000 election. 9/11 happened at exactly the right time, everyone was suddenly scared of the terr’ists, the Bush administration rightly realized that no one could stop them from doing literally anything they wanted, and members of the anxious asshole contingent started discovering each other. The tsunami of belligerent religiosity sweeping the country was another symptom of the takeover. It became cool to be as stupid and angry and selfish as you wanted to be, and to hate everyone you knew was better and smarter and had gotten a much rawer deal than you, especially if they weren’t straight, white, male, and intellectually incurious. Privileged people started resenting that they didn’t get to be the victims, because victims get all the attention. It just wasn’t fair, and they were going to start doing something about it.

If you want to talk about cultural change and feminism, I’ll have to go back to one of the examples I like to cite about how things have changed, but almost under the radar.

JAG  Premiered in 1995, lasted 10 seasons.  Had a sorta right-wing inclination even from the start (Oliver North guest starred as himself, and was treated respectfully, for crying out loud).  The pilot movie was all about women serving on ships, specifically the murder of a female fighter pilot.  And for the first few years, the subject of women on ships and the controversy thereof was the subject of a number of episodes.  By the end of the series, in 2005, the idea of women serving on warships or as fighter pilots wasn’t significant or worthy of notice.  They were just there, doing their jobs just like anyone else.

(Incidentally, when the US military finally emerges from the dark ages, I expect to see a similar thing happen with gay characters on whatever military-themed shows are out there.)

I watch a lot of TV, and I’ve noticed it with a lot of TV shows: while some shows are more explicit about it, network series, which usually aren’t ground-breaking these days, are still doing their part by showing women doing things, often just in the background, that are simply accepted by the main characters (and then, by extension, the audience).  It’s been years since I’ve seen a female cop or lawyer being pointed out on TV because she’s doing a traditionally “man’s job”, and the one time I do note is on “Law and Order” when the whole point of the character was that she was supposed to be ridiculously good looking and other cops thought she’d received an undeserved promotion because of her sex appeal.

There may have been some apparent regression, but I think what has been happening is that the leading edge may have stalled a bit, but the base has been quietly and consistently building.

#67 that’s as succinct, insightful and comprehensive a what’s what of the dismal Smirk / Sneer era as I’ve ever read. It does not deserve to be a thread ender, so please make it your handle or something. (Or, post it elsewhere.)

I just scooted back, figuring the thread WAS over, to ask Amanda to remember the late, great Paula Pierce of eighties goddess garagistas, The Pandoras. PP freakishly dropped dead at an all too young age (I think she was barely 30, non-drug or transit related) as the nineties hoved into view. Music having its own mythic principle, I like to think she unleashed a thousand tattooed angel-faced hellions into nineties music.

It went wrong with everything else—the rest of the W-driven, 9-11 fueled backlash. See Susan Faludi part II, the aughts “fear and misogyny in post 9-11 america.”

God, I hate republican regimes.

Even the Reagan-era had better mainstream music than the 2000s, though, and that was a right-wing decade. Yes, even the late ‘80s. I don’t much care for Guns ‘N Roses, for example, but they’re 1000x better than fucking Nickelback or Linkin Park.

Same even with mainstream “bubblegum” pop. Circa 1985 Madonna, or Brittney Spears? Nineteen-eighty three Michael Jackson, or Zack Effron? It is really no contest.

John:

Progression, reaction, progression, reaction.

Exactly. Just make sure it’s two steps forward, one back. Bush was a step back, now let’s make sure we take at least two steps forward.

Step one: universal healthcare, since that’s what’s on our plate.
Then gay marriage, a woman president, end the drug war, reform the prison industry, and reform the military-industrial complex, in whatever order is politically expedient.

And Amanda:

Contrast that to the reaction to Sotomayor’s nomination, with a number of male writers and pundits acting like having 22% of the Supreme Court female means we’ve turned into a fascist matriarchy

That’s fascist, SOCIALIST, matriarchy. Try to keep up.

I can’t imagine what it was like growing up in NYC.

Growing up in NYC during my childhood in the 1980s and early ‘90s is probably very different than growing up there now, even in the same neighborhood.*  As a kid, I didn’t have to “read” about the crack epidemic or other drugs like heroin as the evidence littered the streets and parks of my childhood neighborhood. 

Crime was also a far more everpresent concern though contrary to Giuliani and Bloomberg’s assertions, a larger part of that probably had far more to do with the fact the tail end of the boomer generation were aging out of the 12-24 age group which criminologists consider the demographic most statistically likely to commit most crimes such as muggings, robberies, and murder.  Remembered hearing about and having to learn to avoid or fighting off large groups of kids who enjoyed beating up/mugging people on the streets and the bus and subways. 

Some paid a higher price as one friend died on his way home from school as a result of being suddenly caught between two rival drug dealers shooting it out.  Safety concerns were such that I recalled everyone in my neighborhood living with an underlying tension that they could be a victim of a crime at any moment.  A few other classmates and older friends ended up serving long stretches in prison for multiple incidents of home burglaries, robberies, and car theft.  As a kid, I remembered being envious of relatives who lived in suburbia because it seemed far more friendly, safe, and clean than what my old neighborhood was back then. 

I revised this way of thinking once I hit high school and was able to hang out with other kids from different areas at different venues in the city that would not have been accessible to a pre-adolescent.  However, this was hampered somewhat by the fact most of us had little to no spending money due to our family’s economic situations back then along with time constraints due to high school academics, extracurriculars, and working part-time jobs to help out the family.  A reason why I got some crap from upper/upper-middle class mostly suburban-raised undergrad classmates who couldn’t fathom why I didn’t go to Broadway Shows or the Metropolitan Opera before college considering I grew up in the city. 

Then again, having access to the city subway system with our high school provided train passes meant we had access to a transportation system which allowed us access to 4 out of the five boroughs and we took full advantage of that when we could. 

* That neighborhood has now become so gentrified that most of my childhood neighbors have been forced out and replaced by yuppies and trust-fund undergrads at NYU and Columbia who can afford to pay the now exorbitant rents down there.  A good example of how much gentrification can radically change the character of an area, one only needs to look at Times Square which was dark, seedy, and littered with pornographic theaters….the last place you’d recommend to mainstream middle/upper-class out-of-town tourist families.  Nowadays, the whole area is lit like a Christmas tree every night and it has become a big tourist trap for families.  Funny that I now routinely see families with young children happily walking around late at night in the very same area that they wouldn’t have been caught dead in after dark just 20 years before.

Growing up in NYC during my childhood in the 1980s and early ‘90s is probably very different than growing up there now, even in the same neighborhood.* As a kid, I didn’t have to “read” about the crack epidemic or other drugs like heroin as the evidence littered the streets and parks of my childhood neighborhood.

One of the too often unremarked on miracles of the last 20 years has been the drastic drop in violent crime nationwide. If you told somebody in 1991 that by 2009 the US would have crime rates similar to those during the Kennedy Administration, you would have been laughed at. But it’s happened, even through two recessions.

This also confuses racists who assert non-whites are violent, since the country is less white now than it was in 1991, yet it is safer.

exholt—regarding your limited access to music: you didn’t have a radio of some sort growing up?

If so, it’s hard for me to imagine that all the FM stations in NYC sucked when you were a kid.

This also confuses racists who assert non-whites are violent, since the country is less white now than it was in 1991, yet it is safer.

They’d probably don’t want to hear about how most of the violence and crime in my undergrad rural college town in the midwest tended to be perpetuated by the town residents who were overwhelmingly White and angry at us college kids both because of our greater socio-economic privilege on average along with our radical-left progressive politics which included acceptance of openly GBLT and interracial relationships….something many of the townspeople seemed disgusted by from what I saw in the mid-late ‘90s.  A critical factor in the horrid town-gown relations back then.  Don’t know if that’s still the case.  Hopefully, things have improved since then…..

Also, all of the few older friends and classmates from my childhood who ended up in prison are White or Hispanic….the two dominant groups in my old neighborhood.

there was music after Led Zeppelin broke up???

exholt—regarding your limited access to music: you didn’t have a radio of some sort growing up?

Nope.  The only radio we had was controlled by the parents as they did not want 80’s or pop music to be present in their homes, especially when they had to hear it from car radios and kids toting the boomboxes on their shoulder blasting it all day when they worked 12+ hour days 7 days week. 

Also, the reception wasn’t the best as it was already quite old by the 1980s. 

As I said, I didn’t have the spare cash to get myself a radio, boombox, or anything like that until I started college and earned money from my first part-time/tutoring gigs.  It also wasn’t necessary as I could get the music from hanging with friends at their houses or listening to the blasted music on the streets.

Even the Reagan-era had better mainstream music than the 2000s, though, and that was a right-wing decade. Yes, even the late ‘80s. I don’t much care for Guns ‘N Roses, for example, but they’re 1000x better than fucking Nickelback or Linkin Park.

Same even with mainstream “bubblegum” pop. Circa 1985 Madonna, or Brittney Spears? Nineteen-eighty three Michael Jackson, or Zack Effron? It is really no contest.

Correct me, if I’m wrong, but my impression of the music industry post mid-late 1990s was that unlike the 1980s, having a marketable/good looks became overwhelming privileged by the music industry execs over the ability/willingness to make GOOD MUSIC.  At least the 1980’s/early ‘90s musicians with some notable exceptions still had to be good musicians.  Acts like the Spice Girls, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears, or Nickelback as far as the music industry execs were concerned:

Music exec: Image first, good music…...whatever…..

And they wonder why CD and music sales have been declining since 2000…...  All I can say is that it wasn’t napster or the internet contrary to the assertion of music industry shills like the RIAA…..

What happened?  The baby boomers bred.  That’s what happened.

One thing that amused me greatly was seeing the Vivian Girls play at SXSW.  Their sound is great—-like the Ramones vs. the Shaggs—-but their fashion aesthetic was soooooo 90s.  It was like seeing a bunch of girls that raided my closet in high school and college, all sundresses, vintage cardigans, and boots.  And there was a cluster of dudes around my age that were stoked, because we came of age in the 90s, and the femmey tomboy look is permanently imprinted on their sexual maps.  In general, I feel lucky to have grown up when I did for that reason.  I tend towards the balance between girly and tomboyish that was the style that was rock and roll in my youth, and a lot of men my age find that to be really attractive.  I had a boyfriend give me steel toed Doc Martens for a birthday present once.

What happened?  The baby boomers bred.  That’s what happened.

Ms. Kate,

If that’s all they did, that wouldn’t be an issue.  The main crux of the problem, however, is the fact many boomers became excessively controlling parents of their millenial children into and beyond the college years….sometimes without the knowledge or support of those very children.  Many current and recent undergrads I’ve encountered were infuriated to find out their parents went behind their backs to continue doing things for them like dispute grades with their Profs/TAs or even make a pitch to HR…..

At least in the ‘90s and before, most of us then undergrads made it a point to keep our parents out of our college lives unless it is absolutely unavoidable emergency situation.  The extreme handful of people who did involve their parents in their college lives in areas we felt was solely our responsibility were regarded as too immature for college and/or their parents were condemned as treating their undergrads as little children. 

Also, most parents and their undergrads I knew back then would rarely correspond more often than once a week or every two weeks unless there was a serious problem/emergency.  The idea that boomer parents of undergrads now feel entitled to call their undergrad children 3 or more times a day would be considered a serious nightmare for most of us ‘90s era undergrads.  Most of us felt part of the point of going away for college was to learn how to live independently of our parents….not to continue involving them in nearly every aspect of our college lives. 

Ah dammit, I’m waaayyyy too late to this conversation.

I spent the 90s slogging around the scene in a pair of steel-capped dickies, jeans, t-shirt, and a trenchcoat (before columbine happened and wearing a trenchcoat was immediate grounds for expulsion). I got called a dyke by the boys in school (to which I responded something to the effect of “like I’d want to fuck you either way?”). I was definitely in the Riot Grrl spectrum, I owned every L7 album and a bit of Bikini Kill, proseletyzed the shit out of it, wrote a term paper about women in punk music and Riot Grrl, also listened to stuff like Belly and the Breeders and Veruca Salt and Tori Amos (pretty much, if you had a girl in your band in the 90s and you were on college radio, I had your stuff—still do).

We’ve got some good stuff still. Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Be Your Own Pet are pretty good punk-rock/garage rock, but I don’t really feel like we’re anywhere near where we used to be, but then, we’re just now gearing up for the “next scene” now that the politics of the country have shifted.

But as far as the scene in the 90s goes, there was a backlash already built into the culture: Industrial music (of which I am a fan and was a fan so fucking calm down before you reply). It was sort of the heavy metal of the 90s. If you look at the fanbase for bands like Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM, etc, it was often a very male-centric, misogynist culture. Very few Industrial groups had women as part of the band. Whether or not the bands themselves were intentionally exploiting male power fantasies or their fans were just that clueless, industrial music had a pretty serious undercurrent of male domination and aggression. If Tank Girl was the Riot Grrl movie of the 90s, then The Crow was undoubtedly the Industrial movie of the 90s: a movie about a dude getting manly revenge on a bunch of criminals who raped and killed his true love in a very manly, violent way. It’s not really a surprise that NIN’s “Closer” was the song that latched onto the mainstream and suddenly every dipshit jock was driving around town with that song throbbing out of his NO FEAR-emblazoned truck.

Exactly. Just make sure it’s two steps forward, one back. Bush was a step back, now let’s make sure we take at least two steps forward.

Good bloody luck with that when even the Great Medium-Beige Hope is intent on keeping those crimes swept under the rug.

there was music after Led Zeppelin broke up???

Wait - Led Zeppelin broke up???

Same even with mainstream “bubblegum” pop. Circa 1985 Madonna, or Brittney Spears? Nineteen-eighty three Michael Jackson, or Zack Effron? It is really no contest.

OK, but the bubblegum pop of the ‘80s also includes things like Samantha Fox, Debbie Gibson, and others.

OK, but the bubblegum pop of the ‘80s also includes things like Samantha Fox, Debbie Gibson, and others.

Ahh Debbie Gibson.  A few older female cousins from the suburbs were rabid fans of hers along with Tiffany….yeah…recalled them blasting her songs….like “Shake your love” and “I think I’m a clone now”.....:p

Argh…need to listen to some Clash and Ramones now to bleach my mind of that memory….

many boomers became excessively controlling parents of their millenial children

Maybe I’m fundamentally mis-interpreting the point you’re trying to make, but I think you may have your math a little wrong.

Baby boomers were well into their forties and fifties by the nineties. They weren’t having kids. They were having kids back in the 70s and 80s, and their kids were Gen X/Gen Y, not millenial kids. The millenial kids were the kids of Gen X and the older Gen Y, not the boomer’s. Boomer’s kids were in college in the 90s, not in the aughts.

exholt - i should have said “resurgence” instead of “advent” re: bubblegum pop acts.  they seemed to go away for awhile after NKOTB before backstreet, i guess when the mickey mouse club kids were going through adolescence.

Resurgence it is.  Am hoping that trend does not mean we’ll get a rehash of the heavy metalists who emphasized big hair, spandex, bright colored costumes, and become self-parodies as we did in the late ‘80s and early ‘90’s as they didn’t look terribly different from acts like NKOTB or Vanilla Ice at the end. 

This is one area where I enjoyed tormenting my older cousins over as several of them were big Van Halen and other late heavy metal fans.  They always hated it when I equated their beloved bands with boy band type acts like Vanilla Ice or NKOTB…...

I loved L7 in Serial Mom as the band Camel Toe (or was it “The Camel Toes?”)

I thought they were Camel Lips?

Baby boomers were well into their forties and fifties by the nineties. They weren’t having kids. They were having kids back in the 70s and 80s, and their kids were Gen X/Gen Y, not millenial kids. The millenial kids were the kids of Gen X and the older Gen Y, not the boomer’s. Boomer’s kids were in college in the 90s, not in the aughts.

You’re thinking of the older boomer co-horts who were born in the late ‘40s and possibly early 50’s.  However, as a member of the tail end of Gen X, most of us had parents who were at the tail end of the “Silent Generation” or “tweeners” unless their parents were of that older boomer co-hort.  I also remembered that couples were waiting longer to have kids during the ‘70s and later.  Most of the boomers ended up having children in the 1980’s IME. 

As for the oldest co-hort of Gen X, few of us started having children as the oldest of us would have turned 20 in 1985….far too young for most of us to have kids especially considering we were stereotyped as being “afraid to commit” or start families due to being the “children of divorce”.  Though a few of the older co-hort of Gen X did have millenial children, they are not representative of us.  Most millenials had parents who were boomers born in the 1950’s and early 60’s….not to mention many older boomers who married/had children in their 40s and 50s….not unusual in my neck of the woods.

Exholt: behold, The Darkness. Your worst nightmare came true a few years ago, spandex cheese metal redux.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-4VOLeKBOw

Mighty Ponygirl: My husband and I are both early Millenials and our parents are Boomers. With the exception of friends whose parents had them in their teens or early 20s all my peers parents are Boomers. I guess some kids at the tail of the Millenials have Gen X parents, but most of our parents are Boomers, hence why the Millenials are such a massive demographic, sometimes called “the Echo Boom.” I should also mention that Millenials are Gen Y, just the demographic mostly rejected the Gen Y label as it made us an appendage of Gen X and not our own seperate group.

Ahh Debbie Gibson.  A few older female cousins from the suburbs were rabid fans of hers along with Tiffany….yeah…recalled them blasting her songs….like “Shake your love” and “I think I’m a clone now”.....

A while back:

Me: “Good Lord - Tiffany is going to be posing nude for Playboy!”
A younger friend: “Who’s Tiffany?”
[short pause]
Me: “I now feel officially old.”

The cut-off birth year for being a baby boomer is 1960 (the boom “peaked” in ‘57). By 1980, the *youngest* of the boomers were 30 already and the oldest of the boomers was around 45, with most of them around 33. This informed the panic and backlash of “nesting” and “mommy-tracking,” which was mostly just that: Backlash (see book by same name for numbers). It was media-driven panic about selfish yuppie women who were too busy making money and wearing shoulder pads to settle down and “do their duty.” Sure, there were women who freaked out, had midlife crisies, watched “Baby Boom” one too many times, and got themselves off to fertility clinics to have turn-of-life babies. But it wasn’t nearly as serious as all that. Let me put it this way: My mom was too old to be a boomer (having been born at the start of the war, rather than the end). She had ME well into her thirties, and I was still born before the 1980s.

shit—I just did my own math… youngest were 20s. Never mind my point. :D

MP, is your real name Emily Litella?

I think the helicopter-parent thing isn’t so much about Boomers per se as about the huge growth of inequality and the millions of ways in which it can really deeply suck not to be rich in this country. (Oh, yeah, and essentially-free long distance calling.)

Boomers have been the first generation in a while to fact the fact that, on average, their kids aren’t going to have lives as comfortable as they did, and their kids’ kids may well do even worse. And at the same time you have the top few percent who are clearly making out like bandits and having a good time at it. So everyone in the top 40% wants their kids in the top 10%, and everyone in the top 10% wants their kids in the top 1%, and the penalty for failure isn’t just an undistinguished life, it’s to be that person three houses down who got outsourced, couldn’t find a job, got stress-related ulcers or heart trouble or fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue, and you sorta wonder whatever happened to them but don’t really want to find out because they might ask you for money. So these parents are on their kids (and on their kids’ teachers) all the time because many of them truly believe that one misstep and you’re under the bus. (And the others are doing the same thing because how dare anyone impede their glorious offspring’s progress, but ultimately that comes to the same thing.)

Pervasive fear (and terrorists have nothing on poverty) is an incredibly strong weapon for conformity.

Dark Avenger—Believe me when I say that I’m completely burned out by work and I’m not surprised I’d subtract 80 from 60 and get 30. My brain is beginning to liquefy.

Exholt, it isn’t just the controlling parents - it is the sheer relative generation sizes. 

When I was in my 20s - the 1990s - the record companies couldn’t give to shits about what my generation wanted because we were not big enough to deal with or care about.  They were still frotteurizing the baby boomers, producing comeback albums and reunion tours and hogging the airwaves with “classic rock” drivel. 

Gen-x was left to its own devices, including the founding of independent labels and distribution of ‘zines.

Then came the little boomer bots, whose parents tended to be older and well capitalized and who formed a much larger target audience for Disnification.  These kids have had so much beamed at them that has been pasteurized, homoginized, and carefully engineered to their tastes and age preferences that they can’t imagine not being able to just consume merchandise known as Hannah Montana or Radio Disney.

I’m grateful that my kids have always rejected this ... I don’t know why, but they do.

Oh, and my kids and their friends are forming bands now.  Gen-x echo kid bands.  Stay tuned.

No, ponygirl, the baby boom runs from 1946 to 1964(according to the Census Bureau) not that it changes your argument much. But I think the problem was not so much the boomers breeding, as taking over the institutions.

I’m completely mystified by the Jonas Brothers phenomenon.  Three kids who look kinda funny and don’t sing or play well.  And this works on people because…?  (Yes, I know it’s marketed hyperaggressively, but why does it stick?)

FlipYrWhig, it works because it is sanitized for their protection.  Just like any Radio Disney product.  Pseudoboybands to Pseudohiphop groups on up - nice and safe!

I’ve always wondered, if most of the population will accept whatever the record companies/MTV/Disney wants to shove down their ear-canals, then why not at least aggressively market good acts? Why the crap? They could have spent the same amount promoting Sleater-Kinney as they did the Spice Girls or Britney, and we’d all be a lot better off for it.

Re: The Jonas Brothers

I’m assuming they’re safe, sexless, anodyne creatures created specifically for young girls to fantasize about without any possibility of actual physical urges manifesting themselves (note their professional virgin status).

Egnu, that’s because they want “artists” willing to do what they are told, not do what they want or feel.  Doing what you want/feel/are good at means being out of the control of the machine.

Exactly why GenX was so different: nobody fucking gave a shit about us, so artists did their own thing, made their own way, and called nobody their bosses.  It was never in the corporate interest until it actually started selling big.

See Also: Lily Allen and her sneaking out demo tapes to her fans to fuck over her corporate masters.

OK, but the bubblegum pop of the ‘80s also includes things like Samantha Fox, Debbie Gibson, and others.

OK, yeah, but that’s not ALL there was. There has always been crap music on the mainstream charts, but today it is ONLY and COMPLETELY crap. Big difference.

As a Millenial, I’m going to defend my generation and point out that we have not yet be in charge of the record industry, where the real decisions are made. The Baby Boomers were beginning in the mid-90s.

I mean, You’re going to blame 13-year olds in 1998 for their choices of music? And not the record execs for foisting it on them? Really?

As one of those 1998 13-year olds, I got into early to mid-90s rock and hip-hop (pre-1997) in my Middle School years even though it was not en vogue. I wasn’t the only one where I lived. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that LFO and Limp Bizkit didn’t have much relevance to angsty young teenagers living in a dying, dreary rural southern town, and the kids of Boomer yuppies were different. Maybe.

And BTW, even Debbie Gibson could kick Zack Effron’s ass.

The phenomenon of parents’ SUVs forming a conga line to drop kids off at the school in my (safe, suburb-like) neighborhood goes back less than ten years. So I’m going to say the helicopter parents were born in the 70s. Before then, kids walked to the school. (Mom might have walked with the younger kids.) As a byproduct, two of the three crossing patrols were eliminated, putting six kids “out of work.”

But I always assumed exholt was an ABC. I’m surprised he takes the anti-helicopter parent attitude, because, in my experience, Chinese kids are in daily telephonic contact with their parents till they (or the kid) die.

The phenomenon of parents’ SUVs forming a conga line to drop kids off at the school in my (safe, suburb-like) neighborhood goes back less than ten years. So I’m going to say the helicopter parents were born in the 70s.

Um, no.  These people are older than me, not younger.  I was born in 1967.  Try again.

Part of that “conga line” was due to cuts in taxes reducing or eliminating school bus service in areas where such service is not required by law.

Part of that “conga line” was due to cuts in taxes reducing or eliminating school bus service in areas where such service is not required by law.

I think, from my experience, it has to do more with social status. If your mom/dad can drop you off, you don’t have to ride the dirty bus with all those poor kids. In high school, this transforms into driving in your own car to school.

Exactly why GenX was so different: nobody fucking gave a shit about us, so artists did their own thing, made their own way, and called nobody their bosses.  It was never in the corporate interest until it actually started selling big.

Which seems to be happening again. See also: Animal Collective, Of Montreal, and the tons of underground bands who’ve gone back to putting out their stuff on vinyl and tapes (Ducktails, Teeth Mountain, James Ferraro, Ariel Pink, everybody on Not Not Fun, etc).

Yet I’ve noted, if a woman in an action film has visible muscles, it was probably the 80s. If she’s brainy and strong and also has boobs? 80s, or Angelina Jolie. I’ve gone from living my teens in a world where pop culture told me that strong was sexy to seeing Sarah Michelle Gellar diet away all her muscles so that she’d be a thinner vampire slayer.

So, maybe rock and roll (but Pat Benetar? Cyndi Lauper? were they nothing?) improved in the 90s, but pop culture in general?

All depends on your point of view, I guess. In my high school, the boys sent letters of complaint to our school newspaper for giving more coverage to our lackluster boys’ sports when the girls’ volleyball team was making state championships.

That’s Deborah Gibson.

I’m in kinda the slip-thru-the-cracks generation: I was born in the spring of 1965.

Too late by 1-4 years for Baby Boomer status (and my parents were born before the Baby Boom years started).

Also in actuality truly too early for Gen-X (no matter what Wiki says on the matter).

And get off my lawn!

Teac, I was born in 1967 ... I realized in my teens that it was hard to get to know anybody my age because there simply were very few people my age - my graduating class was less than 2/3 the size of my brother’s, and half the peak size for the school.

I’m going to repeat what I said upthread:

What the bloody blue fuck are we going to do about it? Nostalgia is all well and good, but in my case it mostly reminds me that there was a time I liked Michael Bolton. How do we do artistic empowerment?

BrianX, you’re a producer.

Produce!

Seek out what we’re talking about, hire female crews and designers, and get out of the way.

How do we do artistic empowerment?

Donate money, time, or equipment to groups like “Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp For Girls” http://www.girlsrockcamp.org/main/

You say you’re a producer? Take on teen and college age girls as interns.

Teach any creative skills you have through your local park district or free schools or other outlets.

Mentor.

Make mix cds for any young girls you may know of cool female and female fronted bands, old music is new if you’ve never heard it before. Gift or share empowering books, comics, zines, films, and television series.

Just be supportive. Let girls know that you respect their thoughts, ideas, and input.

Those are a few ideas just off the top of my head.

Jessi:

Makes sense. Actually it has some resonance with some work I’ve already done, but for whatever reason I don’t think it went as far as it should have. I like your suggestion about the mix cds, except that I don’t know too many young girls well enough to do that.

You’re welcome!

But I always assumed exholt was an ABC. I’m surprised he takes the anti-helicopter parent attitude, because, in my experience, Chinese kids are in daily telephonic contact with their parents till they (or the kid) die.

Weird.  Nearly all the ABC kids I knew in high school and college ended up actually having far less contact and were more independent than other American kids simply because most of our parents had severe language barriers or were otherwise too unfamiliar with navigating the US educational system so all those responsibilities ended up being fobbed off onto us giving us far more of a free hand for better or worse.  Only exceptions were those who commuted to their colleges from home….but even then…the language barrier/difficulty in navigating the educational bureaucracy meant that they still had a great deal of independence.  Then again, what you may be seeing is the ABC parents copying the boomer parents’ helicoptering parenting practices of late or the few unusually overprotective parents which exist in any group or parental generation. 

In my case, keep in mind that my father was completely on his own from the age of 12 onwards when he fled the Communist takeover of China in 1949 and ended up having to manage to cope and live on his own with no parental support.  A reason why despite his strictness in educational matters, he and my mother were unusually lax in areas like curfew.  If anything, he feels the continuing imposition of curfew on teens well past the age of 14 are signs American/Western parents are too overprotective and coddling of their adolescents/teens to the detriment of learning self-reliance and living independently.

As a Millenial, I’m going to defend my generation and point out that we have not yet be in charge of the record industry, where the real decisions are made. The Baby Boomers were beginning in the mid-90s.

I mean, You’re going to blame 13-year olds in 1998 for their choices of music? And not the record execs for foisting it on them? Really?

Ben D.,

Don’t worry.  I agree fault for this crappy trend should almost all be laid at the foot of the music industry which has seemingly privileged marketable image and beauty almost exclusively to the detriment of good…or even passable musical talent…whether this lack was due to the non-existence of talent, non-willingness to manifest/record industry constraints, or both. 

This is one key reason why CD and album sales have dropped in the 2000s…...not napster and unauthorized downloads contrary to music industry shills.  Doesn’t help when that industry continues to exercise and even amp up obsolete business models rather than doing what businesses actually need to do to succeed and maintain that success….find out what the customer demand is and how current/future technological trends can be used to deliver to that demand so it becomes a profitable win-win for both parties rather than browbeating customers with crappy product and then making negative assumptions about their supposed criminality when they vote with their feet by refusing to pay $12-20+ for unadulterated crap delivered through a mechanism increasingly seen as obsolete by many.

I think the helicopter-parent thing isn’t so much about Boomers per se as about the huge growth of inequality and the millions of ways in which it can really deeply suck not to be rich in this country. (Oh, yeah, and essentially-free long distance calling.)

I would buy that except that all the worst manifestations of helicopter parenting I’ve heard about from friends who teach/TA college classes and seen firsthand tend to come from parents and to some extent…millennials from upper/upper-middle class families who act as if their “darling” is so special that they feel entitled to control them and intrude into areas of their college lives that just a decade before would have been considered the responsibilities of the undergrads themselves. 

Worse, this intrusion often extends into doing an end-run past the TA and/or Prof so they can strong-arm them into giving their “darling” a far higher grade than merited….institutional fairness and integrity be damned…  Back in my parents home country, this behavior would have scandalized the parents and child(ren) in question as it is seen as a manifestation of corruption.  In the extreme rare incidents of this back then, such actions would almost always end in expulsion of the child(ren) concerned, severe social ostracism for the family, and scandalization of the parents.

Don’t worry.  I agree fault for this crappy trend should almost all be laid at the foot of the music industry which has seemingly privileged marketable image and beauty almost exclusively to the detriment of good…or even passable musical talent…whether this lack was due to the non-existence of talent, non-willingness to manifest/record industry constraints, or both.

I think it is laziness, pure and simple. It is much easier to find “pretty” music stars than it is to find real talent.

I don’t even care that music stars in mainstream music are going to look good—that’s fine, I get that isn’t going to change, but they should have talent, too.

I was thinking a little bit about my marvelous faceplant and I guess the problem is that when you describe a “baby boomer” you’re usually describing a very specific cultural history: involving being a teenager / young adult during the sixties in order to participate in the hippie thing / civil rights thing / counterculture thing. I don’t really think of a boomer as someone born after 1955 because they would be too young to really make up that demographic of protest and world-changing that the boomers looooove to remind everyone that they “did” in order to offset what they then went on to “do” in the 80s and 90s. My math got a little lost around the way, obviously, but culturally speaking, I don’t know that I would classify someone born in the 60s as a boomer just because of their relevance to the social and cultural zeitgeists of the boomer generation. And if you were pushing twenty by the end of the sixties so that you could go to Woodstock and be devastated by Altamont, then you were pushing 30 by the end of the 70s.

I guess it doesn’t change the fact that a) I was wrong and b) the census doesn’t really care about Woodstock, but I just thought I’d throw that out there in my defense.

that rounding up men to be kept on sperm farms was the next step. 

I want to commend my fellow commenters for having enough self-control over the past three days not to respond to that remark with any comments such as “can’t wait for milking time.”

@ Ben D.:  There has always been crap music on the mainstream charts, but today it is ONLY and COMPLETELY crap.

Everyone always says that.  Twenty years from now people will be lamenting how mainstream pop is horrible and longing for the days when Gnarls Barkley and Gorillaz and Green Day were in heavy rotation, and Pink will have been reclaimed as an ahead-of-the-curve innovator and take-no-shit star.

Exactly why GenX was so different: nobody fucking gave a shit about us, so artists did their own thing, made their own way, and called nobody their bosses.

Oh come on, GenX was a marketing concept to sell more Mtn. Dew. GenX, GenY, the eXtreme Games, were a product sold to us by Pepsi and MTV. I remember seeing that for the first time on Channel One in school and thinking, “Oh, so I guess I’m generation X now. Do the Dew!”

The Pepsi thing is “Generation Next.” It’s supposed to make Pepsi seem cool and edgy and innovative like it’s been since 1903. Pepsi didn’t coin the term “Generation X.”

I think it is laziness, pure and simple. It is much easier to find “pretty” music stars than it is to find real talent.

That and uncontrollable greed and need to be control freaks.  They want easily marketable/self-marketable and controllable acts rather than take the time and effort to develop good acts which may or may not become a “guaranteed hit” and/or guarantee compliance from the acts’ members.  In short, the music industry bigwigs want automated income machines with little to no serious development/marketing work on their part and with minimized risks the acts’ members may go against the “guaranteed hit” plan to follow their own artistic path. 

Unfortunately for the music industry, the consuming public has grown wise to this, voted with their feet, and Apple et al ended up taking advantage of the fact they were caught short when they chose to fight the internets rather than figuring out how best to work with it….

Oh come on, GenX was a marketing concept

WRONG!  Generation X was coined by Douglas Coupland, for the novel of the same name that described the economic marginalization and boomer-centric wastland we inherited.

Get yer facts straight, please.  We were NEVER a marketing target ... NEVER ... until we actually started wagging the cultural dog and bands like Nirvana and Offspring grabbed the nuts of some of the more awake baby boomers and they started buying stuff from the original indie labels.

I remember taking classes at the MIT Media Lab where we dissected this stuff ... there were very few if any campaigns directed to Generation X in the mass media in the late 80s ... I did the research, I did the fucking math.

BTW, Channel One was after GenX - it was designed to market media to boomer children.

I was thinking a little bit about my marvelous faceplant and I guess the problem is that when you describe a “baby boomer” you’re usually describing a very specific cultural history: involving being a teenager / young adult during the sixties in order to participate in the hippie thing / civil rights thing / counterculture thing.

From what I heard from my high school buddy’s boomer aged parents and friends who were active hippies in the 1960’s, contrary to conventional thinking….not all or even most boomers participated in the “hippie/civil rights/counterculture thing. 

In fact, they are fed up with fellow boomers who rain crap on us young’uns for not being as “activist” or “involved” as their generation was…...they viewed those criticisms as a complete hypocritical crock considering they remembered most boomers were only half-heartedly committed, apathetic, or even actively fought against them as the cases of Dan Quayle and W shows.

exholt:

I think (though I could be wrong) that a big part of that enormous entitlement thing is driven by subconscious fear. Of course, a lot of it is, as you point out, driven by a sense that being a vicious asshole to people who get in the way of you or yours is the right way to do things. And then of course there’s the problem of how you maintain some kind of order when any single kid is quite poibly paying more in tuition and room/board than any of their untenured teachers are paid…

Oh my mistake, I I thought GenX was a late 90’s thing, since that’s when I first heard it. I had no idea the term was being used in the 80’s.

I listened to a lot of KMFDM in high school. It’s basically one german guy named Sacha and his rotating circle of friends, which has included a lot of women. He’s gay (I think) and extremely liberal- I know KMFDM and Sister Machine Gun where the only two bands that stuck with their label when its president came down with AIDS. Nobody seems to know what KMFDM stands for, but a german variant on “no mercy for the majority” is the main interpretation.

I was born in 1982, and didn’t really discover popular music until one day in what would have been sixth grade, a bunch of other kids were going on about how cool it was that Smashing Pumpkins had played the town, and I was really bummed out that I had no idea what they were talking about. Eh, that’s homeschooling for you.

the mixtapes i got from older friends had a lot of REM, Tom Waits, and Iggy Pop. I remember sitting in the basement after school, listening to Heart Shaped Box on the radio and really likeing it, a few weeks after Cobain killed himself.

I got into punk more the later in high school the more politically active I became. With the exception of the (truly freaky) Miranda July, i can’t say one way or the other about feminism back then- I passed this one Miranda July CD I had around my high school AutoCad (what they call shop now) class, and it went over great. My then-girlfriend was very into Liz Phair.

Went to a lot of small shows, DIY stuff, mostly out of the local college. nothing like a good mosh pit in a confined space!

My high school was a huge nexus of those people who idle in their SUVs waiting to let billy n’ becky off- and it was totally a class thing. The bus is full of all kinds of unsavory people who start fights and sell drugs and listen to ICP (well, they did, anyhow). My parents wern’t about to drive all the way across the county to sit around and waste gas for 20 min, so I think I was the only person in my AP classes who didn’t either have a car, or mommy to come drop me off.