How Today's Teenagers Are Embracing Nirvana and Other 90's Pop Culture

There are no less than three high schools within four miles of where I live. As a result, the neighborhoods I travel are always crawling with teenagers. In the last several months I've noticed a very curious fashion trend among this set, in that they're often sporting hoodies, sweatshirts and t-shirts featuring 90's bands. Hardly a day goes by in fact when I don't see a pimply-faced sophomore in Nirvana gear. I've also seen Metallica quite a bit, Snoop Dogg, Death Row Records, Foo Fighters and Slipknot. Now I need to stress that this is more than anecdotal (I'm not a big fan of any of these acts so I have no subconscious tendency to notice anyone repping them.) This is something that's both very real and being perpetuated with intention. Apparel makers are cranking out 90's-related clothing and retailers are aggressively promoting it in the teen market. 

Just the other day I saw a large poster in Tilly's window featuring a kid wearing a Nirvana shirt. It made me wonder -- why are merchandisers reaching back to pop culture from thirty years ago to appeal to today's teens? Are they just giving these kids what they've newly discovered and are now embracing? 

Beginning points for cultural trends are often difficult to pinpoint but at the same time, retro style is nothing new. Fashions, music and pop culture figures are often resurrected as they experience periods of nostalgia, usually about twenty years after they first emerged. The 1970's looked back at the 50's with Sha Na Na, American Graffiti, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and Grease. The 80's saw comebacks for big hair, stirrup pants, miniskirts, paisley ties and penny loafers -- all popular in the 1960's. The 90's saw revisits to the 70's in The Brady Bunch films, That 70's Show, and the re-release of the original Star Wars trilogy. But currently, for unknown reasons, it seems the first decade of the 2000's is being overlooked in favor of what was popular in the 1990's. 

I ventured into the aforementioned Tilly's to see if I could discover more and realized that my observations were one hundred percent accurate. The store was loaded with apparel celebrating 90's pop culture, including Mike Tyson, the Chicago Bulls (who won six NBA titles in that decade) and Ice Cube. During a subsequent perusal of Tilly's website I found even more 90's apparel -- Friends, The Simpson, Aaliyah, Tupac, and tons and tons of... you guessed it... Nirvana. What is it about that particular band that elevates them so much among today's youth?... Is it their music?... Almost certainly not. This 90's craze that's taking place wasn't triggered by teens going through their parents CD collection and discovering grunge classics like "All Apologies" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Could it be the imagery and typography?... After all, the "Nirvana" lettering is pretty cool and the album covers for Nevermind and In Utero, as well as the "zonked out smiley face" logo are all pretty iconic. Yes, the aesthetics of graphic designs for the band are certainly a factor -- but the main reason Nirvana apparel is so ubiquitous today is largely due to the 90's nostalgia I've described and the fact that, while grunge didn't age well or sustain its popularity in subsequent decades, Nirvana is almost unquestionably the seminal band of that era. The same way the Sex Pistols and The Clash still carry the mantle and are revered in punk rock (the most significant rock sub-genre of the 70's) that's the esteem that Nirvana is held in when it comes to grunge (the most significant rock sub-genre of the 90's.) 

And so it was that I came to realize that the reason I'm seeing so many Nirvana shirts is less about the band and their music and more about the position they hold in connection with 90's. When you think about it, it could just as easily have been Pearl Jam except Curt Kobain's premature death by suicide has led to a certain romanticization of the artist's life, thereby creating greater recognition and appreciation for his work. 

In any case, if there's one thing I can't abide it's posers. If they truly like Nirvana's music that's one thing, but these teenagers running around in the band's tees just because all the other kids at the mall are are just plain annoying. And hey, as long as we're paying tribute to 90's alt-rock, I say we get retailers cranking out apparel featuring Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, Blind Melon, 4 Non Blondes, the Pixies, Liz Phair and of course Alanis Morissette.

Matthew Perry was Beloved by All -- but his Untimely Death Hits Gen X-ers the Hardest

Matthew Perry's recent, sudden death sparked an outpouring of grief and fond remembrances within the Hollywood community. It also brought a great deal of sadness to fans of the actor and just about anyone who's ever watched and loved him on television. Perry's talent extended far beyond a single TV show (I first noticed him in a guest shot he did on Just the Ten of Us in 1989 and also thoroughly enjoyed him opposite Salma Hayek in 1997's Fools Rush In.) Still, the actor will always be most remembered most as hilarious smart-aleck Chandler Bing on Friends. And therein lies the reason why Perry's death is especially painful for those of us in Generation X. It's because Friends is undeniably a Gen X show. 

In Friends first season (1994) we learn that Monica (and her high school classmate Rachel) are twenty-six years old. The rest of the gang is also right around this same age, with Ross (and possibly Phoebe) only slightly older. So when you do the math, Monica was born in 1968, placing her and the rest of the Friends squarely in Generation X. Numerous storylines and references throughout the series back this up. From Ross's fixation on Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi, to Chandler's Flock of Seagulls haircut and admission of rushing the stage at a Wham concert, clearly these characters grew up in the 80's and thus are unquestionably part of Generation X. That clarified, it's no wonder that Perry's death hits us the hardest. We've lost one of our own. 

My high school class recently had a well-attended reunion and though I wasn't able to make it, I took time to pour over the gallery of photos that were posted online in the days after. While clicking through, I smiled and laughed seeing faces from my past for the first time in literally decades. The funny thing was I wasn't even friends with most of these people. I made all of my lifelong friendships during college and to this day remain in touch with only a single high school pal. Nevertheless it warmed my heart to see people I spent four of my most formative years with and know, despite the abundance of receding hairlines and expanding waistlines, they were alive and doing well. Somehow, we all tend to have very strong sentiments towards our peers and those with whom we've shared a common, significant experience. But the flipside of that feel-good sentiment is the gut-punch and sense of loss we suffer when we learn that one of our comrades is now gone.

That's what many of us are feeling with Matthew Perry's death. Friends was the ongoing story of six Gen X-ers trying to make it in the world as they laughed with, leaned on and loved each other. As we did with the abundance of teen movies in the 1980's (e.g., The Breakfast Club, Fast Times, Risky Business) Gen X-ers saw authentic versions of themselves and their lives in the Friends characters -- whether it was Ross (smart and sensitive and carrying unrequited love) or Phoebe (so unapologetically authentic in her flakiness) or Chandler, with his rapier wit and brandishing sarcasm hiding underlying insecurities.

Many will say that Friends is a show that belongs to far more that just a single generation and that it appeals to Millennials and Zoomers as much as any other age group. This is certainly true. Enough time has gone by now that we can safely say that Friends, and many of it's themes, storylines and characters are classic. Nevertheless, the show provided a different experience for us Gen X-ers who tuned in during its original run. We were watching ourselves -- young adults in their mid-20's, living post-college life in the 90's, going through the same things we were at that same moment in time. For example, when Friends debuted, many Gen-X women (my girlfriend included) had just moved out of their parents' house, started their first real job and were realizing independence for the very first time -- just like Rachel in the pilot episode. Like Joey, many of us were pursuing a career in acting or the arts and working odd jobs to pay rent while we pursued our dream. And while young people watching the show for the first time even today can definitely relate to universal themes like this, at the time it originally aired Friends meant the most to Gen-Xers who got to come home, click on the TV and see Ross, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey and Chandler living their same lives -- or perhaps the lives we wished we had. These were our peers... our contemporaries... our cohorts. And losing one of those is often the hardest blow to take... 

R.I.P. Matthew. 

Board Games of the 1970's Highlighted Americans' Angst

*AUTHOR'S NOTE: Board games are commonly defined as "any game of strategy in which pieces are moved on a board." For the purposes of this article, I'm using the slightly broader definition of "any competitive or strategic game played with pieces or paraphernalia on a tabletop."

To be sure things were tense in the 1970's both domestically and abroad. In the previous decade, high profile assassinations, race riots from coast to coast, the Manson murders, chaos at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and southern backlash against the Civil Rights Movement highlighted a decade in which social unrest was more overt than any other time in our nation's history. But as the 70s rolled in, upheaval, threats and alarmism abounded in a much more subversive way — one that created a palpable tension among the American populace. While we distracted ourselves with innocuous AM radio hits like Me and You and a Dog Named Boo, One Bad Apple and Kung Fu Fighting, in our gut we were terrified by the stress-inducing events that were happening all around us. We lamented the Kent State shootings, fretted about gas shortages, shook our head in disbelief at the corruption of Love Canal, worried that Three Mile Island or some other nuclear disaster would cause our doom, and secretly feared murderous wackos like Ted Bundy, Son of Sam and Jim Jones.

So could it be that all of the fear, pressure and angst built up during the 1970's manifested itself in, of all things, the decade’s most popular board games? Consider some of the ones that were best selling and most played at the time and the gameplay each involved:

Operation put our nerves to the test as we tried to steel ourselves and "take out his spare rib for $100." Touch the sides with those tweezers and you’d trigger a loud buzzer indicating you’d botched the surgery and killed the patient. (Talk about stress!) Meanwhile Perfection, which debuted in 1973, had us racing against time to place cut out shapes in their corresponding holes before the timer ran out and the whole thing went kaplooey in our faces. This unforgiving game demanded just what its name specified -- perfection. Getting some or most of the shapes in place meant bupkis so the game's all or nothing, tension-building premise had us all sweating from start to finish.

Perhaps the most ominous-sounding popular games of the 70s — Headache, Trouble, and Sorry — all had us maneuvering our pieces across the board in an effort to either outrace or sabotage our opponents. In its way, it was the perfect metaphor for the rampant consumerism and "keeping up with the Joneses" mentality that drove the US economy in the 70's before inflation took hold during the Ford administration. 

Think this is all a bit of a stretch?...  Well clearly something was going on in the 70's as we Americans, for whatever reason, played out the abundance of stress the decade had to offer with our dice, game tokens and pop-o-matics. An assortment of other forebodingly named games gained popularity during the time:  Kerplunk, Down the Drain, Don’t Tip the Waiter, Ants in the Pants, and of course, Don’t Break the Ice, which can be considered a not so subtle metaphor for the spectre of the US-Soviet Cold War. Similarly, Risk provided a much more literal representation of what might occur if the USSR (or some other communist regime) conquered the globe.

Stay Alive, introduced in 1971 and advertised as being "quite deadly", had the stated objective of simply surviving. The game was wildly popular throughout the decade, possibly because it embodied our fears for our soldiers fighting in Vietnam, as well as for Patti Hearst during her kidnapping and the hostages held in Iran.

Finally, the defining political event of the 1970's was most certainly Watergate and its surrounding mysteries of who committed the actual break in, “what did the president know and when”, as well as who Deep Throat could be. Parker Brothers seized upon these same mystery and crime solving themes with its detective game Clue, released in the U.S. in 1972 within weeks of the actual Watergate break in. And just like Watergate, Clue featured investigation, cover ups, accusations, and efforts to either guess or prove which of several characters committed the crime. 

Whatever you choose to believe about our choice of board games during 1970's, thankfully, the 80's were a lot more relaxed and carefree. (Fyi, that's the decade when less emotionally taxing fare like Trivial Pursuit and Scattergories were best sellers, and just before the popularity of board games in general began to slump, thanks to the rise of home video consoles like Nintendo and Sega Genesis.)

And the Most Beloved (but Embarrassing) Artist of the 80's is... Adam Ant!

Started an open-ended discussion on Reddit recently asking which 80's band or artist do/did you love BUT are kind of ashamed to admit. The many responses ranged from the obvious (Tiffany, Kenny G, New Kids on the Block) to the obscure (Sigue Sigue Sputnik.) The conversation sparked remembrances of long forgotten acts like Cameo, Winger and El Debarge, shout outs to the criminally underrated ABC and Human League, and confessions by unabashed metal heads of their secret love for Madonna and Debbie Gibson. But surprisingly, the number one artist (measured by mentions in comments and subsequent upvotes) was British new waver Adam Ant... 

No, I'm not kidding; Adam Ant won in a landslide... 

What's funny is I thought of him when I put together the above collage image intended to spark this discussion -- but I never imagined he was so beloved by others.

Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis and the News, Genesis, Pet Shop Boys and Warrant all fared well but the top five are listed below.

Adam Ant - 101

Air Supply - 67

Wham/George Michael - 57

Ratt - 57

Go-Go's - 33

The Cure - 26

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