[rts] twenty years ago, part 1

So let's see...at this time twenty years ago, I was living sort-of offcampus with Lissa in an apartment on Beacon Street, just down the street from Emerson, back when its main campus was on the corner of Beacon and Berkeley. It was my junior hear in college, and things were...well, they were up and down for me. I was learning how to write a script, but I wasn't making any actual films. I was writing songs for the Flying Bohemians, but I wasn't really recording many of them. I was writing, but I was trying to revive the IWN for the umpteenth time. I was still going out with T., but our relationship was pretty strained by then. I was quite creative at the time, but I was pretty much told by my advisor that I probably should have gone to MA College of Art if I really wanted to make movies instead of just learn about theory. An emotional rollercoaster, to say the least.

But hey...that was twenty years ago, and I'm all over that. This is about the music.

It's kind of funny, listening to 1990-1991 again, because in Boston, alternative music was in the balance. WFNX was playing a great amount of Britpop and shoegaze, which I loved, but was of course tempering it with the emerging grunge sound from the opposite coast. With the Northeast being as collegiate as it is, it took awhile for the hard rock with dark lyrics to win over the bouncier, drug-infested dance rock. It really could have gone either way, if it wasn't for the prevailing mood of the Gen-X Slackers: ennui, frustration, and annoyance. Sure, it was nothing compared to nowadays, but at the time it was one of those times of assertion, much like the 50s, where the younger generation realized they could get away with it now.

So what have we learned, musically?

( Children, I know, you deserve more than this world could ever give )

More tomorrow!