armchair cultural observation since 1995

Rotting Back In High School

highschool

December is a great time to look backwards on the past year, but I found myself last month looking back even further. Digging through crates of VHS tapes looking for gems of my past, I found that most of the tapes were anything but.

There’s a cool local news report of the time my church’s food pantry was cleaned out by a thief featuring my mom and dad and hours and hours of mindlessly boring content of my brothers and I playing wiffle ball in our backyard, attempting to play soccer, throwing the baseball around and just about every single present we got for Christmas in the ’80s and early ’90s is fully documented in all of it’s “Just What I Needed!” glory. There’s also among other things 10 minutes of grainy and shaky video my dad took of the sunset setting over the Grand Canyon and an entire Feivel Goes West live show at an amusement park. Riveting stuff, I know.

The real gem in all of those stacks of VHS tapes was a worn out video labeled Ms. Seltzer’s Journalism Class. As soon as I saw it I knew exactly what it was. The video was a project my older brother and I worked on with our high school journalism class in 1995 (the same year I founded a little fanzine I called Tang). It was supposed to be a video yearbook, but ended up being a 15-minute music video trip through the halls of our suburban New Jersey high school that’s so grainy it might as well be an antique from the turn of the century (somewhere I can hear my dad talking about the superior quality of Betamax).

The video’s not quite 20 years old and yet has aged as well as one of those junkies you see in cautionary anti-drug PSAs. For me, it’s almost the equivalent of an indie rock Heavy Metal Parking Lot, complete with all the wardrobe and haircut trappings of the day and a soundtrack of bands whose members have either parted ways, died or are already gearing up for their second reunion tour.

Still, of all the things that have changed since the haphazard dubbing of this video was completed, the music is probably the least embarrassing and perhaps least authentic for the period. The Jesus and Mary Chain aren’t scoffed at like overalls or white sneakers are today (and were at least by my group of friends at the time). Nor are Superchunk or The Bouncing Souls,  Sebadoh or the Beastie Boys. You might not be able to find the kind of striped shirts worn by every other guy in this video or see anyone rocking any of the hairdos unironically but you wouldn’t have to look too hard to find Superchunk on some year-end best-of lists or a review speaking positively of the latest Sebadoh release. In fact, I would argue that Pop Will Eat Itself and probably Oasis are the only bands in the video that exclusively belong to the decade or that a majority of my peers in the video would have recognized then or now.

I say all that not to brag about my musical tastes but to point out that music from the period, at least the indie music of the time, has aged far better than the technology or the fashion. When I hear bands whose members were barely walking in the ’90s citing bands I not only blasted on the tape deck of my older brother’s car but went to see play live at places like the Trocadero and JC Dobbs I’m reminded that my high school years weren’t quite as awful as I thought they were at the time (my brother and I loved to sing that Lou Barlow line about “rotting back in high school” even when were in high school) or that they look like on VHS transferred to digital and uploaded on YouTube.

Sure, things still didn’t look so great in hindsight (“Nice glasses, tool!), but they sure sounded good.

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