Uh Oh Nostalgia

(none of the ideas below are particularly innovative but I am writing them down anyways)

Um. I think I like the 1990s again.

Does this mean I get to spend the next 40-50 years thinking about my teenage years? I hope not. Ugh.

It's maybe that, I dunno, there's something too subtle and self-conscious about most of the music I am hearing today. And also, I think, depression, angst, frustration, still not absent from my life (as if it ever is entirely for anyone). Most electronic music seems to be made by and for cool kids these days, outside of the small contingent of the young and alienated kids in the UK that keep ye olde 'nuum scraping by. 

This is not to say that I care about guitars again, or disown electronics, or anything like that. It's more like, hey, sliding into middle-age, I still find myself up at 5am wishing I had whiskey to go with my cigarettes. So, suddenly, I really like Alice In Chains, even though I didn't actually care for them when I was a pre-teen/teenager.

There's a lot to be angry about in this world, even beyond my personal life. Outside of whatever bands kids who shop at Hot Topic listen to, a smattering of more honest rappers, and, maybe, some decent metal bands, I don't really get the sense that anyone is speaking to that anger at all. And even amongst those who do, well, on the one hand, yeah, maybe I am too "cool" taste-wise, though not as an actual person, to ever love, like, emo or whatever, but, then again, the problem I think most music, "cool" or cool or not or not, seems to suffer from is, at least for me, an exhaustive sense of stylization. Maybe I've said this already, but I feel like we have reached peak mediation.

Probably I'm borrowing from Baudrillard or Debord or someone, but. What I mean by peak mediation is simple and really, profoundly depressing. If all media (records, books, film, TV, etc.) was, at some point, a document of some pre-existing reality or culture or whatever, well, what it feels like to me to listen to music now, well, I feel like I am listening to an attempt to recreate a document. A depiction of a depiction. What was it, the "precession of simulacra" or something like that? 

I dunno.

Why aren't the kids angry?

Let's just say that health is the new conformity and leave it at that.

Or not. Self-help, therapy, medication, self-actualization, advice, advice, advice. The necessary distance from emotions that allows us to "understand" them. Progress, but somehow scary, too. Self-mastery, not imposed by external force but by what may be lost by not achieving it (does Facebook mimic the real world or vice-versa?). Exhausting "normativity". Additional hypothesis: the precession of simulacra applies to people too. I can't prove it, not only because it is unprovable, but also, because, well, I am too alienated to be objective. Pathetic. Or not.

Really, what's particularly wrong with being alienated from this world at this time?* 

Which is why, again, Alice In Chains. 

*It's sort of annoying, I'll admit, to be in this situation at this age. More than annoying, actually. But the triumph of psychology, unfortunately, doesn't seem to understand the difference between a principled rejection of society and unfitness to live within it. A product of the psychological society, neither do I, on some days.

Anywho.

Pointless aside:

The 1990s weren't very good clothing-wise were they? Times are better now, though boring. I feel like we could all get away with a nice pair of jeans and a stylish hooded sweatshirt for another 1,000 years. Nobody is ever going to look like Prince and the Revolution in 1984 ever again, will they?

Bonus:

Even Primus seems angsty now. Jeez.