Tonight Mom and I watched "Montage of Heck", a documentary about Kurt Cobain.
They did a good job of capturing the hopelessness of Generation X. It is a time period I remember all too well. It is the generation I am a part of.
And Kurt Cobain was a good example of how fed up we were, and for some unknowable reason I want to talk about it. Maybe because I see young hipsters trying to recreate a scene they know very little--if anything--about. (Worse, globbing on to music they know nothing about.) I want to talk about how it felt back then, which is different than it feels now. Frustration is typical for any generation of teenagers, but the vibe I get from the emerging "Millennials" is of a different sort. I'd like to put Gen X's particular frustration into words, if only to define it for myself.
The problem I'm running into is that my view might be skewed by my own mental illness, which was diagnosed around the same time Cobain ate a bullet: 1994. So, maybe all of what follows is being said because just *I* felt that way. I've never had the occasion to be anyone else, though, so just bear with me. Hear me out.
I was not the only kid I knew in the 90's to land in a mental hospital, and what I'm talking about has nothing to do with schizophrenia. Kids in the 90's were sent to mental hospitals (though we weren't institutionalized in any sense) the way kids before us were sent to summer camp. We were not kids, we were "problems." [I see loads of youngsters today with a myriad diagnoses and frustrations, but we were the first generation to be treated that way. The difference was we weren't coddled over it; we weren't even told certain meds would make us better. We were left on the doorstep of disappointments and left there. We were dismissed.]
The way I remember it, we were all seen as delinquents. We were told we would never amount to much and most of us didn't give enough of a crap over it to prove anyone wrong. But (in the grand tradition of adolescence), we were angry. We were a disenfranchised generation. We had nothing to rally behind. We didn't have the Vietnam War, or the Great War, or the "silent majority" to topple. We were (or at least we felt) INVISIBLE. We were forgotten too easily, our struggles overlooked.
So our music got loud. And it got raw. And it got lazy, too. Cobain often went out on stage in his pajamas (I believe he was married in them too). [Oh gawd, and look how all the kids today have taken this on!] But it wasn't just that we were lazy, we were in protest: we stopped dressing up; we stopped showing up; out of rebellion, we gave up. We all felt like nobodies, so we acted like nobodies. (Maybe that's the reason for all those "beautiful loser" songs that came out of that era.)
[See: "Jeremy" by Pearl Jam. See: "The Nobodies" by Marilyn Manson. See: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by (you guessed it) Nirvana.]
And I had forgotten all of this until I watched Montage of Heck. If you're old enough to remember news footage of Cobain's coma in Rome, if you're old enough to remember playing The Cure's "Disintegration" on the auto-reverse option on your Walkman, if you're old enough to remember Perry Ferrell's humanitarian awards, if you're old enough to have cared about ANY of this, please give the film a watch. I'll warn you, though: it's a trip down a rough memory road, and it weighs a ton.
