September Was Late
Covid, T-Shirts and Nostalgia
What a MONTH
If you'll forgive my dramatic headline, I'll explain why the September edition of this Newsletter is a full week late (I’m sure many of you were just about to phone the authorities for a wellness check). While I have been going through a small musical drought and dipping into a wave of Nostalgia rather than listening to anything new, I also have a far simpler explanation. After three years and numerous precautions I finally caught Covid. It took me down for a few days and limited my activities to playing Final Fantasy 12 and lots of ibuprofen and Tylenol. I consider myself lucky that it was of the newest and less debilitating strain and after a week I was back to normal. Of course, it was the week I usually start putting words on a page for this newsletter so, there you have it. I’m late and I apologize!
Autobiography of a Band T-Shirt
There are few things as nebulous and inexplicable as being ‘cool.’ I suppose one could say that much like ‘art,’ what is ‘cool’ is subjective. When you ask any adult, I'm certain you’ll hear that being ‘cool’ is low on their list of priorities but ask someone in High School if they think they’re cool, you just might hit a nerve. It’s not hard to imagine the sleepless nights wasted over such a question and I can think of some nights of my own in the last years of the 90’s as I meandered, socially blindfolded through my Jr. High years. While I had it mostly under control by the time I reached 10th grade, the preceding 7-9th grade years were a formative struggle with ‘coolness.’
When I made the full transition from ‘elementary school’ to ‘Jr. High School (7th to 9th grade) I was faced with a much larger group of peers than ever before and all the friends I had come to know through my Elementary School years were scattered to the wind and left to tend to their own fresh garden of blooming friendships. I was a little lost. I had a bit of a social renaissance my final year of Elementary School, feeling at once accepted and appreciated for who I was, but over the course of the summer, the fresh excitement of a large friend group dwindled, and I entered my first recognizable ‘depression era.’
As being depressed in the mid-nineties would have it, I fell headfirst into the last few years of the Grunge explosion. My Walkman grew tired of the stacks of Alice In Chains cassettes, tried to eat my copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind, and eventually retired to make way for my 3-disc, double cassette and radio combo system. The crunchier the guitars, more wounded and self-loathing the lyrics and abstract the album cover, the more satisfied I was. It wasn’t enough to wrap myself in an aural cocoon of tight headphones and louder volumes, though. I needed a T-Shirt to show everyone else, this is who spoke for my soul.
Once I crossed the threshold into Jr. High there was a definitive ‘cool kids’ corner and overwhelming cliquishness that I had never encountered before, and I wanted to be ‘cool,’ but ‘cool’ with the edgy kids who had all the band t-shirts. Of course, I had my Alice In Chains 3-legged dog t-shirt, as that was the most important. I also had an Alice In Chains shirt with a bunch of dancing animals but I got the most compliments on my Bush T-shirt, which was white and had the band standing with their backs to the camera. One specific girl whom I must’ve had a crush on simply because she extended a compliment to me would say ‘cool shirt’ as I walked by, and she said it every time I wore that shirt. I now believed ‘this is the way. This is my ticket into the cool group.’
The next part of this story requires us to return to the most famous of all grunge acts, Nirvana and the half-eaten Nevermind cassette tape. I was a fan, but I never latched on as fully with Nirvana as I did with some other bands. I enjoyed them but they weren’t my band the same way that Alice In Chains and Soundgarden were. Still, I enjoyed them enough to think, why shouldn’t I get a T-shirt to show my allegiance?
The shirt in question came to me by way of my grandmother for that year's Christmas. The Smiley-face Nirvana shirt is still extremely popular today but back in the mid 90’s it was the Top-Teir ‘cool’ shirt to have. I saw many of the ‘cool’ kids wearing it and I thought for certain this would be met with the same fan fair as my Bush t-shirt (in hindsight, who in their right mind would even compare the two bands in terms of quality?) but this was my gravest error.
I returned from Winter break and put on my fresh Nirvana shirt over my long sleeve undershirt and headed to the school with fresh confidence and certainty that I would finally transcend to the top tier and be invited into the inner circle. We hadn’t even made it past 1st Period when I passed down that hallway where I received so many compliments before and was stopped by one of the ‘cool’ kids. It wasn’t the same girl who was so free with her compliments before but one of her close friends who stopped me and looked me dead in the face.
‘Hey, kid,’ she said. ‘You’re a Poser.’
A Poser. An inauthentic person. A fake. A wannabe. That was what I was. If you can picture the whole of my self-confidence as a Mirror with an Ornamental frame, you can probably imagine what comes next. My image cracked and shattered into millions of pieces leaving only a bent frame and the awareness that I was not and would likely never be allowed in the ‘cool’ kids table. To borrow a Smashing Pumpkins song title, I was a ‘Zero’ though after being called a ‘poser’ I would never dream of wearing that shirt.
Though I was devastated and immediately gave my Nirvana shirt to my cousin who was FAR more socially tuned and a slightly bigger Nirvana fan, I would often return to that key moment and see it for what it really was. You could say it was just the cruelty of teenage gatekeeping and nothing more, but I think it eventually registered to me just how fickle and pointless the idea of being ‘cool’ was. Yes, I never really fit in with any of those ‘cool’ kids, but I had my own group of close friends who had a much broader set of interests and joys and were always willing to accept a neurotic, social mess who had a strange but endearing sense of humor as their friend. From that moment I knew that I may never be ‘cool’ but at least I could be authentic.
In summary, I guess I’m here to thank that teenage asshole who called me a ‘poser’ (I believe she turned out to be a lovely person by the end of High School) because without that moment, I may have spent the entirety of my Jr. High and High School years chasing acceptance through something so unfulfilling as being cool.
Nostalgia! The playlist
After living in relative seclusion to recover and fully embracing an Autumn that seems reluctant to begin (Upper 70’s Chicago? Really??) I crafted this month’s playlist attempting to capture that wave. There are several tracks by artists mentioned in the above story with some others that came later in my teenage years, but I think it’s safe to say this is my most ‘Rock’ centric playlist yet. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did back in the day.
Thanks for reading Skeleton Groove! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
