everytime I see your face
it makes me wet between my legs- Liz Phair, exile in Guyville, 1993
Remember? Remember the flannel shirts, the androgyny, the everyone having long hair and nobody shaving their legs? The garage punk bands? The renewed progressivism, the environmentalist movement, the pretending that the 80's had just been one terrible nightmare from which we all awoke? The thrift stores? Slackers? gen-x, lots of caffiene and working from home? Remember feminism then? That was the start of the "fuck this dating bullshit, it's just a function and product of patriarchy"...hey any girl that couldn't look hot in a flannel shirt and baggy jeans with no makeup...well wasn't hot...we did the real drugs then, the ones hippies did, LSD, pot and mushrooms, none of this ecstasy shit, none of the bourgouise drugs like coke and speed, we were relaxing, playing haky sack and reading Sartre...we were being as cool as the beatniks in the 50's and the hippies in the 60s and the punks in the 70s...We had blended it all together and were living a socialist dream, full of egalitarianism and anti-establishment and angst filled, dissonant chords, that spoke to the endless paradoxes and unresolvable contradictions of life and relationships...
Where are we now? Where's the flannel? What's with this extreme makeover, desperate housewives, "the rules", backlash bullshit? What's with new salon lines and and how to get a man to marry you and the pick-up artist and expensive clothes...We're gen-x, we don't get married, we work for ourselves and we don't have a genre of music called "emo" because it has confessional lyrics...is "the cure" and "the smiths" emo? Is Nirvana and Hole emo? Is Bob fucking Dylan emo? Is this culture so entirely corporatized than even emotions when expressed in a particular art form, subject to marketing phraseology? What happened to the flannel? Why have weleft the thrift stores? I was just there the other day and you can still get 5 shirts for 5 dollars...I haven't paid for a haircut in 10 years...and nobody notices, (trust me they don't)...Maybe if we all spent a little less time dating and a little more time reading the newspaper, we could reclaim the activist zeal of the early 90s and do something about all this bullshit...Ladies if you must don kayers of makeup and designer hand-bags at least do so while listening to Liz Phair and try to wear an expression of irony for at least the first 20 minutes of your fancy "date".
Remember? Remember the flannel shirts, the androgyny, the everyone having long hair and nobody shaving their legs? The garage punk bands? The renewed progressivism, the environmentalist movement, the pretending that the 80's had just been one terrible nightmare from which we all awoke? The thrift stores? Slackers? gen-x, lots of caffiene and working from home? Remember feminism then? That was the start of the "fuck this dating bullshit, it's just a function and product of patriarchy"...hey any girl that couldn't look hot in a flannel shirt and baggy jeans with no makeup...well wasn't hot...we did the real drugs then, the ones hippies did, LSD, pot and mushrooms, none of this ecstasy shit, none of the bourgouise drugs like coke and speed, we were relaxing, playing haky sack and reading Sartre...we were being as cool as the beatniks in the 50's and the hippies in the 60s and the punks in the 70s...We had blended it all together and were living a socialist dream, full of egalitarianism and anti-establishment and angst filled, dissonant chords, that spoke to the endless paradoxes and unresolvable contradictions of life and relationships...
Where are we now? Where's the flannel? What's with this extreme makeover, desperate housewives, "the rules", backlash bullshit? What's with new salon lines and and how to get a man to marry you and the pick-up artist and expensive clothes...We're gen-x, we don't get married, we work for ourselves and we don't have a genre of music called "emo" because it has confessional lyrics...is "the cure" and "the smiths" emo? Is Nirvana and Hole emo? Is Bob fucking Dylan emo? Is this culture so entirely corporatized than even emotions when expressed in a particular art form, subject to marketing phraseology? What happened to the flannel? Why have weleft the thrift stores? I was just there the other day and you can still get 5 shirts for 5 dollars...I haven't paid for a haircut in 10 years...and nobody notices, (trust me they don't)...Maybe if we all spent a little less time dating and a little more time reading the newspaper, we could reclaim the activist zeal of the early 90s and do something about all this bullshit...Ladies if you must don kayers of makeup and designer hand-bags at least do so while listening to Liz Phair and try to wear an expression of irony for at least the first 20 minutes of your fancy "date".
posted by slave to my amygdala at 5:35 PM
1 Comments:
Okay, I get it. Good points and I didn't even know what 'emo' was and I guess I wish I didn't. This makes me want to hear the song, the whole album. My sister loved Piz Lair (as we liked to joke) then, she introduced me to her. Now she is a bit more conservative. Maybe that music was for just that time. I don't know. But I know I certainely don't follow her music nor any other current singers now. People change, the artists, the audience, the culture. Can we believe we used to watch Saturday morning cartoons?
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