[A little something from my daily words that I wrote the other day…]

I’ve been listening to more music from 1990-1992 again, because why not? I’m still a bit fascinated by this era, where the sounds have grown larger than (and out of?) the college rock scene, but before the giant wave of Britpop and grunge. The music is lighter, less moody, even kind of positive in a way. It’s sort of like the early Beatles, or the early hippie scene, where it’s working from its surface, or perhaps from a more honest core, before the moods and the darker drugs and the hyped-up scenes came in.

I was on the back end of my freshman year at Emerson and just starting sophomore year, torn between the escape of my small town and being tied to it. It’s the era of the happier times and looking optimistically into the future. The end of the Cold War and the start of the Middle East wars — the first war televised In Real Time that Generation X could watch, bringing a lingering horror that we could possibly be dragged kicking and screaming into it whether we wanted it or not. We had Bush I in office which was essentially Reagan II, more of the same conservative bullshit. But we knew better…we could go further.

We were fighting with our blood and our emotions to break out of the old bigotries and passive ignorance. But it was also the era of great creativity: the new independent movie directors. It was an era of our generation deciding we were sick of the exhausted tropes and music-by-numbers and took a page from what we knew: our own takes on REM and The B-52s and French New Wave and so on. We were nerdy artists and we were having fun riffing on our own creations, knowing full well that we could now get away with it. In short: we were coming of age and we realized we’d had voices of our own. We were irreverent. We were saying fuck the world, let’s do it ourselves if they won’t help us. We were a generation that was seen as an amusing sideline

Out of the mire of my freshman year (and that frustratingly slow last summer working for the town barn) came a much healthier and more positive outlook. I’d grown past my attempts to fit in with the alternahipsters (I was just too square for them, I guess?) and relearned how to gravitate towards the people who would become close, if temporary, friends. There was a positive vibe coming across, despite the situations we often found ourselves in. I wrote some of my best songs to date, created Murph, worked on multiple screenplays for classes. And I listened to even more music than before, because I had so much more access to it: I had WFNX and WBCN and all the college stations (including my own) and I had all the record stores I could shop at.

It was a strange time, as I was indeed seeing the decade when it seemed the world could change in the blink of an eye. And it often did, slipping into so many different subspaces and subgenres before we could even notice it happening. I stayed within this positivity because it was so much needed at the time. I let myself open up to a lot more people. I started opening up my mind a bit, let myself experiment with different ideas and thoughts because I could trust myself now. What I started thinking about, feeling, doing at that point in time, that was when I first let myself go further. Let myself find out who I might be underneath all of this, without all the barriers and without having to put everyone else’s needs before mine.

That was when I chose to stay in the city the coming summer. I knew that going back would have been going in the wrong direction. I had to go forward, live a different life. I was poor as fuck and I spent most of the summer eating bad foods and barely scraping by, but I was bound and determined to break out of my old shell. I’d crash and burn (and spectacularly at that) just a few years later, but it at least gave me a direction when I could start over again.