Already miss the 90s?

Do you already miss the ’90s? How can we direct that nostalgia?

First, what shall we say most marked the decade: the Internet? Coffeehouses? Hip-hop? j Orenthal? Pulp Fiction? Lollapalooza?

I think the Zeitgeist of the ’90s was the main-streaming of the alternative. Not only did we standardize the word “alternative,” but we normalized it and commodified everything that was supposedly alternative — herbal medicine, punk, clogs, snuff films (see Cops). My Oxford English Dictionary claims that “alternative” used to mean something. That is, something “purporting to represent a preferable or equally acceptable alternative to that in general use or sanctioned by the establishment, as alternative (i.e., nonnuclear) energy, medicine, radio, etc; alternative society: see society 3 e. Cf. fringe n. 2 b, underground.”

Using the word alternative to mean counter-cultural became popular in the ’70s. In 1970, for instance, a British journalist pointed out, “Cyclops has died. Strange Days has died. Grass Eye and Zig Zag ail. The alternative press is in trouble all round.” In 1975, the Sunday Times insisted, “There are all the signs of Alternative Energy burgeoning into a big business.” And in 1978, Peace News reported, “The Lucas workers have produced an ‘Alternative Corporate Plan’ demanding the right to work on socially useful products as an alternative to redundancy and to the production of armaments.”

In 1996, two ex-editors of Spin — which is not alternative—made a bundle with their book Alt.Culture: An A-to-Z Guide to the '90s — Underground, Online, and Over-the-Counter. The authors, Steven Daly and Nathaniel Wice, both reported on and prompted the death of the original alternative. Wice told People, “One of the guidelines we had in writing this was that my mother had to understand the entries.” And yet they saw the writing on the wall. In the book they wrote, “The conformity of nonconformity looks like it will set the tone for the rest of the decade” and “ ‘Join us and become unique’ — it’s the paradoxical cry of an over-the-counter culture in which corporate advertisers pass as alternative.” Think Miller Brewing Company.

Point is, a website spun off from the book — making even more money for Wice and Daly, who knew enough to maintain rights to the site — and if, like Tony Soprano, you must face your demons, this is an okay place to do it. Altculture.com (www.altculture.com) purports to be an “online encyclopedia of contemporary culture spanning the worlds of art, film, music, print media, sports, style, technology, and belief. Altculture is both a tour guide and a compass, a project that both documents and defines the nexus of popular culture and digital media through the use of text, images, and hyperlinks.” They’ve divided the site into categories —alt.art, alt.belief, alt.body, alt.consumer, alt.film, altlang, alt. music, alLpolidcs, allprint, alt .society, alt.sports, alt.style, alttech, and alt.tv—and into an A-through-Z index, understand the At the Ms, for example, read smart-alecky entries entries. ” on Macintosh, Madonna (and Madonna Studies), Magnetic Poetry, Manchurian mushrooms, mandatory minim urns, Matador Records, Mentos, militias, morphing, Mortal Kombat, mullets, and the Museum of Jurassic Technology. See. what distinguishes pop culture from alternative culture anymore?

I prefer hitting the “random” button over and over, which haphazardly searches through the site’s database of articles, bringing you to commentary on things like the record label Sub Pop to amateur pom (Camille Paglia declared, “I think amateur adult videos are very positive because people are not letting the priests, the feminists, the therapists tell them what sex should be"). On this subject, check out the entry on the “peripatetic” Julie Doucet, of Lift Your Leg, My Fish Is Dead fame.

What other random memories and tidbits of the ’90s does Altculture.com store? Kate Spade was born Katy Brosnahan in 1962. The former fashion editor and stylist at Mademoiselle married Andy Spade, brother of the comic David Spade, and started her eponymous handbag-design company in 1991. She paired “classic handbag shapes with witty details like peacoat buttons and whimsical fabrics such as raffia, as well as her signature patent leather.”

An “exotic by-product” of British club culture is what we call “jungle” or “drum ’n’ bass” music. “The foundation for jungle was laid by dance producers who cranked up hip-hop drum samples to the breakneck pace of hardcore techno; jungle added raw, booming bass lines and dance-hall ‘ragamuffin’ chants to the mix. (The term jungle, according to some accounts, comes from the Tivoli section of Kingston, Jamaica, known locally as ‘the jungle.’) Village Voice critic Greg Tate said in 1995 that jungle ‘conjured up Blade Runner remade with a Masai cast.’ ”

The site has an entry for “alternative.” It uses the past tense: “For those who wrangled with the question ‘what is alternative?’ there was no satisfactory answer—the term was now in the public domain, and dissent from the mainstream was rewarded within a fragmenting mass culture.”

I don’t miss much about the’90s yet What I do miss are those days, for me around 1993, when I was discovering alternative music I had epiphanies every day. I bought really big headphones—I believed the music was private and discrete. Maybe I’m being reactionary, but I miss that. I went to Lou’s Records last weekend to find it again. I ended up with a CD I had lost several years ago: Low’s I Could Live in Hope,