56KBPS

One of the staples of any household in the 90s was a desktop computer. I'm pretty sure it cost a fortune at the time and had little memory, but it was literally a gateway to the world. I have fond memories of my dad installing Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego and playing SimCity (hold the Shift key and type "FUND" for $10,000). I always marveled at his mastery of the DOS command box (c:/). We had a Gateway 2000 at my house, and they seemed like they were everywhere at the time. They even had brick and mortar stores. I think part of that had to do with the fact that my dad worked for the school system and we were familiar with them since they were everywhere in schools. We had dial-up internet provided by GTE running at a blazing 56kbps per our modem. The internet was obviously was fledgling in the late 90s, but two specific applications really changed things for me forever. Those two - ICQ and Napster.

With the introduction of Napster and ICQ, the computer quickly changed from a pure information/entertainment medium to a rabbit hole of time-wasting overnight - purely due to the internet. If you are not familiar with ICQ, it was essentially the first online instant messenger. Its icon was a flower and you were assigned a unique user ID number, much like a phone number. When you wanted to connect with people via ICQ you had to give them this number. The flower icon had different and different icons associated with it to indicate your level of availability to chat. This meant that the days of actually having to call a girl on her home phone were long gone. You didn't have to worry about some girl's dad picking up the phone on the other end of a little brother or sister listening in on your conversation. Similar to how teenagers use text messaging and apps on the phones without ever actually talking to someone. I felt like I used ICQ for many years and really did not get into AOL Instant Messenger until I was in college. Looking back, ICQ, meant the first time where I started to assume how people felt about me purely based on online interactions (based on an icon, an availability color, or a non-response).

I will most likely have many posts about Napster simply because it was such a big deal to a kid with limited disposable income. To say it was a game-changer for a music lover is a gross understatement. Not only was it an amazing medium to illegally obtain music, but it also indicated a culture shift. It introduced the modern pirate. Long gone were the days where I had to scrounge up $15 to purchase a CD. I could now just download individual songs that I liked and listen to them over and over without any cost. This obviously was dependent on the very limited space on my Gateway 2000's hard drive :). Like many my age, that did not have access to a T1 line, you woke up each morning, opened Napster, and tried to find a college kid's stream who had the song that you wanted and click download. You really hoped for someone who had a T1 line on the other end, even a DSL, but you would definitely take a hard swallow and settle for someone with a 32kbps connection if it really was a song that you wanted. There was one obvious caveat to all of this. My parents wanting to use the phone. I can remember many times being 75% of the way done downloading a song and my mom would pick up the phone and completely cut off our modem's connection - thus stopping the download. That simple. I then crossed my fingers that I could find another acceptable connection to finish out the rest of the download. That bonus track from your favorite artist that was only found on the Japanese release would have to wait.

It definitely was the wild west days of the internet. I think that many in my generation are such proponents of net neutrality because we grew up very much rooted in a culture of Internet piracy. We weren't taught digital citizenship - we were flagbearers on the Queen Anne's Revenge. You can't tell us what to do with our internet :). We were not accustomed to paying for things that we could find free. I continued to download songs illegally all the way into college until it actually hit home that students at my university were being fined thousands of dollars for illegally downloading songs. Money I did not have and a risk I was no longer willing to take.

I can still picture it. Me sitting in front of our desktop, playing Command and Conquer, chatting with some friend on ICQ, and downloading Len's Steal My Sunshine (not buying that CD).

Dr. Martens, Abercrombie, and No Limit

My dad used to tell this story when he briefly attended college in Iowa. Back then, Coors Beer was not available east of the Mississippi River and Stroh's Beer was not available west of the Mississippi. The scenario he described was simple. Buy a bunch of Stroh's, take it to Iowa, trade it for Coors and then sell it for a premium in Indiana. Was the beer really that good or was it that you just could not get it where you lived? I side with the latter. The same situation existed for me with Yuengling. It just does not quite taste the same in Indiana as it did when I had to go to Ohio to get it. In the 90s, this situation also existed for me. It was in the form of clothing with the words Abercrombie and Fitch. I have no idea when Abercrombie became so popular, but it seemed to blow up overnight. The problem for me was that the nearest store was two and a half hours away. Ordering from the catalog did not seem like something my mom would be up for at the time :).

The other problem was that you never knew when you were going to get to Indy and saving money was a new concept for me. By sophomore year I had a job but also had my license. Abercrombie anything was the thing to have. I heard stories of people going to Indy and spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on Abercrombie apparel. I think, looking back, I initially had a hat. An Abercrombie Lacrosse hat - what a poser. Once Abercrombie moved into Fort Wayne, like my beer analogy, it lost its luster. The fascination with Abercrombie clothes carried on for about a decade longer, but it never quite was the status symbol it was in my early high school years. The 90s was such a contrast in trends. Just a few years prior, JNCO jeans and Grateful Dead shirts were huge. We were now obsessed with looking like an east coast rugby player vacationing on Martha's Vineyard.

I have always loved shoes. I attribute a lot of this to the era when NBA/NFL/MLB players were all rolling out signature shoes. You looked up to these athletes and you thought their shoes would help you perform like them. You had to have them and some are now worth a lot of money. It was a harsh reality putting on Bo Jackson's Nike Air Trainer's and not being able to break a bat on your thigh :). Anyway, the summer I turned 16 I begged my parents for a pair of Dr. Marten's. Like Abercrombie clothing, I had seen the boots on some popular guys (that I looked up to) at my school and wanted to look just like them. We were on vacation in Traverse City and happened to go to the mall there. They had a Buckle and my mom agreed to make the purchase. It was the most expensive pair of shoes I had ever owned. I also knew that it was the only pair I would ever get, so I better take care of them. I remember getting into a car accident my sophomore year and my first thought - can the blood be cleaned off my Dr. Martens? I still have my pair. I still have a lot of shoes and my wife complains. I just take such good care of them because I'm afraid that I'll never get another pair. It's just something ingrained in me through experience.

When you're 16 you feel free. You get your license and you're off. I had an '87 Honda Civic. One of the first things I did was have my dad put a CD player in it. My friends did the same and some even added some sweet Rockford Fosgate's to the trunks. Bass was big! I really could have cared less about anything else in or on the car. One of the strangest phenomena of being 16 in Indiana (at least where I grew up) was the surge in popularity of No Limit Records. Like the trends mentioned earlier, it seemed to come out of nowhere and wasn't really that great, but it was EVERYWHERE and popular in the media. Once Master P's single Make Em Say Uhh! dropped, it felt like a new No Limit personality/rapper appeared each week. It seemed impossible to keep up with each new release, but my friends with Columbia House subscriptions were dealing their CDs in our school like they were illegal drugs. It was amazing how big some rappers from New Orleans posing in front of green screens were in the mid to late 90s. Those album covers were LEGENDARY. The hysteria grew even larger in the Fort Wayne area when Master P signed to play for the Fort Wayne Fury of the CBA.

Sophomore year was really strange....

Favorite No Limit Song: Big Ed - Rodeo

A Trip to Garden Grove

When I was a junior at Purdue University, I took an African-American literature class. Purdue is a very, very diverse university, but at the time, African American students were a very small percentage of that diversity. After growing up in a predominantly white community, I was excited to take a class with students from all walks of life. The professor was tough but engaging. She also had a sense of humor and was open to discussing very sensitive topics in a constructive manner. During one of the lectures, she simply asked if racism still existed in our society. A very blanket, general question, but one that garnered some major silence in the small classroom. I remember that we had one Purdue basketball player in our class (he happened to be African-American). He was the brave one that spoke up - knowing that he would be challenged by the professor. He responded that he did not feel that younger generations perceived race to be important. His reasoning - television and musical influences. He cited MTV, BET, HBO, etc. He explained that so much of our generation's influence came from the media - not news sources, but entertainment sources. For one moment our professor was speechless. The media of the 90s was a melting pot of cultural influence. I could not have agreed with him more.

Posts up to this point have had a really broad focus. I've covered years, genres, and trends, but I want to highlight one album that I feel really defined my current musical genre loves. A melting pot of an album that can really be classified into many genres. It's also fitting that this album came out right before I began high school. Everything from the songs, to the lifestyle, to the drama behind scenes really set into motion my high school years and beyond. The album I am speaking of is Sublime by Sublime. Their third and final studio album with their full cast of characters.

Every time a song from this album comes on, especially in a group setting, you can look around the room and see its influence. People mouthing the words and bobbing their heads. It's an amazing mix of punk rock, reggae, ska, dancehall, hip-hop, and dub. Everything that the 90s exuded. I remember getting into Bob Marley and reggae after this album. I remember looking up what Santeria was on Microsoft Encarta (haha). All of the videos associated with the songs are iconic. I remember singing the songs with the team on the back of the football bus coming home from games. It seemed to dominate my freshman year and is an album I continue to go back to over and over. I wanted to be those guys. I wanted to move to California and live that carefree, Animal House lifestyle that they portrayed. It would be later on that I would find out that there was a lot going on with the band behind the scenes and why they never released another album with this crew. Bradley Nowell, the lead singer, would die shortly after from a heroin overdose. A common theme in the 90s. Nowell was even ejected from the recording of the album before it was finished because of his addiction. One of those times as a kid when you realize that some of the people you look up to aren't as perfect as you think.

I would later get into the other Sublime albums. This one is just so iconic to me for many reasons. It blended everything I loved into one compact disc. I'm instantly transported back in time everytime I listen. I'm a huge Jack Johnson fan and his cover of the band's song Badfish is one of the reasons it is my favorite song. I used to teach English and would have my sophomore students complete a 90s research project. The only reason I got one student to turn in his project was because he liked the band and the historical events behind the song April 29, 1992. I think he later dropped out, but I got that assignment out of him :). He made the connection.

That Purdue basketball player was right and is still right. We can become better people with broadened influences. We can exhibit one message to the world through many different lenses. Thank you to Sublime and crew for doing that for me.

Boy Meets World

One of my favorite shows of all time is Boy Meets World. To me, it sums up growing up in the 90s. I wanted to be a mix of Cory and Shawn. At this time in my life I was the quirky, rule-following Cory, but definitely wanted to be the rebellious Shawn (if that is how you would characterize him :)). I wanted the girlfriend like Topanga and the hangout like Chubbie's Famous. I remember even trying to dress like Cory. At that time, bowling shirts were making a big comeback. This was the first time that I did not ask for a pair of basketball shoes for my back to school shoes, but something more fitting - a pair of Airwalks. Boy Meets World was such a great show and one that I continue to watch over and over. It was definitely TGIF era, but always maintained a realness about adolescence in the 90s. Without Cory, Shawn would have never made it and without Shawn, Cory would have been too naive for any situation. That is what friends are for, right? We all knew a Shawn, a Cory, and a Topanga. You may have even had an air-headed sibling like Eric. The show also mirrored the last year of my middle school experience. Up to this point, music was just music, it was for enjoyment, but I started to notice one thing amongst my peers - life imitating art.

I often comment to my wife that I miss the hidden, melancholy messages of 90s music. I'm not talking Dashboard Confessional emotional, but the type of emotion that you really had to listen to the lyrics. If you go back and re-listen to some of the albums I'll list below during this time period - you'll understand. Smart lyrics written by smart people. This was the time in my life where I started to realize that people were actually taking some of these lyrics seriously. Friends talking in class about trying marijuana, exploring their peer relationships further (very pc way of stating that), and expressing that their lives truly weren't that great. Grunge was huge and it was emotion-driven and expressive. The eighth grade was a bit like Blade Runner. It was a melting pot of rap, alternative, and classic rock. Much of everything reflected that from clothes to get-togethers.

One singular moment sticks out to me during this time period that sums up that I was not in Kansas anymore. I have no idea why I remember it, but I clearly do. The Foo Fighters first album had been out for a short time. Someone in my school clearly read the lyrics in the CD jacket and made a big deal about it. The song was This Is a Call and the lyric states, "Ritalin is easy, Ritalin is good". This was 1995 and I had no idea what Ritalin was. At the time, it seemed huge, but I'm not sure why. There were far worse songs with far worse lyrics, but this was the first mention of something that you would not necessarily see or hear on an episode of Cops. Definitely, a Boy Meets World moment, but one that shows how we grow accustomed to changes in society once we hear or experience them over and over. I think I remember one classmate in the entire grade (maybe the entire school) on Ritalin in the mid-90s. To me, that is crazy to believe.

That's it for middle school. Like most people's experience - a transition period. A period of finding out who you are and where to go. Man the music was great and still holds major weight today. I instantly see these album covers and know just about every song. From the awkward slow dances on a Friday night to skating around Angola on my cheap rollerblades - it's all there. It's an instant transport to my own Cory Matthews world.

95-96 album releases that summed up the melting pot:

• Jewel - Pieces of You
• Collective Soul - Collective Soul
• 2Pac - Me Against the World 
• Montell Jordan - This Is How We Do It
• White Zombie - Astro-Creep 2000
• Friday Soundtrack
• Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill
• Foo Fighters - Foo Fighters
• 311 - 311
• Dangerous Minds Soundtrack
• Monica - Miss Thang
• The Presidents of the United States of America - The Presidents of the United States of America
• Ben Folds Five - Ben Folds Five
• Garbage - Garbage
• Oasis - (What's the Story?) Morning Glory 
• No Doubt - Tragic Kingdom
• The Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
• 2Pac - All Eyez on Me
• Rage Against the Machine - Evil Empire
• The Wallflowers - Bringing Down the Horse
• Sublime - Sublime
• Cake - Fashion Nugget

If I had to pick one that defined that time of my life it would have to be Oasis' - (What's The Story?) Morning Glory. Such an incredible album. I wish the Gallagher brothers could have a Shawn and Cory relationship.