90's Baby: 1994
A special blog post about being young and scared of everything.
They’re saying that 1994 was the best year for music, probably ever. Not 1965, or ‘68, or even 1977. “Who is ‘they’?” you’re probably wondering. Well, I’ll tell you exactly who I mean. They is two kids - I’m guessing in their early 20’s - who were sat behind me outside Murray’s Bagels in Chelsea a few months ago. As I ate my bagel, I overheard them gushing about how excited they were for the Pearl Jam and Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts that were coming up. It might not have been those two bands, now that I think about it. It might have been Matchbox Twenty and Third Eye Blind, or the Barenaked Ladies, or Hootie and the Blowfish. Maybe it was Bush. It was some combination of bands that made me think: if you had been alive in the 90’s, you would know that music is not good.
In 1994 I was scared of a lot of things. I was scared of the ocean (I had watched Jaws before being thoroughly desensitized to on-screen violence, as my parents didn’t let me watch R-rated movies and we didn’t have cable), and of talking to girls, both of which I’m actually still scared of. I was scared that when I went to middle school someone would offer me marijuana. When I got there, I unlocked a new fear of the 7th and 8th graders on the bus, who loved to sing the “stupid dumbshit goddamn motherfucker” line from the Offspring’s 1994 radio hit “Bad Habit.”
I first heard The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails that same year, in my best friend's basement. And as we all know, everything is scarier when it happens in a basement.
The layout of the basement was a big long rectangle with two upholstered chairs on the far end, facing the wall where the TV was. Under the cushions of the chairs my friend and his older brother had hidden several issues of Playboy magazine, taken from their dad’s head stash. They kept the magazines under the cushions so we could quickly hide them in case we heard their mom coming down the stairs, and pretend we were just watching TV.
We listened to a lot of music and watched a lot of MTV in the basement. Mostly Nirvana and the Beatles, although every other band that fit under the “alternative” or “grunge” or otherwise guitar-oriented categories were fair game. I had also listened to a lot of rap music in 1992 and 1993 - the first cassette tape I ever purchased was Shaquille O’Neal’s debut album Shaq Diesel1 - but my friends were decidedly anti-rap and R&B. So I adopted this position as well.
Once in a while my friend’s older brother’s friend Brian would come over and we would have a group hang. They were a grade or two above us and Brian was into bands like the Melvins and other far more edgy stuff I didn’t quite have an ear for. I was kind of scared of Brian, who lent my friend’s older brother a VHS tape that contained the first video pornography I ever saw. Brian and I are still good friends to this day.
One day Brian was saying some weird stuff to scare me, which everyone found hilarious. They then decided to fuck with me even further by playing what sounded like the kind of music aliens from the future would telepathically beam into the head of a serial killer who also owned a lot of keyboards. Their plan worked, and I had to leave the basement immediately.
The song that terrified me so badly was “Ruiner,” off of The Downward Spiral. Specifically the organs in the bridge section.
I now believe that Trent Reznor may actually have been channeling satanic aliens, as I learned much later that the album was recorded in the house where the Manson Family had brutally murdered Sharon Tate when she was pregnant with Roman Polanski’s child. One day, Trent Reznor ran into Sharon Tate’s sister at the grocery store in Los Angeles. He got scared and decided he had to leave the evil house forever.
The scary album is about a very sad and grouchy man who eventually kills himself. For some reason I can’t possibly fathom, it resonates with me very powerfully today.
The next time I remember hearing it was at the Birmingham Village Fair in Shain Park. Everyone told me to be careful there, because the previous year a kid from our school had been very badly beaten and hospitalized by Chaldeans from the school across town. I didn’t know what it meant to be Chaldean, although I now realize that many of the older girls who worked at the mini-market at the edge of my subdivision, who I had a crushes on, were that.
I was also scared of most of the rides at the Fair, but I had worked up the courage to go on the Gravitron, which is a ride that spins around very fast. On the ride, the carny operator played two Nine Inch Nails songs.
The first one was “Head Like a Hole,” off of Pretty Hate Machine. The other one was “Closer,” from The Downward Spiral. They sounded so different to my young ears that I didn’t even realize they were the same band.
Both music videos have a lot of spinny things in them. Now that I think about it, it’s even in the title of the scary album. Some very sophisticated curatorial instincts demonstrated by the carny. I wonder what he’s doing now.
Actually it was something by Kid ‘n Play, but my mom listened to it and didn’t like the lyrics so she made me take it back.