90's Baby: 1999

Baby's first Warped Tour.

When I was in 9th grade, I needed fashion advice, badly. I probably needed a professional stylist. I thought I had more pressing concerns, like medical stuff, but the root of my problems was actually the clothes. Let me explain.

At the time I was still seeing the pediatrician I had been going to since first grade, an Filipina lady named Dr. Baraceros. The previous year I was exhibiting a confounding set of symptoms such as fatigue and swollen glands in my neck.

“Have you ever smoked marijuana, Adam?” she asked.

I insisted that I never had. My parents agreed to have me drug tested anyway. I waited anxiously for the test results to come back. Then finally: negative. I don’t know why I was so nervous - I really hadn’t. In fact, the experience would leave me so terrified of being drug tested and my parents finding out that I wouldn’t smoke weed until my junior year of high school. I did, however, take MDMA several times in 2000, after watching True Life: I’m on Ecstasy on MTV. The show made it seem like it fixed everything that was wrong with your mind, and you couldn’t really test for ecstasy.

It turned out I had somehow contracted mononucleosis, despite the fact that I had never kissed anyone. This was a given. I was somehow both small and fat, and unathletic and poorly adjusted and I dressed like shit. I had a weird wavy hairstyle with a part down the middle. Zero swag. Negative bitches.

Now I was in the pediatrician’s office again with another mysterious health condition: a rash on the back of my neck.

“It looks angry,” I heard her tell my mother from behind me.

In a way, the story of the rash started at my first concert, in October of 1998. A month before my 14th birthday I had attended the Rancid show at Clutch Cargos in Pontiac. I still had braces. The experience was incredibly powerful for me, and I walked away changed. I was ready to let PUNK¹ and smoking cigarettes between periods become my entire personality.

Being PUNK would require a significant wardrobe overhaul, but it would ultimately take me several years to get my look dialed in. I credit the ecstasy with helping me achieve the necessary confidence and clarity of mind. In the interim period I was trying to be PUNK with what little resources were available to me. The nearest Hot Topic didn’t quite have what I was looking for. So I was forced to make do.

It was during this exploratory phase that I bought a disgusting mustard yellow sports coat with a pinstripe plaid pattern from the thrift store. I didn’t really know the most basic rules of thrifting (I don’t think anyone really did in 1999) and didn’t get the jacket, which had obviously belonged to a homeless and/or recently deceased person, cleaned. And so, of course, I wound up getting an insane case of ringworm where the back collar lapel touched my neck. If it had been 10 years later when I was hanging out with actual crust punks, it probably would have gotten me clout within my social circle. But people understandably thought the fungus colonizing my skin was revolting, and also my friends were noticeably embarrassed whenever I would wear the jacket.

I’d like to say I was being ironic or something, but the truth is I still didn’t really understand concepts like that. I took myself very seriously. Let me give you an example.

The summer of ‘99 I attended my first Warped Tour music festival at Phoenix Plaza Amphitheater. Or rather, the parking lot of Phoenix Plaza Amphitheater. The lineup looked like this:

It cost $25.

You may notice that the festival featured up and coming artists Blink-182 and Eminem. I refused to watch either set.

My close friends had been fans of Blink-182 early on, back when the band was still relatively unknown, or at least receiving limited airplay. Enema of the State had been released just a month before the Warped Tour came to Michigan, and the groups’ only singles to date had been “Dammit” from their album Dude Ranch, and “What’s My Age Again,” which failed to break into the Billboard top 50.

At the time, I hated Blink-182, opposed as I was to an idea I had constructed in my head of what could be considered “pop punk².” Here’s the thing: I still don’t really care about Blink-182, and I think their music is for simple-minded morons. I like a lot of their songs, and they were so much of their time and place that it appeals to me on a nostalgia level. I think it’s cool that they had Matt Skiba fill in for Tom Delonge when he lost his mind or whatever. I don’t know. Something in me just can’t do it.

Since then, I have come around to enjoying a lot of music I once considered cringe and unlistenable. Here is an incomplete list:

Saves The Day

Electric Light Orchestra

The Smiths

The Eagles

Journey

The B-52’s

Bob Seger

Kenny Loggins

Robert Palmer

Wham!/George Michael

Wilson Phillips

The Vengaboys

The Beatles

As you may now realize, I am rapidly approaching the point where I can’t even keep track of whether something that I initially started listening to as a goof is something I have gone past simply “enjoying” and now earnestly “like,” or identify with. I would go so far as to say that people who take music really seriously are themselves cringe. Still, in my heart, I can’t bring myself to feel left out that I missed seeing Blink-182 right before they became huge. I stand by my decision, and think that was probably one of the coolest things I ever did.

The one that kind of eats at me is Eminem.

One popular notion of the time, and which seems to have been lost to history, was the idea many of us held that it was inappropriate for white people to listen to rap music. And I’m not talking about the way people use(d) their overt hatred of Rap and R&B music as a cultural signifier³, as a coded way of saying you didn’t like black people and they made you uncomfortable, until these notions were largely annihilated by Lil Nas X and the emergence of Country-Rap as a popular crossover style. The idea was that you couldn’t honestly relate to their experience and struggle, and to feign this would be disingenuous, and make you a poseur. Now that I think about it, it was an early precursor to the now-popular notion of so-called Cultural Appropriation.

Here is a video of white kids throwing trash at Eminem when he played Warped Tour that year.

On one level, I wish someone had sat me down and made me listen to The Slim Shady LP, because there’s a lot in there that would have spoken to me, if I had been willing to hear him out. I’m glad can look back now and appreciate not only his rare talent and the incredible music, but that he was authentic in a way very few of us could see at the time.

I don’t know as much as I’d like about Freud, but it strikes me as interesting how universal the ongoing struggle to feel comfortable in one’s skin - and construct a self-image that serves this function - really is.

1. Ska.

2. Of course, everything that I liked and listened to at the time was pop-punk. Here is what was in my heavy rotation: …And Out Come The Wolves - Rancid, Punk In Drublic - NOFX, The Bouncing Souls - The Bouncing Souls, Never Mind The Bollocks - The Sex Pistols, Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death - Dead Kennedys. I owned a compilation called Oi! The Album, because Rancid had played a cover of Sham 69’s “If the Kids Are United” at the show I went to, but I didn’t like any of the music* except that one song.

3. In a similar way that people say they don’t like country music as a way to signal their disdain for conservatives or poor white people.

*I like the music now. Especially stuff like this, and this, and this.