When I was in college in the 1980s, David Byrne and the Talking Heads were in regular rotation in my room along with Pink Floyd, except for the one semester where the only thing I listed to was Dark Side of the Moon (ah – the joy of discovering repeat on an early CD player.)

Once in a Lifetime was one of my favorites. Looking back, it was a Gen X anthem.

Mark Goldstein sent me an email this morning titled your blog, an article i was in last week and yep in response to my post What Just Happened. It included the phrase “same as it ever was…same as it ever was.” and a link to The Internet Is Kmart Now from The Atlantic.

Amy had texted me the article mid-December when it came out. It starts strong.

The 1990s hadn’t gone as expected. A bad recession kicked off Gen X’s adulthood, along with a war in the Middle East and the fall of communism. Boomers came to power in earnest in America, and then the lead Boomer got impeached for lying about getting a blow job from an intern in the Oval Office. Grunge had come and gone, along with clove cigarettes and bangs. The taste of the ’90s still lingers, for those of us who lived it as young adults rather than as Kenny G listeners or Pokémon-card collectors, but the decade also ingrained a sense that expressing that taste would be banal, a fate that the (Read more...)