Thanks for the Memories?

 

 

Memory is a funny thing.

I have very clear – if few—memories from when I was three and four, albeit long ago in a village not-so-terribly-far-away, but I don’t remember the 1990s.

I remember clearly all of the intervening decades, but the 1990s – indeed the first decade of the 2000s as well – escape me.

Don’t interrupt – at this point in every story, someone interrupts with a fact that I know. Just wait.

Yes, I remember that near the end of the 1990s Princess Diana died. That’s my “Do you remember where you were when” moment. The people who eventually bought our townhouse came to see the house during the televised funeral.

Overshadowing the keen desire to move out of a townhouse and move into Oz – I mean Hopewell -- was the week or so of news video of the crash, theories of what – or who – caused the crash and my personal surprise of, wow, she was dating? She dated that guy? I never heard of him, but no matter how rich, I think she could’ve done better. Shows how little I paid attention to rag journalism.

But that death is simply a reminder that I do remember the ‘90s.

I met my husband at the beginning of the ‘90s. We married mid-‘90s, and Diana died at the end. But what I actually mean is I don’t remember the music.

Music has always been important to me. My earliest memories are set to a background of my mother singing Doris Day songs while she was doing housework or “Baby of Mine” when I was sad. She had a beautiful voice, and her relatives often said they had expected to hear her sing at Carnegie Hall one day – if only the depression and her working class upbringing hadn’t made that impossible. (Not to brag, but I’m the one who ended up singing at Carnegie Hall.)

I remember once rounding up my relatives, who were at our house for some occasion, and singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”, and basking in their applause when I finished. Not bad for a shy four-year-old.

The bottom edge of the ‘50s and pre-Beatles ‘60s were musically all about Ricky Nelson for me, as well as “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” and Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Then there was the British Invasion in my formative eight-year-old brain. Figuring out math problems and learning to spell were set to the music of my youth.

I relied on the Monkees and Herman’s Hermits to keep the psychedelic late ‘60s music away. When I learned that the Monkees introduced the world to Jimi Hendrix, I was furious. How dare they? Of course, Jimi, Janis Joplin and the Doors, etc., were the worst thing that could happen to music as far as I was – and am – concerned, although, oddly, I liked Jefferson Airplane.

I’ve always considered the ‘70s as the worst decade of music, starting as it did with the drug-induced psychedelia, and ending with disco. But on closer inspection, it wasn’t all bad.

I liked folksier aspects of ‘70s rock: Three Dog Night; Peter, Paul and Mary – and no matter what anyone says, “Puff the Magic Dragon” was a song about a dragon, not drugs – Crosby, Stills and Nash; Carly Simon; Joni Mitchell; The Moody Blues and Dan Fogelberg made the decade worth living in for me.

I also discovered what was being called alternative rock: Emmerson, Lake and Palmer, King Crimson, David Bowie and Renaissance, among others, and love it.

Of disco, the less said, the better. I did like the Bee Gees, but I liked them before Barry Gibb discovered his falsetto.

For me, the ‘80s came as a relief. Bell bottoms, body suits and leisure suits went away – as did the acid rock performers – well, many of them died of drug overdoses.

Music exploded into the kinds of songs I craved: OMD, Duran Duran, The Thompson Twins, Tears for Fears, The Fixx, Wham, and so many others, especially from the UK, that it was basically a second British invasion.

People would say my music should be ‘70s, since those were my high school and college years. While I liked the folk and alternative of that period, I liked the ‘80s music better.

Although I graduated from college in the ‘70s, the career I’d trained for failed to materialize under the guise of Catch 22 – you can’t get a job without experience, which you can’t get without a job. So I experienced a rather elongated adolescence,working in my 20s in jobs my peers had done in high school.

As I worked on a variety of short-term jobs for which I was desperately overqualified, my peer group became increasingly younger. My interests simply didn’t correspond with my married-with-children friends from high school, and my wages weren’t even enough to allow me to buy a decent car.

By the late ‘80s, I’d held most of the jobs I said I never wanted to do – except become a parent – and I returned to college to train for a career that I was not that keen on, but that I could actually get upon graduation, and make a decent salary into the bargain.

Having just emerged from a 2-year course of study that caused me to lose track of most of the music from the final two years of the ‘80s, the ‘90s appeared.

Yes, stuff happened in the ‘90s. I returned to fencing, joined a writing group for the brief few months that it lasted, met my future husband, and got my first computer. I know there was music, but I was still listening to the ‘80s stuff I’d so loved.

There was also a lot of personal chaos for me in the ‘90s. I discovered there was no dearth of backstabbers and gas lighters in my job, making me feel constantly on the defensive.

On top of that, I had to dodge blind dates. People tried to convince me some guy I wouldn’t have shared the answers to a quiz with was “perfect” for me. Translation: you’re single; he’s single. One girl told me she personally thought the guy she introduced me to was a jerk. (I guess I learned what she thought of me!)

Fortunately, I met my future husband when I wasn’t looking (well, I was looking. It was across three feet of steel, and I managed to get the fencing touch while he was posing in his lunge.) Until a few weeks before he proposed, I hadn’t entertained the idea that he ever would.

 Of course, people asked all the preposterous questions based on my age at the time. What marriage was this for me? (First, last and only. If it didn’t work, it would’ve been the universe’s way of saying I shouldn’t be married.) Why did you wait so long? Geez, I married the first guy who asked!

But through all of that, while there was music, I’m not sure what it was. There wasn’t a British Invasion. There was no singer I combed gossip magazines for pictures of. There was nothing to hang the music on. Instead, I began following certain actors' careers.

There was one song: “All for One” by Sting, Rod Stewart and Bryan Adams. It became our song. Why? It was the theme song for a swashbuckler film. My husband I are fencers, and we both like the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods of history.

So, wracking my brains, I’ve come up with artists I think were from the ‘90s: The Manic Street Preachers, Tokio Hotel, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Five for Fighting and The Goo Goo Dolls.

I could be wrong. They might be from the early 2000s. I’m not sure. I’m no longer on the cutting edge of pop music. I know I have their CDs, whenever they were.

Maybe it’s just that current music doesn’t interest me. Most things seem to be (C)rap, hip-hop or Cher sounding like she’s singing under water (“Do You Believe”). The couple of Taylor Swift songs I’ve heard are pretty good.

So, I guess I’ll just go back to my ‘80s music and try to figure out what, exactly, Simon le Bon is singing in “Union of the Snake” and leave the next era of music to someone else.