I grew up at the perfect time, in the nineteen nineties. I was thirteen when the decade started and twenty-three when it all ended, and I can’t complain one bit about that epoch. The music connected genres, the films were more original than now, the presidency was just right. As a freshman in high school, I saw the Nirvana video for the first time: “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I sat in my parents’ house, on the floor of their living room when it appeared on MTV. I’d never heard music like that before. And they played Alice in Chains on Headbanger’s Ball. I was listening to hip-hop back then as well, when it was at its most classic, the golden era of the genre. Music is magic. Musicians pluck sounds out of the air and form melodies.

Yes, I had it great. I was from Generation X, before millenials took over the land. I didn’t quite understand their pop culture. The bands didn’t seem as genuine or meaningful. Everything became plastic and digital. Apple introduced the iPod. Record stores became defunct. I didn’t want anything to do with any of it, but they forced me to conform. Now I’m like one of the millenials, listening to my music on my phone.

The nineties had a type of rebellious energy against corporations. People dressed like slobs, and society accepted them for who they were. Bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Rage Against the Machine rebelled against the eighties attitude, which was to wear big hair and button up their clothing, to sell out as much as possible, when in the nineties you turned your back on your integrity if you sold out. I wore Cavariccis to school in the eighties with a mullet because I didn’t know any better. How was I to know that grunge music was going to take over fashion and the music industry? I was able to throw away those Cavariccis and wear basic jeans with holes in the knees and grow my hair out to a normal, respectable style (with sideburns). Grunge taught me to be my own version of normal, for as weird of a kid as I was.

Yes, I believe I was born at the perfect time, but that’s what any person would say between those years from adolescence to young adulthood, when the music sounded its sweetest, when the films were their truest, when fashion made the most sense. Maybe we look back and cringe at our clothes and hairstyles, but at the time it felt just right. I still wear jeans and cardigans. Fashion doesn’t make sense to me now, and I have no idea what the music sounds like or how the films are. I gave up. I had my time and that was the nineties. I have Jane’s Addiction on my phone, with Wu-Tang, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins…. It’s hard to believe that people from Gen-Z don’t even know those bands. It makes me feel old, of course, but anyone who’s over eighteen, who’s just now listening to those bands for the first time, should’ve known them earlier if they claim to be music experts.

But that’s just little old me, stuck in a time machine, who doesn’t want to leave it. I’ll never crawl out of the nineties. It was the best time for me. Clinton was president. There were no wars (okay, a little civil unrest, but nothing like now). There was no social media. It fit my mold, and that goes for everyone. I’ve met people, people younger than me, who swore by Blink-182 and Linkin Park, and I didn’t get the appeal. But that’s okay. That was their time for music. I’d officially gotten old by twenty-three. We don’t have to set the boundary at each decade. One movement in the nineties can spill into the two-thousands. But for the sake of this piece, we’ll keep it within those parameters because I look at my own life and feel that everything had changed for the worse once the nineties were over.