Proof of a 90s Origin

Who knows what that is?  We do!  Most all 90s teens had that series of screeches and beeps embedded in their brains by the middle of the decade.  And, believe it or not, it was music to our ears.  It represented a connection that was imminent – a connection to our email inboxes, to chat rooms, to many more people than we could have ever envisioned. 

For those who don’t know what that horrid jumble of sounds actually is, please don’t run away. It’s just the sound of a dial-up modem connecting a computer to the Internet using a telephone line. That’s all. Still lost? Don’t sweat it. The point is that it symbolizes what the Internet was.

The 90s Internet was most certainly not today’s Internet . . . or even the early 2000s’ Internet.  And who could have expected otherwise?  We were all getting acclimated. Many of us didn’t even connect to the World Wide Web until we received our free AOL CD-ROM in the mail.[1] We struggled to craft clever screennames, never considering whether any of them would appear inappropriate or unprofessional in the future. And we didn’t yet focus on how much or even what kind of information we could glean from being online. This new link to other people and information was just . . . cool, so it took us awhile to truly exploit its advantages.  Keep this version of the Internet in your mind for a few more minutes because it is central to the argument I’m about to make.

As improbable as it sounds, I’m about to prove that because I didn’t recognize a 90s icon by sight, I am, without a doubt, pure 90s (and not a millennial).[2]

Here we go.

Freshman year of High School—the year of the OJ verdict, a year before my family moved, and a year before I finally got to experience cable TV at home (remember that – it’s important for this post)—I befriended an edgy but kind girl from my homeroom.  One day, while I was standing next to her locker while she loaded her backpack for the next class, the sketch on her inside locker door caught my eye.  It was of some guy with scraggly hair and a penetrating gaze.  He looked . . . well, he looked sad.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

My friend looked at me wide-eyed.

“You don’t know who that is?”

“Nope.”

It was Kurt Cobain.

*                          *                          *

OK, everyone just calm down.  Before you call for mutiny, label me a fraud, or accuse me of falsely representing myself as a 90s connoisseur, I remind you that I warned you of this (see above).  I knew you’d be incredulous. But let me get to my proof!  Because, you see, the fact that I didn’t recognize Kurt is incontrovertible evidence of my 90s teen-dom. 

First thing’s first: 

As I stated above, I did not have cable until my family moved across town, which was after the locker sketch incident.  Therefore, while I certainly soaked up Nirvana through the airwaves, I didn’t spend hours upon hours ingesting music videos and gazing into Kurt’s empty-yet-soulful eyes.  I’d seen him in brief snippets on local channels, but I didn’t yet have access to the beauty that was early MTV. 

I could really stop here. I didn’t watch music videos on TV, so I didn’t have a great sense of what the guy looked like. Makes total sense. But there’s an as-yet-unstated reason why this makes such sense. The critical piece of my theory is not MTV or cable, but the Internet itself.

The 90s version of the Internet did not equate to endless information and images at our fingertips.  I didn’t have a functioning computer at home—and that wasn’t uncommon at the time—but even if I had, it wouldn’t have been much help in identifying Kurt Cobain.  Why?  Because the early 90s Internet was a very different animal from the Internet of today.  Things were just getting started.  The celeb-drenched repository of gossip hadn’t been fully realized.  Instead, people creeped each other out in chat rooms or engaged in very primal online shopping.  There were personal websites, but they weren’t even close to the sophisticated blogs of today. Instead, they looked like this:  Internet Explorer 1.0 – 1995 | Web Design Museum.  Or this:  Lynda.com – 1995 | Web Design Museum.  It wasn’t as if I could have easily landed on a fancy fan site or music magazine web page to see pictures of Kurt.  And forget about videos – YouTube wouldn’t be around for another ten years.  The only way I could have caught an interview, live performance, or music video of Kurt was – you guessed it – the MTV I didn’t yet have. 

All of this meant that, really, my greatest chance of glimpsing Kurt Cobain’s face would have come through a perusal of hard copy magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone, and I was just getting acquainted with those resources Freshman year.  Before that, when Kurt was still alive and more regularly featured in them, I had my nose in Seventeen, the Delia’s catalog, and, fine, Archie comics.    

Of course, there is another potential explanation to this story – somewhat of a cop-out, which I’m not remotely tempted to take.  I could have simply argued that my friend was a terrible artist and hence her rendering of Kurt’s melancholy face was utterly unrecognizable.  But that wouldn’t be true, and 90s kids hate being inauthentic.  More importantly, it’s unnecessary, because:  

NO CABLE + (NO PC OR PC WITH 1995 INTERNET) = NOT CRAZY THAT I DIDN’T RECOGNIZE A SKETCH OF KURT COBAIN IN 1995

You know what?  Let’s be fair:

NO CABLE + (NO PC OR PC WITH 1995 INTERNET) = NOT RECOGNIZING KURT WAS THE MOST 90S THING EVER

That’s right.  It’s the most 90s thing ever that I didn’t recognize Kurt Cobain in 1995.  Once the Internet evolved into a version that more closely resembles the one we know today, my ignorance would have become exponentially harder to explain. But in the mid-90s, it was not only understandable but expected to have relied on print to access idols, icons, and heartthrobs. I’d say that almost anyone without access to MTV would have been in the same boat as me.

If you’re not convinced, that’s fine because 90s kids don’t care what others think.  Which further proves I’m true 90s.  Which I don’t care about proving.  Because . . . you get the picture.  Thanks for sticking through this one with me.

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[1] Did you know that, supposedly, at one point half of the CDs in the world had the AOL logo on them? 

[2] Still can’t let it go.