So this is an actual thing that has garnered an insane amount of “notes” on Tumblr. (20,000+!) Tweenz are getting nostalgic for the late 90’s/early 00s! I need to right the wrongs (so many wrongs!) that are going on in this (hilarious) quote.
Dear sad emo tweenz of Tumblr:
I was a tween/teen during this “magical” time you speak of — and you know what? Even though Blink 182 and Green Day were on the radio, kids still wore belly shirts, cell phones and computers existed (!!!), girls put on a ton of makeup every day and teenagers were still very much interested in sex. (Also, last time I checked, Blink 182 and Green Day are still played on the radio. A lot.)
We also had out own version(s) of Justin Bieber; they were called boy bands and they were pretty damn awful. We also kinda-sorta had our own Rebecca Blacks in these nascent days of the Internet and meme culture — William Hung, the Hamster Dance, the Dancing Baby, etc. We also had to wait 30 minutes for a damn QuickTime video to download over our dial-up connections, so we appreciated stupid Internet junk! No YouTube!
Now, young disillusioned youngsters, I know it’s easy to yearn for a time you never lived through — but let’s be real. The period of time from around 1997 - 2004 kinda sucked. Pretty sure that’s the general consensus of everyone who was a cognizant human being during this time.
I think the only cool things to come out of this period were Pokemon for Game Boy (awesome) and text messaging. Everything else? Lame. (Especially New Found Glory.)
Only in the early 90s, when you were a blip in the mind of your future parents, was being “grungy” cool. The punk kids of my tweenage years were still looked at as “weird” by the kids who liked whatever our equivalent of Justin Bieber was; in fact, I think that comes with the “punk rawk” territory. You’ll always be weird, you’ll always hate everything and everyone associated with “mainstream” culture will be (to you, at least) a fucking moron. Welcome to being 13 years old! Don’t elt the door hit you on the way out!
You’ll grow out of it. You’ll develop into an equally disillusioned twentysomething (like myself) and look back upon the year 2011 and laugh at all the stupid things you and your peers liked. You’ll realize that things weren’t so bad in the 2010s — I mean, you never had to live through the hell that was an AOL Chatroom in 1996 or Windows 95 or TRL.
So, go hang out at Hot Topic (or whatever your kids do these days) and please, for the love of all things unholy, stop wishing you could have been a kid when there was no such thing as an iPad or wireless Internet.
I THINK what’s going on here is people are confusing points of the ’90s and mixing them together into some nonexistent past reality. I liked being a college student in the ’90s. It was thrilling to see “our” music take over MTV in the early part of the decade. All the shit the original poster is nostalgic for (that actually existed and wasn’t pure fantasy) actually predates Blink-182 and New Found Glory. Actually, by the time those groups came around jocks who cared about popularity and sex and girls in belly shirts were the band’s primary audiences. Nowadays punks ARE the cool kids, back in my day they were outcasts.
Look, this all reminds me of the ’70s when everyone got nostalgic for the ’50s, or the early ’90s when we all wished it was the ‘60.
I guess the present is never enough.
