What About Style?—1995-6.

Eighties redux has had a winning run. It seems as if we've chosen to retain what we like, securely fasten certain musics and ideas in the canon. However (at the moment) I'm more than a little sick of the early nineties. They've been on people's lips for about five years, though they've just really hit the generally accepted big-time. It's that very big-time-hitting that has left me cold, ready to move, ready to parse the slippery middle-nineties (predictable, I know). The A's and P's were in middle-school, so I mark the inception of that mini-era with the theatrical release in the summer of 1995 of Clueless, Jane Austen's Emma repurposed in Bel Air. The effect of the film was miraculous—no need to pause before entering it into the aforementioned "canon." Quite literally everyone I know (of our generation) has habitually quoted or referenced it for fourteen years (and counting). Clueless brought popular American attentions back to So.Cal. and energy and color and tweak and humor and RAVE (almost) and sex (the din of AIDS was suddenly a little less deafening—no one was worried about Christian's health).

Even the smacked-out underground (still North, gravitating toward Portland and away from Seattle) was setting aside bummy flannel and embracing psychedelic, acid sounds and colors (however, I was too young and pop-oriented to pay attention to that stuff). In many ways, I feel like the mid-nineties were about subtly nodding to cultural movements that originated in the eighties (New York and London club culture or 60s redux/remembrance) in mainstream aesthetic life. This theory could also be completely wack--what do I know? Like I said, we were in middle school, perfectly primed for the "overground."

Two ska-punk records from lower-Californian locales a bit over-rough and trashy for Cher Horowitz (who was so famously grossed out by skater-stoners and "Val parties") were released the next year: Sublime's Sublime out of Long Beach and No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom out of Anaheim, Orange County. And my, but they were monstrously successful (and my, but they sounded good to us twelve-year-olds). Sublime and our eager childhood consumption of its lyrics deserve a separate post one of these days (not least because I feel like talking about Gwen Stefani right now). The eponymous album dropped just over a month after the band's charismatic lead-singer was claimed by a heroin overdose. The songs were, on the hole, (hip-hoppish) balladeer reports from the grizzly, drugged periphery, some ugly West. But the sound was terribly sunny, the telling humorous, the ultimate contrast winning. You should glance at this video for "The Wrong Way" (my first favorite song on the record for some obvious and smarmy reasons and O.M.G.—is that Bijou Phillips?!).

No video girl (not even B.P.) could aid in this discussion of mid-nineties style (as you may have guessed, we're not talking about music so much as ideas about clothes and surfaces and impressions) like the pretty much incomparable Gwen Stefani. I've embedded the videos for two singles from that massive (every damn lyric memorized) album: "Don't Speak," the highest performer, a Spanish guitar-inflected power ballad (that sounds bizarrely Russian to my ears now) and "Sunday Morning," a rollicking late-comer. The video for "Don't Speak" addresses Gwen's mercurial rise above even her own bandmates. The other is a sort of cheap, scrappy affair involving cooking spaghetti and a methed-out (?) interlude. Stefani's platinum pin-up hair was such a revelation to me at the time (quite fix-ed in "Sunday" and strung-out in "Speak"). But these paragraphs have really amounted to a lot of pretense; I just want to look at/think about the dress that Gwen wears in "Speak," a forties cut and pattern with a tear in the side that is decidedly punk/post-punk. I don't imagine there will ever be a time when it doesn't work.