Last night my girlfriend watched I T2 Trainspotting. I haven’t seen Trainspotting since it was released back in 1996 and I thought it’d be fun to revisit those lovable junkies and hooligans from the first movie. And it was fun. The dialogue was whip-smart and the cinematography was was breathtaking and the actors were fantastic. But it was fun in a Trainspotting sort of way because it you remember the first movie it was about a bunch of Gen X kids who use heroin because they’re lives have been hallowed out by Thatcherism, consumerism and boredom. In T2 Trainspotting we get to revisit those characters except this time they’re older, a little thicker in the middle and they’re nostalgic while at the same time they’re considering they’re mortality.
I’m a Gen X kid. I’m older. I’m a little thicker in the middle. I think about my mortality. But I’m not nostalgic. The 90s were just another decade for me and then I moved on. Each decade had it’s peaks and valleys and some friends dropped out of my life but they were replaced by new friends. But the 90s were special, special to me, anyway, because I was a young man with a bright future ahead of me and my life was so vivid because I was experiencing everything for the first time. I got to fall in love as an adult for the first time. I also got to experience my first heartbreak as an adult. I got to meet friends for the first time that I’ll probably know until the day I die. Or until they die. Hopefully they go first.
And I was always listening to music and the first five songs you’ll hear on today’s show were part of the soundtrack to my life at that time. The stuff is heavy. As usual, I listened to a lot of different kinds of music back in the 90s, everything from hip hop to avant-garde jazz, but hardcore and industrial was the music that I really responded to. Can you blame me? America was fighting in the first Gulf War and it was clear that it was going to come back and bite us in the ass further down the road. The Republican and Democratic parties were just starting to become recalcitrant and hyper-consumerism was becoming a cultural value.
I’ll see you again next week. I promise it won’t be as heavy as today’s show. See you then!
- Godflesh “Love Is A Dog From Hell”
- Bastro “(I’ve) Ben Brown”
- Loving Six “U.S. World”
- Gore “Mean Man’s Dream”
- Head of David “Dog Day Sunrise”
- The Bug & Earth “Dog (feat. JK Flesh)”
- Pale Sketcher “Plans That Fade (Faded Dub)”
Illustration: GDBee ©2017