Welcome to Hell, Welcome to the Nineties

Every decade you survive looks more embarrassing than the last. The 80s get dismissed with a few jokes about Aqua Net and shoulder pads—easy targets, distant enough to be funny. But the 90s are different, because the 90s are the decade that actually formed people my age. The embarrassment runs deeper there. It has roots.

We were too young to understand what The Prodigy were actually doing. We heard the records and felt something violent and exciting without having any framework for what that meant. Faithless and Daft Punk were operating at a scale we couldn’t process. So we danced our prepubescent asses off to S Club 7 and Alice DeeJay and Vengaboys and felt like participants in something, without being old enough to participate in anything.

Meanwhile we were busy pretending to understand Notorious B.I.G. and Dr. Dre and House of Pain—rapping along to words we probably weren’t pronouncing correctly, about a life so far from ours it might as well have been science fiction. This, apparently, is how identity forms: badly, with borrowed attitudes and borrowed slang, wearing the aesthetics of something you don’t understand yet because you haven’t found the aesthetics that belong to you.

The mixtape collects all of it at once. Welcome back. Welcome to the decade that made you. Welcome to hell.