90s Pixie Cuts

I love good pixie cut. The 90s was a great decade for fashionably short hair. Here are a few lovely examples of pixie cuts.

Can you think of any others?

90s Songs Based on Mental Illness and Depression: Volume II

I published a list of 90s pop songs based on mental illness and depression earlier today. I thought of a few more so I decided to make a second list. Please enjoy.

Offspring, Self Esteem

This is a song about a man that stays in an emotionally abusive relationship with a woman because he has low self esteem. During the bridge of the song he screams “The more I suffer, “The more you suffer means the more you really care, right?” I have to admit that I’ve been in that head space.

Cypress Hill, Insane in the Membrane

I don’t speak Spanish but thanks to Cypress Hill I know the Spanish word for crazy. Insane in the Membrane is their most recognizable hit. Their insanity is probably drug induced but insanity is a problem regardless of it’s cause.

Mary J. Blige, Not Gon’ Cry

Mary J. Blige had a lot of problems in the 90s. I was debating on whether she belonged on this list or not because a broken heart is not quite the same as a mental problem. But I love Mary and it’s my list so I decided to add her. I wonder if Mary has ever met the guy from Offspring. Perhaps they would get along.

Garbage, I’m Only Happy When it Rains

I remember this band and this song but it was never one of my favorites. This is a little gift from You Tube suggestions. But it’s perfect for this list and now that I’m listening to it I like it. As the kids would say it’s a bop. For the most part I’m a happy go lucky girl but I can identify with the sentiment of this song. I personally enjoy a bit of internal drama. It’s fun. And I do love rain.

Way back when there was a band called Lords of the Underground. I only remembered one song of their so I decided to do a bit of research on their song lyrics. With a name like that I figured they were a little off and they made music expressing that. I hit the jackpot. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, “Psycho”. No one has a video with lyrics uploaded to YT.

The Mainstreaming of Urban Culture

Today I was browsing target.com and I ran across a pair of gold toned, chunky, bamboo earrings. I was kind of floored to see them. I remember that style of earring being popular in the late 80s and early 90s. Big, bold, gold hoops were once only popular among Black and Hispanic women in urban areas. They were lampooned for it. Big hoops were thought of as ghetto, uncouth and too flashy to be chic. So are they still ghetto now that suburban soccer moms and hipsters will be wearing them?

I’ve seen this before. I grew up in the 80s and 90s outside of Detroit. The fashion industry has promoted styles within the last ten years that I remember inner city women and men wearing thirty years prior. Back then that style of dress would have made a person unemployable. So it’s interesting to see urban styles marketed as chic and trendy when the fashion industry is actually decades behind the trend.

I ran across this article a few years ago in Lucky magazine a few years ago.

Sorry but Zooey Deschanel is the last person I think of when I think of nail art. No celebrity comes to mind when I think about nail designs. The popularity of nail art has grass roots. Grass that sprung up in between slabs of concrete. Nail art has been a fashion staple across America’s big cities for decades. It was hood until Zooey Deschanel and Lucky magazine said it wasn’t.

I’m not one to get angry about cultural appropriation because I live in a multi cultural society and cultures rub off on each other. But it’s unfair the way that anything that is associated with Black Americans is looked down on but a White stylists or buyer copies an urban fashion, brings it to the White masses who think that it is something new and all of a sudden it’s a new trend and it’s origins are forgotten. Then people tell African Americans that we have no culture and some African Americas seem to agree and wait for the White mainstream stamp of approval.

We have culture but we often turn our noses down at it in order to assimilate into the dominant culture. Instead of Blacks passing it down to our own children another ethnic group ends up selling our culture back to a different generation of Black Americans. It’s honestly our own fault and we should know better by now. But we keep falling for the okey doke. This cycle also happens in music and the restaurant industry.

Black people need to appreciate their own creativity and originality. Stop joining in the chorus of folks labeling something as ghetto in order to fit in to polite society. Something is either tacky and uncouth across the board or it isn’t. The marketing is the difference. Black people should protect their culture and proudly claim it. Don’t wait for a White reality star to make you chic. Learn to market your own culture instead of complaining when someone else figures out a way to make a buck off of it.

I’m sure glad that I saved my gigantic Turkish link gold hoop earrings from the 90s.

RIP Luke Perry

Yesterday the world lost 90s teen idol Luke Perry. He became famous in the early 90s because of his role on the legendary teen soap opera “Beverly Hills 90210”. Legendary is not an exaggeration. At least not for me. There has never been anything like “90210” and there will never be anything like that again.

The main reason there will never be anything like “90210” is because I’ll never be sixteen again. Once you live past your teen aged years I don’t think that it’s possible to focus that type of energy on a TV program and fictional characters. There’s that and Luke Perry’s rise to fame occurred in a bygone era.

Picture this:

The year is 1991. The place is suburban Detroit, Michigan. It’s Tuesday night. In about twenty four hours the favorite show of me and all of my peers is going to air. The countdown is now a matter of hours and not days. The next day in school I look up at classroom wall clocks during the day. I’m counting down the hours to when “90210” came on. It was on the tip of our tongues and the forefront of all of our little early 90s, teen minds.

School is out. YES! It won’t be much longer. It’s just a few hours more. I just needed to get through dinner and probably some homework and then it would be time to see what happened next in lives of privileged, attractive (even the homely one was kind of cute) White teenagers that live under perpetually sunny skies.

I remember that “Entertainment Tonight” came on at 7:30PM. My girlfriends, two other Midwestern, suburban, Black girls, would be on the phone talking to each other by that time on a three way call. That’s how we had conferences about TV broadcasts before the social media aged. We would get so excited when the closing credits to “Entertainment Tonight” started to roll. It was now just a matter of minutes before the main event.

And then it began:

When the first few notes of the “90210” theme song came through my floor model TV set my heart skipped a beat. My friends and I created a short cacophony of squeals and heavily breathing the word YESSSSS into land line phones! We excitedly chatted during the commercials. Once the show began we held the phone in silence until the next commercial break.

“Beverly Hills 90210” was good stuff. We followed the love story between Brenda and bad boy Dylan. I can’t remember if Dylan went to school or not. I think I remember him going to the prom but I don’t remember him being in class. The love triangle between Brenda, Dylan and Kelly was absolutely riveting. And the sweet story of David protecting Donna’s honor melted our hearts.

The show was also educational. I learned where Baja was because of Dylan McKay. My friends and I looked that up because we wanted to know where on the Earth Dylan went on his solitary surf vacations. To this day I think of Dylan whenever I hear the name Baja. We didn’t use the internet then so I don’t know how we looked it up. I’m assuming we found Baja on a globe at school or we used an encyclopedia.

“90210” was absolutely epic. I don’t even think kids today can relate to anything like 9021 mania because they are growing up with on demand entertainment like Netflix and YouTube. Back in my day we just had to eagerly await new episodes and new seasons of our favorite shows. It caused mild hysteria.

Anyhow, RIP Luke Perry. I’m getting a little emotional writing this post. Thank you for the memories. There will never be anyone else like him because times change and people change. Looking back at it the show was very corny and I don’t think that today’s teenagers would accept “90210” as entertainment. There would surely be complaints that the show was elitist and lacked diversity. But I loved it and I’m grateful to have grown up in what pretty much amounts to the Victorian era. Thanks for the memories.