Everything Is Not as Good as It Used to Be

I had a lot of enthusiasm in high school. Every day it seemed like something new and awesome would happen. Every week there would be some kick ass new album coming out, and it was the Clinton era, so every time you turned on the news you got the sense that there was nothing going on that was more worrisome than Bill's penis, so things must be going pretty well with the world.

This feeling of enthusiasm lasted for a little while into my first few university years, but after a while, I noticed that things slowly began to suck. I used to watch MuchMusic all the time, but then Sook-Yin Lee left, and it lost a lot of its cool. Not too long after George Stroumboloupolos was also gobbled up by the CBC, leaving the station to be hosted by whatever emo-looking dumpster babies they could scrounge up.

The transgressive subersiveness of the 90s was gone. Not that things were really all that subversive, but it seems like you could see things in the broadcast media that you just don't see anymore. You'd never see anything on CBC even close to as bizarre as Kids in the Hall, for example. You don't see any mainstream musicians scaring conservatives like Marilyn Manson anymore. The scariest thing you could hear on the radio in the 21st century is Eminem! A scrawny kid with an ALF t-shirt! And the only thing people found scary about him is that he used the word fag and hung out with black people.

I realized some time ago that a lot of my aspirations since high school have been aimed at recapturing that feeling of enthusiasm that awesome things were happening in art and politics. I still can't decide whether it's just me, and I've just lost my spirit, or whether it's because things really are just not as great as they used to be.

I guess there are some interesting things happening on the margins. Artists and political commentators who couldn't get a voice back then now can. David Firth, for instance, who even in the 90s could never have gotten access to the media is thriving as an artist, and doing amazing and important work. I guess what's missing is a certain feeling of momentum. Although things kinda collapsed and everything went to shit when Bush was elected (and not all because he was elected, it was just that a lot of depressing things happened around that same time), there was a feeling that so many cool things were happening in the mid to late 90s, at least from my perspective, that there was going to be some major turnaround in Western culture. There was optimism. Now all of the most vibrant artistic minds seem to think that things are inevitably doomed, and rather than fighting, seem to be acting more as MCs hosting the Gong Show that is the decline of contemporary culture.