COLUMN: Rehash the ideas of the past

From Shireen Santosham's, "If I Was Your Woman," Fall '97 From Shireen Santosham's, "If I Was Your Woman," Fall '97 These days, my biggest fear is that leg warmers will come back into fashion. It seems like the eighties are creeping back into our lives. We don't even have original movies anymore -- first they brought back Star Wars and then they brought back Dirty Dancing? I've always hated the term Generation X, but what can we really say is unique to the nineties? New types of music were being born. In the rock scene the alternative wave hit mainstream and hip hop experienced a new fusion of jazz and rap marked by the introduction of the Digable Planets. Today, we see a very different trend. Kurt Cobain is dead, Guns n' Roses has broken up, and Kid n' Play got a hair cut. Even Metallica and U2 have sold out and gone retro-punk. Where did we go wrong? Somewhere in the mid-nineties we lost our originality. At first, although we shun to think of what we liked back then, Docs and flannel were a refreshing break from post-eighties fashion. "Cryin" became every high school girl's theme song and smoking made the biggest comeback in ten years. Pretty soon, tattoos and piercing became about as unique as platform shoes on Locust Walk. Nonconformity became a synonym for wide-legged fashion. Suddenly, we started getting desperate for new and unique creative drives to follow. In essence, we looked to the past for inspiration. For the first time in recent history, we bit off the past. One of the biggest rips was the "Woodstock II" concert. This concert lacked any and all meaning. The original Woodstock was a freedom concert protesting the Vietnam war; Woodstock II was an excuse to get higher than one ever thought possible. This concert featured such memorable, quality artists such as Greenday, who really added a sense of peace and brotherly love to the event. It was the beginning of the end. Pretty soon, hippie skirts and Birkenstocks ruled the planet and the female artist strumming her guitar wailing about the ills of being a woman took over MTV. Cynicism became fashionable, once again, and only the strong few like Tori Amos and Ani Difranco managed to maintain their dignity. Everywhere we looked, anything associated with the nineties became hackneyed and overplayed. In other sections of pop culture, similar movements towards the past were visible. Bob Marley, the Beatles and the Grateful Dead were revived as icons of rock n' roll. Marijuana again became the symbol of rebellion. For other children of the nineties, disco fever reigned. Starting with the return of platforms and bell-bottoms, the Euro-disc culture invaded America. La Bouche's "Be My Lover" topped American charts and remixes of everything from "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" to the Four Non-Blondes was recycled into one grotesque thumping beat. Intertwined with this "club" culture was the overriding feel of the seventies, filled with bright lights and shiny clothing. Wyclef remade "Stayin' Alive" and Cake attempted "I Will Survive." The retro-disco music re-emerged on radio stations all over the country and we came dangerously close to jamming with our parents over "ABBA's Greatest Hits." This situation was a little too much for some of us, so we moved on to our early childhood -- the 1980s! We started wearing white sneakers with jeans again and pulled out our old overalls. As with the other recycled decades, artist put their own twists on familiar beats; Praz and the Refugee Allstars remade "Electric Avenue" and Frente recreated "Bizarre Love Triangle." This return to the eighties is as much a search for creative voice, as it is a return to our roots. The sounds and style of the eighties is a unique experience which all of generation X shares. To some degree, the return to the eighties also marks the birth of new types of music, never before seen in pop culture. These new music forms include trip hop, acid jazz and jungle. Such music is in sharp contrast to the simple remixing of older music into more modern forms. This new music is, instead, a complete fusion of two generations of music, as well as different styles of music from rap combined with seventies disco beats to retro-club combined with traditional Indian rhythms. Fashion also reflects the incongruity of the music scene everything seems to be in style -- long, short bright or dull; from Timberlands to Go-Go boots. The 1990s have created a period in pop culture which is very unique. We have managed to reinvent our own past while creating a new generation of music. Fashion has never been so diverse. Everything from frilly layered dresses and comfortably loose pants, to harsh, edgy, tight black clothing is all the rage. Everywhere in pop culture, the lines are being redefined. The categorization of music into rock, rap, and alternative seems archaic in the intertwined world of today's sounds. Although not every remix has been successful, in the end we came out with a unique blend of many different music styles from both different times and from different artists. Although much of the music and the fashion of today is reused pieces of history, the nineties have managed to create a new and exciting twist on pop culture. So, what has Generation X produced?