ABOUT a decade ago, I had one diploma student who came to class wearing a Nirvana T-shirt – the 1990s rock band, not the memorial park – which was a rare thing to see among his Gen Z peers.

My reflection on this incident was concurring with the general pattern of cultural trends being cyclical and I guess at the moment in the early 2010s the popular culture of the 1990s had come full circle.

My personal assumption – based on my professional knowledge as a scholar in popular culture – is that a trend comes full circle when the distance between the present generation of youths and the past popular culture is at least two decades hence.

This distance, I feel, is important because while the past popular culture may be something their parents were into as youths, the distance by decades gives enough leverage for the present generation of youths to imbue it with their own interpretation of the previously validated codes and conventions of the said popular culture.

This reminds me of a stand-up routine the great rabble rouser Hishamuddin Rais used to do when he would have cameos at underground Kuala Lumpur gigs I played at in the 2000s.

He once asked a youth who was wearing a Che Guevera T-shirt if he knew what the image meant and without batting an eye the youth apparently replied “Yes, it’s a brand”. Che must be turning in his grave.

Back to my student a decade ago and 1990s popular culture, grunge music (the broad category into which Nirvana had been pigeonholed) in popular culture revolved around flannel, a cool unkempt look, and a general display of ennui we haven’t seen in a long while. K-Pop it is not.

Yet this was the music and popular culture I consumed and grew up with as a Generation X-er and I believe I have some authority to use this as an example to get to my point.

While there are plenty of younger bands that see the 1990s as the zeitgeist of modern music and worship at the Kurt Cobain altar who think the 1990s was a wonderful time to be alive, I beg to differ: the 1990s sucked if you were a teenager.

Dr Mahathir Mohamad (or the media or the police, you can ask him) was on an all-out war against “lepak” culture and rock music entered a dark period when rock legends Search and Wings had their long locks cut on live television by then information minister, the late Mohamed Rahmat.

The underground music scene was also only germinating towards what is now “indie” but things were very much physical: want to meet your peers and check out new music? You had to physically go out and meet people in the flesh and go to a record store to dig the cassette and CDs by hand.

Oh yes, and if you made an appointment to meet someone, you had zero chance of telling them that you would be late by 10 minutes because, well, smartphones weren’t the norm then.

It is impossible for youths of today to really grasp the origins of 1990s popular culture without living through it or listening to a jaded Generation X-er rant about the “good ol’ days”.

However, I too am guilty of this: as an 18-year-old, I discovered 1960s and 1970s rock music and similarly fantasised that it must have been an awesome time to be alive when in reality my only references were the music, photographs and maybe some accounts in music magazines about the era.

I would, of course, ask my father about the era and enjoy hearing his recollections.

What I’m trying to get across here is: the idea that the past is always romanticised in popular culture on very surface-level artifacts like music, film, photographs and fashion.

Similarly, national narratives – especially right-leaning nationalist ones – depend on the similar surface-level romanticisation but one way to counter such nationalist-leaning tropes is to dig deeper into what was popular with youth during the era to which they are referring.

If you want a more nuanced picture of the past, engage with the youth of that era – youthful ignorance and exuberance equally – who are the jaded adults of today.

That’s the real power of youth – not just giving kudos to young people of the present everywhere, because weren’t we all young and reckless once? – March 31, 2023.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.