CREEM VS THE '90s
From its heroin highs to its thong-exposed lows, we give the final “whatever” on the decade so intense it ended the 20th century.
Maybe we here at CREEM are just full of ourselves, but it’s hard for us to imagine anything cool happening without us being around to see it. Maybe, having missed the 1990s, we haven’t yet been house-trained into self-effacement. So we act proud, stand on our lil’ haunches, and bark real braggadociouslike. To paraphrase Bart Simpson in season 5, episode 17 of The Simpsons, “Bart Gets an Elephant” (airdate March 31, 1994), we think we’re people.
The last issue of the original CREEM magazine came out in October 1989. Exhausted by the release of “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and dreading the possibility of an end-of-the-year readers’ pool placing Simply Red over the B-52’s, we looked inwards—to the Love Shack of our souls—and, with hearts as heavy as a cetacean Cadillac, we set sail. We wish we could say that we were always around in spirit. Or that, when there was only one pair of footprints in the sand, we were carrying you. But the truth is that we had to take some time to work on ourselves. To find our smile. To get our groove back. To, in the parlance of the day, have what she’s having. We packed up our KISS records, put our Suzi Quatro jumpers on consignment, found a sitter for Lester Bangs’ ghost, and fucked off for greener pastures (a cute little bungalow on the outskirts of Bob Seger’s secret Upper Straits Lake estate, where fauna was plentiful, the earth fertile, and our landlord let us drink from his outdoor garden hose whenever we wanted).
