Damn The Man, Save The Empire
September 1, 2014 4:42 PM   Subscribe

When Carol Heikkinen reached working age in her hometown of Phoenix, she got a job at the coolest possible place for a high school kid: Tower Records. When she was in college, she spent a summer working at another Tower Records, this one on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. It was through these experiences that Heikkinen wrote the script for Empire Records, then titled simply Empire. As she told me over email, she tried to write a story like the Richard Pryor classic Car Wash, which took place over one day at a car wash — only at a record store. How "Empire Records" Became The Unlikely Film Of A Generation
posted by Ghostride The Whip (77 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Don't forget GWAR!!!!!
posted by Renoroc at 4:47 PM on September 1, 2014 [1 favorite]


How "Empire Records" Became The Unlikely Film Of A Generation

[citation needed]
posted by aaronetc at 5:00 PM on September 1, 2014 [41 favorites]


Every day is Rex Manning Day in my heart.
posted by palomar at 5:08 PM on September 1, 2014 [13 favorites]


It's not even Rex Manning day today though.
posted by angerbot at 5:08 PM on September 1, 2014


Stop calling me Warren! My name's not fucking Warren!
posted by jferg at 5:11 PM on September 1, 2014 [5 favorites]


I don't have to explain my art to you,Warren.
posted by Kitteh at 5:12 PM on September 1, 2014 [9 favorites]


Not entirely True...
posted by KGMoney at 5:17 PM on September 1, 2014


How "Empire Records" Became The Unlikely Film Of A Generation

[citation needed]

What's with you today?
posted by ApathyGirl at 5:30 PM on September 1, 2014 [5 favorites]


What's with today, today?
posted by angelchrys at 5:42 PM on September 1, 2014 [10 favorites]


This is actually a nice piece in that it notes that its eventual cult audience would be with kids who'd been too young to be part of Gen X themselves. These kids could seize upon this sort of representation of Gen X culture without getting tripped up in its authenticity (or lack thereof). They could take it for the teen ensemble piece it was intended to be.

Whereas us actual Gen X folk recoiled at the movie as yet another example of corporate America trying to sell us back to ourselves. Having been in that camp, I never really understood the appeal Empire Records had with people slightly younger than I am. And this article kind of made sense of that for me.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:53 PM on September 1, 2014 [15 favorites]


> I remember watching Empire Records for the 12th time on the floor of my best friend’s basement, complete with green shag carpeting and wood paneling, and then watching it again as we fought sleep, somewhere around 2 a.m., with piles of candy.

If you change the word "candy" to "weed," this is fairly close to my experience with the film.
posted by The Card Cheat at 5:55 PM on September 1, 2014 [3 favorites]


This movie is representative of anything about my generation in the same way that Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is representive of the 60s. Ie it's fun and cheesy but also sort of annoying that people think it's even close to reality (which obviously people here don't really do but...yeah).
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:56 PM on September 1, 2014 [2 favorites]


Sorry, I'm not even supposed to be here today.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:57 PM on September 1, 2014 [7 favorites]


Say no more...every day should be Rex Manning Day! It's a lifestyle after all folks
posted by shockingbluamp at 6:03 PM on September 1, 2014


I saw it a few years ago and it just seemed to be a movie, not something that CAPTURES A GENERATION or whatever. Fun, funny little thing that I wouldn't mind seeing again, not something that needs mythologizing.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:16 PM on September 1, 2014 [1 favorite]


If the people this article is about are anything like my high school friends, they mostly liked the movie because it inspired them to spend about three straight months saying "Damn the man!" about any minor frustration they encountered.
posted by kewb at 6:23 PM on September 1, 2014 [1 favorite]


I love this movie; I was 18 when it came out. I drove all my friends crazy by making them watch it (something I'm sure they still do not thank me for).

I don't think it's the film of A Generation, but it's a film that makes me feel better when viewing it.
posted by Kitteh at 6:32 PM on September 1, 2014 [1 favorite]


My wife does like to sidle up to me and say "Baby, you are SEX!"
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:47 PM on September 1, 2014 [2 favorites]


[citation needed]
posted by aaronetc at 5:00 PM on September 1


I have only ever heard about this movie from magazine articles. I was a junior in high school when it came out. Nobody saw it. Nobody talked about it. Se7en, the Usual Suspects, Clueless, Heat and Braveheart, yes. Empire Records? Nah.
posted by basicchannel at 6:54 PM on September 1, 2014 [2 favorites]


All in, Renee Zellweger has always sucked.


Watch Ride With The Devil and reconsider your position on the matter.


Oh, wait- that was Jewel. Renee Zellweger was in Cold Mountain.



Is Jewel actually better than Renee Zellweger?


Shit, I don't even know anymore.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:01 PM on September 1, 2014 [4 favorites]


I was working music retail when the soundtrack for this came out, and I remember rolling my eyes at how it was supposed to be all Alternative and shit, but (a) it starred Liv Tyler and Renee Zellwegger, and (b) the soundtrack featured the most anodyne bands ever to get airplay on WFNX. I mean, the Gin Blossoms? Toad the Wet Sprocket? The friggin' Cranberries? Evan Dando covering Big Star? Even the Throwing Muses track they got paled in comparison to some of their earlier work. Later on I heard that Liv Tyler did a striptease to the Throwing Muses song, and I headdesked so hard I split the desk in half.

I've mellowed out enough that I think Liv Tyler can be a good actress, and I can watch parts of this without rolling my eyes. And I'm glad the movie finally found its audience. But the quality of the film (as opposed to the roundabout way it found its people) strikes me as a calculated effort at cashing in on the tail end of the alt rock era. Then again, I feel this way towards most cult movies that dropped in the '90s and beyond...SLC Punk and Garden State suffer from this calculated feeling as well. Maybe I'm not the target demo for them.
posted by pxe2000 at 7:02 PM on September 1, 2014 [5 favorites]


Soundtrack for this thread: Empire Records playlist on Grooveshark
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 7:02 PM on September 1, 2014


I worked at a Tower Records one summer in the 90s. Sure enough, I had a coworker who shaved her head.
posted by emelenjr at 7:03 PM on September 1, 2014


You LOVE Empire Records don't you?! Why don't you JOIN THE CAST!!!
posted by wabbittwax at 7:04 PM on September 1, 2014 [5 favorites]


As I recall, Empire Records barely got a theatrical release in the US. I was in the target demo and didn't even know about Empire until the summer of 1996, when brightly-colored posters for it were plastered all over London, rather overshadowing nearby posters for some movie about trains.
posted by infinitewindow at 7:04 PM on September 1, 2014


Is Jewel actually better than Renee Zellweger?

Never seen the two photographed together.
posted by wabbittwax at 7:06 PM on September 1, 2014 [1 favorite]


I worked at a Tower Records one summer in the 90s. Sure enough, I had a coworker who shaved her head.

Well, Sinead O'Rebellion! Shock me, shock me, shock me with that deviant behavior.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 7:08 PM on September 1, 2014 [12 favorites]


If any Empire Records fans want to have their shit seriously upended, watch Ethan Embry in Cheap Thrills.
posted by echocollate at 7:12 PM on September 1, 2014 [3 favorites]


Empire was an OK movie but, yeah, generation defining it was not. I know exactly one person in his 20s who was into the movie, so the author may have a point about its post Gen X following.


Here is the proper list of Films of a Generation:

WWIIers - Casablanca
early Boomers - The Graduate
later Boomers - Animal House
Gen X - Fight Club
Gen Y - Mean Girls
generation born after 2000 - Cars
posted by riruro at 7:23 PM on September 1, 2014 [2 favorites]


Fight Club and Mean Girls came out within 5 years of each other.
posted by muddgirl at 7:30 PM on September 1, 2014 [4 favorites]


Whatever Columbine's generation is called had The Matrix.
posted by infinitewindow at 7:31 PM on September 1, 2014


Gen X - the Star Wars series. From youthful vitality to bloated, joyless creative exhaustion in six films.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:37 PM on September 1, 2014 [6 favorites]


Isn't the answer supposed to be Heathers? Or maybe Slacker or Clerks? Because Empire Records is really a John Hughes movie that happens to be pretty bad, and not set in Chicago in the 1980s.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 7:57 PM on September 1, 2014 [4 favorites]


Gen X - Fight Club

This is a losing game but...no. I am a late late late Gen Xer and I was way too old to care that much about this movie in 99. The answer is Ferris. Bueller.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:05 PM on September 1, 2014 [13 favorites]


Anna Helena Petersen is right in that age that's not-quite-Gen X and not-quite-Gen Y (like me). Heathers and Slacker were good movies, but too old to define my teen years. Clerks was targeted at older kids, too. Clueless and Empire Records came out when I was 11 and when AHP was only a few years older, the target demographic.
posted by muddgirl at 8:15 PM on September 1, 2014


This was the go to slumber party movie for my friends and I in the late 90s. It wasn't the movie of our generation, it was the movie of the generation we wished we were. The few years it took to gain traction meant that the era it was trying to market to was mostly over. It made the early 90's/grunge era seem like a time where being a weird misfit was cool, whereas the late 90s we lived in felt like an identity crisis headed in the worst possible direction, finally settling on boybands an nutmetal.

I think it's super cute that the grunge era is so revered by teenagers now, as it was by my friends and I in 1999.
posted by Betty_effn_White at 8:16 PM on September 1, 2014 [2 favorites]


Although I would make the argument that the movie that defines this particular cohort (I won't say generation because that's too broad) is Hackers. Evil corporate powers brought down by a band of Robin Hoods -- proto-Occupy-Wallstreet?
posted by muddgirl at 8:18 PM on September 1, 2014 [5 favorites]


The thing about Empire Records is that it came along in the era of Clerks and Slacker and that stuff, which seemed at the time to almost literally document proto-hipsters of the '90s and their dismal yet proto-hip jobs. It's almost hard to imagine now, but Kevin Smith was like the great avatar of revolutionary authenticity in filmmaking! Zines and Douglas Coupland and Daniel Clowes comics were in the air and shit... I was in 9th or 10th grade at that time, and Empire Records seemed like such a conventional commercial "media product" in comparison to that other kind of stuff.

Also, at least by the late '90s, Tower was a lot more like the colonizing "Music Town" than the embattled indie.
posted by batfish at 8:28 PM on September 1, 2014 [4 favorites]


Fun Fact. Tower used to be a head shop as well as a record store way way back before Ashcroft and when records were vinyl.

When I was a pint sized 14 year old drug dealer in the late seventies [weed and acid] and went into the Tower Records on Mercer in Seattle and eyeballed the scales on the wall. I pointed from behind the tall counter at the $150.00 [adjusted for inflation $548.12] triple beam, saying simply, "that one" the person behind the counter about shit. When I pulled out the cash they went to the back and came out with a nicely boxed scale.

I caught the 16 bus home.
posted by vapidave at 8:36 PM on September 1, 2014 [8 favorites]


Hackers and Slacker nails it, for me. Yikes.
posted by basicchannel at 8:43 PM on September 1, 2014


Gen X - Fight Club

Come on, it was Reality Bites or Singles. Admit it. It's embarrassing, I know. We're all embarrassed about it.

Or maybe it was The Fifth Element? I think we watched that more than every other movie combined in college.
posted by fshgrl at 8:57 PM on September 1, 2014 [6 favorites]


Also- I was 18 in 1992 and if I had to name the Brad Pitt dystopian movie of my generation it was definitely 12 Monkeys and not Fight Club. 1995 was a hell of a year for movies.
posted by fshgrl at 9:04 PM on September 1, 2014 [7 favorites]


"Car Wash" was a fun low-budget comedy with a good soundtrack, but calling it a Richard Pryor film is a stretch, as he's only in one scene.

It's really an ensemble movie, but if you had to identify a single protagonist, it probably would be T.C., the character played by Franklin Ajaye, whose attempts to win tickets to the big concert and then get the waitress at the diner to go with him are as close to a plot as the movie gets.
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 9:09 PM on September 1, 2014 [2 favorites]


My pick for The Movie of The Grunge Era: 1991: The Year That Punk Broke.
But the movie that we Gen Xers went truly nutso for in the 90s? Pulp Fiction.
posted by Fuzzy Monster at 9:20 PM on September 1, 2014 [7 favorites]


Definitely not generation-defining, but somehow that one movie a bunch of people I knew in high school had seen and really liked in spite of its Gin Blossoms song, the presence of Liv Tyler, and a plot barely anyone remembers. Until I finally managed to see it at some random party, I only knew the movie even existed thanks to the two singles that got radio play.

I don't know why, and I don't remember half the movie, but I have a peculiar fondness for Empire Records. Enough that I actually kind of like that generic-as-hell Gin Blossoms song a decade and a half later. Enough that I'd be willing to go to bat for Empire Records, right up until the time I finally decide to rewatch the thing and inevitably have the scales fall from my eyes.
posted by chrominance at 9:37 PM on September 1, 2014 [1 favorite]


Can I put in my gentle vote for The Princess Bride (1987) as the median movie of Gen-X. Not only embraced by us, but one of the first slow-burn hits thanks to millions of rec room kids with endless replays on videocassette. It got a second life when we hit college and used it as a date movie due to fond memories and discovering it was a actually a really intelligent little film with some excellent writing. Hell, I still love the film today, and I love introducing the novel to people who've only seen the film and watching them come back shocked at what a beautifully post-modern, interactive bit of fiction Mr. Goldman came up with all those many years ago. If the college students I work around on a daily basis are any indication, it's still much-loved as a childhood artifact.

Surely I'm not the only person of my generation to include a quote from it in my wedding (but not that quote thankyouverymuch).
posted by 1f2frfbf at 9:49 PM on September 1, 2014 [8 favorites]


I thought his name was Warren!
posted by skycrashesdown at 9:50 PM on September 1, 2014 [1 favorite]


Singles!!!!!!! Good Lord, the shame! Fifth Element is cool, though.
posted by basicchannel at 11:06 PM on September 1, 2014


I was working music retail when the soundtrack for this came out, and I remember rolling my eyes at how it was supposed to be all Alternative and shit, but (a) it starred Liv Tyler and Renee Zellwegger, and (b) the soundtrack featured the most anodyne bands ever to get airplay on WFNX.

I also worked in retail and only ever knew of this movie as a soundtrack. I never saw any evidence that it was an actual film that was released. Just looked like typical GenXploitation.
posted by anazgnos at 11:17 PM on September 1, 2014


Gen X - Fight Club

I am totally Gen X, and it is SO not Fight Club. It was Star Wars. 11 years old, watched it 27 times. So fuck you all.

Or maybe it's Breakfast Club. Because All those people were going to grow up to be the most awesome biggest stars ever, and they were gong to have their own soundtracks. So there.
posted by happyroach at 12:05 AM on September 2, 2014 [4 favorites]


This movie introduced me to "Plowed" by Sponge which is still like my #7 best song of all time.
posted by PenDevil at 12:19 AM on September 2, 2014 [3 favorites]


The definitive film for early Xers was Breaking Away. Well, at least it should have been.
posted by Beholder at 1:30 AM on September 2, 2014 [4 favorites]


I guess I'm the kind of person this film was aimed at. I was 16 when it came out, and am late Gen X, early Gen Y depending on which source you look at. When Empire came out, I was most definitely not considered Gen X, which I think cut off in 1976 or so. I don't remember a cinema release in Canberra, but it was definitely promoted pretty hard in video stores. I loved Pump Up The Volume, Singles and Reality Bites. I was hugely into grunge and alternative music and can still spout useless facts about how Seattle bands are linked together. I liked Empire too, mainly because it was so quotable, but it was never on my list of must rent movies when we picked stacks of them during the school holidays. Soundtrack was a bit average too. Side note: best soundtrack of the 90's was The Crow. That movie really didn't stack up when I watched it a few years ago though. Also, if we're going for movies we watched as kids as the "movie of our generation", how has no one mentioned Goonies?
posted by Kris10_b at 1:42 AM on September 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


Beholder: "The definitive film for early Xers was Breaking Away. Well, at least it should have been."

I can get behind that. And draft.
posted by chavenet at 2:06 AM on September 2, 2014 [4 favorites]


The biggest crime about the Empire Records soundtrack was that all the really good stuff on it wasn't on it.
posted by Kitteh at 3:39 AM on September 2, 2014 [1 favorite]


The best song, "Money" was missing from the official soundtrack. Criminal!
posted by Snjo at 3:47 AM on September 2, 2014


Now don't be dogging Singles, the only film, that I know, about a transportation planner!
posted by jadepearl at 4:17 AM on September 2, 2014 [7 favorites]


My sister (born mid 80s) had a VHS copy of this that I'm pretty sure she and I wore out in junior high. Not a great movie but it's really what you (read: me) want to think late high school is like when you're 12-13 I think.
posted by dismas at 4:27 AM on September 2, 2014


The definitive film for early Xers was Breaking Away. Well, at least it should have been.


*jams frame pump into your spokes*



And I'm pretty sure that Heathers is the film that defines Gen X.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:30 AM on September 2, 2014 [4 favorites]


Gen-X isn't so monolithic, and tough to pin down. The proliferation of musical genres alone should indicate that there is nothing definitive about us, tho lord knows the marketeers and lifestyle press sure as shit tried their hand at defining it. Empire Records and Breakfast Club before it appealed to one segment, sure, but also Star Wars and the Matrix, Princess Bride and the Fifth Element, Ghostbusters and Fight Club, Jurassic Park and Pulp Fiction, Clerks and the Big Lebowski. There were a lot of great, iconic, touchstone movies in that time period, but none of them rose above the rest to define what was happening and who it was happening to. More like a rolling rambling journal, a slowly expanding catalog of shared experience.
posted by Slap*Happy at 5:02 AM on September 2, 2014 [4 favorites]


Empire wha? Neeeever heard of it.

Star Wars is the correct answer, although we also would have accepted Heathers.

But in many ways there can be only one, of course, which would be Decline of Western Civilization: Part II, The Metal Years.

Hey, remember the music industry?! I was all like, "no way" and they were all "duuhhh, we can't find our ass" and we were all like Bwhahahaaaa! Heh heh.
Ehhh. Hey whatever happened to $400,000 recording budgets anyway?
posted by petebest at 5:06 AM on September 2, 2014


You people know nothing about generation-defining movies. The obvious choices are:

The Beat Generation
Hallucination Generation
Target: The A-Go-Go Generation
Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation
Star Trek: Generations
The Doom Generation
The Junkfood Generation
The Feral Generation
The Lost Generation
Generation Z
Underworld: Next Generation
posted by kyrademon at 5:34 AM on September 2, 2014 [7 favorites]


This Gen X-er loved Pump Up the Volume, personally.
posted by nevercalm at 5:45 AM on September 2, 2014 [8 favorites]


I liked the article, even if I didn't agree with all its premises. (I'm also glad that the author actually wrote a coherent narrative, rather than just dumping all her quotes into THE-ORAL-HISTORY-OF-EMPIRE-RECORDS.html).
posted by rollick at 6:01 AM on September 2, 2014


Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation

My dad remarried when I was ten. The plan was that my younger sister and I would make an appearance at the reception and then my dad's friend's sixteen year old daughter would take us to go see Care Bears while the adults partied. But at the reception I managed to get my hands on two unmonitored glasses of champagne thinking they were sparkling grape juice (which my family served kids at Christmas parties) and proceeded to get wrecked.

Care Bears Movie 2 was the shit.
posted by echocollate at 7:16 AM on September 2, 2014 [7 favorites]


The author is my generation. This is not my generation defining movie. In fact, I doubt most of my friends growing up have even seen it yet. This is a friend circle defining movie, s'cool. After all, we all know Dragonheart was the movie of the forgettable generation between X and the Millenials. Dennis Quaid as a down on his luck dragon hunter....Sean Connery the voice of a dragon, alone and angry at being the last of his kind....and the underlying theme that a prince who was supposed to be the best of us turned out to be the worse. If that doesn't scream '90s, I don't know what does.
posted by Atreides at 7:32 AM on September 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


Gen X - Fight Club

Ugh. No. I'll accept arguments for "Heathers" and "Ferris Bueller" though, as late-end Xer, my entire childhood was basically "Star Wars."

But the movie that we Gen Xers went truly nutso for in the 90s? Pulp Fiction.

True. I think I saw "Pulp Fiction" something like six times in the theater. Ditto "Trainspotting." Both produced the soundtracks that played at literally every single party I went to in college outside of the ones held by crusties and noise kids.


I was actually in Wilmington for fall break of my freshman year when they were filming "Empire Records." My best friend and I spent a lot of time walking around downtown dumbstruck by the created "alternative" culture (which made no use of the actual local alternative culture) they invented for the film, which seemed exceptionally weird to us. My friend worked at a local record store at the time and her actually-sort-of-scary punk rock roommates (one of whom evidently made it on to an early draft of a promotional poster for the movie) made it into the "Sugar High" crowd scene (there's a guy with leopard print hair dancing . . . blink and you'll miss him). There were endless takes that day and by the end, there was much shit-talking on the subject of Renee Zellwegger and Coyote Shivers and that terrible, terrible song.

I remember watching the movie when it came out thinking how bad it was and how poorly it reflected the actual youth or musical culture at the time (and certainly the business of working at a record store . . . "High Fidelity" is much, much closer to reality). But now I realize that "Empire Records" (like "Clueless," which I also sort of hated when I first saw it, though I kind of love it now) was utterly embraced by really young kids. People like my sister (who was thirteen when "Empire Records" came out) count it among their all-time favorite movies and quote it the way my peers quote "Heathers," "Say Anything" and "Dead Poets Society" (the holy trinity of my adolescence). It reflected her experience of the 90s, which was fluffy sweaters and miniskirts and sunny pop music, as opposed to, say, Shellac and complicated politics and chronic depression and dingy, angry people smoking too much and taking drugs, which was more like mine.
posted by thivaia at 7:56 AM on September 2, 2014 [9 favorites]


This Gen X-er loved Pump Up the Volume

Talk hard!
posted by elmono at 9:08 AM on September 2, 2014 [1 favorite]


Looking back on it now, Empire Records might still be in business, but MusicTown definitely went kaput long ago.
posted by ckape at 9:53 AM on September 2, 2014 [3 favorites]


Yeah, Pulp Fiction was omnipresent in my mid-'90s neck of the woods. Everyone had seen the movie, owned the soundtrack, had the poster, quoted the lines, dressed up as the characters for Halloween...
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:59 AM on September 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


I worked at Tower Mercer (video side) when Empire Records came out. It was fun to play it it in the store during my shifts in an ironical way. Oy, what an overwrought pile of melodrama that was. Kind of like working for Tower Records, really, so she nailed it. I think I was too old for the movie to speak to me, but I am supposedly not part of Gen X either. What are the movies for the inbetweeners?
posted by Lardmitten at 12:14 PM on September 2, 2014


"I guess I'm the kind of person this film was aimed at. I was 16 when it came out, and am late Gen X, early Gen Y depending on which source you look at. When Empire came out, I was most definitely not considered Gen X, which I think cut off in 1976 or so. "

Yeah, I'm the same age and I hated Empire Records when it came out, and when I rewatched it a few years ago, it still seemed like 90 percent bullshit. But that was back in the day when Tower was the big corporate record store already, and the locals were struggling against them — and what usually mattered about that was that the local record stores were then fiercely local, something that doesn't come across in Empire, which seems entirely unrooted.

Plus, it had all the fakety bullshit cliches of what was "ruining" (I was more dramatic then) music and driving out actual weirdness and authenticity.
posted by klangklangston at 3:06 PM on September 2, 2014


Oh yeah, and just cuz I forgot. Fuck tower records. KEMP MILL 4EVER SUKKKAS *smashes everything w hammer*
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:14 PM on September 2, 2014


Side note: best soundtrack of the 90's was The Crow. That movie really didn't stack up when I watched it a few years ago though.

Yeah, that was really disappointing upon rewatch. But it did capture the mood of the times pretty well. Pre web 2.0 early 90s.
posted by fshgrl at 9:11 PM on September 2, 2014


The movie Kids represented my high school experience a lot better than Empire Records, with a better soundtrack, but it was depressing as hell, so I never rented it again, and kept going back to Blockbuster to watch the cute white people trade one-liners and monologues in Empire Records.
posted by elr at 1:27 AM on September 3, 2014


I was 12 when the film came out, and I remember some of the hype but also a sense that it was all pretty fake. It's probably because that was the year I started going to punk shows, but the soundtrack always seemed the mainstream ideal of alternative, which is kind of silly. I mean, fine music if you actually like it but not at all edgy or subversive and totally an appendage of the establishment. That it has become a cult hit with people my age or younger isn't really surprising because it safely plays with anti-establishment ideas while still propping up traditional channels.

I should ask my friends who worked at Tower in Sacramento what they think. All I know about working there in the 90s was that they all told me not to get a job with Tower because I would get sucked in and never leave. Many of them were there to the end.
posted by kendrak at 6:22 AM on September 3, 2014


I enjoy this film enough that I bought it on DVD after countless views over the years. I don't think the soundtrack is anything special, although it's serviceable; and I never thought it defined anything, let alone a generation. It's just a funny and endearing movie. It's full of humorous and quotable banter, and is light-hearted and straight-forward. It doesn't represent anything heavy; as much as I love it, I think people are overthinking it.

I can't decide on an appropriate quote to complement my opinion here. Either:

"We mustn't dwell."

or:

"She'll be fine. She's in the store."
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 7:05 AM on September 3, 2014 [1 favorite]


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