Lifestyles of the Bored and Disenfranchised: Mid90s and My Teen Revolution
By Noah R
“A lot of time we feel that our lives are the worst, but I think that if you look in anybody else’s closet, you wouldn’t trade your shit for their shit.”
— Ray (Na-Kel Smith) in Mid90s
I remember those sweet, sweaty summer days when I’d grab my board and grease the pavement with my crusted wheels listening to Pharcyde and Tribe, Black Flag and Circle Jerks, feeling free and feeling invincible. I followed a strict schedule: hit up Burger King, fuck around over at my local 7-11, then return home, sopped and stoked from the mid-day melt. And at the end of the day, I’d always, without fail, crash in my basement to watch some classic Bones Brigade flix whilst drowning myself in liters of Mountain Dew, nearly falling asleep from pure exhaustion. To any young punk, it was the closest you could get to absolute bliss living in the ‘burbs. It was a fun, if lonely, time in my life.
That happened to be the first year of the pandemic, and my senior year of high school in the cleanly isolated suburbs of Virginia. I was freshly 18, without a driver’s license and without a job. I had started to tinker with the idea of being a film critic and was slated to go to college the following year with none of my high school friends in tow, and no idea what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. There was a lot weighing on my mind that manifested itself in the blank canvases of deserted parks, the miles of cookie-cutter housing, the upper-crust “community” events I could and would never be a part of, and the music I blasted for miles and miles as I fiercely burnt blacktop, crashing and stumbling and hurting if only to feel some sense of urgency in this milquetoast Americana that had nothing to offer. Whoever thought the suburbs were the best place to raise a family was lying: there’s nothing more cripplingly anemic than ‘50s housing planning retrofitted into contemporary teenage angst.
Even as a somewhat misanthropic geek who originally rejoiced in the concept of staying online, at home, and barely interacting with anyone apart from digitized friends and family, this new life of solitude and quiet desperation started to crush me; I quickly exhausted all of my hobbies, listened to piles of my favorite band’s favorite bands’ deep cuts, and thoroughly dived into labyrinthine rabbit holes of art and film, but none of these things were a proper substitute for what I truly needed: validation through community.
Mid90s, the story of Stevie (Sunny Suljic), a 13-year-old boy who spends his summer straddling a troubled home life and a group of new friends he meets at a skate shop, was like a revelation to me back then: a paragon of the malaise and apathy I felt within my suburban trappings, a contemporary time-capsule that I could really groove with, and a film that I could really call my own. Kids was too abrasive and Suburbia was too depressing, but Jonah Hill’s directorial debut hit that sweet spot of teenage misery, misfitdom, and occasional triumph that I had always craved, cementing a crucial film experience in my life. I think I could’ve only really liked this in that specific period of my life, where I was transitioning to other things and taking risks, but I needed some simulacrum of communal comfort.
With feelings of isolation at home and alienation from the rest of my friends, it felt transcendent to see kids who were just like me living out the fantasy of youth rebellion in the truest sense, but most importantly, with camaraderie and brotherly affection. This provided a taste of the unattainable, as barely any of my friends shared interests with me. Like most high school outcasts, I broke bread with theater kids and orchestra geeks, but found that I couldn’t fit in with either; I was a guitarist who was weaned off of Premier Guitar and primal, white-boy blues records, and my musical tastes of the odd and obscure never fit the radio-friendly alt-pop of the latter. I could never quite enter into that inner-sanctum of shared interest, and was subsequently made fun of for being an outsider to the outsiders. Back at home, I had no siblings and my parents were similarly clueless about what I liked, how I thought, or how I felt. The suburbs were like the music they listened to: controlled, clean, anti-rebellious, and safe. I didn’t want safety: I wanted to live.
Back then, the overstuffed nature of the soundtrack and the overt angst didn’t push me away as much as it brought me in; it was a reflection of my own existence, how I crammed music into my mind as my own personal jukebox 24/7 as a coping mechanism. I struggled with being a legal adult and still feeling like a child, not having my voice heard, and my art not being able to truly express what I felt. But the Mid90s soundtrack gave me a conduit and a megaphone: punk and hip-hop are brothers-in-arms in the sense that both genres are primarily concerned with youth subculture, lived-in experience, and the idea that even if you’re just some burnout kid with a manifesto burned into your head, what you’re saying truly matters. “I’m only nineteen but my mind is old…” as delivered by Mobb Deep as a street-stuck but streetwise adolescent talking about gang warfare in N.Y.C. on “Shook Ones Pt. 2” or the Misfits using sleazy B-movie plots to express a certain romantic frustration as a bunch of freshly minted New Jersey garage-punks on “Hybrid Moments” gave legitimacy to what I was feeling at the time, even if I didn’t share their particular experiences. My voice carried through, respectively, their subversive sampling and blown-to-hell guitars.
There’s one thing that’s united everyone who were once kids themselves coming of age: having been forced to reckon with an adulthood that came too early, and having to grow up too soon. Mid90s represents that bridge between, both a snapshot of lost youth within the throes of discovery, and the “figuring-out” of life and attaining maturity after experience. I felt as if the director Jonah Hill himself was trying desperately to recapture that spark, or maybe he was simply laying the rebellious embers to rest with one final salvo to his childhood.
At its core, Mid90s is a film about youth discovery (finding shared loves of skating and rap) and the necessity of breaking adolescent taboos (your first cigarette, first sexual encounter, first taste of alcohol, etc.), and in that sense it’s a film I don’t need anymore. It’s something I’ve grown out of, but in that sense, I can appreciate it more--I’ll always look back fondly at that little microcosm I once inhabited, but never relive it. It will always exist as a cornerstone of my late youth, and as a stepping stone of my growth, but just like Stevie with his troubled adolescence, I had to grow up quickly. If Hill had wanted to focus even more on the shedding of childhood innocence, then maybe he would’ve added a cut off of Nas’ Illmatic to his rich rap tapestry for a further sense of grim finality: “Life’s a bitch, and then you die.”
There’s always something special about Stevie popping his board for the first time, or smoking a cigarette without coughing, a unique brand of wonder you can never quite put your finger on, which is precisely what makes it so beautiful. It’s the first proper brushstroke of an artist, or the first note sung by a singer in correct pitch: the first time you overcome that sort of artistic difficulty, the world opens up to you. And subsequently, you become more receptive to it. There’s nothing more punishing than messing up a lengthy crooked grind or hitting a rock while bombing a hill but maybe that’s why skaters are the most viciously determined people out there. They make great artists because they understand that pain is a part of the learning process, and, in more than one way, they know how to fall.
Even on a surface level, Mid90s is what turned me on to hip-hop and had me experimenting with my art based on skater culture, massively influencing the smoother direction my drawings would take on later in my career. The film is messy at its core, but it’s just my kind of messy. Being a teenager is a very messy ordeal in itself, and I’m glad I had Mid90s to help weed out my life. It’s got all the vernacular and depth of the liner notes of a Gravediggas cassette, but I’d be lying if I said they weren’t speaking my language.
Heyo! My name is Noah R. and I’ve been an amateur film critic on-and-off for about two years. I run the (critically unacclaimed!) psychotically psychotronic fanzine T.V. CASUALTY as well as the punk-centric Virginia scene-zine BRAINDEAD, have done album art for the electronic artist Isserley, and write poetry every once in a full moon. I dig everything from serendipitously splattery grindhouse to saccharine sweet rom-coms, and my favorite subgenre is giallo.