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Research: Period Music

The new screenplay I’m working on has gotten me jazzed on bad mid-’90s nostalgia. See, it’s about a bunch of seventh-graders, so I don’t want to fail, in spectacular Diablo Cody fashion, to replicate the rhythm and jargon (both idiomatic and pop-cultural) of contemporary 12- and 13-year-olds. I’m still entrenched in the decaying pop-cultural mélange of 2008, so I could probably fake it much more reasonably than Ms. Cody by, for instance, not putting words into a 2008 12-year-old’s mouth that they would not know. This goes beyond inauthentic dialogue, though. I don’t even want to admit, much less understand, that we live in a world where a 12-year-old would have their own cell phone, credit card, or laptop. I simply can’t write it.

I’ve elected, instead, to set the screenplay in the spring of 1995 and try my damndest to evoke the junior-high zeitgeist of the day. It was a world where people were united and divided by MTV (because, back in those days, they still played about 12 hours of music a day, as opposed to the current 30 minutes) and whether or not you had a Super Nintendo, where kids were much more divided by moronic cliques than anything I ever saw in high school (one thing movies consistently get wrong).

As a result, my primary method of research has been looking at back issues of Guitar World and Nintendo Power — the only magazines I subscribed to at the time — and I’m eternally grateful to myself for not throwing anything away. Ever. These magazines are like time capsules. There’s plenty I remember interesting me back then, but the small things I’ve forgotten are encased within those pages. Even though I haven’t really thought about it in over a decade, did I remember Bush’s single-factory Sixteen Stone? Yeah, it was right there, sitting inside my brain. But what about the Toadies’ endlessly replayed “Possum Kingdom”? Never would have entered my head if Guitar World hadn’t tabbed it. Same with Alanis Morissette, despite my sister blasting Jagged Little Pill, like, four times a day for a year.

It’s nice to fill in the gaps of what I’ve forgotten and didn’t care about — it’ll help me flesh out the other characters — but the main goal is to recreate the world I inhabited at the time, one that cared about pretty much nothing but music and video games, where you’d get the shit beaten out of you for admitting you liked the Goo Goo Dolls more than Pantera (based on a true story, though fortunately I wasn’t the victim — good thing the Goo Goo Dolls sucked!), where meaningless shit was so much more important than it is now.

It’s — among other things — a valentine to my misspent youth, and consequently I compiled a list of albums (which I at one time either loved or hated) to help me get into the mood when I write. I’d like to try to dig up some more bad R&B and pop, but at the time, I was all grunge and metal, so that’s where my mind goes first. If anybody has any suggestion from music in this period (around 1992-1995) — even if it’s older music, if there’s a period-relevant reason for you listening to it, like Beavis & Butt-Head getting me into AC/DC and Black Sabbath, I’m all ears.

Posted by Stan on March 22, 2008 2:13 PM  | Permalink | Career-Based Rambling, How Not to Write a Screenplay | Digg It