Jul 15, 2022 4 min read

The signs around town were inviting people to a concert in the park.

“Smells like the 90s,” was the offering for last Sunday. It would be a concert of hits from then. The songs of Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Green Day, Pearl Jam, No Doubt, Blink 182-you know, all the grunge ones.

Except I don’t know, not really. Much of the popular culture of that decade was lost to me because I was raising little kids.

The realization of that came as I was sitting there in the grass, listening to the performance of a trio of young guys with flannel shirts tied around their waists. The friends sitting next to me were singing along. I was not.

“That whole time twenty years ago was lost to me,” I said.

“It was 30 years,” came the response, and was that ever shocking. I’m now at the age where I lose so much track of time that I’ve assumed 1992 was 20 years ago. The mental math gets worse when I count back to 1977 and realize we’d be planning our 45th high school reunion if my class were to have one.

So my friends were singing along out there in the grass, knowing all the lyrics or at least their own version of the lyrics as they remembered them, and I couldn’t even hum along. Because in 1996, when Metallica charted with “Hero of the Day,” I was raising a toddler. When Red Hot Chili Peppers had a hit with “Scar Tissue,” I was getting to know a fussy newborn girl who couldn’t sleep.

And while other young mothers were able to straddle the parallel worlds of baby stuff and grunge music, I was not so nimble.

Classical music was calming, so we listened to that in the car, as well as nursery rhymes, which lived on little cassette tapes I kept in a basket on the floor of the passenger side. When my son was about three, I found a website that made personalized recordings. A woman sang little tunes that included my son’s first name over and over again. The songs were cloying and irritating, and he loved them.

Maybe I would have preferred Nirvana. I’ve never been a fan of angry and aggressive music, but perhaps if I’d tuned the radio to WDVE or some other station that played rock, I would have gotten my head out of the toddler world, if only for the drive to the grocery store. After all, I didn’t like folk music until I committed to learning about it.

And although I never liked twinkly lullaby music, it’s easy for new mothers to fall into the baby rabbit hole. It’s warm down there, and cozy and safe and so very sweet. I don’t think I climbed out of mine until my daughter was three or four. Between the two kids, that was almost ten years of living out of reach of pop culture. You miss some things during those years when you’re taking every breath with your children.

The band at the outdoor concert was good – or so my friends said. Although I didn’t know the words, I recognized some of the melodies. Maybe they played in the background at the grocery store; some of it must have seeped in.

They named the concert “Smells Like the 90s” as a reference to the biggest song of the decade, Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit.”

Like me, if you were to hear that song now, you’d recognize it and maybe even hum along. No matter what you were doing back in the day.