below is an email i sent to 8minutecapecod@gmail.com when they discussed 90s music and why they seem so self-deprecating on time crisis
Hi crisis crew!
I was re-listening to episode 129: Green day and yellow mustard, and Ezra asked why in the 90s there was a wave of self-deprecating songs (Basketcase, Creep, Loser, Nirvana discography) unlike the eras before and after which has more songs with angst redirected outwardly.
This tangent reminded me of Capitalist Realism by the late Mark Fisher. Published in 2009, the book mostly talks about the post-cold war, post-berlin wall state of the world, which is also the era of said self-deprecating songs.
A section in that book talks about mental health in a capitalist society where it's privatized and mostly directed inwards. In a capitalist society in which mental health is not politicized, issues are mostly dealt with therapy and medication. Erza pointed out that Satisfaction by Rolling Stones is angry but external and I think it is mostly because in the 60s and 70s they had thinkers like Lacan, Deleuze, and Guattari who wanted to tackle mental health from a political standpoint—externalizing the factors of mental health and relating it to a political landscape.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the collapse of the Soviet Union(1991-2), capitalism and its ideology of individualism ""succeeded"" over socialism. The privation and privatization of mental health became the mainstream way of approaching it which could be seen in Basketcase (1994).
