In 1993, I was ending my first year at university. Let me tell you, it didn’t go well. The first year of law had syllabi totaling thousands of pages, and I wasn’t used to studying such quantities. I failed the first wave of exams in June and spent most of my summer studying to give it another go in September (which also resulted in utter failure).

However, as I was waiting my turn for an exam in the hallway of the university, I met a dude who had the same family name as I do. He was super friendly and told me about a bar close to where I lived. The bar was more like a club where we could drink beer for almost nothing, and it was filled with very cool folks who were playing in bands. I brought my friends there, and we enjoyed it so much that we went twice a week for many years. It was the beginning of my grunge years, and I don’t think that it will ever end, since it’s still my music of choice nowadays.

The first of many band posters to be pinned on the walls of my bedroom was The Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream. I loved the song Today and the poster was great. Also, I was drunk very often, so it may have helped me pick the one with the cutest colors…

Many years later, I met Soforah, who had a very similar music story. She also was into grunge music, she also was used to going to a pub with cheap beer and cool folks. We share a common love for pretty much all the same bands, and we regularly play them during our Friday evening beer times.

However, Soforah was much more into The Pumpkins than I was, and that’s how I discovered more songs of Billy Corgan’s band. She also told me that Billy has Belgian roots. Well, no surprise there; he seems like a cool guy.

A few months ago, in a TV show that I can’t remember, I heard “Mayonaise” and wanted to Shazam it, but Soforah already knew the song. I had the poster in my bedroom, and I’m still discovering songs from that album 30 years later. Life, sometimes…

As for why The Smashing Pumpkins misspelled “mayonnaise,” here is the reason: The band visited Japan in 1992 while touring Gish and noticed that the record company had mistranslated a lyric from Gish into a fan booklet as “mayonnaise seas.” The band thought this was funny and used “Mayonaise” [sic] as a temporary song title when recording Siamese Dream, but it eventually stuck. (Wikipedia).

That song is so dreamy…

I was 17 years-old when Smells like Teen Spirit came out. I had friends who were also into grunge music, we were spending all of our time together and we were going twice (sometimes even three times) a week to a bar that was filled with other grunge people, most of whom were playing in bands. We had goatees, we were wearing t-shirts of bands and flannel shirts and we were living around grunge music. We didn’t give a damn about much, all that mattered to us was to get drunk on loud music and to give the world the middle finger.

We were meeting new people all the time, at concerts, at bars, at parties, everywhere there was beer and music. My friends even bought a van and we were coming back from music festivals with more people than we came with.

https://youtu.be/6CBjJhDDunQ

Eventually, everything started to change… The essence of being grunge was to be alternative and, when everything started to turn commercial, most people moved on… Some of us got jobs, other moved on to electro music, the world changed again and, just as it came, the grunge era disappeared.

Even if alternative music still exists, the new sound is different. It’s hard to explain, but something simple and pure that belonged to that time is gone. The 90s had their very own soul, something that can’t ever be reproduced.

Inge, who’s from another part of Belgium, has lived the same experience. More than two decades later, we still both prefer our grunge playlist than the new alternative music.

I wanted to write a post about Star Trek: Picard, but I realized that my feelings toward the franchise are very close to my feelings towards music. That’s why I just rained my teenage nostalgia over you.

Before going any further, let me get this straight: TNG, Voyager and DS9 are the only real Star Trek to me. Some will agree, some will stop reading my blog, but that’s my ST world and no argument will change that.

Those three shows were simple, each episode was a little adventure in itself. It wasn’t overloaded with CGI or modern tricks to make the experience more futuristic. A simple crew, with an incredible alchemy, living simple adventures in space, that’s what Star Trek is and will always be to me.

Just as with grunge music, the world of Star Trek has lost its simplicity and, with it, all that made it a show that I could watch every Sunday evening until my last day.

Picard is a good science-fiction show but, even if I was very happy to see Seven of Nine, Riker and Troy back, it isn’t Star Trek to me.

I could continue my analogy but I think that you get my point. Modern days have brought many good things, but complicated scenarios in TV, sophisticated sounds in music and CGI overload in cinema came at the cost of simplicity. And, to me, it seems that we’ve lost more than we’ve won.