A mid-October night in the midwest. 17 years old, and the car is yours for the night. Windows down, a cool autumn breeze sifts through your hair. You’re on your way to pick up your friends and get up to no good. Twilight is bleeding slowly from purple to indigo. The orange streetlights just kicked on all at once. Static of anticipation. That guttural feeling of endlessness hangs in the air. You’ll never feel a joy quite so pure. The unqualified freedom. Clueless, and careless of that fact.
The catch: that scene never happened. At least not exactly as I’ve described. Parts are true: a sunset here, a feeling of complete agency there. Patches of youthful invincibility, sewn together in adulthood. A nostalgia quilt. “1979” by The Smashing Pumpkins is that quilt. And now, at 32, I can throw it over me and believe for awhile that everything really came together at once.
I call it my favorite song of the 90s. When pressed to explain why, I tend to draw a blank. It’s hard to put into concrete terms because so much of this track’s allure is the feeling. It is getting asked to prom. It is getting stood up at prom. It is going to the game with your friends. It is ditching the game to smoke behind a dumpster. First kiss, first sip of beer, first cigarette, first eternity sitting in a damp basement. Succumbing to drama. Rising above drama. Both at once. It is the soundtrack to high-school that millennials wish we had. Instead, we got “Like a G6.”
“1979” could just as easily be 1989, or 1999, or even 2079 (if we make it that far). It doesn’t age because it crystallizes a chapter in life, not a moment in time. All the peaks and valleys of adolescence, distilled into 3 minutes.
The Healthy Alternative 
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