Somewhere between the exhausting praise, disdain, and endless coverage of Millennials and their more-often-than-not parents, Baby Boomers, sit a once-explored, recently-forgotten, and now-nostalgic generation: Generation X.
If you've ever looked up from a smartphone long enough to watch a movie you didn't live-Tweet, you probably know Reality Bites as the slow, pastiche, embodiment of this "slacker generation," one replete with our Patron Saints, Janeane Gerofalo and Winona Ryder. But set aside easy memes about childhood playground equipment and the first Motorola flip-phone for a minute and you might remember another film that encompasses so many of the cheesy, stereotypical trappings of late-Millennium youth that have become synonymous with the 1990s.
Like most teen comedies, from Grease to Mean Girls, there's nothing particularly novel about Empire Records, and at the time it was hardly a standout in the immediate wake of Clueless. At best it was a poorly performing sleeper that served as a 90 minute commercial for a great soundtrack. And maybe that's what it was, at least commercially. Although it's drawn a significant cult audience in those who may have borrowed it from an older sibling, and it lingers in the back of the mind of most late-Gen Xers who know we've seen it more than once but never really paid too much attention to it; all of us are loathe to admit that, realistically, it's not a great movie.
But that doesn't mean it isn't a decent movie, and most importantly, a movie with heart.
It's not without a jaded sense of irony that a movie centered around an independent record store desperate to stave off a corporate takeover was produced primarily as a vehicle to send teens and 20-somethings off to big businesses like Tower Records, Sam Goody, or Columbia House to buy the soundtrack. But it's also apparent that Carol Heikkinen's screenplay was intended to be something else entirely, an indie film when the genre meant something, and if you squint a bit - or ignore its high production value - you can still find fleeting moments of her vision.
Before the likes of Napster, and obviously iTunes, local record stores (and their bookstore brethren) were faced with a similar threat from big box retailers. In a way, these retailers greased the wheels for internet competition by dulling our senses and our perception of what was truly independent. Conglomerates like Tower Records maintained the token gestures of stores like Empire with well trained staff and in-store concerts, so much so that when the time came, we lamented their loss nearly as much as those independent shops we lost before.
Of course the frustration over the loss of stores like Tower Records was more out of resignation than idealism. We knew Tower and The Wall were big business, but by the end of the 20th Century they were nearly all we had left, and we knew there was no way a brick-and-mortar record store could ever compete with the Silicon Valley's Borg.
But that's exactly why, in hindsight, Empire Records means so much, maybe even more so than well crafted teen comedies of the 1990s with less corporate intentions. Empire Records doesn't just take us back to our youth the way Clueless does. It takes everyone back to the rift that separated one generation and the next, and introduced an entirely new way of shopping, living, and experiencing each other.
Even at its most ordinary for the era, Empire Records is wrought with the personal inexperience of heartache that today's youth find largely online. Who of a certain age does remember, even relish in, that one we let get away or tried and lost, all without the passivity of dating apps and text messages? Even the worst experiences of our time are beautiful lessons and rosy memories that can't be challenged by today's coldly isolated technology.
We don't love Empire Records for its cheesy sub-plots and dialogue, not literally (though we do love the music). We love it because it represents a place we once experienced that has yet to be replicated. Like the coffee shops synonymous with other '90s classics like Singles and Friends, we watch Empire Records and see a kind of engagement that's gone. We used to hang out at the record store, day or night, drinking coffee or a Big Gulp or from a flask. We related to each other universally outside the confines of texts, SnapChat, or Facebook. It's a type of casual relationship that's been near-completely lost to Tinder, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Who walks into a bar or coffee shop hoping to bump into a friend, not knowing if they'll be there? More so, who goes to a store hoping for the same, and then just hangs out with the staff?
There is something strong, almost baser, about the excitement of never knowing and the need for this kind of dynamic interaction.
We were called "slackers" because we hung out in record stores, coffee shops, and bookstores, apparently waiting for life to happen. But we weren't: we were soaking up the buzz of life constantly happening around us, all the time, everywhere. We invented the term "people-watching" because people are the most interesting things to watch.
And can anyone really call us slackers in the face of a generation that prefers Amazon and GrubHub to walking to the corner store to interact with someone, all so they can spend more time binge watching the same show the watched last week? The only thing our successors have managed to prove is how lonely laziness and convenience can be, and in the face of an Empire Records' Broadway revival, that a lot of people long for the kind of interaction we have all since discarded.
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