Where Has the Time Gone?

Recognize that guy? Maybe this will ring a bell:



It's time for all of us to begin feeling old. The baby on the cover of Nirvana's 1991 release Nevermind is now 17. How old were you when the album came out? It was difficult to ignore that album once it broke. I have memories of listening to the radio as a 12 year old, the Top 40 station (because what else was there to listen to?), as my mom drove a friend and I to the mall. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came on the air. I can't remember what songs it followed or which came after, but here's a look a the Billboard Hot 100 for 1991 for possibilities.

-"Justify My Love" Madonna
-"Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" C+C Music Factory
-"Coming Out of the Dark" Gloria Estefan
-"Baby Baby" Amy Grant
-"Rush Rush" Paula Abdul
-"Unbelievable" EMF
-"(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" Bryan Adams
-"I Adore Mi Amor" Color Me Badd
-"Good Vibrations" Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch
-"When a Man Loves a Woman" Michael Bolton
-"Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" P.M. Dawn
-"Black or White" Michael Jackson

So, it was perhaps Color Me Badd or Marky Mark, and then some song where the guy yells incomprehensible lyrics about albinos and turning the lights out. It was years before I could understand any of the lyrics at all (now ,of course, I know them by heart, like most of us). It signaled a radical shift, not only in our musical tastes, but also in our cultural outlook.

Things were happening in 1991.

February 5 - A Michigan court bars Dr. Jack Kevorkian from assisting in suicides.
April 4- William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, is identified as a suspect in an alleged Palm Beach, Florida sexual assault.
June 12 - Boris Yeltsin is elected President of Russia, the largest and most populous of the fifteen Soviet republics.
July 22- Mike Tyson is arrested and charged with raping Miss Black America contestant Desiree Washington, 3 days earlier, in Indianapolis, Indiana.
July 22- Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is arrested after the remains of 11 men and boys are found in his Milwaukee, Wisconsin apartment. They soon found out that he is involved in 6 more murders
July 26 - Paul Reubens (aka Peewee Herman) is arrested in a Sarasota, Florida theater for fondling himself.
August 13 - The Super Nintendo Entertainment System is released in the United States.
September 2 - The United States recognizes the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
September 6-The Soviet Union recognizes the independence of the Baltic States.
September 6- The name Saint Petersburg is restored to Russia's second-largest city, which had been renamed Leningrad in 1924.
September 8 - The Republic of Macedonia becomes independent.
September 21 - Armenia declares independence from the Soviet Union.
October 15 - After a bitter confirmation hearing, including sexual misconduct allegations by former aide Anita Hill, the United States Senate votes 52-48 to confirm Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court of the United States.
November 6 - The KGB officially stops operations.
December 8- Leaders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine meet and sign an agreement ending the Soviet Union and establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha Nature Reserve in Belarus.
December 25 - Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as president of the Soviet Union, from which most republics have already disbanded; the 73-year-old state is now expected to dissolve completely.
December 26 - The Supreme Soviet meets and formally dissolves the Soviet Union.
December 31 - The Soviet Union officially ceases to exist.

How time flies.