It's the Squares. It's Always the Squares.
The parties and labels may change but the biggest enemy of a free and diverse society is, and always will be, the "Squares."
I love the epithet “Square.” I hope that I can in some small way lead the charge to reinstate that slang into popular vernacular. It’s wonderful. It’s so direct and it’s so perfect. It’s better than prude or uptight, more encompassing than conservative, more direct than stick-in-the-mud.
It’s perfect. Just like a square.
We all know a square. It’s that person you know that looks around before they nervously laugh. The one whose clothes are always ironed just a little too neatly. The ones who start blushing the moment the word ‘penis’ or ‘vagina’ is even uttered in a social setting. They’re the people who like to stick to the strictest definitions of words. The people for whom uniformity is nonnegotiable. The ones made uncomfortable by crude language. They’re always worried about what other people are doing. Oddly, they consider themselves so put together that they have the time to, usually without invitation, help others.
You know Squares.
Squares are also not restricted to being either a republican or a democrat. No, a square transcends party and transcends time. They live as interdimensional beings. Capable of ruining both parties and ceremonies. They hate popular media. Heck, they hate anything that doesn’t have perfectly sharp-lined edges!
Now in this year of our Lord (or Lords, I don’t want to leave out the polytheists) 2022. We are surrounded by squares. Oh sure, no one uses that term (They should. Fight me). So what terms do they use? Woke, the elect, elites, PC, and just plain old college students. Those are the modern squares. They’re really nervous about sex. They’re exceptionally nervous about offending anyone, and they are monumentally nervous about language. Also, they don’t use drugs. Which I’m not advocating, but also, come on all the cool kids do drugs.
It didn’t use to be this way. You see when I was a kid those weren’t the squares. Oh, sure liberal arts kids were always a little too caught up in their linguistic gymnastic routines because they got far too into etymology for a semester. Alas, there just weren’t enough of them to really do anything about it and they were woefully disorganized (as hippies generally are). No, our squares were the religions right and the soccer moms.
Now the religious right doesn’t need much of an explanation. Middle class, mostly white, devout Christians, or (less commonly) jews looking to subvert individual liberty to enforce some sort of higher-order moral code. Usually at the behest of their version of God. Everyone alive today should know about the damage these people did. Some of their biggest hits were; Megachurches and TV evangelicals, the Satanic Panic, and priests molesting kids! There’s more but…
Let’s talk about Soccer Moms.
Here’s a history lesson you won’t get in documentaries about the 90s. You won’t hear about it in historical study classes about the decade. Oh but it existed. People these days might think back and think “Oh soccer moms, yeah, we get it married stay at home moms that helicopter parent.” It’s a bit more than that. You see to elder millennials and Gen x Soccer mom became itself something of a negative term for overbearing women with way too much time on their hands who fetishized their children to an extreme. They overlapped perfectly with the religious right to create something of a group of super squares and by their powers combined summoned captain… I mean waged WAR on media. A lot of them were democrats, but not like the cool hip pot-smoking democrats that listened to heavy metal and taught philosophy outside on the lawn! No, these were your Tipper Gore’s and your Pam Howar’s (Note, these women were not elected officials, they were the wives of elected officials. Didn’t you know that’s how it worked). They were the patron saints of Soccer moms. Scared that if their children heard naughty language it would put them on a path to absolute corruption.
The Soccer moms and the religious right found a common enemy in movies, TV, and especially music. Boy did they hate music. So the squares all got together in the 80s and they formed the PMRC. This was an attempt to sanitize what they considered to be music too outside of good taste to allow to be available because as with everything involving soccer-moms- The Children, think of the children!! They also dabbled in stranger danger and toughened up movie ratings.
Everyone I knew hated Soccer-moms (for clarification I’m not trying to blame women there were a lot of men who were like this too, but I am going to use the derogatory term we used at the time). They were NARCS. They would tell your parents if they heard you swearing. If they saw some patch for some uncouth band on your backpack they reported it. If they thought your clothes were a little too hip they’d lobby your school or parents for new codes. They definitely wanted you to pull your pants up.
And Rap? Oh, boy did all the squares hate rap. Which to rappers was just fine, because they hated them back. You see we went to absolute WAR with the squares and for the most part, we won. The 90s were stupidly flush with people pushing the envelope of taste for no other reason than to piss off the squares. Was Andrew Dice Clay particularly funny? No, but he sure as hell pissed off your mom. SNL and their cast including people Dennis Miller, David Spade, Adam Sandler, and Chris Rock (and more) were pushing the envelope as far as they could. MTV went REAL back when it meant raw and not highly edited.
The squares hated moshing? Well fuck you we are going to beat the shit out of each other in this here mud. The squares said you can’t say N—-r. Gangsta rap said, “hold my beer.” The squares wanted wholesome family TV. The Simpsons, Ren and Stimpy, and Beavis and Buthead were shows you snuck over your friends’ houses to watch. The squares said knock it off with the drugs and we RAVED. The squares said “don’t try this at home” and the skater kids tried it and more trading bootleg VHS of some of the most dangerous shit you will ever see teenagers do.
The excess of the 90s in its language and culture of pushing boundaries might look in hindsight as if it were all just a racist, violent, sexist playground. Except it wasn’t. Everything we were doing was performance art specifically designed to absolutely get under the skin of every single square we knew. Harder, faster, louder, cruder and fuck em if they can’t take a joke.
And we joked. Oh, we joked.
Nothing was off the table? Rape not funny? George Carlin proved it could be while taking down misogyny in the same sentence. Child molestation is no joking matter? We thought Canteen boy meeting Alec Baldwin was riotous!
The list goes on.
The thing to remember is that the squares don’t actually have any real power. They only have power if you’re afraid of them. And then, like now, they have no real power other than to turn their nose up at you and huff and puff and hope that you go away. In the 90s we won by Not-Going-Away. We would double down whenever they found something a little too offensive. Bevis and Butthead were too offensive. So Matt Stone and Trey Parker said “Well what if we show you animated children swearing and getting raped?” How does that fit?
Don’t back down from the squares. They’ve never won before and as far as I can tell they’re not going to win now either. There is never enough of them, and there never will be.
Stand up to the squares. After all, they’re just geometrically symmetrical shapes.
And let’s resurrect “don’t be a square” as our rally.
So what do you think? If you’re of a certain age can you think of something from an era that just pushed the envelope to push the envelope? I left a lot off of that. MADtv, Married with children, etc. So, so much hip hop and rap were designed just to fuck with censors. Specifically, that was the art. Fuck with censors. Comedy movies could get dark and/or crude. So many stand-ups pushed the envelope over the edge of a cliff. The import of animation from Japan with a dark, sometimes very dark, (I’ve seen every one of these. God bless West Coast Video’s lazy teenage employees) bend to it. I didn’t get into sex but it was also off the charts in terms of envelope-pushing. Skinemax was a foundational part of discovering your sexual identity as a 13-year-old in the 90s. Video stores helped us find all the underground horror films from the 70s and 80s that inspired a whole generation of filmmakers and pop culture.
Let me know below, please. Did I miss anything you loved? Or are you just curious about any of the really out-there stuff from that period? Think anything went too far? Disagree that it was all about pissing off the squares? Let me know.
I am really digging your Substack. Your columns, especially this one, really resonate with me and my life experiences. I think we might have went to the same high school and/or college together. In both, there were many Steve Rodriguezes on campus, though none with the spelling of your first name. :)
You've described me, a late-vintage Gen Xer, pretty well. I agree with everything, and we shared the same cultural milestones.
Like, how did you feel watching this year's Super Bowl halftime show? I could remember when those very same entertainers on the field were the spoils of the culture wars of the day. Almost 30 years later, seeing Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg perform at the Super Bowl is essentially a victory parade thrown in our honor.
These gangsta rap icons today are a very successful businessman and an old-ass Instagram influencer, respectively. (Seriously, Mr. Dogg -- is there anything you *won't* endorse?) In the case of Dr. Dre, another quintessentially Gen-X thing is to reference life events to something we've seen on "The Simpsons" in its '90s heyday. In the episode where Lisa sees her future self marring a British guy, there was a visual gag of a dorm being named "Dr. and Mrs. Dre Hall." About two decades later, Dr. Dre legitimately endowed (not with his wife but with Jimmy Iovine) a multimedia program and a namesake building at USC. There's literally a Dr. Dre Hall!
https://news.usc.edu/161256/iovine-and-young-hall-dedication-new-usc-building/
With this said, you have to look at the Super Bowl halftime show and realize the harsh truth that we are 1) old and/or 2) lame.
Gangsta rap at the Super Bowl is effectively a coronation of mainstream validation. We're no longer the cultural frontiersmen, pioneers and adventurers. We're the schmos waiting for our cholesterol medicine at the pharmacy.
Don't be shy!