Gen Z’s Nobody Status Is Now Predestined.
Politics and pills will be the only outlet left for millions of young Americans who have been tallied up—from the Ivy League to the annals of Pitchfork—and found wanting.
Perhaps you were a fan of Matchbox 20 back in their late-90s heyday. Plenty of company in that boat — the band’s debut album Yourself or Someone Like You sold a cool 12 million copies after its 1996 release. With that stratospheric reach of sales, you were made, like it or not, to know the songs off this album.
I was not a Matchbox 20 fan. The 90s overflowed with grunge and alt-rock gold; no teenager could hope to keep up with all, and the direct lyrics and smooth production on the Matchbox 20 scene seemed too square and, frankly, dull in the real-time company of superior peers. And yet, when a single from that album (“Real World”) played last week over a store’s speaker system, I got smacked by a nostalgia that felt unusually and unevenly on the sad side.
“I wonder what it’s like to be a rainmaker.” Rob Thomas opens the track with this line, and it stands out now, 26 years later, for the lyrical freewheeling, a strain of funky strangeness. Who is wondering about this rainmaking, and why? It’s just offbeat. Unlike what’s playing on Spotify and the rest of the wifi waves these days, or for that matter, the past decade.
