Nirvana Shirts, Clerks III, and Growing Up

Walking around campus, I inevitably see students wearing Nirvana, Sublime, and other 90s band t-shirts. Whenever I see these shirts, I have an tinge of nostalgia, and almost immediately, I start thinking about specific songs. Yet, I also think, “Does this student even know the band they are representing?” The answer to this question, usually, is a resounding, “No!”

One day, I saw a student wearing a Sublime shirt, and I specifically asked, before even thinking about what songs the student may like, “Have you listened to them?” The student looked at me and replied, “No.” I then proceeded to ask why the student would buy and wear a shirt from a band that they did not know about and had never listened to. The student said, “It’s a cool design.”

Every time I saw that student since that interaction, I asked whether or not they had at least queued up Sublime on Spotify or some other streaming service and given them a listen. Eventually, they did, and they determined that they didn’t like Sublime’s music. However, they still wear the shirt.

While I see Sublime shirts here and there on campus, they pale in comparison to the number of Nirvana shirts that students wear. Everyday, without fail, I’ll see a Nirvana shirt on campus, typically either the In Utero cover or the drunken smily face logo. Sometimes I’ll ask students about…