HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL - PART 1

At least once a year, someone like Time or Newsweek does a feature about, “What’s up with teenagers, anyway?” They always wind up asking kids a load of horseshit questions like, “Do you think you have enough free time?” or “Are you worried about college?” They never get to the stuff that matters like, “What are punks wearing these days?” or “What happened to all the metalheads?” or “Who’s zoomin’ who?” We were sick of this media blackout, so we went out to Vice contributor Chris Nieratko’s store, NJskateshop, to ask

some local kids what the current high school scene is like. Then we asked some kids who started school ten years ago to tell us what the deal was when they were in high school in the same area (northern New Jersey). Then we went even further and asked a few ancient dudes (30 and 31 years old) to tell us what it was like back in the Paleolithic era. Basically, this is cultural anthropology but about stuff that we give a shit about. Let’s start with the old and work up to the new…

1989 - 1993

Guidos:
Both guy and girl guidos (guidas?) wore almost nothing but Z. Cavaricci button-up shirts and pants (those ones that bunch down into the crotch like it’s a black hole). Sometimes the ladies would mix it up with a tasteful-by-comparison Benetton combo. Both genders used an obscene amount of product in their hair, though to opposite effect: The guys gelled theirs into slick, impenetrable black helmets while the gals sprayed theirs out as high and wide as it would go, framing in their excessive makeup. All guidos adorned their exposed cleavage with gold cross necklaces, and they always had shoes on that were way too fancy to wear to school—usually leather loafer-type things with shiny buckles for the guys, heels for the ladies. The guys all drove suped-up Trans Ams from which they would blast the early favorites of the 90s mainstream house scene (LaBouche, Snap, and C+C Music Factory).

The girls mostly caught rides from the dudes. A lot of the guys were juicing to aid their body-building, and made a little extra car-money by selling off their excess ’roids to the jocks. Along with some of the football players and the burnouts, the guido guys were the only honest-to-god tough kids at school, though most of the fights they’d get into were with each other. Unless you’ve been avoiding TV for the past 20 years, you should already have some idea of how relentlessly yappy the girls were.


Punks and Hardcore Kids:
The kids into punk and those into hardcore were definitely distinct elements, but because there were so few of each they were all generally buds and hung out together. Also, because the suburbs were still really tame back then and just wearing a bunch of buttons was enough to be considered “weird,” both crews’ looks were very subdued. Typically, just jeans and a band shirt, then a pair Vans or Docs, were enough to make you a punk alternateen. Nobody gave a shit about either the skinhead thing with the Docs or any sort of “skate cred” with the Vans like in some other places. They were just fucking shoes. The kids who were more into skateboarding would wear looser clothes and shoes like Vision Streetwear or Skate Rags and Ghetto Wear.

The chief differences within the big group were that the hardcore kids were generally into NY guys like Agnostic Front, Youth of Today, and the Cro-Mags, and they shaved their heads. The punks pretty unanimously rocked a haircut we called “the Surge” (hair trimmed down really short except for one swooping bang across the eye) and were big on classics like the Exploited, the Misfits, and Dead Kennedys. DRI was also really huge with the punks (people were always doing that stupid fucking dance from the logo). Roughly 99 percent of the punks and HC kids were straight-edge, so “party-time” generally consisted of going to shows, playing shows, or sitting around at the Chicken Holiday where there was a curb to skate. (Though that’s not to say they wouldn’t show up at parties thrown at the local clay pits.) These kids would every so often borrow the parental car, but their transportation was mostly limited to skating, bikes, and walking.


Theater Crew:
For some reason during this period, drama club was a haven for latterday Deadheads and early 90s hippie revivalists. Maybe it was something to do with herd mentality or a collective response to acid experimentation, but everybody who got involved with theater ended up in tie-dyed Doors shirts and torn-up jeans or those loose hippie dresses, smoking weed out behind the aforementioned Chicken Holiday.


STEVE LENARDO, SAYREVILLE NEW JERSEY HIGH SCHOOL CLASS OF 1992
DRAWINGS BY MILANO CHOW


TO BE CONTINUED:
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