One of Larry Clark’s Kids
There was a canon of the lowest common denominator when I was in high school.
This was stuff that you could count on being in most people’s collections most of the time. It varied in quality, but it was assumed everyone could tolerate it — or at least did. It was great for parties or when someone new gave you a ride home.
Eminem’s Marshall Mathers record was in it. Sublime was definitely a key part of it. Some classic rock would probably fit the bill.
Larry Clark’s Kids was part of the canon. It was ubiquitous and made up the cultural repertoire and atmosphere of the time. Sometimes this was literal: I entered more than one teenage bedroom that had it muted and playing on loop (of course it would have to be periodically rewound because this was the VHS era).
The film was part of a vocabulary we all knew. A number of scenes were iconic, including the famed Central Park fistfight that ends with a man being brutally beaten with a skateboard.
Everyone knew that scene. I remember once a rollerblader at whatever skate spot we were at trying to recruit me to jump in during an upcoming fight. His vision was that at the end I would hit his opponent across the face with my skateboard “just like in that movie” (I didn’t, and the two fought in the way people fight in real life — mostly pushing and yelling).
