1995: For The Loud Girls, The Quiet Boys, And The Songs That Saved Us

It was the year our feelings got louder.
Not prettier. Not easier.
Just louder.
Sharper.
Unapologetically alive.

We wore our heartbreak in stereo,
let our anger leak out of car speakers
and our school bus headphones.
Everything we felt was scored to distortion,
to drumbeats that hit harder than our parents ever could.

We swallowed Jagged Little Pill whole.
Didn’t even flinch.
It was bitter, sure—
but honest.
And finally, finally, someone was mad like we were.
A woman. Screaming. Smirking. Surviving.
We sang every word like a middle finger we hadn’t known we were holding.

The Bends gave us ache
in a way that didn’t ask to be fixed.
Just understood.
Radiohead whispered in frequencies
that said yes, the world is heavy,
but you are not alone in it.

Then Mellon Collie came—
two CDs of chaos and dreamscape,
fragile boys with eyeliner
singing lullabies made of teeth.
We drifted into Tonight, Tonight
like it was a promise we might still make it.
We raged with Zero
like the world should be scared of what we were becoming.

What’s the Story was swagger and sadness,
a British sneer with stadium-sized feelings.
We learned to harmonize with hopelessness
and call it an anthem.

And somewhere in the margins,
Garbage crackled in—
all velvet and venom,
Shirley Manson sneering truths
we weren’t brave enough to say out loud.
She was every girl who smiled like a weapon.
Every girl who had enough.

Not A Pretty Girl landed like scripture.
A manifesto in guitar chords.
A love letter to every misfit,
every woman who had been made too loud,
too soft, too smart, too much.
We pressed play and felt seen
in ways the world never quite managed.

We lined our rooms with posters,
our journals with lyrics,
our hearts with rage and longing.
We were too young to vote,
but old enough to feel everything.

1995 didn’t ask us to be okay.
It gave us music that let us be honest.

And somehow,
we’re still humming it.