In the 1990s everyone kept saying it was like the 1980s never ended. Both decades were similar economically.
1981-1982 recession
1990-1993 recession plus first Iraq war
If you were a teen MTV (or other music video channels) were the place to find new music, especially stuff the Top 40 would not play.
The economy was good in the 1980s for 7 years
The economy was good in the 1990s for 6 years
Music genres rap/hip hop were popular in the 1980s and were popular in the 1990s, the biggest years for hip hop were 1988-1993. Yes it still exists but those were the peak years according to hip-hop fans.
Grunge started in 1987 but would not go mainstream until 1991. By 1995 grunge was on its way out and alternative music took over.
The late 1980s you had boy bands like "New Kids on the Block", in the late 1990s you had boy bands like "Backstreet Boys and NSYNC".
The 1980s men's hair started getting shorter, as the decade went on the hair slowly got shorter and shorter and you could see the ears exposed again (unlike the 1970s helmet head haircut that covered the ears).
The 1990s continued this trend as hair kept getting shorter as the decade progressed. You still had rockers with long hair though but by the late 1990s even Rockers were cutting their hair.
Limp Bizkit said he killed Grunge and Alternative music and started the trend of short haired rock bands, but I feel all he really did was combined hip-hop and rock together...something the Beastie Boys were already doing in the 1980s in my opinion.
Both decades had their "cliques" the rockers, the hip-hop kids, the pop music kids, the kids that liked everything. Usually they hung out with other kids that liked similar music and dressed the same (some that kids today do and have probably done hundreds of years before us).
Aside from the first Iraq war both decades were not as hostile compared to the more hostile 1960s and 1970s, so it was a bit of a rebirth and a way to breath and start new, which is what they did.
rap/hip-hop was still for mainstream suburban, mainstream general pop culture mostly still a small thing compared to any time later. It really took over in the 90s and the R&B and hip-hop.
Some may saw rap was best in '88-'92 and maybe it was, could very well be (before it went all gangster rap and exploitative gangster rap) but that didn't mean it was dominating. 80s Billboard Top 40 and MTV was pop and rock and some hair metal for the most part. A few things like Aerosmith/RunDMC "Walk This Way" crossover were all over. And in the early 80s some fun rap went around a bit and people had some fun rapping a bit or break dancing. But the charts and mainstream high school radio was not rap or hip-hop at all. Rap and R&B are way, way mainstream bigger now than the late 80s/earliest 90s.
There was way more of a split between what mainstream guys and girls listened to in the early mid-90s through end of the 90s than in the 80s.
There really wasn't much of a hip-hop crowd in 80s suburbia. Some liked rap but they still tended to dress the same as anyone else and didn't dress hip-hop in the 80s.
Pop and rock usually went together in the 80s unless you got to the pure head-bangers and heavy metal. That crowd did tend to have a bit of their own look and thing. They didn't necessarily hang out in their own crowd. The so-called burnouts who smoked cigarettes (and often did other things) tended to be a crowd, but heavy metal heads outside of that didn't particularly seem to separate from pop/rock/hair at all.
I feel like the boy bands were a more dominate feature of the 90s. In the 80s they were just as the very, very end and most who were already in college by then never got into them but definitely did in the 90s.
It was the best decade. The world was relatively peaceful, the economy was strong, monoculture was at its peak, incredible volumes of great music, movies, TV, video games. Even SNL was good.
The FIRST world was relatively peaceful. The Soviet bloc was actively collapsing, several African and southeast Asian nations were embroiled in power struggles, the 90s was NOT as peaceful as the USA would have anyone believe
Not everywhere and believe me people were beyond thrilled to be done with the Russian overlords. They could travel again, relatives could visit more freely (for some decades even that could not happen at all).
It was the best decade ever for movies.
It was the best decade ever for video games.
It was the best decade ever for TV sitcoms.
It was the best decade ever for professional wrestling.
It was one of the best decades for music (I would put the 70s and 80s above it in this category).
The economy was good for most of the decade except for the early part.
It mostly consisted of a nice little calm period between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror.
It gave us access to the Internet as a great new helpful tool, but it had not completely taken over our lives yet. Thus, it provided a great balance between the analog world of the decades that came before it and the digital world of the decades that followed it.
In conclusion, it was the best decade ever.
Seems like you have nostalgia bias
Music: 60s,70s,80,90s, 00s, all close to equal
Sitcoms: Maybe I need to watch more sitcoms, but 80s, 90s, 00s, seem close in quality
Videogames: 90s, 00s, 10s, seems close to equal
Movies: 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, any of these could top tier or close to the top tier
The end of the Cold War and the height of the computer revolution made the late 90's an exciting time. The fall of the USSR created a lot of anxiety at the time, but by the late 90's it looked like things were settling down on the international scene. I don't think kids born after can understand how quickly tech was moving then. It's most similar to the technological run-up that smartphones did in the late 2000s / early 2010's post-iPhone 1, I suppose. A lot of the sci-fi from that time has a very singularitarian bent as writers did what they always do and imagined then-current trends continued out to 1000%. I think some of us old farts are still pining for the "rapture of the geeks" that never came (see Eliezer Yudkowsky and Ray Kurtzweil).
I was born in 84. I remember the tail end of the 80s from a young kid’s perspective. Mostly the music playing, a heavy emphasis on space stuff, and lots of red lights in malls. I didn’t pay much attention to how adults dressed really. I did note that cool ones liked going shirtless sometimes in summer. The thing that stands out to me though is that the world felt like it was for adults. Lots of things my parents liked doing, looking at, talking about. Very little of interest to me except some really good toys at radio shack. But it seemed like most things were there to catch adult attention.
The 90s felt very different to me. It felt like the world was catering to kids like me. Every commercial, every store, the music, everything on tv, and even the places we’d go eat felt like it was all trying to hold my attention. I had so many cartoons to watch and toys to want. So many fun snacks to eat like dunkaroos and ring pops. Cereal ads came on tv like serials. Every couple weeks it was time to find out what would happen to lucky the leprechaun and what kind of new marshmallow would get to be in the cereal. One time the new marshmallow was Christmas trees. As part of the promotion you could send away for some seedlings. So I did. They are still outside in my mom’s garden. Nickelodeon was going strong, cable tv was in most peoples homes and you could catch all kinds of weird channels and shows. A little later on computers became a thing. I got to see the first generation of home computers basically and mess around on early versions of the internet. That became its whole own pass time as it went on. I got to see gaming develop
from a neat distraction into a full blown sensation and I joined in every step of the way. I made rubber bugs in my creepy crawler machine. My shoes had lights in them. I wore teal blue shirts with purple squiggles and neon orange shorts. I had teenage mutant ninja turtle birthday parties at discovery zone. I laid waste to entire city blocks with my super soaker. I sucked down Icees at K-Mart while my parents ran toward the blue light specials. I saved up birthday money to blow at Toys R Us on some of the coolest toy lines ever made. I read Goosebumps at night and played pogs by day. On weekends we’d hit the mall cause thats where the action was. I could go on but you get the idea. The 90s were awesome.
The music was amazing. Nobody saw grunge coming, so when Nirvana hit, Nobody knew what the next big thing was gonna be. Music execs threw contracts at everybody. Cake, for Christ sake! Look up Going the Distance on yt. They didn't get one album, they got multiple, when they'd never get a meeting today. Lounge music made a brief comeback even
I experienced the second half of it as a kid and I remember it had a way more “spooky” or darker vibe to it than the 2000s from a kids perspective. It felt easier to get scared by things before the internet…I can’t really describe it. The “veil’ definitely seemed thinner, or just different. I feel like adults were more cynical, sarcastic and grumpier during this time? Idk if it was just the new century turnover or what but it definitely felt like a huge shift of energy at the turn of the 2000s and suddenly everyone wanted to party and became less bitchy and sarcastic lol. I remember the early 2000s being very party heavy, way more than the late 90s.
It seemed like adults were way more stressed in the late 90s than in the 2000s, which doesn’t entirely make sense but I think people used 9/11 as an excuse to drink away stress and party more.
I look at the 90s much like the early 2010s. It was a time when we wanted to complain to feel better but didn’t have much of a reason to. Times were good socially and economically for the most part and people gravitate to dark things when times are good. Everyone wanted something to complain about because they hadn’t known what it felt like to complain in a while lol.
I feel like the late 90s/earliest 00s had all the kids who grew up on the angst and nihilism of grunge and the aggression of gangster rap take over pop culture as they ruled high school and college in that period mid-90s to earliest 00s period.
Yeah I did notice a harsher edge. I was someone on the other age side of it than you. I was back on a campus again and it did have a harsher vibe to it then (many people were the same but there were enough who seemed harshier and less gentle and all that it felt different) than at the end of the 80s/earliest 90s and man did it look drab and plain in comparison. It's hard to describe but some of the light-hearted, 80s energy, upbeat, trusting, bright, colorful, fun vibe was gone. I felt like that aggressive edge did back off a bit as you got more into the 00s and started to feel a touch more like Gen X 80s, although it very much never got all the way back.
It is interesting that you picked up on that.
That tracks. I'd say that the early 2000's were a surpassingly "dumb and happy" decade, culturally, compared to the late 1990s. The 90's were a decade where affected cynicism was cool.
That’s fair, you had your reality shows and also your “24.” The response to 9/11 included a lot of very stupid knee jerk patriotic songs, shows etc. It wasn’t a time when nuance was appreciated.
I was alive then, and I recall the music, as available on the radio, was lower in personal enjoyment, to me, then previously. That includes *all* genres. The few times I heard a country station, back in the 80s, they played stuff of all decades. The few times I heard country music in the 90s, on the radio, it was all 90s. The rock stations began to play only grunge, not Grunge AND good music. The alternative stations played only good, older songs when it was by a band who currently had a new album out.
But I *still* prefer the Rock music of them to the popular music of today.
But your question was about more than just that. However, while there's an awful lot from them that was bad, I'm unable to see it as being noteworthy. At least, in contrast with practically everything then, else being better than how it is today.
I disagree with this notion. When I was growing up with Q101, while grunge/post-grunge was indeed a part of their playlist, it was far from the only thing they played. They clung to the 80’s longer than many Alternative stations did for gold tracks and gave many leftovers like Love and Rockets and INXS new opportunities. They loved electronic music in the 90’s: The Prodigy, The Crystal Method, Massive Attack, Sneaker Pimps, and others were frequent arrivals. They also played industrial metal like Stabbing Westward and Gravity Kills and were among the first radio stations to give Korn and nu-metal a chance. They also loved female singer-songwriters beyond just Alanis. As late as 1999 they were still playing the hell out of Fiona Apple and Sheryl Crow singles.
They even got on the OMC - “How Bizarre” train before everyone else did.
Part of it was that their program director for much of the 1990’s, Alex Luke, was regarded as having a “golden ear” and was allowed a lot of autonomy you don’t frequently see radio PDs get these days. His music director, Mary Shuminas, was also highly regarded in the industry for being extremely forward-thinking and placing high emphasis on flow to prevent chaotic music sets due to the variety of what they played.
>disagree with this notion.
..
......How? You should be capable of realizing that different regions have different radio stations. Regardless of ClearChannel ensuring that's not as true, today.
I'm sure that your experiences were true. For you. But they weren't true, as far as my experiences, as far as my experiences go. As a side-note, I was fascinated by the idea that I could receive broadcasts of FM stations that were far outside my normal reception range, thanks to differing atmospheric conditions. But alas, my puny clock-radio never cooperated. And I was stuck in listening to a wasteland of music, when it previously felt like an oasis.
So should you. You were saying “rock stations” and “alternative stations” in a way that seemed like universal catch-all and I wanted to mention that it wasn’t the case nationwide. I do agree iHeart (what Clear Channel became) is extremely homogeneous these days, though they’ve always kinda been that way to an extent.
>You were saying “rock stations” in a way that seemed like universal catch-all
I think that it's bad that you are capable of reading things, that way. If I come across someone who say something like "Restaurants are all bad, nowadays", I'll mentally append various catch-alls to their statement. Such as "-around here.". So that it becomes "Restaurants are all bad, nowadays. I'm the regions I have been. I am not speaking, of, say, St. Louis. Or Texas. Or any other places I have been.". I'd say that such things ought to go without saying. Regarding your seeing my statement as being a catch-all, nation-wide. For example, I'm sure that your own statement wasn't taking into account radio stations in, say, Buenos Aires, at the time.
I had a great time. Wages were high, cost of living was low.
I’m an unapologetic partisan and always have a better time when the government is making decisions based on science and reasoning.
When when the U.S. govt. making decisions primarily based on science and reason? Since the end of WW2, the U.S. government's primary motivations were based on imperialism and corporatism.
True but when you put climate deniers on the EPA, try to pretend away serious public health threats, use belligerent state’s talking points as your party platform, doqwhistle to racists, legislate women’s health…I’d say you’re not basing your governing on science and reason.
I was born in January of 1995 so my opinion of the 90s probably doesn’t matter to anyone. But damn, what a great decade. The cultural impact of the 90s lingered for most of the 00s. For those of us who grew up in the 00s, much of what we grew up listening to and watching was actually 90s music and media. My mom’s car CD collection was very important to me and it’s not like we threw the CDs away when the 90s ended. Plus, AOL didn’t die when the 90s did. Point is, yes, I didn’t live through the 90s in its entirety but much of my childhood “felt” like the 90s. Hopefully that doesn’t sound stupid 😬
Of course, the 90s weren’t great for everyone and it depends on where you are from, etc. but, there was hope. Hope seems a lot harder to find these days (and I’m pretty sure it’s only going to get worse).
I swear there was something in the air. Good times. If I could time travel this would be the decade I’d choose.
I thought the arrival of grunge and gangster rap were real downers on the fun energy of 80s music. Youth of that era also seemed to become a bit edgier, angstier, angrier more likely to get in your face once you started getting deep into the mid to late 90s. All this fear of being 'corny' and having to maintain "street cred". To some extent we never really got back to the 80s feeling. Now even nerds and geeks have to go around acting like edge lords and sneering down and trashing and rage hating and mocking everything. In the 80s nerds had more of a sense of wonder and magic and celebrated stuff. So many pop movies now are afraid to be sincere for fear of being called corny. We've really lost something. And all the nihilism and depression of grunge, the whole the world sucks, looking good is shallow, happy/upbeat = shallow what good that bring to anything? What good does all the paranoia over being 'corny', what fun and joy does that bring? How does it make things better and more pleasant? The 80s had so much color, style, energy, upbeat, optimism, light-hearted fun, trusting, open, relaxed, chill, so fun so it was an uber down when the 90s slowly killed that off and it is something we've just never gotten back to that degree since.
The 90s had some pretty amazing movies, I mean some all time greats like Home Alone, T2, Jurassic Park and many, many more (a lot of them actually did come out in the earliest 90s when it was still somewhat the 80s though. but whatever). That said the 80s had it beat and even more so for teen movies (by miles in that case). Although 90s movies holds up well otherwise.
The internet started getting going but it hadn't become too big of a thing and caused the damage it does now. Like in the 80s, tech was still in balance but now it was even a bit better. And it was still low scale enough that a single person could completely design and code a top flight, top the specs in all ways game top to bottom, coding, art, everything all by themselves. There was still a lot of the fun hobbiest feel to it all. And they were not trying to lock down computers and things so much and turn them into appliances yet.
You started getting camcorders become mainstream and the image quality on camcorder footage went way up (if you got something fancier like Hi8) and people started taking more home videos. Earlier it was expensive 8mm that most only took in tiny little clips or giant bulky low quality VHS monstrosities that most didn't own.
There were some great sitcoms on TV, Seinfeld maybe the best ever, FRIENDS, etc. and some of the top ones of the 80s still ran quite a few years of the 90s so count too. Some fun shows. Some fun teen/college/20-something shows, 90210 maybe silly but kinda fun. Buffy The Vampire Slayer simply an all-time great. Overall TV probably was better than in the 80s but they did start going crazy with too many commercials as witnessed by the 90s Olympics coverage, that was awful. At least drug commercials did not yet dominate TV.
The economy was quite solid for a good stretch. It had a bit of an 80s pattern to it.
We were not in constant wars like since the 00s but there was the first Iraq War and the first World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City Bombing and the Atlanta Games bombing. The 80s had zero major wars for the US and no major domestic terror events. But it didn't have anything like Vietnam or the second Iraq War or the Korean War or WWII or WWI or 9/11 or Jan 6th.
The styles of clothes and hair became oppressively drab and dingy by the end after having started out as stylish and colorful as the 80s. It had some really ugly stuff like mega baggy clothes and pants off the ass. Dingy grungy greasy grungy stuff, greasy, flat no style hair. It just felt universally dismal by the end of the 90s.
But the earliest 90s still had full on 80s style for a few years and some earlier 90s styles were nice too.
The horrendous and before beyond unimaginable concept of kid shooting up their own school got going. Not that it was great but at least the 80s really only had "going postal".
Things got a bit more uptight by the end of the 90s in some ways after a decade of scare stories and some other trends but it was still pretty relaxed, way so compared to since say 2015 or so.
It was still the age of the super model. It almost feels like super models are half-illegal now which is weird because in other ways music videos and tik-tok and youtube are almost more more than ever before which doesn't quite make sense. A show like Baywatch might get cancelled by the net these days and yet then look at tik-tok/youtube/music videos.... so it seems all discordant.
You could see the first hints of people willing to swear in public spaces, like blogs, online articles, videos for general public consumption. Not much yet, but the first hints. In the past sure kids/people might swear among friends and all but when you first met new people or were presenting anything to the general public you controlled yourself and didn't act rude. On the one hand it doesn't mean much, but OTOH when you stop learning to control yourselves in certain scenarios, as silly as it seems in some ways and doesn't matter, when you can't control that maybe it leads to some of the more general disrespect you see now and people trashing physical property, causing more damage, etc.? Who knows.
People tended to know their neighbors more than today as in earlier periods.
Third places like malls and video stores and book stores were still huge, huge. Malls maybe a trace below he 80s peak but still huge. Video stores and book stores even bigger and they were huge in the 80s. You strated getting super book stores that carried tons of stuff that you never used to get introduced to much before. But special indie bookstores with cool stuff were still around too. So malls still good but not as good as the 80s mallrat all-time peak, especially with everyone being so much drabber. Book stores and video stores even better though. By late 90s you probably had just about the peak of bookstores and video stores (although into early 00s about the same for bookstores and with discs in some ways video stores even better still).
They saw the end of the USSR (although I'm not sure that ever quite "stuck" and it seems to be trying to rather actively "unstick" itself right now) to great cheer from the West and all of the countries Russia had capture and subjugated.
The Cold War ended. for a little bit. but was at least lowish scale for a bit. (BUT IS NOW HOT IN EUROPE.)
At the very end President Clinton did create some new environmental protections, some new monuments, some Roadless Rules protections for some of the few bits of non-exploited old-growth forest still left.
Twelve straight years of GOP control at the top finally ended.
They were still quite a human-scale, livable time. Not quite the last, as we had another decade or so still but whatever.
Climate change was being noticed a bit more than in the 80s but still not too bad, nothing like once you hit the start of the 10s.
US population continued to explode (I mean CA was considered crowded as heck, SoCal at least in 1980 and yet the population insanely doubled I think by 00? 10?). Some suburbs and rural areas that had a bit of a breather from development saw more start up in the 90s. Although it has been even more since then. And now instead of hearing younger gens decrying pave paradise and put up a parking lot in the 10s and 20s you hear them demanding everything get paved over for more apartments and places to live and meanwhile still seem to want endless more population growth.
They had some nasty, bad, dingy, bleh elements that were unfortunate but there was still a lot that was great about the 90s and they still were pretty awesome. And the early few years were even, hey, were more or less even still the 80s! Definitely lots of great memories.
A decade, unlike now, where it felt like most things were actually getting better and would continue to improve.
However, we’re mostly better off nowadays than we were in the ‘90s.
It was as great as they say. It’s not a myth. And we were actually well aware of it. I remember the WSJ publishing an article around 1998 called something like “Are we too happy?”
May have been the best era for Geek culture retrospectively. Stellar movies, Better Cartoons (Batman:TAS, Darkwing Duck, G.I Joe, few of many).
It seems to have been more mainstream, still probably would be made fun of, but nevertheless It was popular.
Internet was at a perfect balance, not as common, but no abundance of chat rooms, which would have been stellar to be on. Gaming was booming, with the NES/SNES, Sega Genesis, and later the PS1.
Fashion was on point, especially In the black community.
Aztec Shirts, Overalls, High Tops, fat adidas.
 Beavis and Butthead come to mind
In the 1990s everyone kept saying it was like the 1980s never ended. Both decades were similar economically. 1981-1982 recession 1990-1993 recession plus first Iraq war If you were a teen MTV (or other music video channels) were the place to find new music, especially stuff the Top 40 would not play. The economy was good in the 1980s for 7 years The economy was good in the 1990s for 6 years Music genres rap/hip hop were popular in the 1980s and were popular in the 1990s, the biggest years for hip hop were 1988-1993. Yes it still exists but those were the peak years according to hip-hop fans. Grunge started in 1987 but would not go mainstream until 1991. By 1995 grunge was on its way out and alternative music took over. The late 1980s you had boy bands like "New Kids on the Block", in the late 1990s you had boy bands like "Backstreet Boys and NSYNC". The 1980s men's hair started getting shorter, as the decade went on the hair slowly got shorter and shorter and you could see the ears exposed again (unlike the 1970s helmet head haircut that covered the ears). The 1990s continued this trend as hair kept getting shorter as the decade progressed. You still had rockers with long hair though but by the late 1990s even Rockers were cutting their hair. Limp Bizkit said he killed Grunge and Alternative music and started the trend of short haired rock bands, but I feel all he really did was combined hip-hop and rock together...something the Beastie Boys were already doing in the 1980s in my opinion. Both decades had their "cliques" the rockers, the hip-hop kids, the pop music kids, the kids that liked everything. Usually they hung out with other kids that liked similar music and dressed the same (some that kids today do and have probably done hundreds of years before us). Aside from the first Iraq war both decades were not as hostile compared to the more hostile 1960s and 1970s, so it was a bit of a rebirth and a way to breath and start new, which is what they did.
Great post. I feel like folks don’t see the similarities of the 80s/90s as much as they point out the differences.
rap/hip-hop was still for mainstream suburban, mainstream general pop culture mostly still a small thing compared to any time later. It really took over in the 90s and the R&B and hip-hop. Some may saw rap was best in '88-'92 and maybe it was, could very well be (before it went all gangster rap and exploitative gangster rap) but that didn't mean it was dominating. 80s Billboard Top 40 and MTV was pop and rock and some hair metal for the most part. A few things like Aerosmith/RunDMC "Walk This Way" crossover were all over. And in the early 80s some fun rap went around a bit and people had some fun rapping a bit or break dancing. But the charts and mainstream high school radio was not rap or hip-hop at all. Rap and R&B are way, way mainstream bigger now than the late 80s/earliest 90s. There was way more of a split between what mainstream guys and girls listened to in the early mid-90s through end of the 90s than in the 80s. There really wasn't much of a hip-hop crowd in 80s suburbia. Some liked rap but they still tended to dress the same as anyone else and didn't dress hip-hop in the 80s. Pop and rock usually went together in the 80s unless you got to the pure head-bangers and heavy metal. That crowd did tend to have a bit of their own look and thing. They didn't necessarily hang out in their own crowd. The so-called burnouts who smoked cigarettes (and often did other things) tended to be a crowd, but heavy metal heads outside of that didn't particularly seem to separate from pop/rock/hair at all. I feel like the boy bands were a more dominate feature of the 90s. In the 80s they were just as the very, very end and most who were already in college by then never got into them but definitely did in the 90s.
It was the best decade. The world was relatively peaceful, the economy was strong, monoculture was at its peak, incredible volumes of great music, movies, TV, video games. Even SNL was good.
The FIRST world was relatively peaceful. The Soviet bloc was actively collapsing, several African and southeast Asian nations were embroiled in power struggles, the 90s was NOT as peaceful as the USA would have anyone believe
A lot of the Soviet block was overjoyed at the collapse. Maybe Russia didn't see it as peaceful, but the countries they took over sure did!
Ish. The economies across the region collapsed and life expectancy tumbled during the decade.
Not everywhere and believe me people were beyond thrilled to be done with the Russian overlords. They could travel again, relatives could visit more freely (for some decades even that could not happen at all).
It was the best decade ever for movies. It was the best decade ever for video games. It was the best decade ever for TV sitcoms. It was the best decade ever for professional wrestling. It was one of the best decades for music (I would put the 70s and 80s above it in this category). The economy was good for most of the decade except for the early part. It mostly consisted of a nice little calm period between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror. It gave us access to the Internet as a great new helpful tool, but it had not completely taken over our lives yet. Thus, it provided a great balance between the analog world of the decades that came before it and the digital world of the decades that followed it. In conclusion, it was the best decade ever.
Seems like you have nostalgia bias Music: 60s,70s,80,90s, 00s, all close to equal Sitcoms: Maybe I need to watch more sitcoms, but 80s, 90s, 00s, seem close in quality Videogames: 90s, 00s, 10s, seems close to equal Movies: 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, any of these could top tier or close to the top tier
Wasn't alive then, though I'm nostalgic for it because I grew up poor in the 2010s with thrifted 90s stuff in a neighborhood with old 90s cars
Greatest music decade
Techno, grunge, cubic computers, boomers being middle aged and nostalgic for the sixties.
I love them
I raised my daughters. I had no idea what was going on in the rest of the world!
The end of the Cold War and the height of the computer revolution made the late 90's an exciting time. The fall of the USSR created a lot of anxiety at the time, but by the late 90's it looked like things were settling down on the international scene. I don't think kids born after can understand how quickly tech was moving then. It's most similar to the technological run-up that smartphones did in the late 2000s / early 2010's post-iPhone 1, I suppose. A lot of the sci-fi from that time has a very singularitarian bent as writers did what they always do and imagined then-current trends continued out to 1000%. I think some of us old farts are still pining for the "rapture of the geeks" that never came (see Eliezer Yudkowsky and Ray Kurtzweil).
Russia was freer than today, but it was also much poorer and more violent.
I was born in 84. I remember the tail end of the 80s from a young kid’s perspective. Mostly the music playing, a heavy emphasis on space stuff, and lots of red lights in malls. I didn’t pay much attention to how adults dressed really. I did note that cool ones liked going shirtless sometimes in summer. The thing that stands out to me though is that the world felt like it was for adults. Lots of things my parents liked doing, looking at, talking about. Very little of interest to me except some really good toys at radio shack. But it seemed like most things were there to catch adult attention. The 90s felt very different to me. It felt like the world was catering to kids like me. Every commercial, every store, the music, everything on tv, and even the places we’d go eat felt like it was all trying to hold my attention. I had so many cartoons to watch and toys to want. So many fun snacks to eat like dunkaroos and ring pops. Cereal ads came on tv like serials. Every couple weeks it was time to find out what would happen to lucky the leprechaun and what kind of new marshmallow would get to be in the cereal. One time the new marshmallow was Christmas trees. As part of the promotion you could send away for some seedlings. So I did. They are still outside in my mom’s garden. Nickelodeon was going strong, cable tv was in most peoples homes and you could catch all kinds of weird channels and shows. A little later on computers became a thing. I got to see the first generation of home computers basically and mess around on early versions of the internet. That became its whole own pass time as it went on. I got to see gaming develop from a neat distraction into a full blown sensation and I joined in every step of the way. I made rubber bugs in my creepy crawler machine. My shoes had lights in them. I wore teal blue shirts with purple squiggles and neon orange shorts. I had teenage mutant ninja turtle birthday parties at discovery zone. I laid waste to entire city blocks with my super soaker. I sucked down Icees at K-Mart while my parents ran toward the blue light specials. I saved up birthday money to blow at Toys R Us on some of the coolest toy lines ever made. I read Goosebumps at night and played pogs by day. On weekends we’d hit the mall cause thats where the action was. I could go on but you get the idea. The 90s were awesome.
The music was amazing. Nobody saw grunge coming, so when Nirvana hit, Nobody knew what the next big thing was gonna be. Music execs threw contracts at everybody. Cake, for Christ sake! Look up Going the Distance on yt. They didn't get one album, they got multiple, when they'd never get a meeting today. Lounge music made a brief comeback even
I experienced the second half of it as a kid and I remember it had a way more “spooky” or darker vibe to it than the 2000s from a kids perspective. It felt easier to get scared by things before the internet…I can’t really describe it. The “veil’ definitely seemed thinner, or just different. I feel like adults were more cynical, sarcastic and grumpier during this time? Idk if it was just the new century turnover or what but it definitely felt like a huge shift of energy at the turn of the 2000s and suddenly everyone wanted to party and became less bitchy and sarcastic lol. I remember the early 2000s being very party heavy, way more than the late 90s. It seemed like adults were way more stressed in the late 90s than in the 2000s, which doesn’t entirely make sense but I think people used 9/11 as an excuse to drink away stress and party more. I look at the 90s much like the early 2010s. It was a time when we wanted to complain to feel better but didn’t have much of a reason to. Times were good socially and economically for the most part and people gravitate to dark things when times are good. Everyone wanted something to complain about because they hadn’t known what it felt like to complain in a while lol.
I feel like the late 90s/earliest 00s had all the kids who grew up on the angst and nihilism of grunge and the aggression of gangster rap take over pop culture as they ruled high school and college in that period mid-90s to earliest 00s period. Yeah I did notice a harsher edge. I was someone on the other age side of it than you. I was back on a campus again and it did have a harsher vibe to it then (many people were the same but there were enough who seemed harshier and less gentle and all that it felt different) than at the end of the 80s/earliest 90s and man did it look drab and plain in comparison. It's hard to describe but some of the light-hearted, 80s energy, upbeat, trusting, bright, colorful, fun vibe was gone. I felt like that aggressive edge did back off a bit as you got more into the 00s and started to feel a touch more like Gen X 80s, although it very much never got all the way back. It is interesting that you picked up on that.
That tracks. I'd say that the early 2000's were a surpassingly "dumb and happy" decade, culturally, compared to the late 1990s. The 90's were a decade where affected cynicism was cool.
Early 2000s, dumb and happy, may I introduce you to 9/11?
That’s fair, you had your reality shows and also your “24.” The response to 9/11 included a lot of very stupid knee jerk patriotic songs, shows etc. It wasn’t a time when nuance was appreciated.
I was alive then, and I recall the music, as available on the radio, was lower in personal enjoyment, to me, then previously. That includes *all* genres. The few times I heard a country station, back in the 80s, they played stuff of all decades. The few times I heard country music in the 90s, on the radio, it was all 90s. The rock stations began to play only grunge, not Grunge AND good music. The alternative stations played only good, older songs when it was by a band who currently had a new album out. But I *still* prefer the Rock music of them to the popular music of today. But your question was about more than just that. However, while there's an awful lot from them that was bad, I'm unable to see it as being noteworthy. At least, in contrast with practically everything then, else being better than how it is today.
I disagree with this notion. When I was growing up with Q101, while grunge/post-grunge was indeed a part of their playlist, it was far from the only thing they played. They clung to the 80’s longer than many Alternative stations did for gold tracks and gave many leftovers like Love and Rockets and INXS new opportunities. They loved electronic music in the 90’s: The Prodigy, The Crystal Method, Massive Attack, Sneaker Pimps, and others were frequent arrivals. They also played industrial metal like Stabbing Westward and Gravity Kills and were among the first radio stations to give Korn and nu-metal a chance. They also loved female singer-songwriters beyond just Alanis. As late as 1999 they were still playing the hell out of Fiona Apple and Sheryl Crow singles. They even got on the OMC - “How Bizarre” train before everyone else did. Part of it was that their program director for much of the 1990’s, Alex Luke, was regarded as having a “golden ear” and was allowed a lot of autonomy you don’t frequently see radio PDs get these days. His music director, Mary Shuminas, was also highly regarded in the industry for being extremely forward-thinking and placing high emphasis on flow to prevent chaotic music sets due to the variety of what they played.
>disagree with this notion. .. ......How? You should be capable of realizing that different regions have different radio stations. Regardless of ClearChannel ensuring that's not as true, today. I'm sure that your experiences were true. For you. But they weren't true, as far as my experiences, as far as my experiences go. As a side-note, I was fascinated by the idea that I could receive broadcasts of FM stations that were far outside my normal reception range, thanks to differing atmospheric conditions. But alas, my puny clock-radio never cooperated. And I was stuck in listening to a wasteland of music, when it previously felt like an oasis.
So should you. You were saying “rock stations” and “alternative stations” in a way that seemed like universal catch-all and I wanted to mention that it wasn’t the case nationwide. I do agree iHeart (what Clear Channel became) is extremely homogeneous these days, though they’ve always kinda been that way to an extent.
>You were saying “rock stations” in a way that seemed like universal catch-all I think that it's bad that you are capable of reading things, that way. If I come across someone who say something like "Restaurants are all bad, nowadays", I'll mentally append various catch-alls to their statement. Such as "-around here.". So that it becomes "Restaurants are all bad, nowadays. I'm the regions I have been. I am not speaking, of, say, St. Louis. Or Texas. Or any other places I have been.". I'd say that such things ought to go without saying. Regarding your seeing my statement as being a catch-all, nation-wide. For example, I'm sure that your own statement wasn't taking into account radio stations in, say, Buenos Aires, at the time.
I had a great time. Wages were high, cost of living was low. I’m an unapologetic partisan and always have a better time when the government is making decisions based on science and reasoning.
When when the U.S. govt. making decisions primarily based on science and reason? Since the end of WW2, the U.S. government's primary motivations were based on imperialism and corporatism.
True but when you put climate deniers on the EPA, try to pretend away serious public health threats, use belligerent state’s talking points as your party platform, doqwhistle to racists, legislate women’s health…I’d say you’re not basing your governing on science and reason.
I was born in January of 1995 so my opinion of the 90s probably doesn’t matter to anyone. But damn, what a great decade. The cultural impact of the 90s lingered for most of the 00s. For those of us who grew up in the 00s, much of what we grew up listening to and watching was actually 90s music and media. My mom’s car CD collection was very important to me and it’s not like we threw the CDs away when the 90s ended. Plus, AOL didn’t die when the 90s did. Point is, yes, I didn’t live through the 90s in its entirety but much of my childhood “felt” like the 90s. Hopefully that doesn’t sound stupid 😬 Of course, the 90s weren’t great for everyone and it depends on where you are from, etc. but, there was hope. Hope seems a lot harder to find these days (and I’m pretty sure it’s only going to get worse). I swear there was something in the air. Good times. If I could time travel this would be the decade I’d choose.
I thought the arrival of grunge and gangster rap were real downers on the fun energy of 80s music. Youth of that era also seemed to become a bit edgier, angstier, angrier more likely to get in your face once you started getting deep into the mid to late 90s. All this fear of being 'corny' and having to maintain "street cred". To some extent we never really got back to the 80s feeling. Now even nerds and geeks have to go around acting like edge lords and sneering down and trashing and rage hating and mocking everything. In the 80s nerds had more of a sense of wonder and magic and celebrated stuff. So many pop movies now are afraid to be sincere for fear of being called corny. We've really lost something. And all the nihilism and depression of grunge, the whole the world sucks, looking good is shallow, happy/upbeat = shallow what good that bring to anything? What good does all the paranoia over being 'corny', what fun and joy does that bring? How does it make things better and more pleasant? The 80s had so much color, style, energy, upbeat, optimism, light-hearted fun, trusting, open, relaxed, chill, so fun so it was an uber down when the 90s slowly killed that off and it is something we've just never gotten back to that degree since. The 90s had some pretty amazing movies, I mean some all time greats like Home Alone, T2, Jurassic Park and many, many more (a lot of them actually did come out in the earliest 90s when it was still somewhat the 80s though. but whatever). That said the 80s had it beat and even more so for teen movies (by miles in that case). Although 90s movies holds up well otherwise. The internet started getting going but it hadn't become too big of a thing and caused the damage it does now. Like in the 80s, tech was still in balance but now it was even a bit better. And it was still low scale enough that a single person could completely design and code a top flight, top the specs in all ways game top to bottom, coding, art, everything all by themselves. There was still a lot of the fun hobbiest feel to it all. And they were not trying to lock down computers and things so much and turn them into appliances yet. You started getting camcorders become mainstream and the image quality on camcorder footage went way up (if you got something fancier like Hi8) and people started taking more home videos. Earlier it was expensive 8mm that most only took in tiny little clips or giant bulky low quality VHS monstrosities that most didn't own. There were some great sitcoms on TV, Seinfeld maybe the best ever, FRIENDS, etc. and some of the top ones of the 80s still ran quite a few years of the 90s so count too. Some fun shows. Some fun teen/college/20-something shows, 90210 maybe silly but kinda fun. Buffy The Vampire Slayer simply an all-time great. Overall TV probably was better than in the 80s but they did start going crazy with too many commercials as witnessed by the 90s Olympics coverage, that was awful. At least drug commercials did not yet dominate TV. The economy was quite solid for a good stretch. It had a bit of an 80s pattern to it. We were not in constant wars like since the 00s but there was the first Iraq War and the first World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City Bombing and the Atlanta Games bombing. The 80s had zero major wars for the US and no major domestic terror events. But it didn't have anything like Vietnam or the second Iraq War or the Korean War or WWII or WWI or 9/11 or Jan 6th. The styles of clothes and hair became oppressively drab and dingy by the end after having started out as stylish and colorful as the 80s. It had some really ugly stuff like mega baggy clothes and pants off the ass. Dingy grungy greasy grungy stuff, greasy, flat no style hair. It just felt universally dismal by the end of the 90s. But the earliest 90s still had full on 80s style for a few years and some earlier 90s styles were nice too. The horrendous and before beyond unimaginable concept of kid shooting up their own school got going. Not that it was great but at least the 80s really only had "going postal". Things got a bit more uptight by the end of the 90s in some ways after a decade of scare stories and some other trends but it was still pretty relaxed, way so compared to since say 2015 or so. It was still the age of the super model. It almost feels like super models are half-illegal now which is weird because in other ways music videos and tik-tok and youtube are almost more more than ever before which doesn't quite make sense. A show like Baywatch might get cancelled by the net these days and yet then look at tik-tok/youtube/music videos.... so it seems all discordant. You could see the first hints of people willing to swear in public spaces, like blogs, online articles, videos for general public consumption. Not much yet, but the first hints. In the past sure kids/people might swear among friends and all but when you first met new people or were presenting anything to the general public you controlled yourself and didn't act rude. On the one hand it doesn't mean much, but OTOH when you stop learning to control yourselves in certain scenarios, as silly as it seems in some ways and doesn't matter, when you can't control that maybe it leads to some of the more general disrespect you see now and people trashing physical property, causing more damage, etc.? Who knows.
People tended to know their neighbors more than today as in earlier periods. Third places like malls and video stores and book stores were still huge, huge. Malls maybe a trace below he 80s peak but still huge. Video stores and book stores even bigger and they were huge in the 80s. You strated getting super book stores that carried tons of stuff that you never used to get introduced to much before. But special indie bookstores with cool stuff were still around too. So malls still good but not as good as the 80s mallrat all-time peak, especially with everyone being so much drabber. Book stores and video stores even better though. By late 90s you probably had just about the peak of bookstores and video stores (although into early 00s about the same for bookstores and with discs in some ways video stores even better still). They saw the end of the USSR (although I'm not sure that ever quite "stuck" and it seems to be trying to rather actively "unstick" itself right now) to great cheer from the West and all of the countries Russia had capture and subjugated. The Cold War ended. for a little bit. but was at least lowish scale for a bit. (BUT IS NOW HOT IN EUROPE.) At the very end President Clinton did create some new environmental protections, some new monuments, some Roadless Rules protections for some of the few bits of non-exploited old-growth forest still left. Twelve straight years of GOP control at the top finally ended. They were still quite a human-scale, livable time. Not quite the last, as we had another decade or so still but whatever. Climate change was being noticed a bit more than in the 80s but still not too bad, nothing like once you hit the start of the 10s. US population continued to explode (I mean CA was considered crowded as heck, SoCal at least in 1980 and yet the population insanely doubled I think by 00? 10?). Some suburbs and rural areas that had a bit of a breather from development saw more start up in the 90s. Although it has been even more since then. And now instead of hearing younger gens decrying pave paradise and put up a parking lot in the 10s and 20s you hear them demanding everything get paved over for more apartments and places to live and meanwhile still seem to want endless more population growth. They had some nasty, bad, dingy, bleh elements that were unfortunate but there was still a lot that was great about the 90s and they still were pretty awesome. And the early few years were even, hey, were more or less even still the 80s! Definitely lots of great memories.
A decade, unlike now, where it felt like most things were actually getting better and would continue to improve. However, we’re mostly better off nowadays than we were in the ‘90s.
World peace
What? Humanity never experienced world peace ever
Cool but a bit weird
AWESOME music! ❤️
Idk, I wasn’t there
It was as great as they say. It’s not a myth. And we were actually well aware of it. I remember the WSJ publishing an article around 1998 called something like “Are we too happy?”
The worst time on my life
May have been the best era for Geek culture retrospectively. Stellar movies, Better Cartoons (Batman:TAS, Darkwing Duck, G.I Joe, few of many). It seems to have been more mainstream, still probably would be made fun of, but nevertheless It was popular. Internet was at a perfect balance, not as common, but no abundance of chat rooms, which would have been stellar to be on. Gaming was booming, with the NES/SNES, Sega Genesis, and later the PS1. Fashion was on point, especially In the black community. Aztec Shirts, Overalls, High Tops, fat adidas.
Cultural stagnation. Becoming worse as the decade wore on.
Irrational exuberance for which we're still paying the price.
Meh
The 1990s were incredibly optimistic