Are the 90s really, truly over?

Great Debates
1

By the “90s” I don’t mean 1990-99, but the overall zeitgeist that defined those years and the themes of that decade. It seems like many of them still applied or at least did until recently. The Post-Cold War utopianism was strong even during the early days of the Ukraine war and even now you still hear about the “End of History” and how the Web and Capitalism are going to make everyone rich and everything perfect. 9/11 did of course put a damper in that but it never changed the outcome of that mentality, America as a world police. In fact it accelerated it.

I also notice that 90s is still thought of as a “young people’s decade”, and belonging to the “greater present” in the same way that 2011 is. Ie, not distinct enough from everyday life today that it can be considered an “era” yet. Even despite all the stuff about 90s kids, which mostly centers around Nickelodeon cartoons and the slightly (okay admittedly often much) more old fashioned technology of 15-25 years ago. The fact that today’s kids love the 90s and love today though to me implies that the two are not all that different, because kids in the 90s hated the 80s.

2

I don’t see why they should be over. We break history down into discrete years, decades and centuries for our convenience, not because it reflects reality.

3

My view is that the 90’s was a decade of peace and good economic progress, but especially peace. Communism had collapsed all over Europe and there was not yet a new “Evil Empire” to fear. This peace, of course, was destroyed on September 11, 2001 with the rise of Islamism as the new Evil Empire ideology. So we’re back in 1985 except that we are afraid of Islamists coming to destroy us rather than Commies.

4

9-11 ended the 90’s, and you could argue that the economic crash of 2007 ended the “oughts.” The teens were the recession decade (even if it got an early start and might not last a full decade.)

5

The 90’s started with the Gulf War and a recession with a sizable crash in the markets. So, if we’re going to define it as a period in time, it seems ridiculous to me to argue that 9/11 and 2007 somehow mark out separate periods of time. They’re continuations of the same problems in the markets and the same problems in the Middle East.

Unless maybe we’re defining “the 90’s” to be a 7-year period starting in 1994?

More significantly to me, the 90’s brought us rap, hip-hop and boy bands, none of which are going away. Fashion has only changed a little bit in the last 20 years. Communism is out, globalization is in. The Internet is still changing everything. We started the 90’s with Hillarycare and don’t-ask-don’t-tell and now have Obamacare and the overturn of DOMA. We started with Bush, moved to Clinton, moved back to Bush and stand a good chance of either another Bush or another Clinton in a couple years. I’m generally on the “nothing has changed” bandwagon… but, really, nothing has changed.

6

As I might have alluded to in other threads, I returned to university this year. Which means I get to socialize with kids fresh from high school and often feel very old, despite only being in my mid thirties.
For example, I learned that kids these days don’t really know whoKurt Cobain was any more. Which means the 90s are very over.

And things have changed. The social dynamic’s all to shit, everybody’s typing on their cellphones all the time and exchanging Facebook updates while sitting right next to each other, hardly anybody’s smoking (and smoking doesn’t seem to buy me any cool points)… Oh, and everybody’s freaked out by terrorism because 9/11 GWOT Charlie ISIS etc.

7

Bear in mind that for you guys born in the 80’s, the 90’s will have had a deeper stamp on you than, say, someone like myself born in the 60’s. (I’d expound further, but the goldfish in my shoe heels need to be fed)

8

What we think of the 60s was something like 1965 to the mid-70s, so there’s no reason to assume that things changed in 2000/2001. From my insider view, it is hard to say what is different besides technology. I’m at the age where 2003 still seems recent, and the difference between me and college freshmen is vast as far as pop culture goes (scary thought: 18 years olds grew up on Dora the Explorer. Before that was pointed out to me, that show seemed “new” to me.

Honestly, I think the film 21 Jump Street covered the difference between 2012 and the 90s/early 00s pretty well. The 90s were more cynical. Being apathetic is no longer a positive. Using “gay” as an insult is less acceptable.

I would put that later on in 2008. How do I know? I bought my house in August 2007. :smack:

9

In my mind “the '90s” is the period from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of '89 to September 11, 2001. To me, the '90s really did end in 2001. How could it not have? The optimism that carried us through the preceding decade - defeating the USSR, unexpectedly dropping crime rates, stock market through the roof - came crashing down around us. We got involved in two wars that we’re STILL trying to extricate ourselves from (as opposed to the much more clear cut first Gulf War). The political division and bitterness in the country that first started to get bad under Clinton increased exponentially under Bush. The internet and other technological advances (i.e. cellphones) really started to pick up speed in the 2000’s. The last of the WWII generation finally retired and started to recede into the background. Social movements like gay rights exploded - in the '90s there were protests and parental warnings when “Roseanne” showed a lesbian kiss; in the 2000’s we had “Will and Grace” and the ever-increasing number of states with legal gay marriage. Even the demographic composition of the US has changed: for example, the Hispanic population has exploded since the '90s, to the point that it is now the largest minority population in the country, adding another dynamic to the traditional black/white narrative.

Now, maybe music and some fashions haven’t changed that much, but in most real ways to my mind the '90s is already an increasingly foreign country.

10

I guess if you’re 50 it all seems the same, but '90s kids are probably the last group of pseudo-normal humans who grew up not tethered to an electronic device 24/7. Yeah, we had video games and shitty internet, but when I grew up we actually went outside and played in big unsupervised groups, rode bikes, really fat kids were much rarer instead of a normal sight, etc. Nowadays neighborhoods seem like ghost towns when it comes to kids. Basically what Kobal2 said.

I was born in '85 and feel weird being lumped in with millennials. I don’t feel like I have much in common with them and it’s disconcerting because I’m not that much older, really.

It’s funny over the last 5-10 years seeing the huge influx of '90s nostalgia and references in pop culture. So this is what being pandered to feels like.

11

Incidentally, I’ve long wished that some enterprising journalist/historian would write “The Nineties” in a way similar to what David Halberstam did so wonderfully in his book “The Fifties.” Much like the earlier decade, I think the '90s is seen as a peaceful, prosperous, simpler time that deserves a re-exploration.

12

Russia may no longer be Communist, but she is not our friend. We are rapidly falling into another Cold War with them. ISIS may be evil, but WWWIII is more likely to break out in the Baltics than the Middle East.

13

If Seattle grunge rock is dead, one can only conclude that the 90s are dead too.

14

I was born very close to the 80s (January 1990) and the 90s definitely influenced me a lot.

15

I was born in the 1950s, but I have to say the 1990s were a banner decade for me. Lots of goodness came my way.

16

I think the 90s ended on 9/11. Society and culture just hasn’t been the same since.

17

Yeah, pretty much. To me the 90s were a period of relative carefree-ness and general hope for the future - there were no more big enemies, the more pressing scares were AIDS (which in the end didn’t really impact many people outside of certain specific niches) and boy bands, anybody could get rich with a half-baked idea and a dot-com, the Internet was going to make borders and races obsolete, the coke was pure and plentiful…

Then suddenly everything was terrible again and we were going to all get slaughtered in our beds any minute now. Aaaany minute now. So to me the 00s and 10s are really defined by this hammering discourse of fear and uncertainty, often brought straight back from the Cold War era (changing an adjective here and a noun there), which I’d never known growing up. It’s a big step back IMHO.

18

I agree, born in 1987 here and the 90’s were my childhood. Sometimes I am very nostalgic for it, other times I could not give a damn.

19

Some say the 90’s were a time of “peace”, but for whom? Conflicts have occurred in different parts of the globe throughout history, some more than others. In the former Yugoslavia, I doubt the 90’s are remembered for being “peaceful”. Heck even in the U.S we had the Gulf War, and we undertook some military missions such as Somalia, though we were not at war in that sense.

I disagree that if we have peace or prosperity that means we are in the same cultural/political blah blah time as the 90’s. Peace, economic prosperity, and what have you are not relegated to only a particular time period. The nineties did not invent peace and economic prosperity. By the way I don’t remember since I was about 4, but was there not an economic recession in the early 90’s?

Things change within a decade, for better or worse. Nineties style music, from grunge, gangster rap, to dance music is all dead by now and has been for close to twenty years.

Few mentioned earlier that rap is not going away, true to an extent but rap in of itself is not very popular at all right now let alone the type that was prevalent in the 1990’s. To make that claim is tantamount to saying the 90’s were similar to the 60’s or 70’s because rock music, but the type of rock was very different. Same with boy bands, there have always been teeny bopper type singers for decades, means nothing. Plus there is only One Direction, in the late 90’s there were several big name boy groups competing. Not the same.

I think we are in a different world today than back then, starting with the attacks of Sept 11. We can find similarities between that decade and the one we are in now, but that is true of all decades.

In general I would say no, the 1990’s ended around 2000-2001. Heck what we know as the 2000’s decade ended around 2009.

Today we are firmly in the 2010’s, both literally and in pop culture, political sense.

Hope I made sense.

20

Here’s what was special about the '90s - no existential threats. The Soviet Union was gone and Russia was ruled by more or less friends. No significant terrorism. Yugoslavia sucked if you lived there, but NATO’s intervention was pretty clean. Gulf War I was fought with worldwide support, limited aims, and few casualties. We made money on it IIRC.
And at home, after the recession, unemployment was below where it theoretically should be. In Silicon Valley we sold everything we could make. Changing jobs was simple. We got great bonuses, went to a fancy restaurant for our Christmas party,
and practically every internal committee came with a T-shirt or better.

We had so little real news we worried about shark attacks.