I was thinking how little society and fashion has really changed since the early 1990s. Kids still sag their pants and wear backwards baseball caps, yuppies and valley girls are still everywhere, “End of History” style capitalist triumphalism has somehow managed to survive the Great Recession, Friends is still considered a hip show and music is broadly the same styles as it was in the early '90s. Nirvana is still considered “modern rock” even though some of the songs off of Nevermind were first played 25 years ago! “Hipsters” are supposedly this new thing but actually they’ve been around since at least the late 80s with the college rock culture. Even some 80s things like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the Beastie Boys don’t seem all that old today.
I’ve also noticed in America that streets and buildings still look basically the same as they did in the 80s and 90s. Aside from the boxy cars and porn theatres NYC in 1988 could easily pass for a scene from 2014.
I think there’s a massive difference between 1966 and 1990, but a fairly small one between 1990 and 2014 in terms of fashions and attitudes. 1966 seems as close to the Victorian Era as it does to 1990. It seems like most of the things that define today - Starbucks, political correctness, sex offender registries, globalization, violent cartoons, Islamic terrorism, GMO foods, wannabe rappers, all started in or around the year 1990. What do you think?
Yes. Whilst this is only a subset of the grand mode of the 1830s which is when the truly modern era began, it definitely seems like stagnation.
On the other hand stagnation is often good, 'Happy is the people that is without history’ etc., but this is a very boring stagnation. Even the extreme radicals are manifestations of conservatism.
I think fashions have stagnated a bit, but I say that as someone who has lived through four different decades and is now halfway through a fifth. People half my age can define the 90s a lot more clearly and can see the progress in fashions better than I can.
Aside from fashions, music has gone through several periods of change, though not big ones, and other social and technological trends have changed dramatically.
Threads like this come up maybe once a week around here and I don’t agree with the premise at all. It’s been 20 years since Kurt Cobain died so there’s been a lot of photos from the period unearthed. It amazes me looking at those photos how much teen fashion changed between 1994 and even a couple of years later, let alone then and now. It’s not quite as incongruous looking as some of the get up you see in photos from the 1970s but there are close to zero teenagers dressed in that style now. In the mid-1990s there were far more teenagers going around wearing what they approximated to be 1960s style clothing than there are kids dressed in early-mid 1990s garb nowadays. I could name half a dozen styles that have come into and gone out of fashion in that period. That saggy pants/baseball cap look was never huge where I live but no self respecting teenager would dress like that now.
In the last 25 years white dude guitar music has been largely eclipsed as a mainstream concern, replaced by r’n’b, hip hop and EDM acts.
But even without going back that far, try read No Logo today, or better still get a teenager to read it today and ask them if it is still relevant. Globalisation arguably commenced many, many decades ago but in my briefish time on this earth public attitudes to it have changed immensely, same with public attitudes to gay rights and a host of other social issues.
America has a black president, something which even a decade before Obama’s inauguration seemed like something a long way off.
There’s more diversity now in almost every society on earth than there was in 1990.
Fewer than 20 years ago, the archetypal mobile phone user was a self-important businessman, the archetypal internet user was an antisocial male, even without any other changes, the adoption of mobile ICTs since the early to mid 1990s make an enormous difference. Even how much society’s relationship with ICTs has changed in the past 5 years is noticeable to me.
I think if you were alive in 1990 and are alive now it can seem like not much has changed but I think even a cursory analysis shows this to be untrue.
I hardly see how music is the same as it was in the early nineties. Back then stuff like alternative rock and rap were the popular genres. Now it’s pop like Katy Perry, Justin Beiber, Taylor Swift, and Pharrell.
I doubt anyone still considers Friends a hip show. The hip shows now are gritty dramas like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones.
So you wouldn’t consider Juicy J, Tyler the Creator, BOB etc rap? Paramore and Imagine Dragons isn’t alternative rock? I wouldn’t say it’s the same, I’m just saying if you compare music from 1990 (Vanilla Ice, NWA, Paula Abdul, Bobby Brown, the Beastie Boys, Madonna’s “Vogue”) to circa 1966 music (The Beatles, Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys, Petula Clark, Four Seasons, Grateful Dead) and to the 2014 music forementioned it’s pretty obvious it’s far closer to the latter.
We not living like the Jetson’s yet, which is how I had imagined we’d be when I was a kid back in 1990. But we ARE living in a very different milieu. It’s hard for me to figure how 1990 and 1999 were even in the same decade.
You could play this game all day, Adele, one of the best selling artists of the past decade, pedals a line of blue eyed soul that wouldn’t have been too outré in 1966. Genres rise and fall in popularity, things are revived, others discarded. I’m not sure pointing out similarities between 1990 and 2004 points to stagnation. Indeed, in 1966, James Brown et al were laying out the source material for much of the sampled music that was popular in the '80s and '90s.
The history of popular culture contains far more continuities than seemingly seismic shifts. The generation that came up in the '60s imagined they were living in tumultuous times like no other, a slightly younger generation imagined punk changed everything, then a bit later hip hop was the thing that changed the world, except none of them did and all of them did. Boy bands today like 1 Direction don’t sound a million miles away from early Beatles or even '50s doo wop acts.
I don’t see where it’s required that things change rapidly or be visibly drastically different. It happens that a lot of the change since the '90’s involved ideas rather than changes in material goods or fashions, which still had changes even if they weren’t drastic.
By that I mean to say that things are drastically different today than in the early 1990s.
Computer technology is a great example. I use CAM software at work, and to revert back to early 1990’s versions would bring the factory to a screeching halt.
Today, kids can go online and play video games with other kids from around the world, making what would have been (in the early 90s) an antisocial loner type of kid into a socially interactive (yes, by degrees) kid.
Yes, the buildings in Chicago look like they did in the early 1990s. (most of them)
But there are a lot of buildings there that look just like they did in 1900, as well.
It all depends on what one is seeking to see.
I am not sure how you are, but is it at all possible that, like most people, you have formed your idea of what is normal in your youth and that colors your perception forever?
My grandmother wore non-iron floral print house dresses in the 21st century and perhaps in your world Nirvana and MC Hammer are as modern as ever.
In some ways it does seem like we’re stuck in the 90s. This occurred to me reading the thread on what the 90s were like. There are certainly differences between now and then, but it doesn’t seem like the distinct changeover in eras that is usually associated with decades.
