Music doesn’t go away. You can find a radio station playing Nirvana in 2014 just like you could in 1994. The difference is now the station playing Nirvana is considered a classic rock station.
Things haven’t changed much in like 11,000 years. Some people farm, a bunch of people live in cities and make art that some people like and others say is shit. Rich people are grinding orphan bones into bread meal, or whatever it is do all day. Sometimes there’s a war or economic disruption, other times things are chill. Some moral panic of the day vexes the elders. Today I’m watching the NBA playoffs; my ancestor was watching gladiators. Same diff.
The “end of history” thing isn’t even new. Bet the Sumerians thought their setup would last forever too.
1990s NFL team uniforms were considerably old school compared to the uniforms of today.
And MLB players still wore the stirrups.
It’s because of the Internet. Before 1990, stupid people started picking up weird fashions because everybody in their neighborhood did it (much like lemmings) and they thought they were “cool.” “Cool” is just a stupid way of saying “average.” Thanks to the internet, stupid people everywhere realize localized fashions are just that, localized, so they are less likely to be influenced by bands, famous people, etc.
Wait, you expect us to just throw the orphan bones out? That would be wasteful.
Re: the OP, for much of the '90s I was living in Paris, which could be a good reference as it has all these accumulated layers of development that go back a couple centuries. I returned to the US in early '97 and except for a couple of quick trips, had not spent any significant time there until just this year, and the long absence made it much easier to see the relative change over time. I’ve now made two lengthy business trips and there definitely is another layer of technology added to the crust of surface appearance. To name just a few items:
– Flat-screen TVs and displays are everywhere in public places
– Several tram lines equipped with rather futuristic articulated vehicles traverse the city, only one of which (IIRC) existed in the '90s
– Many of the bus, Metro and suburban railway lines have had their rolling stock replaced with new equipment in the past ten years (although the one I ride most often, the RER B has not, even there the old stock is being refurbished in an entirely different color scheme)
– Significantly more of modern, La Defense-style high-rise development is encroaching on the city center
– Styling of cars and light trucks seem to have gone majorly for high-profile, sort of “capsule” designs
– After what seemed to be decades of stagnation, local politics seems finally to have some new faces, many more of which are female than was formerly the case, and often bearing “non-French” last names.
On the other hand, most of the clothing I see there would not have looked at all out of place in the '90s, and much of the mechanics of daily life such as shopping for groceries have not really changed, so there’s that.
To sum up, it may seem that there has been little change relative to some other recent periods, but then there has not been so much fundamental infrastructure change that would have an impact on the visual environment, such as transitioning from horse-drawn to motorized vehicles, city-centered to suburban development, overhead then later underground power transmission, etc. But if one really looks, there are considerable and significant differences between then and now.
I wholeheartedly approve of the women who now wear tight black yoga pants.
This times 1000.
Here’s the last thread I can find/remember on exactly the same topic from about a month ago.
Unsurprisingly, the same points were brought up.
It’s supposed to be a camel toe, not the grand canyon.
It’s like the Eye of Mordor: when you look at it, it looks into your soul.
I’m wondering if another reason things don’t seem so different is because they haven’t been framed that way. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, all I could hear about was how crazy the 60s were. How groovy the music was. How influential the times were. I wanted to be a hippie when I was 12 years old, like a big weirdo. But in just a couple of years, all the girls were wearing peasant dresses and billowy baby-doll tops and flared jeans. The 60s had been sold and marketed to us as the era of coolness, as opposed to the lameness of the 90s.
In my mind, the 90s are still kind of lame, at least fashion-wise. Everyone walking around in tight stone-washed jeans with bows at the ankles and ugly Reebok hightop sneakers. Throw on a flannel shirt over a t-shirt and replace the Reeboks with Birkenstocks and you’ve got the mid-90s look. There just wasn’t a whole bunch of creativity when it comes to 90s fashion, compared to the 60s, at least. Seems to me that young people nowadays are lot more flamboyant than they were back in the 90s. Especially with regard to hair. Here in Richmond, every black chick seems to be sporting a look like Janelle Monae. I absolutely love this look and wish that I was young enough to pull it off. But try showing up anywhere with that look circa 1995. You would have been clowned to death!
What do you think they are going to do? Tear down the Chrysler Building and Rockefeller Center?
Here is a similar video from 2014 of Times Square:
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Hey, you got to take the bitter with the better: some folks wear 'em who shouldn’t, but plenty enough folks are doing it right.
In the early 1990s I was still using a Commodore 64 and most PCs booted to a DOS command line. The Internet was Telnet and FTP using Gopher, and most boards were Bulletin Board Systems in your local dialing area with 2400 baud modems.
Now Google, Wikipedia and other online resources are virtually an extension of my memory- no comparison at all.
Clearly the world today is vastly different than the world 24 years ago. But I think that one can make a claim (and I think this is what the OP kind of had in mind) that the changes are of a very different kind than some previous 24-year periods.
Friends is a good example… there are some specific dated references on Friends, and obviously you’d notice the lack of cell phones and web usage if you were paying attention. But I think that most of the overall plot lines, humorous moments, and general areas talked about would (a) not be offensive, and (b) still be funny today. I wasn’t alive in 1966, but the impression I have of it is that there was much more of a cultural “what we talk and think about and how we act” shift from 1966 to 1990 than from 1990 to 2014.
It’s also certainly possible that the just “walking around, what does the world look like” changes are less servere. It would be interesting to perform a test with photos of the same location taken at regular intervals, ask people to sort them chronologically, and see which time periods are most/least distinct… that is, maybe 95% of people could tell 1940 from 1955, but only 60% of people could tell 1955 from 1970 (or whatever).
Awareness and condemnation of rape along with demands for equality of pay between the sexes seems to be stronger to-day than in the past.
How is the Pill or condom less available to-day than now? And yes the Handmaid’s Tale is equally implausible to-day then it was in the early '90s (arguably more so).
One area which hasn’t changed much is political discourse-the Republican Party has been stuck in the same New Right mode since the late '80s/early '90s with the exception that neoconservatism has been more or less dumped.
The decline of shopping malls and video stores are a big change though.
OTOH, teen life doesn’t seem or look that different. I read books written a decade or two ago and the descriptions (except perhaps for the lack of an I-Pod) isn’t all that different from now.
Between 1966 and 1990 - Major shift.
Between 1990 and 2014 - Major shift, but meh. Why? Because of what happened between 1966 and the early/mid 1970’s. I guess you had to be there. (Thumb through old copies of Life and Time magazines between 1966 and 1972).
I think it would be the other way around since the standard photo in 1940 and 1955 was black & white, and the standard photo in 1970 was color.
Oddly enough, this weekend my sister and I were reminiscing about the old days when we worked at Six Flags Over Georgia as teens. This was during the early 90’s. Antebellum themes were all over that place. In fact, an entire section of the park was named after the Confederacy. Another section was called “Cotton States” and there were restaurants that were casually referred to as plantations. Music from Gone with the Wind was piped in through the speakers.
I doubt this would fly nowadays. As a society, we’ve become much more self-conscious of historical racism. You can expect even die hard Southerners to cringe at decorating an amusement park with Confederate memorabilia.
So I disagree that we are stuck in the 90’s.
Absolutely.
I cannot believe that anyone would not see the difference between the 1990’s and today. Never mind technology (which has frankly surpassed even sci fi), but social and cultural attitudes, fashion, more etc.
Friends went from 1994 to 2004. You can often tell which season it is by the hair and clothes alone, not just the actor’s appearances. Even the later episodes look dated.
HIMYM. Started 2005, finished 2014. Early season have very 2000’s fashions.