If Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart” ever starts getting airplay on the oldies stations, I’m moving into a cave.
The better “alternative” music had only a fraction of the popular awareness compared to the other crap.
I think Star Trek: TNG is a good indicator of the zeitgeist of the 90s. Think about how positive and optimistic that show is! If we just talk to the alien being who is trying to eat our ship, I’m sure we can work everything out and all get along! Right? But, post-Berlin wall, perestroika, mid-East peace talks, etc., there was a real sense of the possibility of peace. Poverty doesn’t seem to be an issue. Clashes around other stratifiers (race, sex, religion, nationality) are so old-fashioned they’re not even mentioned. (Sigh. Now I’m all nostalgic for the 90s.)
Compare that with, say, Firefly. There’s no sense of a possibility of resolving the conflict there. In that show, the best possible ending is that they get to keep eking out an existence on the fringes of an oppressive society.
My regular radio station (DC101) has a “90s at Noon” segment. I love it, but it makes me feel old. I’ve been listening to those songs for 20 years?? How did that happen?
I was born in 1982. The Cold War was only in my consciousness because of Nikolai Volkoff.
Exactly what I was going to say.
You know you’re getting old when you see people nostalgic for stuff that happened when they were kids AND YOU WERE AN ADULT AT THE TIME (e.g., also see “The Nostalgia Critic”).
X-files.
Maybe this is why Enterprise didn’t fly so well? Zeitgeist mismatch? “I’ve got faith of the heart…”
I guess it depends on how plugged in you were into music in the 90s.
Like you, I spent all of my childhood in the 80s, and all my teen years in the 90s. In the 80s, what got played on the car radio, controlled almost exclusively by my father, was what I listened to. So I got heavy doses of Sting and the Police, Foreigner, Phil Collins and Genesis, Michael Jackson, Annie Lennox, and Cyndi Lauper. When the parents were away and brother and sister were watching me, I got exposed to the Beastie Boys, Dougie Fresh and Slick Rick, Run DMC, Prince, and Madonna. We didn’t have cable and I didn’t have any money, so all the music I listened to came to me passively, so I was kind of forced to at least tolerate it, if not love it. To this day, certain 80s songs take me back to specific moments of my childhood, like going to my grandfather’s funeral (“I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues”) or eating at Pizza Inn when I was seven (when I surprised my father by singing “I Want To Know What Love Is”, which was being piped in over the sound system). The bulk of my music collection is from the 80s, and I think it’s because my developing brain called it “good” and therefore that’s what I continue to think it is.
But by the 90s, I was less passive and more discriminating, which made “good” much more meaningful. When Edie Brickell’s “What I Am” came out when I was in the sixth grade (I believe it hit my ears during the summer, so I could have been going to the seventh), I suddenly had a favorite song. Really, before then, everything I heard was my “favorite.” Then Sinead O’Connor came on the scene and I was like, “WHAT?!” “Nothing Compares to U” became my favorite (and it still ranks up there at the top). In fact, “I Don’t Want What I Haven’t Got” was the first album I ever bought and when I bought my first Walk Man in the ninth grade, it was the only thing I listened to. Seriously. I played that tape until it broke and then did a bunch of housechores so I could raise enough money to get a replacement. The idea of living without that tape was simply unfathomable to me. I can’t think of anything in the 80s that had that impact on me.
By sophomore year in high school, alternative and gangsta rap were suddenly on the scene and it was like the floor had dropped out from everything. White kids were waving around copies of the “Chronic” and black kids were singing about being albinos and mullatos and their mosquitos and libidos. The music was great, but I think what happened to us was no different than what had happened to my siblings–who’d hit their teen years in the 80s–or the generations previous. If you’re musically plugged in as a teenager, every week you have to have a different “jam”. One day it might be “Tennessee” from Arrested Development. The next it might be “Take it Slow” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I was one of those kids. I didn’t have a lot of money, but every time I did come across some green I was heading out to Wax and Fax and seeing if I could find a used Black Crowes or U2 album.
When I got to college (1996+), though, I was reaching back to the 80s music that I had missed. Old school Duran Duran and Boy George still remind me of studying organic chemistry. I was aware of Alanis Morrisette and certainly listened to groups like Bones Thugs and Harmony…and Biggie Small’s “Get Money” still takes me back, but I wasn’t about to rush out and get any “new” stuff. The late 90s was kind of when I started getting less plugged into contempory music and started cultivating a love for classic rock and pop tracks from yesteryear. Maybe it’s because I had hit that age when I felt like anything new was for kiddies, and kiddies, of course, don’t have any taste? I have no idea. But to me, the period of 1990-1995 was when 90s music was at its best, because that’s when new genres and groups that were relatively unknown (like REM) were coming up strong.
Now I don’t think it terms of decades and I’m more about “Does it sound good” I know I’ve missed lots of good groups as I’ve gotten older, so I’m always on the hunt for new-to-me-but-not-necessarily-new things to add to my collection.
I remember a Calvin and Hobbes strip in which Calvin is reading Chewing magazine, and says something about how there’s no such thing as “general interest” anymore – everything is niche and microtargeted. Although he was talking about magazines, to me that kind of encapsulates everything about the 90s, especially the music.
I feel EXACTLY the same way! (I’m 33 too) I remember my later HS/early college years MUCH more fondly than my early adolescence.
Well, here’s some 90s nostalgia for you:
Whenever I read any economy news about how terrible things are, I think back to the 90s. Remember how everything seemed great, and how we were buying everything? And music of the 90s? Love.
I still listen to and enjoy the soundtracks to Spawn (1997) and *The Matrix *(1999).
Also, Blood Sugar Sex Magick was my personal favorite album of the decade. Man I wore that thing out. I still love it.
I’m about 10 years older than you and I feel the same way. I think the years 1991-92 were one of those periods–like the British Invasion of 1964–when there was an unforeseen sudden shift in popular music that caught the American music industry and radio off-guard. The old formulas no longer worked and new ones had yet to be developed. Unfortunately, after the mid 90s, went back to being even more rigidly formatted than before. By the end of the decade, with the avalanche of boy bands and pop tarts, one got the feeling that unless you were a 13-year old girl, the music industry wasn’t interested in you as a customer anymore.
…which happened in 2008 when VH-1 aired “I Love the New Millenium,” a nostalgic look at those distant years of 2001-07.
Any dark post apocalyptic supernatural cyberpunk film from the mid to late 90s onward has basically the same soundtrack combining a mix of industrial, nu-metal, hard core hip hop and big-beat electronica. Usually some combination of Prodigy, NIN, Tool, The Crystal Method, Filter, any member of the Wu Tang Clan (particularly Rza or Method Man), Rage Against the Machine, Stabbing Westward, Ministry, Marilyn Manson, Chemical Brothers, White Zombie (usually some techno remix) and Rollins Band. Some of these films actually have Henry Rollins.
They can be found on my ‘Electroindustrialhiphopalypse’ playlist on my iPod.
The 90’s were an awesome time to be a wrestling fan. The Monday Night Wars, ECW, Stone Cold, The Rock, nWo, wrestlers becoming best selling authors, etc etc etc.
Bicycles also had great pain jobs in the 90’s. The early 90’s were all about neon and then moved onto splatter paint jobs. Bikes today are a lot more bland.
It’s interesting hearing people going on about '90s music because I’ve never really noticed anything particularly definable about it- I don’t have fond memories of it or anything like that and I can’t really think of an example of a sound that I’d call “Very '90s”. Conversely, though I think the '80s had a more distinctive “sound”, at least looking back on it from the second decade of the 21st century.
There’s no one particular sound imho, but there were definite styles that lived and died in the mainstream in the '90s so will forever evoke that period in people who were fans. Grunge (although hardcore went back well into the '80s, but as a mainstream phenomenon it was a '90s thing), Grebo, Euro-Pop (it still exists but there’s a particular '90s flavour), Boyband r’n’b, Brit-pop, etc. all had their heyday in the '90s. I was just thinking the other day how AOR doesn’t really chart anymore. It used to be a radio mainstay and there was always something in the charts, towards the end of the '90s it died a death in the mainstream. The closest I can think to it now is some of the soft country hits you hear.