I'm tired of Millennials hogging the '90s nostalgia

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m from Generation X, and I really coulda sworn the '90s was our decade. But I keep seeing blogs, posts, and email forwards chock full of nostalgia for that decade, but not oriented around the big news events of the time (especially not of the early years), or around the kind of popular culture teens and twentysomethings at the time were into, but mostly concerning grade school fads and Nickelodeon or Disney Channel TV shows. WTF?

I mean, everyone who is alive during an era is entitled to be nostalgic for it. But this strikes me as similar to if The Wonder Years was representative of the dominant '60s nostalgia rather than being an interesting example of an atypical POV.

So what age group should “own” a decade in this sense? I submit that you should be able to remember it from beginning to end, including the major news events and big pop culture events (most popular songs, movies, TV shows) of each year. And there should be no previous decade about which this is true for you. Preferably you experienced major “coming of age” milestones during the decade: starting high school, getting a driver’s license, getting the right to vote, graduating high school, becoming old enough to legally drink, graduating college. Still being in your twenties by the time the decade ends seems to make sense too.

So by this metric, the “ideal” birth year for someone to claim the '90s as “their” decade is 1976, solidly GenX. Expand a few years in each direction, and everyone born somewhere in the '70s should be set. And at the time, those were the people really driving popular culture (along with, in the early '90s especially, some older GenXers from the late '60s). But as I say, those are not the people I see reminiscing now, who are IMHO trivialising the memory of a pretty interesting era and presenting it as something rather banal.

My theory for why this is happening (when it didn’t to, say, the Sixties) is that it is because there are just not nearly as many Americans born in the '70s as in any other decade (unless you go back to the Depression era, but I mean non-elderly Americans). So despite having a brief heyday when they were teens and twentysomethings, they are being swamped out now.

2

Last I checked Nostalgia wasn’t something that could be depleted. If you want to have Nostalgia from that era, knock yourself out, but I don’t see why I (born in 1989) have “illegitimate” nostalgia from that era. Childhood nostalgia is some of the strongest nostalgia.

ETA: Heck, the Nostalgia Critic did several movies for teens and grownups from that era – he was born in 1979. I really don’t think 90s kids are “hogging” it in any meaningful sense.

3

Though I’d argue that if it is prevalent, it’s probably mostly due to the fact that millennials kind of “own” the internet in that we were the first to really grow up with it and help shape it. It’s natural that a lot of its content is shaped and geared towards them. And now that the internet is bigger, most of us are college aged, and the college aged people usually tend to be the ones driving pop-culture.

Even so, I see tons of '80s nostalgia as well in the form of video game retreux stuff.

4

I don’t really see the problem. I’m also a Gen-Xer and I remember in my early 20s I was all about '80s nostalgia. Not the major news events of the '80s, but things like Cabbage Patch kids and Transformers and Atari 2600. I was also really into '80s music in the late '90s/early 2000s because it reminded me of being a kid.

It shouldn’t be any surprise that people about ten years younger than me would be nostalgic about the '90s pop culture instead of that of the '80s.

5

1976 is the tail end of GenX no matter how you slice it- though generation grouping is far from an exact science.

He’s Wiki’s breakdown.
Looking at that list, I am realizing for the first time that “Generation Y” and “Millennial Generation” refer to the same group. I thought GenY was the end of the 70s through the early 90s and I thought Millennials started early 90s.

20 year groupings seem less meaningful for more recent years. For much of the 20th Century, it took about 20 years for anything to change much: I can accept 20 years of Baby Boomers because the 50s pretty much started at the end of WWII and lasted until the Kennedy Assassination.

Starting with GenX, I’d start shaving it down a bit- the world started changing more rapidly. I always thought of GenX as the Kennedy Assassination through the Ford Administration. I thought of GenY (remember, I thought GenY and Millennials were different), I thought GenY as being Carter through 1990 or 1991 (for some reason, even though I’m an American I place the big dividing line at German Reunification). I thought of the Millennials as 1992 or 1993 through early 2000s.

Anyway, 80s nostalgia wasn’t limted to people who were teens/college in the 80s. You say you were born in 1976? So as a kid you had G.I Joe, Transformers, The Karate Kid, The A-Team? Help me remember: did 80s nostalgia cover any of that or was it limited to Wall Street, Out of Africa, Thirtysomething, and Dallas?

6

I was a teen in the 70’s and have zero nostalgia for Funk or Glam or Disco; just the degenerate early 70’s (the tail end of underground comix, John Waters, Death Race 2000, etc.) and Punk at decade’s end.

But i wasn’t too surprised when GenX was “hipster-ironically” going nuts over Glam and Funk and Disco in the 90’s. in the 80’s we’d revived the early 60’s with Raybans and skinny ties. It’s just the natural order of things.

7

Nonsense.

(and that article is old enough that it itself is a bit of 90’s nostalgia, for me anyways).

8

What bugs me about '90s nostalgia is that the '90s are too recent to qualify as nostalgia. We still have middleschoolers who were born in the 90s, fercryinoutloud!

9

I was born in 1976, and mostly identify with the 80s. This probably had something to do with me being the youngest.

My nostalgia is for hair bands and 90210 (first three seasons) and Ice Ice Baby. I pretty much completely lost touch with pop culture in 1995 or so, preferring the Beatles and Taxi Driver. Grunge passed me by completely.

I was thinking about this the other day, when I was listening to a 90s radio station. You know why I abandoned the 90s? Because everyone was so sad and angsty all the time! The music became Pearl Jam and the politics became PC and everything was just So Damned Important, no one ever seemed to have fun. Certainly the younger teenagers did, but once you hit college, you better be serious, even in your fun.

I identified with the go-go 80s, where the boys wore lipstick and the girls wore neon, and we were all walking on sunshine. :slight_smile:

10

I love that concept of meta-retro!

And sorry, Jragon, but you are basically personifying my complaint. How can you be nostalgic for a decade half of which you can’t really remember at all, and the other half of which you experienced as a grade schooler? To me, you are borderline young to even “claim” the '00s, much less the '90s. Be more patient! (The Onion article hinted at this lack of patience.)

Maybe in a few years the Millennials/GenY will discover '00s nostalgia and we few GenXers can have the '90s back. (BTW, one cause of confusion about generational nomenclature is that for about ten years, the media used “GenX” to refer to whoever was 18-30 at the time.)

I wonder though if one problem (shared to some degree with our current decade is that the '00s are awkward in terms of their spoken label, unlike the decades everyone alive now has been familiar with before, from the '20s through the '90s.

11

Doug, I would say the early to mid '90s is right on schedule for nostalgia if you compare with the '50s nostalgia of Happy Days and Sha Na Na that hit in the '70s and the flower power nostalgia that arrived in the late '80s.

12

Keep in mind that Gen X was called Gen X because there were fewer people in it that surrounding generations (the baby boom had stopped but the echo boom hadn’t started, or was it the echo boom and the echo echo boom?). Those overloaded generations around Gen X need all that extra time to meet their nostalgia quota :slight_smile: .

13

You don’t need or want hard rules for this stuff. I was born in 1982 and I feel like I’m between Gen X and Millenials. The rule I’d always heard was Millenials would be for people who graduated in 2000 (the year I graduated), but I definitely don’t feel any sort of attachment to anything people more than a few years younger than me do.

By the same token, though, I think of Gen X as being people who were in high school at some point in the mid to late 80s through early to mid 90s, which is about 12-15 years and also a little early for me, and it includes a lot of cultural stuff, like hair metal and grunge, that was over well before I started high school.

All of that said, I have nostalgia for the 80s and 90s. I love the 80s because it reminds me a lot of my young childhood, so I remember all the great cartoons like Thundercats, Transformers, He-Man, and GI Joe, and I fondly remember the NES, but I was less interested in pop culture stuff because it didn’t mean anything to me. But I also have fond memories of the 90s because those were my coming-of-age years, and I similarly remember a lot of early 90s cartoons, 16-bit video games, early internet, and I have great pop culture memories as the decade progresses. Though, frankly, most of the music in the 90s was just awful, so I tend to have more fondness of some earlier stuff and stuff at the very tail end and into the 2000s.

That all said, I’m having trouble seeing one generation necessarily owns more of a decade than another, because our nostalgia is for different things. I fondly remember SNES and TMNT from the early 90s, where a Gen X guy will probably more remember grunge. So, they’re the same time, but our nostalgia are about different things.

So when looking at Millenials, very few should have any real memories of the same stuff that the Gen Xers are nostalgic for. If Millenials want to be nostalgic for Power Rangers and Pokemon and Rap Metal, that’s just not the same stuff Gen X will care about.

14

Right, and it just wasn’t visible to most of the culture (just kids and their parents to a lesser degree). It would be as though the '00s were remembered (and maybe they will be) not for 9/11 and Iraq and Hillary vs. Obama, not for The Wire and Breaking Bad, not even for Katy Perry and American Idol.…but for The Wiggles and Dora the Explorer.

You’re right though that you are kind of on the border between generations; although my wife was born in early 1984 and feels very Millennial.

Leahcim, i did not know that was the provenance of the term Generation X, even though I did read the Douglas Coupland novel. Interesting!

15

Well, you’re not king of nostalgia and I’m going to be nostalgic for pogs and tamagotchis whether you think I should or not. Nothing is stopping you from taking a screencap of Mad About You and putting it on Reddit with a caption saying DAE Remember This Show.

16

Pogs and tamawhatsis? Get off my lawn!

17

That sounds about right to me. I was born in 1975, and I felt like I was towards the end of Gen X already, yet clearly Gen X. I would put the heart of Gen X/Baby Busters at around 1970-1973. I don’t know what my cutoff is, but if you have living memory of the Cold War and the fear of nuclear annihilation or remember playing with an Atari 2600 in a “non-retro” context in your childhood to very early adulthood, you’re most likely Gen X. The birth years 1980-1983 are pretty on-the-cusp, but generational boundaries are, naturally, fuzzy. My brother was born in 1981, and he identifies with a lot of Gen X cultural landmarks, but there’s clearly a cultural gap and he seems on the cusp of things I identify as Gen X and Gen Y.

For me, as a Gen Xer, I think of the 80s as my nostalgia decade, but the 90s were certainly formative for me, as many personal milestones from first kiss to graduating high school, then college, then getting my first job, all happened in the 90s. But, somehow, the 80s are my nostalgia decade. For me, it’s the feeling of childhood. So I could understand Millennials claiming the 90s as theirs for nostalgia.

18

Interesting, pulykamell. You should be an almost perfect representative of my '90s person, but you harken back to the '80s. By my own paradigm, I am on the fuzzy border, which as you say is a common problem with judging these things. I was born in 1969, so to get a sense of what would be comparable to your seeing the '80s as your nostalgia decade, I would need to go six years earlier and think of '74 to '83 as being a decade. And while I do have fond memories of Saturday Night Fever fever, the fact that I had no inkling Watergate was happening or that I was unaware of the most popular movies and TV shows of the mid-1970s, just kills it for me.

Really, my own paradigm even seems a bit on the young side for my taste. It would make my decade, if it were unconstrained by labels, run from 1983 to 1992. But, I mean, I turned 21 in 1990; I turned 30 in the last year of the 90s; and I had my first child’s weeks into the year 2000. So the nineties is still the nostalgia era for me, while the '80s just seems like an ancient barely relevant curiosity even though my high school years and much of my college years lay within it. I guess going to bars was more significant! LOL

19

Well, what I could say is that when people on my Facebook feeds, who are mostly ±5 years and as “GenX” as I am sharing nostalgia, it’s almost always nostalgia for the 80s. Like the picture of the cassette tape and pencil with the caption “Share if you know what this is for.” Or even the little plastic insert you’d put in your 45s to play on a turntable. It seems the wave of nostalgia I see among my friends is for their childhoods, although as we move further and further along in time, I wouldn’t be surprised if the 90s and then 00s encounter their own nostalgia waves in my generation.

20

That’s a good point.