Yeah. With music, you can imagine having a '60s revival, a '70s revival, an '80s revival… but a '90s revival? You can’t do a '90s revival, we’re still in the '90s. Longest decade ever.
Edit: Not that I mind. The '90s are awesome, it would suck if they ended.
We are seeing a homogenization of generations that hasn’t happened since before the early 19th century.
It is, of course, driven by our music and art (and to a lesser extent our literature).
When I was growing up, in the middle of the 20th century, the only thing I heard was old school Country-Western on the radio and Erinco Caruso on the Victrola. Rock and Roll (where did the Roll go?) was such a departure from what was the status-quo that it marked a significant difference in the musical landscape. Elvis, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, they were so utterly different from Perry Como and Frank Sinatra that my parental-units had a VERY hard time accepting them.
I grew up in a musical family. My folks met each other in church choir and my brother and I grew up singing and being sung to. Music has always been important to me and it appears to me, in retrospect, that it was of paramount importance to my cohort. We were not just rebelling against the previous generation’s music, but also their social values. Many of us felt we had a right to be different than our parents. Mind you, I know this is a common thing, but my generation had a new tool … music.
But now, not so much. I enjoy some of the new music that comes out (as long as it doesn’t… you know… uh suck), and I can listen to many of the songs that my grandchildren listen to and actually enjoy them. This bridges a great deal of our popular cultural heritages and diminishes what we used to call the ‘generation gap’.
It is not as if I am going to go to a rave soon, but I have a resonance with my progeny that my folks did not with me and I think music is the binding force.
I don’t think I agree at all.
Music? He cherry-picked a few superficial examples. Today’s music bears little resemblance to 1992. Grunge is dead, and is any kind of rock popular anymore? Long gone are the days of Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Euro-house is dead, and what passes for dance music is either underground or from pop stars (Lady Gaga, Rihanna, etc.) Long gone are the days of C+C Music Factory and Snap!. Rap/hip-hop is nothing like it was back then either.
Fashion? I can’t remember the last time I saw a dude with long hair and a flannel shirt. Or a high-top fade and pan-African clothing.
I don’t know about the picture thing. You can find plenty of pictures–like your from someone’s old high school yearbook–where people definitely look different from folks of today. And I would say 1985 is a perfect example of this. Everyone looked goofy in 1985. Big feathery hair. Jheri curls and Stevie Wonder braids. Clothes were crazy-looking too. I don’t like the baggy pants look, but guys sure did like tight pants back in those days. And daisy dukes on the basketball court, too.
Though I do agree that 90s fashion does not differ as dramatically from today’s stuff as it does from 1980s fashion. But you have to exclude the early 1990s from that analysis. Early 1990s was kind of weird. (That whole New Jack period was weird. Imagine guys today doing the Kid n Play together on the dance floor. Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.)
Hot girls wear glasses? Jim Rose? Awesome!
I would also wonder how much of it is that the cultural change has moved into the virtual realm, where it can’t be seen so much in physical artifacts. That people are putting their creative energies into a new realm and leaving the older modes more or less in place while doing it.
And combine that with instant global distribution and amazingly cheap manufacturing costs for mass market goods and more than ever before you can create yourself not by being new but by combining the old in new ways, picking and choosing existing artifacts so that at the macro level they don’t look new but at the micro level are distinct in important ways.
While the 15 year old of today may consume a lot of things that seem very familiar to the 15-year-old me in 1990, I’m guessing they spot me as a poser in a heartbeat if somehow that me came forward into the present.
I think the critical difference is that in 1992, Spy magazine was still around to satirize the culture, but it’s not now.
Out of curiosity, I looked up what the Billboard top 10 for this week and for 20 years ago. I found it interesting to compare them.
A lot of early to mid 90s pop culture has become dated and subject to ridicule. Youth laugh at 90s video game music having that “Seinfeld” sound. Many youths won’t be caught dead in a pair of blue jeans. 90s jargon such as “dude” is nearly as outdated as “far out” or “groovy”.
Some 90s culture trends such as “indie music” are still here, similar to the decades-long popularity of ragtime music, but the novelty has been lost. Season 20 of the Simpsons just isn’t as good as the first several seasons.
But culture isn’t just pop culture, and culture in general has changed a lot. For one, it’s become more homogenized. A lot of small towns don’t have stores selling country western gear anymore, or people wearing cowboy hats. And society has changed due to most people going online and having cellphones. Provincial viewpoints are ridiculed in public forums, so there’s more consensus and political correctness. If people don’t know about something, they can quickly google it rather than ask a friend or use resources at the library. A lot of people get addicted to their computers, surfing websites such as Facebook, so they don’t go out fishing on the weekends or other non-cyberspace activities. Or they arrange a date through Match.com rather than the local bar scene.
So the 90s arguably have more in common with the 80s than today if you look at the culture at large rather than hairstyles.
I’ve often wondered why saggy pants are still popular with some teenagers - a fashion that was around more than twenty years is still considered current? I remember a colleague around 1991 complaining that his teenage son was wearing sagging pants).
I mean, long hair on males started showing up (in the rural town where I grew up) in the late 1960’s, and by the early 1980’s, was sufficiently passe that someone wrote on the wall in the hippie section of the student union, “It’s 1983 - can’t you afford a (bleep)ing haircut?”
One possibility is the shorter cultural memory resulting from technological changes like the 24-hour news cycle and internet everywhere. People who can’t remember what it was like five years ago aren’t going to know that their trendy fashion was around twenty years ago.
I don’t agree at all, particularly when it comes to a very recognizable and penetrative aspect of culture - Television. Programs are vastly different now - reality shows, the popularity of crime-drama, mass-eschewing of the laugh track - shows from the 90’s don’t fit in at all today.
Even granting the main premise - that today’s movies/fashion/music is largely similar to that of 1992 - it kind of ignores the fact that elements of culture are transmitted nowadays over an entirely new medium (the internet) - one that is continuously going through its own cultural evolution. Really, look at how websites have changed in the last decade (and even in the last couple years since that post was made). The differences are obvious and staggering. Web sites and their presentation represent culture in a huge way nowadays, when they weren’t a factor at all 20 years ago. That’s not the kind of change you can hand wave away.
Baggy jeans are a default these days, not a fashion.
Skinny jeans have been more of a fashion in recent years, and skinny jeans hanging low on the butt (like baggy jeans) are even more recent. Thanks, hipsters.
My dad lamented once to me the fact that ‘music passed him by’. He couldn’t turn on the radio and hear music that he liked/grew up with. All he had was the old stuff and he craved something new in the music that he liked.
I always assumed the same would happen to me as I grew older but it never did. My kids like the music I listened to when I was their age and I tend to like much of what they listen to now. It is not uncommon for me to steal my daughters IPOD and listen for awhile.
As another poster said…it seems unnatural. However, I am glad it is.
There was a previous thread on the SD about this. It was based around the movie “Back to the Future.”
The idea was that 1955 was WAY farther away from 1985 than 1985 is to 2015.
I agree. Without cellphones, I would have a hard time telling if a quick street photograph was from 1995 or 2010.
It was an interesting article but hand-waving the tech advances is simply ludicrous. Cell phones look way different and are everywhere, earbuds and bluetooth sets adorn many ears.
Fashion is different too, brands like The North Face and Patagonia have gotten insanely popular just like those Ugg boots. We had a whole thread about how those things are essentially the college uniform these days.
What about early 90’s fashion? Garth Brooks was popular in some circles and I remember seeing those stupid color block button downs a lot. Not to mention BUM Equipment and all those stupid color-change shirts.
Reusable grocery bags are WAY more popular, I see a few every time I go shopping. Carrying water has gotten surprisingly common considering the amount of money our government spends to keep tap water potable. Lots of folks tote some sort of plastic water bottle/Nalgene/Camelbak bottle.
I was born in 1985 and playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which is set in 1992, manages to make me very nostalgic. That game does a good job of capturing and mocking some of the significant changes since the 90’s.
Even the example pic trotted out in the article does a poor job supporting the author’s claims. That photo looks horribly dated, not only the fashion and hair but the picture quality. Movies that kicked ass in the early 90’s like Terminator 2 look extremely dated by today’s standards.
It’s a good article and a fun topic but I think the author does a better job making himself sound old than making his point.
Complete hogwash.
Other than the “small” matter of the explosive growth in technology and the internet, here are a few other things that have crossed my mind.
In 1992, I doubt many would have supposed that gathering threats of domestic terrorism (OKC in 1995) and foreign terrorism (WTC in 2001). Few could argue that these had only neglible effects on American culture.
In 1992, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney told us “while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the (1991) conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question in my mind is, how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is, not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the President made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”
By 2012, we now know he didn’t mean it.
As late as 1997, five years after our cut-off, ABC felt the need to put a parental advisory on the episode of the Ellen show where the title character merely uttered the phrase “I’m gay.” By 2012, we have gay marriage or civil unions in a growing number of states, the repeal of DADT, and overall, a far more open and accepting society.
In 1992, Bill Clinton was our “first black president,” (recall, this remark was made by one despairing that the United States would ever see a black president). By 2012, Barack Obama became our second.
To be fair, I think the article linked in the OP is looking at the fashion and creative aspect of culture – haircuts, clothing styles, music, etc.
I think this is a biggie. While there were gay TV characters and gay celebrities and such in the early nineties, I think gay couples and gay lifestyles have become far more normalized and accepted over the last twenty years.
As far as substantial cultural changes go, as opposed to things like clothing styles and what music people listen to, I think thats been the most major one to take place over my lifetime.
Smoking has pretty much disappeared, of course, and fitness and health issues are becoming part of everyday culture in a big way. When I was a teenager in the mid-nineties, I was smoking a pack a day, drinking like a Irishman and apparently trying to kill myself. If you weren’t into sports, taking care of your body wasn’t an issue, at least not for me or for anyone I knew. Today, gyms are popping up everywhere, the streets are full of joggers, and as far as I can tell, the kids are all into yoga instead of substance abuse.
Although, of course, paradoxically, there’s also an obesity epidemic going on at the same time.