What do you remember of the mid 90s in general - the period say starting January 1993 to the end of 1997?
Was there a strong 70s revival vibe? If so, when?
How did the general feeling in the US differ from today?
Was the “Multimedia Revolution” actually a huge thing, especially amongst Boomers?
Was it really as optimistic a time as it seems in hindsight?
Would you say the US was healthier in some ways politically?
When did Grunge/Post Grunge/etc fall off?
Did people in their early/mid 20s in the 90s like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach, etc?
What music did people above 40 in say 1995 listen to?
Do you recall the Macarena fondly or with horror?
Were the Cranberries a huge band in 1994-1995?
Just try to give me a snapshot of what the mid 90s seemed like for someone who was between their mid 20s and early/mid 40s in 1993-1997. Am curious to hear different perspectives on the whole era.
My daughters were preschoolers then, and I was working two jobs so their mother could stay home with them.
I was too busy to observe any cultural zeitgeist beyond Barney.
I was in my 20s in the 1990s, so I would seem to be in your sweet spot, but I don’t really understand the question or what you’re trying to understand. Just like today, people in the 1990s felt their experiences individually. Those of us who were young livesnit because we were young and our lives were stretching out ahead of us, we had few of any obligations, and fewer disappointments and failures.
We were there for the rise of grunge. I remember well when popular music was Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, etc. But we are the wrong people to ask when it “fell off.” It never fell off for us.
What do you mean by “multimedia”? We had broadcast and cable television, CNN, AM/FM radio and newspapers and magazines and books. We read frequent stories about the coming “information revolution,” but as a practical matter we had no idea what that meant so we ignored it.
The economy seems bleak under the George H W. Bush administration, but Clinton’s election, government surplus, improving economy felt like improvement. And we were starting to think that long-needed reforms like universal health care and the end of discrimination on the basis of sexual preference were in reach.
But then came 1994, a backlash of angry white men, a group whose impact had last been felt in the Nixon age was in power and the looked like the worst kind of unscrupulous, authoritarian, reactionary animals. We had no idea how bad it was going to get.
I’m 62. My daughters were a bit older, the eldest from tween to entering adolescence, the youngest kindergartener to almost tween. I too was too busy with work and life to notice much if any of that stuff the OP lists. Didn’t care about those things in the least.
I remember that dial up message boards were interesting, and Compuserve was starting to provide internet access, so I installed my own 2400 baud modem on my DOS-based computer. And I liked classic rock. And still do.
Yeah, I had a kid in 1991 and one in 1994. The rest is a blur. I do remember Bill Clinton got elected. Although I was living in Seattle, I never really noticed the grunge movement.
Well, I worked as a social worker for exactly that time frame (93-97) as an elder abuse case worker. Probably not the kind of answer you’re seeking …
I was pretty into Jane’s Addiction, listened to Hole when I was in the mood, loved my Tori Amos albums, but still as often as not cued up older material, especially Zeppelin and Floyd, Kansas, Styx, Heart, Alan Parsons Project, etc.
I could not have hummed the Macarena for you at the time. It was a “thing” much like that “gangnam style” video was in more recent times but who the fuck cares?
O J Simpson trial monopolized everyone’s attention on a scale similar to the death of Diana.
Cell phones were in use but were a status symbol of the important business folks. Flip phones and whatnot, not iPhones of course.
The death of Apple Computer was predicted almost weekly, by the way.
I worked in IT with mainframe computers. Then when PCs came around I adapted - something new to learn.
My radio station had been considered AOR (album oriented rock) and I guess it changed to “Classic Rock” but it was playing the same music as before.
Around that time I had a period where I listened to country music, which was close to the pop music that I had listened to.
For the Cranberries. I missed them back then. I discovered them later and listen to them now.
No? If there was, I don’t remember anything that I would describe that way.
In that time period, multimedia went from almost nonexistent to merely highly rudimentary. The percentage of people with PCs increased only around 15% from 1993 to 1997–the very best of the PCs strained to show 320x240 video at 15 frames per second, and most computers were not the very best. I’d argue that the "multimedia revolution didn’t really kick in until around 2000 or so, when DVD became available and high-end computers were powerful enough to play them.
I was 21 to 25 in that time frame–if I ever even heard of the existence of any of those groups even once back then, I don’t remember it. I’ve only ever heard of them mentioned on the internet well into the 2000’s (well–the first two–Papa Roach is new to me) and have never heard music from any of them.
Well, we thought that we had won the Cold War and the Gulf War, so there is that.
Not really.
With the same raw contempt that I’ve always had for all dance crazes–they are for people with room-temperature IQs.
This is 1993, not 1983. By 1993 I, a poor college student, had a Motorola Microtac, bought for $0.01 at Best Buy with a service contract. When I got it, there was a line wrapped around the store to buy them.
I realize that “older” is relative, but I don’t expect to call myself “older” at least until sometime in my 50’s, thankyouverymuch.
Fuck, though, 1993 to 1997, I was young, but not young and stupid. These years correspond largely with my Army service (1989 to 1991 reserves, 1991 to 1996 regular).
Culturally, the biggest things were the use of CGI for popular media. I remember returning from my assignment in Germany in 1993 and seeing high quality computer graphics used in video nearly everywhere! I seem to recall Exxon and gas pumps dancing for some reason.
Another was the acceptance of alternative music when I got back to the USA. I was simply a freak when I left in 1991, and a norm in 1993. Kind of the same thing happened to me and craft brew when I went to China in 2011 and returned in 2016. Everyone loved IPA’s too, all of a sudden.
The biggest thing, though, was the economy. Even today people will tell me that I’m crazy when I say that the military pays enlisted people absolute crap. I ETS’s as an E4 in 1996 and doubled my total compensation with my first job. Granted, I was technical, not a grunt, and under a five year contract due to that. I wasn’t a Clinton supporter, and I’m not a Democrat, but even to this day, I’ll say that Clinton’s been the best president since Reagan because he didn’t do anything. Nothing at all (except for some of the bad stuff that lead to the global economic crisis many years after he left), and nothing at all is what I think a good president does.
I had recently married (in LA, during the riots to be precise). I was working for a biotech startup and it was horrendous. The OJ Simpson murders and trials were a huge deal in the media. I would say that the 24-hour news cycle continued its climb into permanence. It started with the Gulf War, but it really cemented its place in our reality during the OJ period. It moved from something that reported the news to a beast that also drove the news.
I vaguely recall bell bottoms making a brief re-appearance, but other than that, no.
Generally, I think things were optimistic. The economy was doing well. New tech was emerging and the prospect of what that meant drove consumer confidence. Pharmaceuticals, biotech, computers. Housing prices were starting to climb, but in retrospect they seem laughably low.
Today, the “Great Recession” is a recent memory and economic prosperity doesn’t feel safe or possible. People starting out have huge student loan debt already, housing is expensive, everyone has either been through a job loss or been directly impacted by someone else who has. It feels a bit like waiting for the other shoe to drop. An economic downturn seems inevitable and feels like nemesis stalking us all. I imagine that people who lived through the Depression felt like this. Yes, times are good now, but they may not always be.
Overall, I would say yes. But. There were large socio-economic gaps between groups. Racial inequality and systemic persecution was endemic. The social safety net was under attack (welfare reform, for example). It felt like a time where change was possible and even happening, but the problems were real.
Yes. Compromise between groups was expected, not despised. People of the Left and the Right had a lot more in common with each than they do now. Of course, this is also the time period when Bill Clinton was harassed with endless investigations and eventually impeached. It definitely wasn’t a golden era for politics, but I would say that at least things got done.
No clue. I remember the movement starting in the late 80s, and it was still extremely popular in the late 90s. I can see direct lines between grunge and many bands that are popular now. I would think of it more as evolving than leaving.
Yes. It was never a song I pumped up in the car, but as a wedding song it was fun.
Yep. I recall it peaking sometime in the late 1990s, which is when That 70s Show started its pilot (continued for another few years).
I think a lot of the bitter cynicism and divisiveness that we see now probably had its roots in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A lot of shock jock commentators we see now - Hannity, Limbaugh, etc - were alive and well then, but the had less of a platform.
The first multimedia I remember back then were CD-ROM and DVDs. The internet started introducing the concept of video uploads, but it was nothing like what we see now.
In some ways, yes, it was more optimistic. We had won the Cold War, and we had relative peace and prosperity. Incomes grew at that time. People got angry about politics but because there were fewer outlets to express it, and because our exposure to political information and misinformation was limited due to the times of day that the new came on. Information was received, not exchanged on platforms (Usenet and Compuserve don’t count).
The seeds of what we’re seeing now started back then, and I attribute it to two things: one is the 24-hour news cycle and proliferation of media outlets (even before social media); the other is the growth of income inequality, which has created an elite class of uber wealthy on one end and half the nation in financial insecurity on the other. That trend started in the late 1980s, and really took off in the 1990s.
But the real disaster was the Great Recession of 2008. I don’t think the country has recovered psychologically from that disaster. And I’m not sure we ever will.
The death of Kurt Kobain probably killed grunge with it - that’s how I see it. Like disco it probably would have died anyway. I confess to listening to Limp Bizkit.
Probably things they listened to in college, which would have been music from the early to mid 1960s.
Mild amusement.
I wouldn’t say they were huge; I’m thinking that Stone Temple Pilots and Pearl Jam were bigger.
I think if you were an ordinary average guy in your 20s and 30s, you were pretty optimistic that you’d have work and that the country was getting wealthier. The internet and its related technologies made the possibilities seem endless. I remember air travel without having to go through a ton of security.
I was working full time then, and looking back, I realize that I only got headline news, and not much of it. So I can understand why people who work full time, and only get news from Fox, can have no clue what a disaster Trump is.
I had kids 14 and 9 at the beginning of the period, was working at Bell Labs as AT&T fell apart, and spent some time taking the older kid to shoots and auditions.
Then I moved to California, where we bought a house which seemed absurdly expensive at the time but turned out to be a bargain. Then I worked 12 hour days at Intel for a doomed project and left.
I was a Republican back then but politics didn’t seem very important, but the boom was just beginning in Silicon Valley which was fun.
I don’t know if there was a '70s revival - I didn’t much like the '70s culture when I lived through it the first time.
I turned 20 in 1994, and I was working at a bakery then and listening to Ace of Base on the radio while I made bread.
Clinton was the first election I voted in. Having lived under a Republican since I was six, I was elated by his victory. That turned sour pretty fast, though.
The culture war was alive and well. Pat Buchanan spoke at the 1992 Republican Convention and talked about how the homosexuals wanted to ruin America (spoiler: paraphrase, but not by much). There was a strong sense that being a homophobe was natural and acceptable, far more than today. In 1992, it became illegal for a man in North Carolina to rape his wife, and that was controversial. A bill to legalize oral sex failed, because of the difficulty cops would have in prosecuting homosexuals. In 1994, Gingrich’s Contract On America swept Republicans into legislative power, and they fucked up the country good.
The War on Crime was in full tilt. Locking someone up for life for stealing $20 worth of pizza was considered acceptable by large swaths of the country. Clinton’s reaching-across-the-aisle meant welfare reform, kicking lots of people off of assistance.
We knew about the Greenhouse Effect then, but nobody in power gave a shit.
I paid $200 to get 8 Mb of RAM for my computer, and it was a bargain.
I sent my first email in 1994, to my sister in France. It took me awhile to believe that she’d really get the message right away, and that it wouldn’t cost me anything. I wrote some nonlinear fiction on the web for a college class, using the new “hyperlink” technology, and thought I was cutting-edge for it.
1993-97 is actually somewhat a blur for me. My BIL was on the downhill side of mental illness and lost the fight in 94. My wife went from being a big sister to an only child and just dealing with things (emotional and family) ---- well, we didn’t really come up for air much. I want to say we went egocentric in a way but that isn’t quite it; more dealing with the realization that what we expected as our lives and the reality of what would be became more clear to us.
I do remember getting into computers more than I had been and my place in the economy being very good but I remember a lot of dissatisfaction among our friends. I also remember us coming to terms with all the “time saving devices” in our lives; that even with microwave ovens and everything else that we didn’t seem to have the spare time and free time we had in say the 80s. The older we got (even to today) the more crowded and scheduled each day became and for friends our age as well. Gone were the days of “got anything on for tonight” and welcome to the years of “got any free time next week”.
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It was never a song I pumped up in the car, but as a wedding song it was fun.