That was the heyday of Seinfeld. Watch a few episodes and you’ll get a good feel for the Urban Nineties.
Yep. In the 1990s, it was all about locking people up.
I was born in '65, so I was 28 in '93, and just married. Selected answers to your questions:
> Was there a strong 70s revival vibe? If so, when?
Not that I recall.
> Was the “Multimedia Revolution” actually a huge thing, especially amongst Boomers?
Are you referring to online stuff with this? At the beginning of the time frame you’re talking about, while there were a number of online services available (Compuserve, America Online, Prodigy, etc.), as well as things like Usenet and bulletin board services, the Web was in its infancy, and going online, for anything, was still a niche sort of thing.
By the mid '90s, people were getting online in larger numbers, but very few people had broadband, so it was slow dial-up, and “going online” was more about email, a little bit of web surfing, and browsing forums (like the original Straight Dope forum on AOL 
); things like watching videos online were still way off, and most people still didn’t trust using their credit cards for online shopping.
And, for people who were a bit older, like many Boomers were at that time, it was all a little confusing at first. There’s a now-infamous clip from the *Today *show, from 1994, with Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric being completely clueless about the internet, and email addresses.
> Was it really as optimistic a time as it seems in hindsight?
Sort of? We’d come out of a recession in the early '90s, and I remember, in '90 or '91, analysts talking about the '90s being a decade of austerity and restraint, after the excesses of the '80s. But, then, the US won a fast war in the Middle East, that made a lot of Americans very happy, and the economy boomed. I also recall reading articles in the mid '90s by economists who suggested that recessions might be a thing of the past. (They were wrong, of course.)
> Would you say the US was healthier in some ways politically?
Up until '94, maybe. (See comments from earlier posters about Newt Gingrich.)
When did Grunge/Post Grunge/etc fall off?
> What music did people above 40 in say 1995 listen to?
Most of them, if they were still listening to music, were probably listening to the music they had listened to when they were 20, which means they were listening to stuff from the '70s or before.
> Do you recall the Macarena fondly or with horror?
Cheesy and was way overplayed for a short time, especially at wedding receptions.
> Were the Cranberries a huge band in 1994-1995?
In the US, I’d say “reasonably popular,” but definitely not “huge.” Their first four albums all made the top 20 in the US, but they only had two songs make the top 40 (“Linger” and “Free to Decide”).
high school
Bell bottoms made a bit of a comeback. I remember asking my teacher and they said about 20 years after people stop being teenagers, they get nostalgic and want to bring back things from their youth. Its happening now with our generation wanting to bring back nintendo and other 90s things.
[/QUOTE]
How did the general feeling in the US differ from today?
[/QUOTE]
the war on terrorism hadn’t started. Back then the fringe GOP members were still the fringe (now they’re the mainstream). The debt was starting to be paid off.
Multimedia revolution was more late 90s. THats when people started burning their own CDs at home, that was a huge thing at first. You could make your own CDs with songs you downloaded via P2P. MP3 players didn’t really exist until the mid aughts.
I remember we went from burning your own CDs, to burning CDs that stored the music as MP3s (so you could store more), to MP3 players, to cell phones to played MP3s you downloaded, to cell phones that streamed MP3s. It took about 20 years but it was a lot of advances.
I think so. We weren’t as dysfunctional. Climate change wasn’t as scary. Poltiics wasn’t as divided. Terrorism wasn’t as big of a threat. White nationalism, fascism and racism were still fringe movements. Nobody really cared about North Korean nukes.
Yeah.
Don’t remember
Fondly
Define huge. They were on the radio and were a popular band, but I wouldn’t call them huge. Huge bands of the 90s were bands like nirvana, smashing pumpkins, pearl jam, etc.
I began hearing about “MP3” files a year after the timeframe you specified. For awhile I could not figure out what all the shouting was about—who the fuck cares what specific format your audio file is in? Then the light dawned: these suckers are 1/10th the size of AIFF or WAV files! And they still sound good! Napster was in its heyday in 1998. I downloaded all the albums I had previously owned on vinyl or cassette. First, that is. I admit I went on to pirate some I had never paid for. I later on made some post hoc purchases out of respect for the musicians, but that came later.
I had an external CD burner as of 1997, before most people did. And I had an audio line in from my choice of either a cassette player or a turntable and could digitize my friends’ albums and give them their tracks on CDROM. I was popular for this. I made CD case album covers and printed labels for the CDROMs. (Later I bought white printable blanks and printed directly on the CDs, but that also came later on down the pike).
I had SoundEdit 16 in a house of musicians. It means I could stick a microphone, or a pair, in the room and record the musicians live and then edit the wave forms in SoundEdit. I knew what it meant but they kind of didn’t. They didn’t get it, and dismissed it as the same thing as MIDI files.
I was a freshly minted MBA working for investment banks (UBS, Lehman Bros and Nikko Securities) in Tokyo and Hong Kong. Single for about half of that time period.
1970’s revival? Are you fucking kidding me? The 70’s were bland and only saving grace maybe was being the impetus for the punk/American Hardcore scene. Ain’t nobody that grew up in the 70’s was nostalgic for that decade.
“Multimedia Revolution” was CD’s. Pretty huge in that they were portable vs 12" records.
Dunno about optimistic. There was a recession in 1991 that wasn’t helped by the Iraqi invasion. As a newly minted MBA, it was a bleak time without many job opportunities.
Would you say the US was healthier in some ways politically? There was still the 4th estate, and didn’t have the interwebs propaganda masquerading as alternative facts.
Did people in their early/mid 20s in the 90s like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach, etc? Not sure. I was in my 30’s
What music did people above 40 in say 1995 listen to? Not sure, people above 40 were old in 1995.
Do you recall the Macarena fondly or with horror? Fondly. Remember many an enjoyable late night in Hong Kong clubs where the house band played Macarena.
Were the Cranberries a huge band in 1994-1995? Musta been because even I heard of them at the time living in Hong Kong.
1997 was the Asian crisis. It sucked and impacted the global economy. You probably don’t even know what I’m talking about…
I’m afraid my age disqualifies me from OP’s survey. :o
It was the End of History, no less. The Final Triumph of Liberal Democracy. Those savvy prognostications would now seem like a Monty Python sketch.
I think the Asian crisis barely registered as a blip on New York stock markets. I remember being at the U.S. Consulate a few weeks before the baht was floated and hearing an American plead for help — all his savings were in Thai-baht bank accounts. I suggested buying gold, but he wasn’t interested in that solution. The American consular official was even less helpful: “My salary is paid in American dollars. Ha ha ha!”
As I look back on the 90’s, I remember one of the few good financial decisions I made during that decade was investing 100% of my 401K in the stock market.
I was in my 20s, so I’ll play. Although mine is from a British perspective, so my cultural touchpoints will be different.
Two words: Cool Britannia. After a sluggish economy that was just starting to recover in 93, to the height of pure positive joy at the election of Tony Blair’s Labour government in 97, the mid 90s were pretty special.
God no. It was all about Britpop.
Can’t speak for the US, but the UK felt a tonne more optimistic than in today’s Brexit world.
Not sure multimedia was a word which ever crossed our lips. We had mobile phones, and texting, had just about got email. The internet was just weird and useless.
Yes, it really was.
Never heard of these guys. We listened to more British stuff in those days - Pulp, Suede, Blur, Oasis. No idea what people in their 40s liked.
It was as awful then as it is now.
They were huge when I was still in College in '93.
“Older”, eh? Why you little…fuck. JK. Well, this one time back in '94 I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt…
Born right smack in the middle of 1967. Enlisted in the Army 1992-1996. Honestly? I was in a pretty terrible and asocial place from about 1981 until 1995 or so, so most of the OP points don’t ring any bells. Seems like in about 1994 the USA lost its conservative party to whatever it is the Republicans have become and it’s been nonstop backbiting and decline ever since. You may want to look into Newt Gingrich if you’re interested in what happened. I did like the Cranberries though, but I can’t listen to them today because they take me right back in time. Then parenthood happened in 1996 and I became too busy with work and babies to stay relevant.
I think overall you can look at today and back then as being a pair of Thomas Kinkaid paintings: Technically not the same, but not strikingly different, either.
I’m too young to weigh in according to the OP, but I have fond memories of those years (I was 10-15) and I definitely remember the 70s nostalgia. Partly because my mom graduated high school in 1979, so she kept the dream of the 70s alive my whole childhood, but it was a thing in pop culture too. Dazed and Confused was one of my favorite movies back then. The Smashing Pumpkins song 1979 was a huge hit. I actually just watched that Woody Harrelson/Randy Quaid movie Kingpin again last night, from 1996, and the soundtrack was about 50/50 90s alternative and 70s classics. Quentin Tarantino was huge, and his movies were full of 70s music.
The Cranberries as I recall were big, but not huge. Second tier fame, I guess. They were on the radio and most people knew of them, but they were nowhere near as big as Pearl Jam or Counting Crows. Grunge started to die when Kurt Cobain died, but its reverberations were felt throughout the decade. Bush burst on the world in 94 and they were solidly grunge, and non-grunge bands like Counting Crows and Weezer both released very grungy second albums in 95-96. REM put out Monster in 94, and I got it for Christmas as REM was one of my favorite bands, and it was very grunge-inspired compared to their earlier work. In fact, while grunge as the edgy, underground, countercultural movement was dying by 1994 when Kurt died, grunge as solid mainstream bandwagon everyone had to jump on was at its peak in the 94-96 time frame.
I didn’t have a computer until 1999 but some of my friends did, and I remember playing Oregon Trail and getting on AOL chatrooms during these years. To me it all seemed like a novelty, and I didn’t quite understand why everybody was saying this stuff was going to change the world.
Oh, and you didn’t mention it, but the biggest cultural influence on kids my age during that entire era was Beavis and Butthead. It’s hard to explain how freaking hilarious and influential it was to a 12 year old in 1994. I had a teacher who would lecture us on how horrible the show was, and she would call them “Beavis and his brother” so as not to speak Butthead’s name out loud. That made the show all the more hilarious.
Grand Funk Railroad LPs.
I was in library school working on my MLS 1991-92 and looking for my first library job in 1993. We librarians talked about hypertext and the World Wide Web quite a lot, but hadn’t really seen it and I don’t think we fully appreciated the potential or what it would mean to our professional lives.
August 1994, I was a NASA contractor in a documents library, and saw Mozilla for the first time. It was like looking at the future.
1995, when that contract ended and I was out of a job, I was someone who knew what html was and could write simple code in Notepad. It made me suddenly very popular and altered the course of my whole career; instead of spending the last 25 years as a document archivist, I became a website manager.
Ok; I’ll bite.
I had gotten back from deployment for Desert Storm (my National Guard unit was activated) and finished undergrad in December of 1992. The subsequent 3 years or so was finishing a grad school program which I absolutely loved. I was very socially and academically engaged and had a blast. Those years were some of the best of my life.
Not in my experience
Most of the folks I ran with felt things were pretty good.
I didn’t discover the internet until 1999; my TV was square; and getting a CD player in my Jeep was the tops. I was not aware of any “Multimedia Revolution”
For me it was.
Most here would disagree, but I was (am) a conservative Republican, so this was like the golden age.
I was completely unaware of “grunge” or “post-grunge.” Still pretty much am.
I’ve never heard of these three bands. All I listened to at the time was country and '50s oldies. At parties, fellow students would of course have more contemporary CDs to play, but it was just background noise to me.
Well, I’d *heard *of it. A line dance, right? But I can’t say I’m familiar with the dance or the tune. (I actually did my share of line dancing and two-stepping at the local big-huge country venue. That was a HUGE thing at that time, at least in my neck of the woods. I had the hat, the boots, the rope belt, etc.)
I’ve never heard of the Cranberries.
Beepers were more of a 1993 thing.
The first wave of the crack epidemic as I recall. All of a sudden young white girls were heading to the hood to get a fix and it drove the media and law enforcement bonkers. Oh, and of course they had beepers!
Edited to say I’m not sure if I understand record charts 
I was using the band’s discography entry on Wikipedia. That chart shows that “Zombie” did not make it onto the US Billboard Top 100 chart, though it was a top 20 hit in a number of European countries. (Then again, I’m presuming that the Wikipedia entry is accurate.)
The Wikipedia entry for the song itself lists that it ranked in the top 40 on four different Billboard sub-charts, but not on their main “Hot 100” chart.
I’m a bit out of your age group at 68, but that still puts me at my early/mid 40’s in 93-97. So I’ll bite, for what that’s worth, which isn’t much:
>>>Was there a strong 70s revival vibe? If so, when?
I’ve no idea. Certainly not with me.
>>>How did the general feeling in the US differ from today?
General feeling? I’m not sure there is, or was, any such thing.
>>>Was the “Multimedia Revolution” actually a huge thing, especially amongst Boomers?
It’s my impression that few Boomers were paying any attention to it; but my impression might be wrong. IME most people still didn’t have computers, though it had gotten more common to be using them at work. I’m pretty sure it was during this stretch of time when the town planning board put out a survey asking, among other things, what the area needed and somebody responded that we needed an ISP; and none of us had more than the vaguest notion of what they were talking about.
>>>Was it really as optimistic a time as it seems in hindsight?
More optimistic than now, I think; but I doubt that any time was as optimistic (or as pessimistic) as it looks in hindsight.
>>>Would you say the US was healthier in some ways politically?
In some ways, yes. In others, possibly not. I think there was somewhat less splitting off into groups that were only talking within themselves, but also I think there were more voices that weren’t being heard.
>>>When did Grunge/Post Grunge/etc fall off?
I have no idea either when it fell off or when it started. (Well, some idea, I suppose, as I wouldn’t have placed it in say 1930.)
>>>Did people in their early/mid 20s in the 90s like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach, etc?
I don’t know.
>>>What music did people above 40 in say 1995 listen to?
I was listening to Celtic, when I could find it; to what is now I think called “classic rock” though I can’t remember when it started to be called that; and some range of other things. Can’t speak to anybody else.
>>>Do you recall the Macarena fondly or with horror?
Neither. I vaguely recall people talking about it, and my equally vague impression is that the whole thing was silly, but also that it was often intended that way.
>>>Were the Cranberries a huge band in 1994-1995?
I have no idea. Not with me, anyway.
The multimedia revolution, stuff like PCs becoming mainstream, Laserdisks, the new consoles that claimed to be as powerful as computers, the game Myst, etc.