Why so little 1990's nostalgia? (Latin, Canada, compared, women)
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
It really wasn't until last decade that people started feeling the 1980s was all that great. When I was a kid in the 90s, the 80s were seen as a corny joke of a decade--which is how the 1970s were viewed until people started rediscovering the kitsch of that decade in the 90s.
Completely.
I actually liked a lot of 80's music - my uncles would kick down their old tapes to me - but even then, I realized how over/melodramatic, overproduced, and excessive a lot of the music that came out of that decade was. Stuff like this is what made it a regrettable joke to people in the 90's:
Contrast that with this. Both songs charted, and both are about adolescent rage and disillusionment, both videos take place in abandoned/decrepit places...
There was a paradigm shift away from the Sharks Vs. Jets, choreographed and stylized rebellion to an attitude of indignation and indifference. I think that people who came of age in the 90's looked back at the 80's as a time where the same sort of consumerism that they (at least, believed that they) loathed was what drove youthful rebellion and counterculture. You were still expected to go out of your way to make your hair look intense, to purposefully dress in an abrasive and confrontational fashion, maybe even wear makeup even though you were a dude; the 90's, you rebelled by making it clear that you couldn't be bothered to wash your hair and had spent the last eight days wearing a shirt that you paid $3 at a thrift store as you bounced from couch to couch, occasionally sleeping in the back of a friend's van or something.
Quote:
I'd say in a few years, 90s nostalgia will really take off.
Again, in the major coastal cities, it's definitely already started, and I only imagine that it'll continue to become more and more obvious.
On the one hand, I'm stoked for it - if my little sister hasn't cut them apart by then, I can go back to wearing my old Nirvana, Tool, Failure, Blur, Jesus Lizard and Gits shirts with impunity - and on the other hand, I have to admit, I shudder somewhat at the notion of some of the higher points of 90's culture being appropriated as marketable pop nothings, but at the end of the day... how is that really any different from anything else that's happened in the past few decades? By the mid 90's, wearing a tie-dyed shirt, throwing a peace sign and saying "groovy, man" was an ironic-but-loved cliche.
On the one hand, I'm stoked for it - if my little sister hasn't cut them apart by then, I can go back to wearing my old Nirvana, Tool, Failure, Blur, Jesus Lizard and Gits shirts with impunity - and on the other hand, I have to admit, I shudder somewhat at the notion of some of the higher points of 90's culture being appropriated as marketable pop nothings, but at the end of the day... how is that really any different from anything else that's happened in the past few decades? By the mid 90's, wearing a tie-dyed shirt, throwing a peace sign and saying "groovy, man" was an ironic-but-loved cliche.
In the 90s, it seemed like the 70s were making a come back.
In the 90s, it seemed like the 70s were making a come back.
They definitely did, but it was sort of misappropriated into a weird late-60's/early-70's cultural mishmash where people seemed to think that you wore your tie-dye to the disco floor, and then you and your buddies would wear your leisure suits and pile into a painted VW bus.
With 80's retro, tracksuits and Members Only jackets were acceptable attire to wear to an 80's club night where they'd play Van Halen and The Clash.
Already with 90's retro, you can ape Kurt Cobain's hair and stubble while wearing a neon, reproduction Rude Dog shirt.
All of which makes total sense when you consider that the people who start following these trends generally were toddlers or not even born yet when those fashions were in full swing.
Again, in the major coastal cities, it's definitely already started, and I only imagine that it'll continue to become more and more obvious.
On the one hand, I'm stoked for it - if my little sister hasn't cut them apart by then, I can go back to wearing my old Nirvana, Tool, Failure, Blur, Jesus Lizard and Gits shirts with impunity - and on the other hand, I have to admit, I shudder somewhat at the notion of some of the higher points of 90's culture being appropriated as marketable pop nothings, but at the end of the day... how is that really any different from anything else that's happened in the past few decades? By the mid 90's, wearing a tie-dyed shirt, throwing a peace sign and saying "groovy, man" was an ironic-but-loved cliche.
Failure ... thanks for reminding me of a great band I had forgotten about.
A '90s revival is definitely starting to bubble up along the coasts. Here in NYC there are a couple of bands who wear old soccer jerseys and do a retro-revival of the Stone Roses / Happy Mondays sound.
I wonder if there'll be a revival of the more abrasive, aggressive '90s genres, like industrial and the harder end of grunge, on the part of teenagers looking to rebel against the overly polite and sentimental sound of the modern day "indie" scene. The past ten years have been a pretty good decade for metal, but not for non-metal heavy rock genres.
I actually liked a lot of 80's music - my uncles would kick down their old tapes to me - but even then, I realized how over/melodramatic, overproduced, and excessive a lot of the music that came out of that decade was. Stuff like this is what made it a regrettable joke to people in the 90's
Contrast that with this. Both songs charted, and both are about adolescent rage and disillusionment, both videos take place in abandoned/decrepit places...
The period around 1992 was sort of an interesting period where really raw post-hardcore bands like Helmet or former avant garde No Wave bands like Sonic Youth could somehow be shown on MTV's midday programming in the wake of the grunge explosion. You'd have "Life is a Highway" being played then you'd have "Unsung" right after that--just a weird change in styles. It was crazy because three years earlier rock music on MTV was mainly hair metal bands--I remember that when all the hair metal bands that had been popular years earlier came out with their followup albums--the videos seemed hopelessly out of date. No one at my school in 1992 would ever come close to admitting to like Motley Crue or Poison or Warrant at that point.
Quote:
There was a paradigm shift away from the Sharks Vs. Jets, choreographed and stylized rebellion to an attitude of indignation and indifference. I think that people who came of age in the 90's looked back at the 80's as a time where the same sort of consumerism that they (at least, believed that they) loathed was what drove youthful rebellion and counterculture. You were still expected to go out of your way to make your hair look intense, to purposefully dress in an abrasive and confrontational fashion, maybe even wear makeup even though you were a dude; the 90's, you rebelled by making it clear that you couldn't be bothered to wash your hair and had spent the last eight days wearing a shirt that you paid $3 at a thrift store as you bounced from couch to couch, occasionally sleeping in the back of a friend's van or something.
Again, in the major coastal cities, it's definitely already started, and I only imagine that it'll continue to become more and more obvious.
On the one hand, I'm stoked for it - if my little sister hasn't cut them apart by then, I can go back to wearing my old Nirvana, Tool, Failure, Blur, Jesus Lizard and Gits shirts with impunity - and on the other hand, I have to admit, I shudder somewhat at the notion of some of the higher points of 90's culture being appropriated as marketable pop nothings, but at the end of the day... how is that really any different from anything else that's happened in the past few decades? By the mid 90's, wearing a tie-dyed shirt, throwing a peace sign and saying "groovy, man" was an ironic-but-loved cliche.
They are already having early 90s dance nights at some of the hipster dance clubs in Portland. I've gone a few times and the night will usually start with a lot of early 90s hiphop and R&B---everything from Bell Biv Devoe to Public Enemy to Color Me Badd to Digital Underground to even forgotten stuff like PM Dawn--although later the DJs usually just end up playing a bunch of mid-90s pop house/techno. But it felt sort of weird to go and see a bunch of 21-year-olds dancing to almost the same hip-hop playlist as my 7th grade dance--but honestly it was fun to mess around and do the running man to Das EFX and "The Power" by Snap.
Which brings up another thing, when waves of nostalgia/retro style hit--which usually go in 20 year cycles--there's the authentic nostalgia of people who actually grew up with the era and love a lot of the music or have fond or not so fond memories of the style and fashion of the period. Then there's the appropriated nostalgia where people who were too young to really remember the period or weren't alive at all, sort of look at it as something cool and new or just something sort of kitsch. For example, last decade there was a small trend among hipsters with the whole corny "Yacht Rock" deal(which was a funny show) to start to bring back the really forgotten smooth MOR hits of the late 1970s and 1980s like Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald. So much so that when Hall and Oates toured recently they had a whole host of younger hipster types at the show in addition to Baby Boomers and older Generation X reminscing about their the pop radio hits of their youth. Sometimes it's an ironic affectation for these now "retro" styles, sometimes people really come to like them--but it's funny what people will choose to revive.
As for the 90s, yeah, you're right, it'll be interesting to see what elements of that decade people will choose to bring back and idealize or fixate on. I remember seeing kids in the mid 90s at my high school wearing tie-dyed Grateful Dead t-shirts, retro seventies-style Pumas and baggy jeans--listening to both 60s/70s rock and gangster rap. I mean, at this point the big albums of the early 90s like Nevermind or Pearl Jam's Ten seem to have never really gone away--with singles from those albums as ubiquitous on some rock radio stations as say something from Led Zeppelin IV or AC/DC's "Back in Black". However, talking to my 12-year-old cousin, I realize that while he might have heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" he hasn't much idea about the rest of Nirvana's output. Nor does he have much idea about the other bands of that era, let alone the more obscure ones, and wearing Doc Martens and bulky flannel would be a weird novelty for him. I've gone back to listen to a lot of the old stuff I discovered as a precocious 14-year-old--stuff like Dinosaur Jr., early Pavement, Fugazi, and even old grunge chestnuts like Badmotorfinger, and what strikes me is how much raw and abrasive music of that era sounds compared to the music of today. Bands of that era were still just coming out of the post-punk/hardcore scene, struggling around that still-underground scene for years, instead of today where you have "indie rock" bands(as if that term even means anything anymore) looking for song placement on a TV commercial as their big break a few years into their career.
Then again I went to a "90s Party" that some girls in their mid-twenties were holding a few years back and they chose to fixate on bright neon colors, bicycle shorts, and Ace of Base. So who know what will be the trends people will try to emulate.
Failure ... thanks for reminding me of a great band I had forgotten about.
A '90s revival is definitely starting to bubble up along the coasts. Here in NYC there are a couple of bands who wear old soccer jerseys and do a retro-revival of the Stone Roses / Happy Mondays sound.
I wonder if there'll be a revival of the more abrasive, aggressive '90s genres, like industrial and the harder end of grunge, on the part of teenagers looking to rebel against the overly polite and sentimental sound of the modern day "indie" scene. The past ten years have been a pretty good decade for metal, but not for non-metal heavy rock genres.
Good call. Yeah, that's the thing--rock genres that have a more burgeoning underground scene that aren't dependent on real mass popularity outside of their core audience will have a lot of bands that the youthful masses can suddenly "discover" when people start to tire of the status quo. The whole overly positive music passed off as "indie" music is basically pop music these days--there's this breed of music like Fun or Grouplove or Foster the People recently that I can't stand. Compare the names of those bands and their songs with what was popular in the more cynical 90s... Yet, if you look at what's going on politically and with the economy--really this should be the more cynical period--yet pop music and modern rock music is almost entirely void of any sort of anger or rebellion these days. Which sort of reflects the theory that when times are really bad, people will sometimes fall back into more upbeat positive music.
I can see the Madchester sound already sort of coming back with some English bands---evenutally it will get more prevalant since we've had about a decade of four to the floor beats and synth-pop/dance punk bands aping the 80s and New Wave music--going back to music with old school breakbeats of the 90s(which were beats sampled from the 1970s) would be a little different and feel almost fresh again.
The period around 1992 was sort of an interesting period where really raw post-hardcore bands like Helmet or former avant garde No Wave bands like Sonic Youth could somehow be shown on MTV's midday programming in the wake of the grunge explosion. You'd have "Life is a Highway" being played then you'd have "Unsung" right after that--just a weird change in styles.
This is an aspect of the ‘90s that I really do have a lot of nostalgia for. The post-Nirvana but pre-Internet era struck a fun balance between obscurity and accessibility -- MTV and the record industry were throwing every underground subculture at the wall to see what would stick, so even if you lived in the burbs or the sticks, you could get exposed to all sorts of cool stuff if you kept your eyes and ears open.
But you couldn’t immediately dive online and learn everything about it -- instead you’d have to page through music magazines and haunt the used bin of your local record store, trying to puzzle out the context of some bizarre and fascinating song that you’d heard on late night radio or seen in a 90-second snippet on Beavis & Butthead. For me, that sense of mystery and discovery was half the fun of being a serious music fan.
One watershed moment that separates the early 90s and the late 90s, and probably had a big effect on the relative perceptions of late Gen X / early Gen Y versus kids a few years younger, is the 1996 Telecommunications Act that removed the limits on media ownership and allowed Clear Channel to start buying up broadcast radio stations. I remember it very vividly -- all of a sudden, all my favorite radio stations started sucking.
NY had an amazing hard rock station (Q104.3) that played what was in retrospect an incredibly eclectic mix of contemporary grunge, old-school hard rock, and semi-underground metal and hardcore. Unfortunately, Clear Channel bought it in ‘96 and turned it into a generic classic rock station.
Quote:
They are already having early 90s dance nights at some of the hipster dance clubs in Portland. I've gone a few times and the night will usually start with a lot of early 90s hiphop and R&B---everything from Bell Biv Devoe to Public Enemy to Color Me Badd to Digital Underground to even forgotten stuff like PM Dawn--although later the DJs usually just end up playing a bunch of mid-90s pop house/techno. But it felt sort of weird to go and see a bunch of 21-year-olds dancing to almost the same hip-hop playlist as my 7th grade dance--but honestly it was fun to mess around and do the running man to Das EFX and "The Power" by Snap.
Speaking of early-'90s R&B, I wouldn't mind a revival of the "vocal group" style where several equally good singers perform together as a disciplined unit. I was listening to some old En Vogue stuff the other day and realizing how much practice it must have taken them to get that sound in an era before Auto-Tune and digital post-production. R&B still has plenty of individual divas and crooners, but that style of close-harmony group singing has fallen out of fashion.
Quote:
Which brings up another thing, when waves of nostalgia/retro style hit--which usually go in 20 year cycles--there's the authentic nostalgia of people who actually grew up with the era and love a lot of the music or have fond or not so fond memories of the style and fashion of the period. Then there's the appropriated nostalgia where people who were too young to really remember the period or weren't alive at all, sort of look at it as something cool and new or just something sort of kitsch. For example, last decade there was a small trend among hipsters with the whole corny "Yacht Rock" deal(which was a funny show) to start to bring back the really forgotten smooth MOR hits of the late 1970s and 1980s like Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald. So much so that when Hall and Oates toured recently they had a whole host of younger hipster types at the show in addition to Baby Boomers and older Generation X reminscing about their the pop radio hits of their youth. Sometimes it's an ironic affectation for these now "retro" styles, sometimes people really come to like them--but it's funny what people will choose to revive.
Good point. On the one hand, you have young kids looking for something different and (to them) new, but on the other, you have people in middle age who have finally have the disposable income and cultural clout to indulge their nostalgia for the stuff they grew up with.
You can see this even in the way that the canonization of the ‘80s punk/indie scene has been building steam over the past few years. I can understand the impulse behind it -- as a teenager in the Nineties who got into older punk and postpunk by way of grunge/alternative, I wished I had been born ten years earlier so I could have been around for bands like Black Flag and the Minutemen -- but it’s a little depressing the way a certain group of bands has become the object of “hall of fame” idol worship and packaged nostalgia that’s not all that different from the Baby Boomer classic rock it was supposed to be rebelling against. At least the Stones put on a show of releasing a new album to tour with every couple years instead of just replaying Exile on Main Street start to finish.
Quote:
Then again I went to a "90s Party" that some girls in their mid-twenties were holding a few years back and they chose to fixate on bright neon colors, bicycle shorts, and Ace of Base. So who know what will be the trends people will try to emulate.
They'll bring back Hypercolor shirts. That's gotta be it.
I remember growing up in the 90's, kids rejected music from previous decades. We would NEVER listen to 80's music let alone 50's, 60's, or 70's. We coveted alternative and rap, and watched MTV religiously. The baby-boomer generation dominated all other venues during the 90's. Tv, commercials, politics, movies, and radio stations at the time were constantly playing 60's oldies music. You would never see a tv commercial with Nirvana, Green Day, or Dr. Dre music. 90's music rarely got in airplay other than maybe 1 local alternative station. Our parents considered 90's music evil and called it "noise".
Today, you hear a lot more current music on tv, in commercials, and on the radio. You rarely hear 60's music at all. 80's music has made a comeback since 2004 for nostalgic purposes in pop culture.
When 90's nostalgia comes, it will be because of the music. There is nothing else from the 90's I can think of that is worth being nostalgic about. Baggy clothing was a staple of the 90s, but has only recently faded. I doubt people suddenly start wearing pants falling halfway down their butts again. Maybe neon clothing makes a comeback.
I think it already sort of has. I sometimes see teenagers wearing bright neon-colored sneakers or printed sweatshirts or t-shirts these days.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
... thanks for reminding me of a great band I had forgotten about.