The 90s


I went to HS and college in the 90s and I will tell you millennials it sucked!! I don't know why you think it was cool - it wasn't There was *beep* mainstream music like 4 Non Blondes (featured in this stinker of a film), bad clothes and you couldn't get laid without being terrified you were gonna get AIDS. The I wish I had been adult in the 80s instead. Much cooler!! Better music, no AIDS, better cocaine and less worries. One more thing, punks didn't listen to Nirvana. We listen to Bikini Kill and the Gits from Seattle. After it became popular that *beep* was jock music. Sorry the truth hurts.

reply

I was an adult in the 1980s (college class of '77) so perhaps I can comment on this. This mostly applies to New York and Northern New Jersey - the latter in 1984 to 1997 and then back to New York. Experiences for those in Nashville or Tucson probably vary.

1. Fewer worries: Arguably true. College debt hadn't become the racket it is now. If you had just about any kind of college degree you could get some kind of job, say in publishing. The pay wasn't great but there usually were full benefits and some degree of job security. The contingent job/freelancer concept hadn't fully developed yet.

Housing: relatively cheap for both rental and purchased housing at the beginning of the 1980s. But the first housing "boom" (ripoff?) started in the middle of the decade. Rental to condo conversions were early symptoms.

Crime: A drawback for the decade. There was a definite tension on the streets because the odds of being a victim (probably more than once) were so high. The heroin problem that had been going on for decades (see Manchild in the Promised Land) seemed to morph directly into the crack epidemic.

2. Better cocaine: Speaking of drugs, I've never used that one so I have no point of comparison.

3. AIDs: Seemingly came out of nowhere to become a very big deal by 1985, if I recall correctly.

4. Bad clothes: Not something I ever could spend much money on. Probably anything that is very fashionable at one moment is going to look ridiculous soon after. That is until it makes a retro/ironic comeback.

5. Music: I'm usually several wavelengths off what is going on, so I'm not the best judge of this. Even though I'm in the right age group, I mostly missed the first wave of punk (starting in 1975?).

But, yeah, Nirvana was over-hyped. Maybe if they had lasted longer . . .

So give the 1980s an edge over the 1990s. Although if you have money/economic security, on a personal level almost any decade can be a tolerable one.

reply

The early 90s, after Nirvana broke and before Britpop went huge, was the best time for radio music ever. As mainstream music goes, you can do a lot worse than the rise of alternative.

reply

[deleted]

There was plenty of AIDs in the 80s, people just didn't realize they were spreading it around.

reply

I get the feeling you'd have been miserable in any era.

I went to college in the '90s and loved the hell out of that time. The music was incredibly good, as good, or better, in my opinion than most of what we heard in the '80s, which is when I was in high school. Just because 4 Non Blondes suck doesn't mean the rest of the music did. In fact, I believe that the '90s, or more specifically from about 1991-98, were a time when the musicians, and their fans, ruled the roost. Before that, the record companies called the shots, and churned out the crap that is '80s music. The Beastie Boys, and hip hop in general, really kicked it off, but Nirvana took it into overdrive. For a long time, record companies had no idea what to do, and ended up letting the bands do what they wanted.

Also worth noting: that golden age began and ended in a high school gym. A decade that was launched in 1991 with such promise by Nirvana, playing to a riotous, moshing audience in a dark, smoky gym, celebrated by cheerleaders adorned with the symbol for anarchy, came to a screeching halt in 1998 in another, very different, gym. We should have known such freedom could only last so long, and after a decade of floundering, wondering how to identify, and worse, how to market, grunge and "alternative" music, the record companies struck back. “If kids want a gym,” they seemed to say, “we'll give them a gym, but on our terms.”

No more throbbing, heaving masses of teens moving as they see fit, no more darkness, no more smoke, no more musicians, even. While Nirvana represented a complete lack of control, at least on the part of the labels, this new paradigm epitomized control. Get a 17-year-old girl, chosen not because of an ability to write music or play an instrument, but for her wholesome looks, teach her, and her co-stars, tightly choreographed dance moves, and put them into a clean, well-lit gym, and voila! Smiling little automatons, dressed by committee, dancing in lockstep sync to music created on a computer was the answer the labels had been seeking for a decade, and paved the way for a never-ending parade of assembly-line identical musical acts ready to be marketed to target demographics the moment the machine churned them out.

reply

Pretty sure they had AIDS in the '80s.

reply