So new post-#MeToo theory of the ‘90s is that as institutions from businesses to the Senate and Presidency of the United States “grappled with sexual harassment” and started reorienting against it and trying to sort practitioners out the NY and LA culture industries held out effectively, relying on tight internal relationships and captive legal and para-legal institutions (“privilege” meant “private law”).
Other norms too – I cannot emphasize enough how in the 90s fucking teenage groupies was accepted and celebrated as definitional of rock stardom – this was where you first saw “new economy” companies generalizing “rockstar” to “elite and valued employee”
This differential sorting left the culture-shaping industries of the time consisting of, and thus the culture guided by, a cohort that was significantly higher in both desire for human exploitation and skill at human manipulation than the rest of society, over and above the dynamics you would normally expect pressing in that direction, and this is critical to understanding '90s culture in retrospect.
Just as those seeking tribal tattoos 20 and 30 years ago were drawn to the aesthetics of an exoticized, ancient culture, so too are many of the new, Gen Z tribal fans: specifically, to the years 1997 to 2004, and their curious folkways.
That is the cultural period Aesthetics Wiki defines as “Y2K,” an era that is in the process of being strip-mined by cool internet people under 30 for outfit ideas, design trends and general vibes.
Thinking about how to serve up some musing on Clinton and realizing that like no one under 30 will understand the Bono references.
Honestly I was born a little late for them myself, I didn’t really follow youth music until 1996, I knew he was like, the celebrity lead of a recognizable band, but it seemed fundamentally as arbitrary as if it had been Michael Stipe riding on Clinton’s jet and blurbing neoliberalism in Newsweek.
The hilarious thing is that as late as the 90′s Boomers were still seen as the generation in the shadow of their WWII-vet parents, whom they selfishly spited by refusing to grow up. Bill Clinton was the first boomer president, literally and figuratively, he liked McDonalds and jazz music and that was enough for some of the old establishment gatekeepers of the time to declare him Unfit to Lead.
And I guess this has just passed from common knowledge to historical curiosity because I see not a hint of irony, or acknowledgement that this just happens every thirty years or so, from people who see boomers as a uniquely privileged, uniquely evil class in American history, the eternal oppressor in the way a 19th century Marxist might talk of ‘the aristocracy’. And yes those people are idiots, but sometimes you have to push back on idiocy.
Not terribly sure what you’re looking for, so I’ll just riff that both the general positivity around the early-90s Desert Shield/Storm Iraq War and the later-90s “Greatest Generation” WWII commemorations and cinema revival were used by Boomers to distance from earlier Vietnam War opposition and use war to reconnect with their parents’ generation.
Meditate on the role of the Vietnam War in Forrest Gump’s 90s Boomer-experience pageant.
God, how much of ‘80s pop was just “and now… The British Queers!”
I used to nod in agreement about how rave was just derived from gay clubs, Paradise Garage and all that, but god, it’s like getting your prostate slammed gives you +5 Synthesizer
This was the context of Trent Reznor calling himself a “synth faggot” in 1994
90s “electronica” was just a second attempt to adapt gay dance club music to the albums-and-radio-singles recording industry structure after “disco” failed, huh?
Before you’re like “oh ‘prestige TV’ isn’t all that”, I want to remind you that as recently as the early 1990s, a dinosaur scalesuit working-class family sitcom with slapstick elements was actually pretty cutting edge because though it DID reuse plot beats that had been in regular circulation since the pre-television white ethnic “little theater”, it did so in awareness of what they had done with that on Roseanne
The Simpsons should end already so a bunch of people who used to watch it but don’t anymore watch the finale, which then triggers an extremely specific group of people with extremely specific things wrong with them get weird about it. I would like to see that. Gif sets. People posting favorite quotes. People being like oh yikes yikes yikes I knew some of this wasn’t going to age well but damn. A 20k Moe/Milhouse fanfic that launches a shipping juggernaut.Tumblr user springinspringfield with shaking hands types up a three thousand word post on how Bart Simpson was always written to be trans coded. And I wanna read that post and be like “yup argument checks out” and incorporate it into my sincerely held belief system
There’s a genuine discussion to be had about Smithers’ place in the queer canon and I think it should be held by teens who were not alive when the show started airing but nevertheless make very confident statements about the 90s
the one experience that unites all 90s and early 2000s kids is experiencing at least one work of fiction with a deceptively adorable illustration of cute animals on the cover who live in societies with an established political system, hierarchy of leadership and culture and are driven from their homes by human activity and/or engage in violent conflicts with other animals in similar communities that lead to many of the characters’ brutal deaths, which are described in graphic detail and which left you briefly emotionally traumatized by being confronted with the concept of your own fragile mortality before you were 10
the 4 horsemen
it has been brought to my attention that this was an ENTIRE GENRE of children’s fiction for some reason
