You have created a complete ‘90s dystopia in this piece, dishearteningly close to the one I spent a decade desperately trying to avoid.

You forgot the part where everybody went to Woodstock ‘99 and Limp Bizkit was awsome!  And it would have been perfect except for the whiny girls who complained.

Even I have to suppress some stuff.

Men nowadays, except maybe a handful of youth ministers in the Midwest, have no idea how sharp a goatee can really look.

Nicely played. The whole thing, really, but I love that you were also able to work in the “youth pastor” meme…

We also have youth pastors to thank for keeping frosted tips alive long after Justin Timberlake went solo.

heh

They even aren’t really on Google.  No Wikipedia, nothing.

Psychobaby, RIP.

Zif, I feel strongly that you should tell your girlfriend that any fashion trend that Midwestern evangelicals trying to look hip are behind is something she should adore in a boyfriend.  Who wouldn’t?

And whither white boy dreads, for that matter? A big, matty mess hastily stuffed under a Rasta Tam. Nothing said “hey, I am not going to give you a hard time for living in your parents basement” quite like White Boy Dreads.

Ah, those carefree years.

Nicely done! And what is it with youth minsters and goatees? Every. Single. One.

wither, even.

Those youth ministers make a goatee look so dreamy that I think I might just grow a nice curly goatee of my own to go with my poofy hair (half Jewish, and oy vey did I get the hair!) and big ol’ brown eyes. That’ll bring those Greek-alphabet-reciting ladies a’running! I sure do wish I’d been just a bit older than 15 before the end of decade, I could have so thoroughly enjoyed a decade of DMB, Bud Light and Tool.

“Friends” is why I moved to New York, y’all, and it has not disappointed!

You and Marc just scored one of those sweet rent-controlled $300/month 1000sqf 2-bedroom pads in the Village, didja? I remember when I had one of those back in the 90s. Don’t get me started on the kooky gals who lived next door.

Nice try, Marcotte.

Every once in a while I get nostalgic for the nineties.  Thank you for reminding my why I shouldn’t.

Oh, this is a joke?  I guess I am a joke then, and my life in the 90’s was a big joke.  That was pretty much it until about 1996 when I entered a very serious, long-term relationship.

Oh well, I had fun.  And those fake memories that everyone is laughing at are my real memories, but I love them. 

Goodness, I graduated college in 1999. Whyever would you think I’m making it up whole cloth?

Tool fans: now those guys were real men.

Geeeeeeeenius.

@Mighty Ponygirl:  The singer from Strike Anywhere is still rocking the dreads!  http://www.b9store.com/strikeanywhere

I don’t think I’ve ever seen him with the hat, though…

I graduated in 91 so I’m quite a bit older than you are.  But we 20 somethings at the time, or at least my crowd of friends, definintely did most of that stuff.  We totally got together for Friends, and yep, we even had Melrose place parties.  Yes, I loved all that music.  Yes, I went to Lilith Fair.  Don’t even get me started on 90210, our seminal show.  To this day I can’t hear R.E.M.‘s Losing My Religion without thinking about Dylan and Brenda breaking up. 

We fucked like bunnies too, today they call that friends with benefits, or hooking up.  We didn’t name it.  We were all great friends of both genders.  I guess I am not that tuned into the in-crowd joke, but that’s okay, I wouldn’t trade my 90’s for anyone else’s 90’s, and that is the truth!

I loved the 90’s too!  It was the only time I listened to radio, though my tastes differ to yours.  Smashing Pumpkins, Rage Against the Machine, Alice in Chains, Tool (yes!), Tori Amos, Bjork, PJ Harvey, Fiona Apple.  Oh and Loreena McKennitt, she had Mummer’s Dance playing a lot on the radio.  I love that song.  The late 90’s were awesome too for music.  Pretty much, check out the soundtrack to Brokedown Palace.  Silence by Delirium (which features Sarah McLachlan) and all those other lovely haunting dance tracks.  You just don’t get that kind of mainstream music anymore.  Now it’s all about the stutter effect and saying PARTY and CLUB a lot.

Also, I was more of a Seinfeld girl myself, I never much liked Friends xx

it is astonishing how much our 90’s were alike, except in montana we didn’t have south padre island. we just drove out a dirt road in the woods somewhere and built a fire to stare at while we drank.

but seriously, the parts about Dave Matthew, Phish, and Tool are weirdly accurate.

to add: cruising around in my best friend’s little pick-up while we listened to NIN and Hey Jealousy and that one song by Blind Melon. And someone who moved to MT from a big city introducing us to ani difranco in the late ‘90’s.

When did “X-Files” go off the air? (I shudder to look.)  That was our TV/potluck show.

What is this I don’t even

And K-NACK? Is that some Texas station? Or is it a reference to KNAC and how unfknblvbl it was?

Ha ha ... I once, well, “broke up” is probably too strong a phrase, but decided to not go out with a guy I had hooked up with who was really into me because he was also really into Phish. He also had a goatee! But it was definitely when he gave me the Phish tape that I decided I had to stop it before it went any further. That was in 1996.

I’m so glad all these fashions are coming back in to style.

Is it just me or are fashions recycling at a crazy fast pace? It used to be (back in my day!) that when something came back around, you’d be digging through your parents’ old stuff. Then the 80s stuff started to come back (which has been on and off for about 10 years now), and we were talking about stuff I clearly remembered and now it’s stuff that I still have. Those peasant skirts did come in handy when I was pregnant! Just wore them under the belly.

Full disclosure: I am not the most fashion forward person. I kind of have my own thing going, which may or may not overlap with what’s in style at any given point. But even I can look back in horror at how I dressed in the 90s. One of my college friends posted some pictures from freshman year (‘95) on FB and we all wanted to de-tag ourselves. :-(

@ Eric ... Totally! Sunday nights on Fox!

Eric_RoM@23:

There’s a difference between when X-Files went off the air (2003) and when it should have (1998). But hell yes. My dorm freshman year had Friday night showings of X-Files in the dining room (remember when it was on Friday nights? (1995-96).

I’m the same age as Amanda and swerved very close to the heart of this. Way too close for comfort. Yikes!

What, Keith - you didn’t enjoy those halcyon Robert Patrick seasons?

I still dream of the 90’s

Weird, I wrote a post about feeling nostalgic for the 90’s just last month, although I miss a very different 90s (understanding of course that Amanda’s joking). (warning: that links to a post referencing Susan Voelz, sometime member of Poi Dog Pondering, who some might compare to DMB, but those people would be dinks).

Anyway, as I said over there, “I have a theory (which is mine), which is that “The 90s” actually comprised a period from about 1988 (the year of the first Pixies’ album) to about 1994 (around the time Curt Kobain killed himself. Not that Curt “owned” the 90’s or that his death caused its downfall or anything, but it’s as good a date as any, and my memory of the period is of things going downhill fast after that). At least, this was the in-between time period for the cultural highlights of my in-between generation. Yes, other stuff (soul-deadening effluvia) happened in the 90s “the decade”—boy bands, nu-metal, rap-rock—but those things didn’t belong to “The 90s”.”

Discuss.

Ha ha! I got all the way to “dudebro” before I figured it out. Well done: you’re just contrary enough that you might really like DMB. Shudder.

(around the time Curt Kobain killed himself. Not that Curt “owned” the 90’s or that his death caused its downfall or anything, but it’s as good a date as any, and my memory of the period is of things going downhill fast after that).

My personal theory is that for a brief period of time, the content and product somehow got ‘away’ from the labels. (Your idea of 88-94 is about as good a set as any.) And it took them some time before they could get their hands back on the rudder, so to speak.

You can essentially spilt the ‘90s into two halves and the spit comes shortly after Cobain’s death. After that, the DIY nature of the proto-punk ‘grunge’ movement and its influence gave way to more glossy radio friendly unit shifters (to take from Cobain…). Sure, it was still there, but it was no longer seriously hyped as being prominent.

(Also of interest to note is that the sales charts were switched around ‘91 or ‘92 to tabulate actual sales instead of airplay. This was when everybody suddenly found out the labels weren’t really in control. [It also showed that C&W;sold better than people originally thought. But that’s a different argument.] The only benefit this had for the labels was that it allowed them to better tailor their marketing.)

Amazingly, when the record companies reasserted control, they then had to contend with Napster and other file-sharing processes. Now they controlled the message, but not the messengers. A different-but-similar fight. And I’m pretty sure that about this time FCC rules under Clinton started to be changed to be more pro-monopoly friendly. Radio then sided with the labels and has followed in lock-step down that road ever since.

(As a side argument, I’d probably say that every decade, musically at least, can be split in the middle. The sixties weren’t really anything before, say, ‘65. The seventies didn’t ‘start’ until maybe ‘73. All the ‘major’ events in music tend to happen in the middle of the calendar decade. But that’s if you want to tell time by musical trends. Those never conform to easy to predict periods of time and there is a lot of overlap.)

*Golf clap*
This is the sort of writing that keeps me coming back to Pandagon. If I could I would give you all of the interwebs for the day.

(Your Friday Genius 10 list had me hook, line and sinker saying, “This is the worst Friday Genius 10 List evar.”)

Michael Corleone:

How many women you suppose would go to a wet Speedo contest? (I’m sure those happen in gay bars from time to time though…)

It’s funny to be because a lot of 90s fashion was a recycling of a prior era itself. 

Ah yes, bellbottoms.  I was in high school in the 90s and all the cool girls wore l.e.i. flares.

I wish I could embed the Orson Welles slow clap because you deserve it. Between this and Hulu’s 90 styled, dial-up design it’s a big day for the 90s as April Fool’s theme.

Heh, the 90s I miss has a lot to do with computer innovation and Settlers of Catan. 

It’s all about what’s important to you, I suppose.

You were freaking me out for a few seconds, Amanda, channeling Jean Teasdale like that…

I’m also a fan of this band![URL=“http://rift.wowgoldfirm.com/rift-cdkeys/”]Wow[/URL]...they are realy great.

Nice 4/1-ing, Amanda, but I think you should have done something like a post titled “I hate to admit it, but what those Men’s Rights Activists are saying makes a lot of sense!”

Ugh. Phish. Our hemp wearing dude didn’t even listen to anything as good as Phish. He was always rambling about Rusted Root. God I loathed that band.

Fortunately my weed was better than his, and if people were going to smoke weed at my house they could damned well listen to death metal. Smashing Pumpkins, STP, and Soundgarden were the compromise position, so they were mostly what was played.

Dave Matthews, Rusted Root, and Phish were all permabanned from my house. If you don’t remember RR, there was like one song everyone wanted to listen to on repeat all night long. This one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGMabBGydC0  There weren’t enough drugs in the country to make me listen to that for six plus hours.

I’m still not shaving off my goatee, dammit.

I loved the 90’s. I spent half in college and the other half overseas. I came of in the 80’s, now there is a decade I could stand to forget.

I wasn’t a big fan of the 90s trends—grunge more or less ruined everything I liked about Heavy Metal, and alternative just never grabbed me.

OT, but Scott Adams of Dilbert fame just copped to being a Men’s Rights guy, basically.

‘Tool fans: now those guys were real men.’

So now a real man is/was a pompous neckbeard too blinded by their hero worship of a pretentious, diminuitive creep to realise how pathetic they are? Good to know.

(OK, kinda joking. I actually like Tool, but seriously, fuck the fanbase).

When I was in college, the whole campus would shut down on Friday nights for Melrose Place.  Everyone watched it.  Walking the halls during show time (if you were too much of a loser to get invited to someone’s room for the party *cough*) was like walking in a tomb.

I do like Tool.  Maybe that’s why I didn’t get invited?

So now a real man is/was a pompous neckbeard too blinded by their hero worship of a pretentious, diminuitive creep to realise how pathetic they are? Good to know.

Yes that is the joke.

I went to college in the early-to-mid 70s, and even I recognized a lot of that!

One of the things I miss the most now that I’m an all-the-way grown-up is making love on a mattress on the floor with the black light making the Jimi Hendrix posters gleam and Tool on the stereo.

Yeah, we had the black lights and the Jimi Hendrix posters, but it was Iron Butterfly’s In A Gadda Da Vida (had to be the 17 minute version) or Cream’s White Room on the stereo.

he late 90s was an epic time for women in music.  The big thing was ladies being all empowerful and angry and screw off, boys!  So we’d listen to Paula Cole and be all scandalized that she didn’t shave, which made us feel very rebellious indeed.

We had the hippie chicks who didn’t shave (and, as an added benefit for us guys though it wasn’t supposed to be for guys, went braless)—even at the University of Kentucky, though maybe not as many as in the northeast—and while I guess that Janis Joplin and Joan Baez and Carole King did, women were coming into their own in rock music even that long ago.

It wasn’t quite what the late sixties were supposed to have been, but by the early seventies the war in Vietnam was ending, and that made a difference in attitudes.

I’m going to assume everyone acting clueless is just playing along.  Except Dana.  He is clearly just clueless.

Man, conservatives truly do not understand sarcasm or humor, do they?

I’m embarrassed that it took me until the Meredith Brooks part to really catch on. Call me a conservative.

This was hilarious until you got to the part about K-NACK.  Then it just became depressing.  Psychobaby continues to thrive on beat up guitar cases in old coffee shops throughout the city.

I miss them, in a gauzy, nostalgic way. Although the 90s I miss really began around ‘89 and were over by ‘96. The years around 2000 were godawful in every way.

I wouldn’t worry about it, junk science. I don’t even know who Meredith Brooks is.

To be fair to myself, I did raise an eyebrow at the “Ross and Rachel” reference. Oh well.

I rewatched Thelma and Louise on Netflix recently and was transported back in time to the glory days of line dancing. Don’t even play like you never did the Electric Slide or the Achy Breaky! And stone washed jeans with zippers all the way up to your navel. Those were hawt.

Chignona, I blame the internet and/or our increasingly brief attention span for the speed at which fashions are recycled these days.  It’s funny to be because a lot of 90s fashion was a recycling of a prior era itself.  I wonder at what point we will have to return to the 18th century for our fashion inspiration, because we have simply done the 20th century so many times.  I still hope for a day when we all wear spandex and jetpacks.
Comment #32: chareth cutestory on 04/01 at 06:04 PM

IIRC, the 90s were all about recycling the 60s and, later, the 70s. We’re still kind of recycling the 60s and 70s. There have been continuing efforts to recycle the 80s, but I’ve yet to see that really catch on. Steampunk might be argued as an attempt to recycle the 1800s, but I haven’t seen that catching on in a big way. And I guess the resurrection of burlesque and Dita Von Teese-type fashion is an attempt to recycle the 40s and 50s.
We should probably all be in those identical Star Trek-type jumpsuits by now.

#38 corleone,
Thats like saying the slave days were racist because only Black people could be enslaved.

#68,
I’d like to see people recycle the 20’s a bit.

#70 - That reminds me, there was a lot of fashion recycling in the 70s too. There was the whole Victorian thing with the lacy dresses and big sun hats in the early 70s. That seemed to morph into some recycling of the 20s, particularly Art Deco. Then there was a phase around the middle to resurrect the 40s with angular suits and dresses with big shoulder pads and some attempt to bring back the fishnet-veiled pillbox or fascinator, which I think morphed into the shoulder pads and synched waists of the 80s. Then Grease came out in 78-79 and it was all about the 50s, which launched us into early-80s politics.

... the 20s would be a great era to recycle, since the prevailing fashion was a revolt against debilitating femininity and women were able to make a lot of the stuff themselves.

Ouch, Marcotte.

1st: I looked damn good in that peasant skirt at Lilith Fair and how did you get such a picture perfect view to indict?

2nd: It was Ally McBeal we had to break-down every week, not Friends, during post-show girl chatter hour.

3rd: Hatin’ on Alanis Morissette (particularly in 1996 when Jagged Little Pill was on auto-repeat)...well weren’t you cool…obviously I have nothing ;P

#34 Egnu,
“I have a theory (which is mine),...

I’m going to ruin the commendable subtlety of this reference by going “YEAH JOHN CLEESE!!!”

#74,
...just to be all “YEAH MAINSTREAM ENTERTAINMENT FIGURE”, which is totally in keeping with the spirit of this post.

See, this is why no one likes hipsters. Not even other hipsters like hipsters.

In Athens - home of R.E.M., the B-52s, Pylon, Five-Eight, the Drive-By Truckers, Dead Confederate, etc. * - the only local band that consistently sold out the Georgia Theater from maybe 2001 to maybe 2005, the town’s biggest indoor venue - was The Dave Matthews Cover Band. And that was the band’s name, too,  the DMCB. Apparently, they nailed it. Granted, these guys just attracted the frat and dudebro-woo-girl college kid crowd, which Athens has in plenty. The townies and arty folks and hipsters were either at house parties, getting each other into each other’s show at the Caledonia for free, or - most likely - at the Manhattan being aghast at each other over PBR’s that the DMCB had sold out the Theater again. Except during AthFest. Man, everyone comes out for AthFest.

It’s my theory that the popularity of jam bands, classic rock’s resurgent popularity, and the various retro bands spawned the from is why mainstream country music’s so dull. Sure, country got massively popular in the early ‘90s and, thus, of course, sucked, but if one actually goes back and cracks open some Alan Jackson or Clint Black or Pam Tillis or Mary Chapin Carpenter one will find plenty of good stuff. Granted, it was the start of the whole “positive country” movement and the beginning of the end of country’s stoic/Buddhist tendencies. Still, there was still honky tonk to be heard, steel guitars remained in the mix, and the bass guitar still could swing from time to time. Even in the early Naughts, good stuff still found its way on the radio, like the Dixie Chicks.

Now, though, the “positive country”/ham-fisted nationalism/outright Babbitism has been turned up to eleven and the music sounds like something you’d hear on a radio station called something like “Dave FM”. Lots of power chords, lots of drum breaks, lots of really thick production. Personally, I blame this on the popularity of Big & Rich.

* Like Widespread Panic, so there’s that. All of them are very nice people who tip well.

Tool is always my favorite thing to listen to when ever I needs to get into a good headspace.  10,000 days was even the music I used when giving birth to my second child.  Undertow and aenema will always remind me of high school and lateralus and salvial will always remind me of college.  They are some of the most memorable concerts Ive ever gone to.  (the only other one would be type o negative, who did their best stuff in the nineties though I love it all.)

I got to the middle of it and thought *record scratch* “Hey… there’s no damned way that I as a snot-nosed goth kid in small-town TX was edgier than Amanda Marcotte during the 90s.” Even though I came of age (the age where people develop distinct musical preferences that diverge from those of their parents, anyway) after its zenith, the mere aftershock of the riot grrl era had a huge impact on me, and the results of its commercialization led me to artists that I would’ve never heard of otherwise, as well as the idea that it’s okay to be an openly odd girl. I still miss the days when “women in rock” ended with an exclamation point instead of an asterisk re:mainstream music.

Great memories here.  Thanks, Amanda!  But I’m surprised no one has shown any love for the Spin Doctors.  Pocket Full of Kryptonite remains one of the most innovative albums in rock, and the 90s just couldn’t have happened without it.

I had so much fun in the 90s. Lots of excellent music, although there was plenty of silly music too. I liked some of the more obscure Seattle bands like Skin Yard and 7 Year Bitch, and of course the Pixies were tearing it up in the early part of the 90s, and there was some really innovative hip-hop coming out then too, like Wu-Tang, Company Flow, Dr. Octagon, lots of stuff.

Ah, and who could forget this classic item about the only 90s band more awesome than the Spin Doctors?  The final line is, I hope, very much in the spirit of this post.

I’m a black guy who listens to primarily hip-hop but I must say I dug everything about this post. Sarah M is the shit and Fumbling Towards Ectasy helped me get through my freshman year in college. Paula Cole too. I liked how she got pissed that her record company wanted to airbrush her pubic and armpit hair off her album cover. There was something very hip-hop about that whole alternative scene in the ‘90s. Independent, nonassuming, heartfelt. I felt a kinship with Sarah, Tori, Natalie M, Paula Cole etc. And the first time my girlfriend played “Ice Cream” for me I was instantly hooked.

Not to mention the Lilith Fair has always supported underappreciated black artists. Meshell N, Res, Erykah Badu. I will always cherish them for that.

Thanks for taking me down memory lane. I’m about to plug in my IPod and listen to “Cannonball” right now.

Well, I loved the 90’s and I don’t care who knows it.  From a UK perspective we had Cool Britannia, Brit Pop, Oasis, Pulp, Blur!  What’s not to love?  Sure, it was shallow and all about the spin, but really, it wasn’t the worst time to be a baby feminist.

And I will never ever forget the night of 1 May 1997.  I’m sure it doesn’t mean a damn thing to Americans, but it was the night we kicked out the Tories, and the first time anyone of my generation had a government that wasn’t Conservative.  Regardless of the decade of New Labour horror that was to follow, that was absolutely amazing.