The Meaning of the '90s

Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Swears had quite a good thesis about this, I think.

swears said:
The 90s never really ended culturally though, did they? There was no break like punk rock or acid house at the end of the 90s to really set the stage for a new style or attitude towards music and pop culture in general. One thing that really suprised me was that you never heard "90s" as a signifier for something a bit dated or naff during the 00s. (Like "Combat Pants? Ugh.. so 90s!")The same way "80s" was used up until about 2002, until that era was cool again. Ten years ago is always supposed to be crap, right?

Although I've got a hunch "garage" will become a signifier for all kinds of retro shenaigans in the next few years. The "post-dubstep" crowd are on the case already.
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swears said:
I think the problem is that at the end of every decade since the 50s, you've had some sort of emerging trend in youth culture that set things up for the next decade. In the late 50s you had rock and roll, late 60s hippies, late 70s punk and disco, late 80s hip hop and acid house...

And then style as a whole and the popular culture had to play catch up with these developments in the following years. You couldn't have had the laid back, globular, flared design of the 70s without the hippies and you couldn't have had the stark, brightly coloured 80s without (if not punk, then) new wave.

But there wasn't any movement like that at the end of the 90s except a new(ish) tasteful eclecticism propounded by hip ambassadors like the Beastie Boys, Beck, James Lavelle, etc...
Not really much to go on there, eh? So now we just have this mish-mash of mostly retro signifiers.
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Edit: in response to those forum posts about how nobody will remember the 90s.
 
V

version

Well-known member
craner said:

a time for fear

Events Strike Somalian Warlords, drug dealers and gunmen high on qat murdering civilians, stealing food from the starving, extorting hug...
atimeforfear.blogspot.com atimeforfear.blogspot.com
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"The people of the 1990s were people like: Donald Trump, Anna Nicole Smith, Don Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, Tipper Gore, Louis Farrakhan, Killah Priest, Jean Baudrillard, Salman Rushdie, Ayatollah Khomeini, Michael Alig, Jean Marie Le Pen."

Remarkable commitment.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
version said:
"The people of the 1990s were people like: Donald Trump, Anna Nicole Smith, Don Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, Tipper Gore, Louis Farrakhan, Killah Priest, Jean Baudrillard, Salman Rushdie, Ayatollah Khomeini, Michael Alig, Jean Marie Le Pen."

Remarkable commitment.
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V

version

Well-known member
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IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Mr. Tea said:
Swears had quite a good thesis about this, I think.
Edit: in response to those forum posts about how nobody will remember the 90s.
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But doesn't this just push the question back one step... so it becomes "why not?"?

That is to say that @swears may have fairly astutely spotted what didn't happen. And sure, quite possibly he was correct when he homed in on the following

"... no break like punk rock or acid house at the end of the 90s to really set the stage for a new style or attitude towards music and pop culture in general."
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... as THE most clear and crucial sign that unlike previous decades the 90s never had a clearly marked ending that swept the slate clean and created a cultural space in which the next decade could happen.

So yeah, not only did he identify the sign, he was able to boil it down into one very easy to grasp sentence, in fact one very simple to grasp concept. Which is not to be sniffed at, it's not an easy thing to do, certainly I never saw K-Punk get close to achieving it in what was (or ought to have been) years of trying.

But...

But, but, but, buuuuut... hold on a minute there, now we know what didn't happen, are we any closer to knowing why it didn't happen? Do we know what to do in the future we so that we can make sure it doesn't not happen again? Can we fix it and get back on track by simply making sure every cultural period finishes at the right time and in the right way?

Or do we have to fix the ending of the 90s and create a parallel universe where culture is good and then go down that trouser leg of time paying vigilant attention to assuring every period is properly marked off by decade-closing palate-cleansing new genres of our own devising?

And how the fucketty fuck do we do that?
 
V

version

Well-known member
Shaka's adherence to the medium being the message re: contemporary 'content' is on point. The machinery and distribution networks are the area of interest atm. A piece of art's value currently lies in how much it can spin up the machine, e.g. Barbie igniting a furious 'discourse' across multiple platforms.
 
W

wild greens

Well-known member
You could easily argue that nothing has had any generational meaning since the late 80s, when self-referential nostalgia became an active ideal. For all the supposed futurism of sample culture and reappropriation (sic) it has ultimately allowed us to become a collage rather than a sum of whole parts

I guess you could look at the multicultural 50s nostalgia wave of the late 70s as a precursor in a sense, the first idea of it

I mean these days garage is back and most of it is 25 years old at this point, what's the difference
 
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