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The biggest rappers are Jay-Z, Eminem, and Lil' Wayne - all from the '90s.
The biggest rock bands are The Foo Fighters, U2, and Nickelback - all big in the '90s.
Even Britney Spears, Beyonce, Mariah Carey, and Christina Aguilera are all from the '90s. Lady Gaga is just doing what Madonna was doing in the '90s.
Dubstep is a niche genre. You don't see anybody doing Dubstep being a bigger star than Beyonce or Eminem or something. Yeah, Skrillex is getting press, but it's not a huge cultural shift or anything. It's all just 21st century electronic crap.
The change from the '80s to the '90s was a HUGE shift. Like I said, somebody from 1987 looked like an ALIEN in 1992. The hair was completely different. The clothes were completely different. The music was completely different. The slang was completely different. The politics were different.
A person from 1999 would not be that out of sorts if they woke up in 2011. They would have to be brought up to date technologically, but overall we're basically the same. They wouldn't have to change the way they dress all that much and could hear most of the same artists they listen to now on the radio. There's a few new bands, but mostly they could still listen to U2, The Foo Fighters, Jay-Z, Eminem, Britney Spears and Madonna on radio all the time.
And I was kid in the '90s and racism is a much bigger deal now, than it was then. Obama getting elected has brought about the worst racial slurs from the Tea Party set and you're still seeing police brutality and even the wealth gap between Whites and Blacks has gotten wider in the 'past decade. Places like Milwaukee and Detroit are more segregated than they've been in years. The '90s was when all the social issues started to recede. Now, they're coming back.
And there quality of sitcoms is not really a strong argument for whether or not we're still '90s influenced overall. That's not really an indicator like musical styles, clothing, and politics. If anything, it just shows we haven't progressed as a society to create anything meaningful since the '90s on TV.
Radiohead, RHCP, and Pearl Jam are still going as well. Nickelback is an abomination and its a huge disservice to the other bands mentioning Nickelback in the same sentence.
Radiohead, RHCP, and Pearl Jam are still going as well. Nickelback is an abomination and its a huge disservice to the other bands mentioning Nickelback in the same sentence.
I didn't say they were good, just popular and a huge part of American pop culture, which they are.
Radiohead, RHCP, and Pearl Jam are still going as well. Nickelback is an abomination and its a huge disservice to the other bands mentioning Nickelback in the same sentence.
I'm not a dude, but I don't think they're so bad. They wouldn't be my top choice to listen to, but I wouldn't stab my eardrums out if I heard their music.
Examples. Baggy pants. Skinny jeans have replaced them to some extent, but there's still plenty of people who sag like it's still 1992, people who weren't even alive in 1992.
The Simpsons. First aired in December 1989 actually. A 90s icon. Still on the air today, and despite the fact many people stopped watching it around 2000, it's still relevant to today's society and extremely popular.
Ditto with South Park, which started in 1997. There are 14 year old kids today who were only just born when South Park came out and love it. The show is still extremely popular, probably only slightly less popular than it was in 1998.
Reruns of Seinfeld and Friends beat most currently running sitcoms in ratings. People's taste in television in the years 2000-2012 is basically identical to what people enjoyed in the '90s.
Same with tattoos and body piercings - not going away anytime soon most likely, if anything eventually it will probably become rare for a person not to have at least one kind of body mod. Even my 52 year old dad has been converted to the cult of the tattoo.
That's not to say the 1990s were exactly like today. They were actually quite different. But that's really just because the nineties still had so much stuff from the eighties that was still popular and relevant. I'm just saying the trends that started in the nineties are for the most part, still going strong. There's never been a backlash against '90s culture - we went straight from loving the 90s while it was still the present to being nostalgic about the 90s.
The reason you see people still dressing like its 1997 is because they grew up in that era and no longer go to school and still think that clothing style is the fashion (they just keep buying new stuff that looks like it was from that time).
However that has been the case in every generation. Especially when people get married, they no longer really follow what the younger people are doing, it is why society says married people are boring lol.
If you remember the 1990s was mostly a repackaged version of the 1960s. When I was in high school the kids used to like stuff from the 60s. Some people took it to a certain extent than others.
Now that i'm a young adult I see some of the people I went to HS with and they still wear the same style clothing they wore in 1997 when I left HS. While some of those people have adapted and evolved.
I'm guessing you were probably very young in the 90s so you focus on your childhood alot. To be honest though the 90s was a very watered down decade, which really had no identity of its own. All it really became was repackaged stuff from the past but called something else.
Rap/baggy jeans that you mention started in the late 80s, although hip-hop originally came out in the 70s. The haircuts in the 90s that teenagers wore were mostly ones that started in the late 80s but became more mainstream by the 90s.
Technology evolved more in the 70s and 80s than it did in the 90s. The only thing that was different was that stuff was becoming cheaper for people to now buy in their home, such as the internet (which was around in the 80s, but mostly text based). Not many people had modems though because they were too expensive, but modems became mainstream by the late 90s.
It took nearly 20 years for average consumers to even record on a CD, which buy the time CD burners were mainstream digital music was taking over. They waited too long with CDs in my opinion, and now they are becoming a thing of the past.
The grunge thing was stuff that emphasized the garage band rock sound from the late 60s/early 70s. The straight long hair was stuff from the late 60s/early 70s.
Usually fashion reflects itself every 30 years, and i'm now noticing people under 21 wearing things I would have gotten made fun of for wearing in the 90s.
But as a Generation X/or Generation Y person (whatever they call it) I have to admit the baby boomers were the last to really evolve pop culture quickly, they even invented rap in the 70s (even though it was unheard of on the radio till the 80s).
Hope you understood my long post and can see how everything somehow goes in cycles.
The reason you see people still dressing like its 1997 is because they grew up in that era and no longer go to school and still think that clothing style is the fashion (they just keep buying new stuff that looks like it was from that time).
However that has been the case in every generation. Especially when people get married, they no longer really follow what the younger people are doing, it is why society says married people are boring lol.
If you remember the 1990s was mostly a repackaged version of the 1960s. When I was in high school the kids used to like stuff from the 60s. Some people took it to a certain extent than others.
Now that i'm a young adult I see some of the people I went to HS with and they still wear the same style clothing they wore in 1997 when I left HS. While some of those people have adapted and evolved.
I'm guessing you were probably very young in the 90s so you focus on your childhood alot. To be honest though the 90s was a very watered down decade, which really had no identity of its own. All it really became was repackaged stuff from the past but called something else.
Rap/baggy jeans that you mention started in the late 80s, although hip-hop originally came out in the 70s. The haircuts in the 90s that teenagers wore were mostly ones that started in the late 80s but became more mainstream by the 90s.
Technology evolved more in the 70s and 80s than it did in the 90s. The only thing that was different was that stuff was becoming cheaper for people to now buy in their home, such as the internet (which was around in the 80s, but mostly text based). Not many people had modems though because they were too expensive, but modems became mainstream by the late 90s.
It took nearly 20 years for average consumers to even record on a CD, which buy the time CD burners were mainstream digital music was taking over. They waited too long with CDs in my opinion, and now they are becoming a thing of the past.
The grunge thing was stuff that emphasized the garage band rock sound from the late 60s/early 70s. The straight long hair was stuff from the late 60s/early 70s.
Usually fashion reflects itself every 30 years, and i'm now noticing people under 21 wearing things I would have gotten made fun of for wearing in the 90s.
But as a Generation X/or Generation Y person (whatever they call it) I have to admit the baby boomers were the last to really evolve pop culture quickly, they even invented rap in the 70s (even though it was unheard of on the radio till the 80s).
Hope you understood my long post and can see how everything somehow goes in cycles.
Good post.
What I will say is that a big difference between now and in past decades is that cultural shifts were a little more extreme in the past.
You're right about people dressing the same as they did in 1997, because it used to be that dressing the way that you did in high-school or college was just out and out a no no
Could you imagine somebody who grew up during the hair-metal era dressing like Vince Neil or Axl Rose in 1993. I mean, that's only about 2 or 3 years into the '90s and already the culture had shifted to the point where dressing in a kind of '80s L.A., Sunset Strip kind of way was just absurd.
Or imagine somebody who'd grown up in the '70s wearing an afro and bellbottoms in 1985 or something. They would've looked like Martians or something.
Now, I mean if you were to like resurrect 2pac or Biggie Smalls or Kurt Cobain and drop them in the middle of the street today, they wouldn't look that out of place in today's world.
I would say we left our souls behind in the nineties.
The creative spirit is lacking.
BEfore the 2000s, every decade had some notable pop culture trend that was new and unique. Now, everything's so cookie-cutter and boring.
As proof, look no further than aal the remakes of shows such as Alvin & the Chipmunks, The Three STooges, TEenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Flintstones, Looney Tunes, etc. Meanwhile, there was nothing really memorable (pop culture-wise) in the last decade that you can say people will look back on in the future.
Do you think the 2000s and the part of the '10s that has past are culturally distinct from the 1990s? Personally I think we're still in the nineties in a cultural sense and here is why.
I was thinking how the major tropes of the nineties, the things that made the nineties different from the eighties, for the most part are still going strong, and in some cases are actually even bigger today, 12 years after the end of the nineties, than they were in the nineties themselves!
Examples. Baggy pants. Skinny jeans have replaced them to some extent, but there's still plenty of people who sag like it's still 1992, people who weren't even alive in 1992.
The Simpsons. First aired in December 1989 actually. A 90s icon. Still on the air today, and despite the fact many people stopped watching it around 2000, it's still relevant to today's society and extremely popular.
Ditto with South Park, which started in 1997. There are 14 year old kids today who were only just born when South Park came out and love it. The show is still extremely popular, probably only slightly less popular than it was in 1998.
Reruns of Seinfeld and Friends beat most currently running sitcoms in ratings. People's taste in television in the years 2000-2012 is basically identical to what people enjoyed in the '90s.
Rap music has proven not to be a trend but a decades-long, multi-generational phenomenon that might enjoy extremely high levels of popularity well into this century. Same with tattoos and body piercings - not going away anytime soon most likely, if anything eventually it will probably become rare for a person not to have at least one kind of body mod. Even my 52 year old dad has been converted to the cult of the tattoo.
The decline of so-called 'polite society' also I think really accelerated in the early 90s and continues to this day. Before the '90s, only certain kinds of people used profanity, today, pretty much everyone does. Formal dress is only for valet and politicians. I think that in the '90s people became generally more sarcastic and aggressive too, as well as more depressed, and that has gotten even worse in the past 12 years.
And even though the '90s are now 20 years ago, well, the early 90s, the focus on nostalgia is still rightly the '80s because it's the most recent time that had a culture that does not extend into the present moment.
I think since 2008, something authentically new has been forming, but it's still overshadowed by the continuing tropes of the 1990s.
That's not to say the 1990s were exactly like today. They were actually quite different. But that's really just because the nineties still had so much stuff from the eighties that was still popular and relevant. I'm just saying the trends that started in the nineties are for the most part, still going strong. There's never been a backlash against '90s culture - we went straight from loving the 90s while it was still the present to being nostalgic about the 90s.
Your right and i'm sick of it! I was born in the 90s, I dont wanna live them over again! The 80s was the last original decade. The only thing thats changed from 90s pop culture is people got older.
Would be nice for the 90s fashions to finally go away for along time, which for some reason they havent yet.
Would be cool if the 80s cameback, even though I wasnt alive then it looked like a fun time and things evolved very quickly then.
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