UKC

Whilst watching a tacky, 100 reasons the 90's were amazing type thing with loads of crusty d-list celebs and washed up comedians doing talking heads stuff, I realised that the 90s WERE actually amazing. Loads of genuinely amazing, cultural stuff was happening and I lived through it. I experienced a lot of it, I remember it, I wasn't living in a vacuum. But I didn't realise that in 20 years time, people would be looking back and that it was genuinely exciting.

For example, TFI Friday was something I watched before going out, sometimes. Britpop was the music I listened to because I enjoyed it. Nirvana were a successful band my Dad said wouldn't last and when Kurt Cobain died, it was on the news for a few days. Diana died, I was annoyed that the tele was full of the same stuff every day and normal shows were cancelled. Labour were elected. Felt normal. I saw Pulp Fiction, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, Lock Stock and thought all films were that good.

Then I realised, nothing remotely culturally or politically significant has happened since. The Olympics are the only thing I can think of that made me think, yes, this is a moment. But apart from that, nothing.

Who are the bands, what are the TV shows and the books people will remember? When was the last film that was actually good instead of a rehashed sequel? Who are the great people who we will remember with statues?

So my question. Are we living in a cultural, social, political interest vacuum, dead space in an otherwise continuous stream of history? Or do I live in a cave?

In reply to XXXX:

If you think dancing to repetitive music until the sun came up whilst completely gazonked on all kinds of pharms, then the 90s were a real hit with you too.

In reply to XXXX:

Surely the rise of social media (inc you tube) might be considered culturally significant?
Politically the first coalition for a very long time?

In reply to XXXX:
September 11th 2001?

Felt pretty significant to me.

In reply to XXXX:
I think it relates to your age. As you get older you naturally take less interest in what's 'going on'. The musical tastes you developed in your teens will stick with you, the memories of teenage relationships, loves gained and lost will stay in your heart as significant and intense, the films you saw - the first 15 or 18 certificate, the clubs you went to.... everything was better, cooler, more intense. Slowly, over time, your interest in what's happening now will wither and die as you become a shadow of your former self, glorying in your youth as your hairline recedes, your erections fail and your waist expands. You'll listen to Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, et al. and wonder why young people like such rubbish music. You'll go to the cinema and wonder why they keep making the same old crap. You'll lazily claim about politicians 'they're all the same, why should I bother,' because you've lost the fire in your belly and can't be bothered to engage with the issues that matter anymore. Before long you'll be sat on your own in a pub in your Nirvana T-shirt, nursing a pint of craft ale and humming 'Wonderwall', wondering whether you are literally invisible to all the hot young girls by the bar, or if it's just that they don't care if you live or die, and you'll ask yourself "is this it? Why is life so rubbish now, when it was so great back then?" Well, I've got sour news, life is still great: you just got old and no-one cares.

Or maybe the 90s were great and now is just sh1t

In reply to XXXX:

I think you might be living in a cave, or at least the 90's coincided with a period of personal growth, which perhaps magnified the significance to you. Were you a teenager at the time?

In reply to XXXX:

9/11 was pretty significant, and shapes much of the way we see the world today. It defines our politics and has influenced what we now consider appropriate (or not) in the general media; Art, literature, music and films being several areas that still do not escape the cultural aftermath.

In reply to XXXX:

http://www.supajam.com/news/story/Video-going-viral-Footage-of-a-countrysid...

I was never a raver, but watching this made me smile.

In reply to Axel Smeets:

Snap!

In reply to Axel Smeets:

I suppose it was significant to some people but to be honest it didn't really mean much more to me than any of the other terrorist atrocities around the world since I was born. The thing that probably had the greatest impact on me personally was the publication of The God Delusion in 2006.

In reply to XXXX:

The serious answer is that the birth of the internet, social networks - particularly facebook - , and youtube, will be looked back upon by historians as the most revolutionary time in human history. We now have access to pretty much the sum total of human knowledge, available to us at all times on our phones; we can connect with like minded people from around the globe and create local and global communities of interest; the march to secular democracy will be unstoppable (in the loooong term) with any luck - the internet will be the death of religion eventually; and most importantly never a day needs to go by when you can't watch a fat kid falling off a skateboard, or a fluffy cat being cute somewhere.

In reply to ChrisBrooke:

I do get the thing about stuff seeming most significant at certain times of your life when you're more involved with it, but I still can't help getting a bit of a pop music end-of-history vibe. Most new stuff feels like a slight update on what was around 15-20 years ago for dance or pop music or 30 years ago for rock and indie. And I don't think that's always been the case.

In reply to Ramblin dave:


Pop music became a central part of youth culture when it was new and there was lots to explore. The fact that it remained there for several decades is impressive, but in recent decades it's become increasingly tired and lacking in genuine novelty. That's no doubt related to the fact that youth culture has moved on from music to other things, notably video games, where there's plenty of scope for novelty and individualism.

In reply to XXXX:
In the naughties, the iPad still hadn't been invented.

In reply to Ramblin dave:

I work in music and I must admit to being pretty stuck in my teenage/early twenties in terms of my tastes. I don't really have the passion to search out new stuff because very rarely do I hear anything that gets my interest when I do. I think dubstep was the most interesting development in recent times, but I know that's a bit of an acquired taste. I actually get depressed looking at music videos in the gym. The music is often terrible, bland and banal, and the image obsessed, often highly sexualised (with no context) posturing of the performers is just depressing. I'm self aware enough to suspect the problem lies with me being in my late 30s, but at the same time I can't help the sneaking suspicion, like Irk, that the 90s were just way better

In reply to Ramblin dave:


Absolutely. In dance music the late 80's and early 90's pretty much nailed all the genres and everything since has been derivative. House and garage, especially British, trance, techno, drum and bass were all pretty much fully formed come the mid-nineties. It's only dubstep (but even that emerged in the late 90's) or maybe grime that took some different directions but were still heavily based on what went before. So for music what emerged from Detroit and Chicago, Ibiza and then the British scene definitely was a very new movement and it hasn't been repeated since. It was on a level with British blues in the early sixties morphing into the Stones, the Beatles, the Kinks etc which then spawned prog rock etc. The nineties were brilliant for that reason. Not so sure about Britpop though, where would Oasis be without the Beatles?

In reply to ChrisBrooke:

Yeah, grime and dubstep are two things that stand out.

Weirdly, the Kiss FM gym-pop stuff they play at my local climbing wall is some of the only stuff I hear that regularly sounds unarguably modern. And even there it tends to do it mainly by combining 90's / early 2000's elements (R&B vocals, anthem trance riffs, grime-lite MCs, garage beats, electropop synths etc).

In reply to XXXX:

I'm guessing your UKC name came from a half man half biscuit song that wasn't released until after the 90's had finished. They have also made further great albums since.

In reply to XXXX:

Pantera, Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth, Korn.......
Eric B and Rakim, Dre, NWA, Ice T, Public Enemy

Not a bad decade....

In reply to edunn:


I think they were from the 90s as well, not sure how culturally significant they were even then

In reply to Escher:

I'm not so sure. 90s electronic music sounds horrible to me now, just awful old-fashioned dated nastiness with absolutely no regard for what sounds good. Electronic music IMO just gets better and better the more people invent new stuff and new ways of making it.

Take this for example (listen nice and loud on some good speakers if you can):

https://soundcloud.com/perserreich/to-na-bi

OK, it's pretty much a rip-off of Mount Kimbie, but Mount Kimbie could never have existed before dubstep and everything that preceded that from the 90s onwards. Dance genres (club music) tend to get totally stuck in ruts and regurgitate the same formula for decades at a time, but electronic music more generally is leaps and bounds on from where it was at in the 90s.

Whodathunk that Chicago house/Detroit techno would end up spawning monsters like this:

https://soundcloud.com/aku-en/akufen-star-truck-sheep-space-9

In reply to Jon Stewart: I guess it depends on what you tend to call 'dance' and 'electronic' music and where they cross over. I'm erring more towards dance than electronic i.e. more the stuff that was played at free parties at the time. I Dj'ed a fair bit back then, put on a few free parties and there was an underground British electronic house scene that I was really into. It was a certain mix of 120-130 bpm British house that was my thing. I still listen to it now and much of it hasn't dated but yeah sure there's a fair bit that has, but some of the stand out tracks nailed the genre in my opinion, be that vocal, dark, progressive, drum and bass and so on. I agree that the sort electronic music you've linked to as improved as technology has improved. But it was the mood and groove of certain branches of dance music that nailed it by the mid-nineties IMO.

For me there was a golden period 91-93 where British artists melded acid house, breakbeat 'hardcore' as it was known then, detroit techno, chicago house and NY garage and used spacey/sci fi samples, and done with a sense of humour, the 808's, the 909's shuffle rhythm, analogue synths and DJ's would play a wider mix of four to the floor tunes.

Some of the artists mastered analogue synths and the art of mastering recordings so they sounded rich and accomplished, whereas before that things could be a bit bleepy or one finger piano playing!

After that the scene diversified and specialised and DJ's played more of one type of music. But amongst the music of that time there were a far number of tunes that set the stall out for most of what would come after, bands like Hardfloor, Leftfield, BT and many more. Its that stuff that really started it off for me, just before that time things sounded much less accomplished and after just more of the same with better production.

In reply to ChrisBrooke:

Thanks Chris. I'm off to top myself now

In reply to XXXX:

So the only thing anyone's come up with is a terrorist atrocity and Facebook. I'm kinda glad I was born when I was!

Give me examples so I can appreciate them now, rather than from the future!

In reply to XXXX:
Big Brother, TOWIE, X factor and Britains got Talent?

In reply to Escher:

Yes, totally see where you're coming from. For me it was a bit different, (I'm not saying you're old, but ) at 17/18 when I started going out it was drum'n'bass and trip hop that I was into - still remember very fondly nights with dj food, LTJ Buken, warp stuff, etc, a good few years after the early 90s rave scene. If I was that age now, I'd have just as good a time, with just as exciting music

I never really experienced the '20,000 people standing in a field' thing, when the whole world of electronic music was brand new. Kind of gutted to have missed it, but I had a great time going clubbing in the years that followed and still really enjoy the electronic music being made now. And the internet makes it so much easier to get your hands on (but nowhere near as exciting as spending a fortune in record shops).

In reply to XXXX:

The 90s were my time. I was 15 in 1990
I liked 90s music at the time ,but now find it all rather dull.

Maybe just that I've done it to death , but I can't listen to all the Britpop stuff ,or any of (apart from a few ) of the trance stuff from the time.

From the 90s I now like Suede more than I ever did ,and some of the less mainstream bands.picked up the TFi Friday CD in Tesco today ,looked at the track listing and quickly formed the opinion that it was a CD I would never want to buy.or listen to.although there was one Suede song on it.

Anyway ,the 80s are where it's at

In reply to XXXX:

Films didn't start getting good until 1999 when Being John Malkovich came out. Dogville and Manderlay 2003/5. Exit Through the Giftshop topped off the naughties with a genre so new, so original, and so post-post-modern that everything done before was just preparation for it.

TV satire/comedy has been brilliant from the 80s (Yes Minister), through the 90s (Day Today) and naughties (Thick Of It, People Like Us, Bellamy's People).

It's only really indie music that had its heyday in the 90s, and appears to have basically died since. Everything else is still great.

In reply to ChrisBrooke:

jeesus h christ, was feeling fairly perky till I read your post, now I'm off to slit my wrists. My needless death is on your hands, think on that sonny jim.

In reply to pebbles:

Hey man, I'm just telling it like it is

In reply to ChrisBrooke:

The only really significant era for youth in the west was the 60's and early 70's. I could spell it out, but I shouldn't need to

In reply to Al Evans:

In the 60s and 70s the youth had the thrill of inheriting the mantle of cultural dominance. Now the youth still have cultural dominance, but without the thrill of the new they have no idea what to do with it.

(/generalisation)

In reply to Al Evans:

Wouldn't happen to coincide with the time you were a youth by any chance Al?

In reply to john arran:

Yes
but Woodsock, IOW, Stones, Beatles, The Who, Beach Boys, Joe Cocker, The Kinks, Cream, etc etc.
BTW I also liked Punk, New Wave but after that it more or less went to ratshit, a few highlights like Springsteen and Meatloaf but really New Romantics was the end. Now we have the almost laughable Rap music, it wouldnt have got airtime even in the 80's. Name me one great Rap music track, even Michael Jackson was better than that.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


LTJ Bukem Jon! Otherwise it sounds like you were dancing next to me in a club through at least the first two thirds of the 90s. I had Logical Progressions on tape and would insist on playing that or Timeless (Goldie) on friday nights driving the uni minibus full of the climbing club up into some remote Highland glen for winter weekend meets.

In reply to Jon Stewart:




Can't really agree with that, Jon, but I don't know where to start.

In reply to Al Evans:


Stan - Eminem

In reply to Al Evans:


Welcome to the Terrordome or Fight the Power obviously, but even if you don't dig African-American assertive cultural and political resistance there is loads of good hip hop party music. Of course being old I'd go for something like Beastie Boys silliness or jazz-influenced hippy hip hop like Tribe Called Quest or De la Soul, but I'm sure the 'yoof' could suggest modern equivalents.

In reply to Al Evans:



I think as others have said it depends what age you were a youth or at your most impressionable.

I think the late 60s and 70s were well over rated but there again I was only 2 when the 70s started

Late 80s early 90s now your talking...

Better drugs, music and culture.

The Manchester scene, Stone Roses at Wigan pier and Spike island, Happy Mondays @ Glasto 1990. Ku club Ibiza 1988.

I loved it... strangly enough I was 20 in 1988

cheers

Gaz

In reply to ChrisBrooke:


You are right about the internet and you could say the same about cellular phones and geographic information systems like Google Maps or even Google's search algorithms and self driving cars. There is real innovation and technology behind all of those.

But my bet is nobody is going to care about FaceBook and YouTube in 10 or 20 years because they haven't contributed anything, they aren't even tech companies they are just media companies using bought-in technology to store other people's content and sticking a glossy face on it. Sure, they are currently much bigger than other content stores but that's a transitory situation. People remember who invented TV not which channel had the best programs 20 years after TV was invented.

In reply to XXXX:

At least 17 years* have to pass before we can look back on any particular decade with a sense of nostalgia.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, the media raved about how good the music, culture and life in general was in the 1980s. That is just beginning to happen for the 1990s. It's still too early to feel nostalgic about the Naughties, but it will happen.

There is some psychology at play here. A normally developed and healthy mind has an overall tendency to focus on positive things. This is a good thing as it helps us to cope with stressful events, or to not worry excessively about potential future stressful events. This also applies to memories and so the overall memory of a particular period of time is slowly reduced to only the positive things as you place less and less emphasis on the negatives. Look back at the music charts for the 80s, the classics that we love today were just a tiny fraction of what was available at the time and a lot of it was utter shite, just like today's music charts.

*I made this number up

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:
I think 'da internet' generally is the point, and the means to create communities, interest groups and for that matter political revolutions. The gaps of knowledge and organisational capacity between the holders of power and the rest of us are shrinking and are only going to go in one direction. However much governments try to censor or withhold information and the capacity for people to organise, the tide of history is against them. It's unthinkable that information about science, logic, rational thinking, free thought etc won't eventually permeate repressive, stultified societies. However many free thinking, secular bloggers are killed in Bangladesh or Pakistan, however China or Saudi Arabia tries to block free expression online, etc etc etc, there will always be more of it and them, because people like to be free (whether they know it or not ). The internet will help change come about and it's only a matter of time. Hopefully.....

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Google and mobile phones were 90s. More ticks in the box

In reply to Al Evans:




Apart from a difference in musical tastes from the era I'd completely agree with the perceived decline and dearth of quality after the 80s ... but then again I'm rapidly approaching being an old git too

In reply to edunn:

I think what he might be alluding, to was the growth in home grown music, which also coincided with the economic growth after the recession of the early 90's, combined with New Labour coming into power and Tony Blair/the establishment having photo Ops with the artists and musicians of the day, that there was (perhaps just the appearance of) a sense of connectivity between the general populace and the arts & music and politics too?

Without a doubt 9/11 has been the most pivotal event in the past few decades when it comes to world politics & the arts though, perhaps bigger than the Berlin wall coming down and the fall of communism.

In reply to XXXX:

Loads of interesting stuff happening at every level, just easier to stay locked into the now as then conservative channels of cultural consumption. Time for a reboot, even if its a twenty five year old hairdresser and an expensive toupe. Got to be burning, or your not living chief. Relight the fire.

D

In reply to john arran:

Humph, you're only 52. My oldest brother who is in his late 40's thinks good music happened in the 90's too, and after that...perhaps you need to look around for it?

In reply to Timmd:

Good music has happened in every decade and shows no sign of stopping any time soon. The point is that the heyday of musical discovery that started in the 50s with the development of electric instruments had largely run out of places to explore by the end of the 80s. The existing genres are still being tinkered with, sometimes to great effect, but since around then any new genres have been either pretty rare or pretty crap. Popular music today seems increasingly either a niche interest or a bland background, rather than the defining characteristic of youth culture it once was. You might have millions of young people queueing for the latest electronic device nowadays but I can't remember the last time any new music release generated such wide interest among young people.

In reply to john arran:

Ah, I see what you mean.

In reply to paul_in_cumbria:
Which decade are you talking about here? The 80s (with the exception of Korn)?
Metallica's output in the noughties was mostly guff.

Edited for clarity

aIn reply to Tom Valentine:


Don't worry, I was joking.

My only point was that film has certainly not gone downhill since the 90s - I don't think the 90s was a significant decade in cinema. There a loads of great films from every decade since its invention, but many of my favourites are the really modern stuff from the past decade or so: Kaufman, Von Trier, Hanneke.

In reply to XXXX:

The 90's music that you are so keen on came about after 10 years of Margaret Thatcher and the Tories.

I predict the music of the late 2020's will be awesome and right up your street

In reply to XXXX:

I think everyone's getting the wrong idea. It's not about the quality of music, or film. I think it's about it being an event. A communal experience that seemingly everyone is talking about, or watching, or listening to.

In reply to XXXX:


Ahem. Not everybody is getting the wrong idea: "You might have millions of young people queueing for the latest electronic device nowadays but I can't remember the last time any new music release generated such wide interest among young people."

In reply to john arran:

Well done, help yourself to a biscuit. Party ring sir?

In reply to XXXX:

Mine's a chocolate hobnob, thanks.

In reply to XXXX:
My music collection is totally rooted in the 80's and 90's (and mostly on vinyl). From punk, the brilliantly creative post punk era, through the American stuff (dinosaur, pixies, sonic youth and their ilk), hip hop and into dance. It's almost as much a museum piece as me.
But I have no doubt whatsoever that there is just as much brilliant music out there today in many genres - it's just finding the bloody stuff without being overwhelmed by the huge volume of product.
Also at 50 the sentiment of much music made by 20 year olds doesn't seem very relevant to me when my most pressing issues are when I'm going to finish mending my fence or water the tomatoes.
Hence I tend to stick with artists like Nick Cave, Polly Harvey and Jack White as they could be considered my generation.