Why has there been no widespread 90's revival?

Well no, but there's no genre as wide as Hip-Hop or R&B that you could really say is just 90s, is there?

No, nor for any other decade either. Which is why bringing them up as evidence of 90's revival didn't scan for me, don't really see why that's so confounding?

I remember some friends doing 80s revival as early as '98 - and there was Romo in '96

Waaay back upthread, but bars in my college town had "Timewarp Tuesday" nights that were all 80s music starting in 1994.

That's fair. I just wonder whose '90s we mean and what "nineties" is shorthand for.

This is a good point. I'll cop to having brought up grunge because it was huge in the white boy rock fan circles I had access to as a teen, and because I was pretty convinced it would become 60's boomer rock level monolithic at that time.

I am in a New Jack Swing Parties London group on FB but even before covid there wasn't much activity :(

that makes me wish I was in London

Seinfeld sample in this Wale and SZA song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4wyY5pJ9r8

Wale has always been a Seinfeld stan; dropped The Mixtape About Nothing (w/ Seinfeld graphics) in 2008.

ahhhh

lotta 90s influences everywhere rn but pop culture will never work in that purportedly cyclical way again due to internet

That was my point above re: death of the monoculture.

Waaay back upthread, but bars in my college town had "Timewarp Tuesday" nights that were all 80s music starting in 1994.

I seem to remember a (moderately tongue-in-cheek but still OTM) 1980s revival story in Select Magazine in... 1993? It's somewhere here but I can't find the issue.

thinking about the popularity of sadboy bart among many younger digital natives, in the context of whatever the 90s means to these people (many of whom weren't born yet). it's not revivalism since it mixes it up with 00s emo and 10s cloudrap signifiers and post-vapor nostalgia filters which mine pathos from wanting to go back and knowing you can't. it's "i hate myself and i want to die" as a post-post-ironic shitpost-turned-aesthetic, deeply felt and flippant and corny and knowing all at once. this stuff is *everywhere* and someone should do some kind of study of it (closest i found was a p4k article on s i m p s o n w a v e which gets at some of this but is only part of it)

https://fsa.zobj.net/crop.php?r=Qm6gD1sdY0tHzEdN26bXhb2G4-iQEMOCF6NAJREpQbbw7vYiYR5_506xu9kThJgY_WSA_tp2LEba1dKn03AXg4gk4ogSlPelMO_oTdg-vo9Cx8qeF6iXJiX_9Yx5KFA8CqU_bCIUm5-Io-uq

Yeah, a lot of my friends in their 20s have been in bands that sound kinda like Swervedriver, I've been to dayglo parties where they play stuff like 'Castles in the Sky' and 'King of my Castle' (I'm sure there's another '90s house song I'm trying to think of here but my mind is only giving me tracks about castles). I don't really feel like there *hasn't* been a '90s revival.

I threw an 80s party in 1990!

(But of course as has been mentioned above, "80s" has come to mean just one segment of the 80s -- somebody earlier in thread said 1984-87 but I'd say 81-86? Like, "Walk Like an Egyptian" yes, "Hungry Eyes" no.)

Which is why bringing them up as evidence of 90's revival didn't scan for me, don't really see why that's so confounding?

Yeah, sorry, confusion over wording, is all. When you said "I don't think ppl think of Hip-Hop or R&B as particularly 90's genres" I read that as "Hip-hop and R&B weren't particularly big in the 90s", which isn't what you meant.

As for 90s nostalgia, I would have said that the fading of Nirvana has come as a huge surprise to me. As a college kid it just seemed clear they were going be like the Beatles, a permanent feature of the way we talked about culture. People upthread saying they see kids wearing Nirvana stuff, so I guess so? But my experience has been just the opposite, that talk about Nirvana has utterly vanished. My kids (teens) certainly don't know who they are or know any of their songs, and they know plenty of old stuff.

???

They're certainly the last band to make it into the "rock canon", for what that's worth.

kurt is lennonified at this point. plenty of kids my age didn't know beatles songs but plenty worshipped them, lots of let it be shirts, etc

nirvana were tained for a while for some by "not being as good as [less successful indie band]" and by the wave of post-grunge and nu-metal that cited them but no one cares about the former now and a loads of kids who grew up on the latter still worship nirvana/kurt and the whole mythology. i don't think many rock stars have been referenced more in rap

*tainted

My 9 year-old heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on the radio when we were driving somewhere, pronounced it his new favorite song, has added about seven of their songs to his rolling Spotify playlist and insisted on us buying him a T-shirt last time we were at Target, so, anecdotally at least, I don't think they are going anywhere.

At what age are you planning to have the "Scratch Acid were better" talk

Think 12 maybe?

His tastes are all over the place, and while I play music around the house constantly, I don't really try to force anything on him and see what sticks. His favorite artists in the last few years have been Marshmello, Imagine Dragons, Kiss (which, fair play, I though Kiss was the bee's knees when I was 9 too), Metallica and, now, Nirvana.

Millennials are old enough to have their own The Big Chill now but I haven't seen such a thing, nor would I want to

What was Gen X’s Big Chill?

xpost - Bunch of people dancing around to "House of Jealous Lovers" while they wait for Doordash to show up?

I think we were so repulsed by the original Big Chill that we never wanted to have our own

What is the Gen-X Big Chill?

Oh, oops.

Ha, was just reading the other day about a 2014 film with Jason Ritter, Aubrey Plaza and Max Greenfield called About Alex that was apparently called Big Chill 2.0 in a lot of reviews. Can't say I've seen it to confirm.

In the UK, maybe it was ITV’s Cold Feet.

I am afraid the Gen-X The Big Chill might be Knocked Up.

I rewatched The Big Chill recently and noted that the 30-somethings in it were jumping around to vintage records that were mainly 15-20 yrs old at that point, so it would be very much like 30-somethings of today putting on "Toxic" and going nuts. But the film is really about loss of idealism, so you have to have had idealism to begin with.

The Big Chillax

The Gen X Big Chill was Greenberg, maybe?

I don't even know what anybody's Big Chill is. What is this thing that is purportedly a behemoth of culture that everything should be measured against?

Ha ha, you're right - it is odd. I'm all about Peter's Friends.

Anyway, coming back to my earlier point about people stopping thinking in terms of decades once they're not readily nameable, here's the ngram of relative usage of the word decade

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=decade&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true

https://i.imgur.com/489GLOh.png

Wait, it was Garden State, wasn't it?

I am afraid the Gen-X The Big Chill might be Knocked Up

yeah I feel the Gen-X version would have to be a piss-take of some kind perhaps starring Will Ferrell, but it's too late for one now

Reality Bites

I haven't seen either, but I think the protagonists of Garden State and Reality Bites were too recently out of college. The Big Chill was about 30-somethings.

That's true, I was just thinking more about the reliance on the soundtrack and how that had more of a cultural impact than the film itself.

If anyone needs help in achieving the look, here's a guide:

https://www.glamour.com/story/how-to-dress-90s

So that chart upthread would indicate that generalizing about how people of previous eras contextualized decades is itself a stereotypically '80s/'90s thing to do

Reality Bites

― BrianB, Wednesday, June 9, 2021 1:20 PM (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This and Singles were my first two thoughts, but the characters in those are really post-college 20-somethings, not 30-somethings starting to wrestle with middle age.

Those are Gen-X St. Elmo's Fire's not The Big Chill's

St. Elmo's Fire is kind of more Gen X or extreeeeemely late boomer. There's sort of an internal division within Gen X imo, like people who were out of college by the end of the 80s vs people in college in the early/mid 90s

the last 20 or so posts are incomprehensible

There's definitely a small unnamed generation between boomers and Gen X... like people born in the early Sixties can't qualify as boomers but are a little early to fit in as officially Gen X.