Once the Inevitable 90s Revival occurs which genre will be the most influetial or popular?

Though if this style is gonna come back in vogue, I'm gonna be so happy, because those were THE BEST DAYS EVER!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BhueqxT4Ss

also surely the "uncool" stuff is exactly the stuff that *will* get revived?

When the first ironic Eurorapper shows up I'm gonna believe you, but not quite yet.

yeah you might be right, but that stuff was always seen as slightly cheesy

Not if you were a "rave" teenager back then.

sampling, trancey synths, 2step, boyzIImen early mariah TLC

― plax (ico)

This could be true for independent and underground musicians for the following 2 years but as home production becomes more advanced independent artists will be able to gather influence from genres with more complex production (as opposed to garage rock, lo-fi, "chillwave", folk and all sample based music that dominates the scene). Mainstream will likely continue to evolve and might be drawing inspiration from the underground scene in the 00's rather than from the 90s.

I don't really see rock making an important comeback anytime soon.

also surely the "uncool" stuff is exactly the stuff that *will* get revived?

― rip sarah silverman 3/19/10 never forget (history mayne)

Yes, reviving crap is all part of the the hipsters' ironic nature. What I meant is that it will become uncool once the mainstream catches unto it, then hipster musicians will have to review their kitsch history and move to another spot.

But then I constantly think of the new generations as some sort of punk identity with no real idealism and who just love pranking their mediatic environment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul_hcxlA5KU

I used to dress up like this back in the 90s... Except that I had more colourful clothes, like orange baggy jeans and neon green rave shirts. If the 2010s kids will find it cool again, that'll be AWESOME!

Which come to think of it might just be some sort of 80s subconcious revival where it's all fun and games and nobody really has a strong opinion or hates deeply or gives a shit about science or politics. New generations might have to deal with it and suddenly wham here comes a 90s social revival of depression and sectarianism.

the 80s being blissfully free of depression and sectarianism

bobby sands revival we hardly knew u

Well, sure no decade or century for the matter has been truly free from depression or sectarianism, but I sort of have the idea that in the 80s and 00s people preferred to get distracted from them and subconciously avoid them while in the 90s generations seemed to want to gorge on them.

the depressive 90s (which is like mnstrm singer songwriter, postgrunge, maybe britpop afterbirth?) will be difficult for revivalists because the sentiment is usually conveyed in rote minor key mopiness rather than any coherent aesthetic ready for reappropriation

the 90s was a stitch, the 00's was a migrane. i think the 10's are shaping up to be a welt of some kind.

Is there a name for that genre of turn-of-the-90s pop-rock with the positive vibes, huge guitar leads, and gated drums?

^^^ rooting for revival of this. But I'm not sure it will really pan out in the same way as 80s revivalism, for reasons already hinted at on this thread. 90s music, at least rhetorically, was supposed to be about either violent rejection of "80s things" or some kind of serious step forward for them. This is clearest with the hoary old "grunge killed hair metal" story, where the 80s were inauthentic and evil and the 90s brought something "real," but I think similar stuff was going on with gangsta rap being offered as something harder and more real than previous styles. This obviously doesn't cover or explain all musical developments in the decade, but it doesn't have to - - the reason why the 80s could be revived is that they were on some level suppressed.

That never happened with the 90s in the same way. Part of this may have to do with generational demographics, and the massive waves of teenagers kind of coming in at awkward times, always with older and younger siblings to maintain continuity through. I have students now who are 19 but know every word of "Ice Ice Baby." That is to say, they were born after the song was a hit and know it as if it were some sort of classic rock radio staple, which at least where I'm from it definitely is not, but who knows whether that proves anything.

But the relationship between 90s and 00s music has always felt, and been pitched as, more evolutionary than revolutionary. There are plenty of things that fell by the wayside and maybe some of them may come back; there's no genre of music whose typical product "sounds" the same as it would have ten years ago. I'm reminded of this inconclusive thread: The song that represents the END of the 90s which got as far as identifying a 3-5 year transition zone of stuff that was popular in the last couple years of the 90s and first couple years of the 00s that seemed really foreign to a general conception of what either the 90s or the 00s "sounded like." If you need a three-year transition zone, there may not be enough of a rejection to give rise to later revival.

Although I think the "positive vibes" bands belong to a similar "transition zone," so maybe all of this looks a lot more orderly with 20 years' distance rather than 10.

That's an interesting point, in the 80s album poll we had a similar discussion about whether or not 90s popular music distanced itself from 80s music - was it more "hard" and "keeping it real"? You can read the discussion here (after my post you have scroll down a bit for Contenderizer's answer, and that's where the discussion starts):

Now this is how it started: THE ILX 1980s ALBUM POLL RESULTS!!

I agree that there doesn't seem to be such a clear, conscious break between the 90s and the 00s. I guess one of the most visible signs of 00s starting was the back-to-the-basics rock revivalism of The Strokes et al, but it doesn't really signify a big break from the 90s, as nineties rock wasn't particularly proggy either. And another big change, which relates to the above, was electronic music dropping largely out of the mainstream and going back underground, at least for the first part of the decade. But again, it doesn't feel like there was any "fuck 90s!" sentiment behind that change.

I'm not sure if I get your demographic explanation though... Weren't there more teenagers in the 90s than in the 00s?

Hopefully the 90s will never be revived. They deserve to be forever buried, the same way those metallic digital/FN synth sounds of the late 80s/early 90s thankfully never ever seem to be revived.

With respect to dance music, I don't think that there was a big break between the 80s and 90s. Techno and house music drew also inspiration from New Order, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys and Art of Noise. These bands also drew inspiration from those genres as well.

I had a conversation about this last night - is there anything from the 90s pop landscape that's worth saving? The musical palette turns me off completely in a way the 80s and 00s don't. I don't know if this is a residual of my most rockist period, but even the pop-rock stuff I liked in my early teens (Green Day/Bush/Foo Fighters) sounds rubbish to me now.

(I'm not saying there was nothing good in the 90s, just that what was good was happening way outside the pop mainstream)

A lot of 90s rap and dance music was great, moreso than in the 00s, I would argue. And a lot rap and dance were in the pop mainstream back then. I'd definitely argue for saving stuff like G-funk or jungle or even rave.

Nowadays I don't think songs like "It's A Sin" or "Just Can't Get Enough" or "Electric Dreams" sound dated at all, and really a lot of these songs could've come out in 2007 if I didn't know better. But in the '90s they sounded so old fashioned. Back then I remember thinking that bands like Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys may have been the most ahead of their time in the 80s, but by the 90s their sound was dated. I think this feeling was largely based on both bands' lack of loops and samples and a reliance on machine sounds. Of course in the '00s synths and drum machines came back in vogue, while break and loop-based music felt very much a nineties thing. Essentially Moby and Fatboy Slim took sample'n'loop about as far as people could stomach, killing off the '90s in fine style. More leftfield artists, particularly working in IDM, were taking it even further, literally smashing loops up into little pieces and putting them back together to create glitch, drill'n'bass etc. When people like Miss Kittin and the electroclash brigade turned up, it was a real breath of fresh air to have dance's textural landscape swept clean and to start again with these basic machine-drum beats.

I would like to start a thread about tracks from the late 70s and 80s that really could have been electro tracks in the 00's. I had a really good example and I've forgotten it now. Doh!

More than anything, I think that the musical differences between the 90s and the 00s are sociopolitical rather than audible. Dance music, up until the mid-90s was still seen as this dark, illicit movement associated with warehouses, drugs, the squatter movement, secret meet-ups on the M25 etc. Acid house, rave and jungle were punky styles of music - fast, engaging and rebellious. Attending a rave or being a raver wasn't just something you did to release tension after a hard week at the office. In many ways it was a matter of identity, a political statement or even a lifestyle choice. But as much as it was political, early '90s dance had a great sense of humour, largely attributable to the fact it was largely sample-based music. So while big raves had to be organised like a military operation, you still had Trip To Trumpton getting into the charts etc. And then you had such violent genres as gabba and hardcore (dance music's equivalents of Oi! and death metal I guess?) which just don't really exist anymore, but did do a lot to bring fans of metal, punk and industrial into the dance fold.

Take this scene of underground warehouses full of dreads, caterpillar boots, camo, smiley faces then zip forward a few years to your average dancefloor in 1999. Following the death of rave (it was the Criminal Justice Act on the veranda with the candlestick btw), dance music is no longer a statement, it's a huge commercial enterprise with superclubs, holiday destinations, megastar DJs, shiny shirts, hair gel, high-heels, bouncers, £5 pints etc. It wasn't about blowing your mind on acieeeeed or raving against Thatcher; it had become, in my eyes, a much more sordid affair than even Inspector Morse could have anticipated.

Having gone from rampant irreverence to commercial sellout in 10 years, the 2000s at least saved dance music from it's own success, not by "going back underground, to stop it falling into the wrong hands", but by turning it into a true "artform". Dance fans, producers and DJs were demanding to be taken seriously, to show that their music mattered as much as rock and jazz and everything else. So in a way, the 2000s was when dance music went truly middlebrow. The '00s dancefloor having become a place of art, of contemplation, of soul-cleansing, of spirituality through music - not in a hippie way, but through that sort of stoicism audible in Miss Kittin's deadpan delivery, the repetition and subtlety of minimal house, Vitalic's controlled synth build-ups, LCD Soundsystem's art-school tendencies etc.

I think of the musical 90s beginning in early 1989 with acid house, Superfuzz Bigmuff, Stone Roses, De La Soul, Napalm Death and ending with the appearance of the Spice Girls.

Fingers crossed for New Jack Swing.

TEXTBOOK SOCKING A++++++ WOULD SB AGAIN

Not you, Adam

Stop talking about shitty top 40 90s and rave, what about this:

90s guitar college rock indie... The 80s are back now so lets hope this comes next?

Shit's like whack-a-mole round here

Another angle on this that may be way off base: the 90s were in some way (perhaps largely rhetorically, again) committed to a sort of postmodern universal-sampling agenda, with things like Paul's Boutique becoming touchstones and records like Odelay and the Bran Van 3000 album getting hype on the back of "they put every genre in a blender and hit Frappe!" (That kind of line now seems a little trite in hindsight, but it was the rallying cry.) Not to mention all manner of unlikely revivalism (see: the swing vs ska thread) already happening in the mid-to-late decade.

Now, the ONE thing that was sort of off-limits was everything to do with the 80s, because the other big 90s rallying cry was the anti-80s rejection already discussed. Once the 80s got let back into the tent (Miss Kittin, Midnite Vultures, dance-punk, whatever point of reference you like), there was kinda no degraded past thing left to pick up on. I mean, it's not like the 00s were solely about rediscovering the 80s - - - remember freak-folk? All the post-00 Elephant Six-related records? Etc... it's just that the 80s revival was particularly visible because these were doors we were not supposed to re-open.

In other words, I wonder if there can be a 90s revival, not only because the 90s never went away in the first place, but because everything under the sun has already been authorized for revival. We may see pockets of this or that thing coming back into vogue due to generational turnaround (ie: I grew up with the Positive Vibes bands; people my age might tap into those sounds with no sense of them being Evil Corporate Rock) but I'm not expecting the mass unleashing of any particular sound/aesthetic.

That being said, there were an awful lot of horrendous acid-washed ripped jeans on sale at the mall a couple weeks ago...

Back then I remember thinking that bands like Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys may have been the most ahead of their time in the 80s, but by the 90s their sound was dated.

If we take this template and flip so it applies today: who from the 90s sounded incredibly ahead of their time at the time, but then seemed pathetically dated last decade? That's the kind of person due to be revived, then.

This beat is, this beat is, this beat is Technotronic.

I'm personally rooting for a continuation of the Hip-house revival.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXowKTHMJ0s

Having gone from rampant irreverence to commercial sellout in 10 years, the 2000s at least saved dance music from it's own success, not by "going back underground, to stop it falling into the wrong hands", but by turning it into a true "artform".

Maybe this is true of of the more underground varieties of dance music, but I really think mainstream/chart dance became worse in the 00s. I think the irreverence, the sense of utopia, the punky rebel energy, the sincerity, made 90s dance much more interesting that 00s mainstream dance, which seems to be more about coolness, detachment, hipness, ironic reference points - all these trends culminating in the late 00s "indie electro", one of the worst forms of dance music ever. Gimme your Westbams and Technoheads and Apollo 440s over LCD Soundsystem and Crystal Castles any day!

i can't stand most indie electro stuff with the exception of lcd. dude made some good music.

If we take this template and flip so it applies today: who from the 90s sounded incredibly ahead of their time at the time, but then seemed pathetically dated last decade? That's the kind of person due to be revived, then.

I'd really hope there'll be a jungle revival of some sort. Back in 1994 it felt like there was so much potential in that stuff, but then after a year or two it was gone, and even though drum'n'bass was great for a few years after that, by the late 90s it felt like the whole thing had solidified into stagnant and predictable subgenres. And of course jungle couldn't have been revived in the 00s because of the general 80s coolness and anti-sampling attitude of that decade (as discussed above), but if were gonna have 90s revival in the 10s, then jungle is one of those prematurely withered lineages I hope someone would continue.

I think the reason people say 80s revival is because there is so much excessive flashiness and hipness that overshadows or is pushed to be the reason to care about something before you hear any music. Internet gossip has made music listeners a bit shallow, so people learn about all the reasons why an artist is hip that doesn't even pertain to the music they make, all before they hear a note. In the 90s your opinion about an artist was more likely based on the CD you heard, or on college radio, and the image you associated with it was the album art. These days its like indie TMZ. (Of course all of this was mostly about an indie perspective).

I'm surprised at Tuomas of all people for wanting a retro revival. I thought you hated retro, tuomas? Wanting a revival of music from when you were 12 is a bit geir-like.

I wasn't talking about a full-blown revival, that's why I mentioned continuing the lineage of jungle, not just copying it. My point was that if there's gonne be an "inevitable 90s revival", jungle would be one of those relatively unexplored bits in the 90s genre map that someone could build on.

ardkore contuomium

THIRD EYE BLIND

Man I wish it was still the 90s when it was all about the music and fashion played no part whatsoever in people's taste

Oh I wish I was a Beck raver with jungles in my hair.

With respect to dance music, I don't think that there was a big break between the 80s and 90s.

It was. But it was around 1987-1988 already. The 90s started then.

(Speaking of music here though. Clothes and hairstyles were still very much 80s until 1991 or thereabouts)

a lot of my friends have been repping Drinking In LA as some sort of lost classic just fyi?

If we take this template and flip so it applies today: who from the 90s sounded incredibly ahead of their time at the time, but then seemed pathetically dated last decade?

Hardcore techno.

A 90s revival is not inevitable, and I'm pretty sure threads like these have jinxed this possibility..

I suppose one question that could help point in the right direction: are there any 90s artists or songs or albums that became retroactively more popular during the 00s, perhaps as a result of usage in a soundtrack or commercial? This happened a lot with 80s pop during the late 90s, ie Tainted Love, Da Da Da... I know there were more of these.. top 40 stations (in my area anyway) added these songs to their rotations as a result of the commercials' popularity (and I'm assuming an increase of listener requests..) and around the same time there was "the wedding singer" soundtrack, and cartoon network started airing Thundercats in the afternoons... something tells me "80s nostalgia" was considered highly marketable during the last 3 years of the 90s and beyond, whereas 90s nostalgia between 2007 and the present hasn't been nearly as ubiquitous.

The only recent "90s nostalgia" movie I can recall is The Wackness and that was over 2 years ago.. I occasionally hear some newer artists like Silversun pickups or that Amerie song "Why R U?" from last summer, but unfortunately none of these attempts seem to be making any lasting impressions.

maybe this thread highlights how stupid it is to divide everything cultural up into decades anyway

maybe this thread highlights how stupid it is to divide everything cultural up into decades anyway

xposts. Drinking in LA was on the radio when i was in work today. It is not a lost classic.

Why do I fucking bother

Anyway, I think, what would be needed for a 90s revival is for typical 90s music to become unfashionable. Which hasn't really happend other than in the case of Eurodance and drum'n'bass.