Why has there been no widespread 90's revival?

What do you mean, Alba? That The Floyd and The Zep are big again?

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, June 9, 2021 8:38 AM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm guessing he meant that Floyd and Zep weren't very huge to him in the 90's, which will be yr usual US/UK divide at work.

― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, June 9, 2021 8:39 AM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, what Daniel says. I'm teasing about your medium-sized town really. But you're right that decade revivalism does tend to be dumbly reductionist.

Roaring 20s' kicked it off, it feels like, though don't know when that phrase caught on.

What about the gay 1890's?

naughties is the worst kind of innocent smoothies bollocks i hate britain

You're quite right, Daniel!

Here's yr gay nineties and roaring 20s n-gram.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gay+nineties+%2Croaring+twenties&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true

The 90s were optimistic?

― MarkoP, Wednesday, 9 June 2021 12:50 (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

overwhelmingly so imo

Appropriately enough to my theory, the 'gay nineties' was coined just as the 20s made decades catchy again

The 90s were optimistic outside of, you know, Rwanda and the Balkans, until Tricky released his Pre-Millennial Tension album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi5j7jjhm4M

> naughties is the worst kind of innocent smoothies bollocks i hate britain

Haha. However you are all aware it’s noughties, as in the number?

I see Y2K parties all the time. at midnight people crash their cars into the house

Noughtsy-woughtsies xp

Haha. However you are all aware it’s noughties, as in the number?

It's cloying either way. The '-ies' is excusable with other decades because it's there in the number.

naughties or noughties, it's the same horrible tedious twee play on words

It's bad but so is "two thousand and..." instead of "twenty..." regarding any of the last eleven years which just won't stop happening.

grammatical awkwardness is inevitable, twee innocent smoothies bollocks is avoidable and must be avoided

The 90's rave revival appears to be in rude health here in Bristol. Recently a lot of the yoofs I see e-scootering past my house are wearing bucket hats and baggy jeans like it was 1991, no idea whether this is just a local thing though.

Breakbeat / hardcore / jungle (with actual chopped funk samples, not the lumpen 'nu skool' variety) are all back in vogue, which is a pretty 90's vibe to recreate. Also a lot of flyer / event poster / release art is heavily influenced by early 90's Dreamscape vibe atm.

The one thing that saddens me a bit is that a lot of the cheesy hands in the air breakdown stuff that worked so well in contrast to the rough breaks isn't being revived as much.

I feel like I constantly see references to Simpsons/Seinfeld/Friends online these days, so it sometimes feels like the 90s never ended.

see how the poison spreads

https://i.postimg.cc/rsYKFtRb/Screenshot-20210609-141437-Twitter.jpg

Simpsons memes are a particularly interesting one because it's obviously all the most memorable 90s quotes and images and younger adults have happily adopted them to the point where its original format as a TV show feels secondary to its newer life as evergreen reaction source, without acknowledging it still exists as the former except when to complain about how bad it is.

'noughties' is completely fine

🤢 

the naughty aughties

quietly one of the worst things about twitter is people saying derivative unfunny stuff and then other, apparently even less funny people, popping up to be like "gonna start using this now" or "omg, stealing this one for later." or more likely, posting a reaction gif from some TV show captioned "omg, stealing this one for later."

as far as the 90s, this is obvious but another cycle here is Gen Xers having kids, the kids grew up with 90s music playing in the car, they're now old enough for some of them to also claim it as their favorite stuff. same as the 70s-90s thing when Funky Days Were Back Again. or the tremendous number of people around my age (39) who grew up on Graceland and Billy Joel's Greatest Hits, and so forth. this is distinct from people actively unearthing things that were lesser-known or unpopular in their original heyday, but the thread Q seems to be more about a mainstream-accepted, pop-recognized kind of revival.

Wu-Tang definitely feels bigger than in a long time. i see the logo a lot.

can corroborate that bucket hats are very trendy w london kids, or at least were very recently

I've seen the Linda Lindas story posted all over, which is cool but also 100% riot grrl revival

while back it was the same with these School of Rock kids covering Fugazi

https://www.rockcellarmagazine.com/fugazi-twitter-trend-cleveland-school-of-rock-teenagers/

Linda Lindas link
https://variety-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/variety.com/2021/music/news/linda-lindas-racist-sexist-boy-lapl-1234978285/amp/?amp_js_v=a6&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQHKAFQArABIA%3D%3D#aoh=16232459270401&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fvariety.com%2F2021%2Fmusic%2Fnews%2Flinda-lindas-racist-sexist-boy-lapl-1234978285%2F

I think part of the problem here is people's conception of "the 90s" ends in like 95

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, June 9, 2021 8:47 AM (fifty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This seems otm to me personally and on a broader level. Similar to how a lot of people's conception of the 80s seems focussed on like 84-87.

something i think about a lot is how old shows getting added to Netflix seems to be a new factor in this that wasnt at play in previous instances of decade revivalism, in terms of what things get plucked from the ether as the dominant signifiers of the era. i know more than one person who has gotten a Frasier-related tattoo in the last few years (im sorry to say). but if the streaming rights deal had broken a different way, i imagine it could just as easily have been Grace Under Fire or Spin City or something

95 is when the internet started becoming mainstream, right? Seems normal to split the decade in two based on that

Hip-hop and R&B still going strong. The way Soundscan revealed how undercounted their commercial strength was and the way radio yielded to them was the decade's most distinguishing characteristic in America, not grunge or whatever, whose impact on the Hot 100 was more minimal than on the bigger album chart.

So what "nineties" are some of y'all looking for?

This seems otm to me personally and on a broader level. Similar to how a lot of people's conception of the 80s seems focussed on like 84-87.

That's true in some contexts, but at the same time I sometimes see everything crunched down in ways that are hilarious to those who lived through it. I wish I'd taken a photo, but a few years ago I was in Edinburgh and there was a flyer from some student disco that used the Trainspotting poster with Morrissey, Shaun Ryder and god knows who else photoshopped in place of the actors.

I can't remember if it was billed as an 80s night, 90s night or both.

Maybe it was supposedly Madchester-themed, in fact.

its already been 10 years since that album of Win95 startup sounds was The Wire's album of the year

I really want a return to the Poppy Bush Interzone—acid and techno leaking to the mainstream, Metallica having a top 40 hit, etc.

Hip-hop and R&B still going strong. The way Soundscan revealed how undercounted their commercial strength was and the way radio yielded to them was the decade's most distinguishing characteristic in America, not grunge or whatever, whose impact on the Hot 100 was more minimal than on the bigger album chart.

If it's still going strong it can't be a revival, no? I don't think ppl think of Hip-Hop or R&B as particularly 90's genres, and I don't think most examples of those genres that you hear on the radio in 2021 sound more influenced by the 90's than the 80's or 00's.

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

90s are those mythical pre-9/11, pre-fovever-war, pre-recession, pre-austerity, pre-trump, pre-brexit, pre-climate-worst-case-scenario, pre-pandemic times when everything was pretty much ok and everybody basically got along

we had it all, Arrested Development, Dr Dre, Eve 6, Limp Bizkit, Bob Dole, debit cards, grunge

I don't think ppl think of Hip-Hop or R&B as particularly 90's genres

Wait, what?

xp it was the "end of history" iirc

To an extent the show Portlandia was Gen Xers paying homage to the '90s, or "The Dream of the '90s" as they called it. I sense among my fellow Gen Xers that our nostalgia is focused on the '80s (i.e. high school) or still on the '70s - whether ironically (we were neglected and ignored latchkey kids) or genuinely (we were free-range kids, how great was that). I do think there was a vibe of optimism for a hot minute in the early '90s underneath the slacker cynicism and that is the moment and the zeitgeist I've been lately feeling some pangs of nostalgia for. I feel nothing whatsoever for the culture of the late '90s. But then there must be a maximum age a person can feel nostalgic for, and for me that is about 26.

My neighborhood is a sort of mass production factory for kids and I see them wearing Nirvana t-shirts all the time and have for years. It's funny though, it's really just Nirvana. You never see them wear a Throwing Muses or an L7 shirt.

I had a 90s revival party and I destroyed Wikipedia and infected everybody's computer with trojans, also added frames to every website

xp

yeah it's weird that lots of young people seem to listen to Nirvana but never Pearl Jam or Soundgarden (from my anecdotal viewpoint). Those bands were almost as huge as Nirvana back then.

Do young people today listen to Rage Against The Machine? I feel like that's a band made for teenagers that would probably hold up over time

I don't think ppl think of Hip-Hop or R&B as particularly 90's genres
Wait, what?

Those genres are way too huge to be associated with one decade imo. Subgenres like New Jack Swing or G-Funk are associated with the 90's, but saying that Hip-Hop or R&B in and of themselves are 90's genres would be like saying Rock is a "70's genre".

Like if "WAP" comes on the radio do you think "ah, a 90's throwback"?

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