'In defence of the 1990s....'

‘AND NOW.... AN OPINION!’

I dislike it when people mock and ridicule the 1990s, and claim it to be a sad, terrible decade devoid of culture or identity. They always contrast it alongside the ‘60s, ‘70s, and most often the ‘80s, using the supposedly vibrant feel of these decades as proof that the ‘90s was a dark and meaningless time.

          This is a classic case of bovine excrement.

          The ‘90s had the poor luck to come directly after the wild and bombastic ‘80s, a decade famed for its originality, its good music, its ludicrous yet somehow universally accepted fashion, and its chunky technological revolutions. Compared to all that, it is no wonder that the ‘90s is seen as flat and grey, little more than a stepping-stone to the bright new world of the 21^st Century.

          Popular music of the ‘90s was I admit, more or less, utter crap. Dominated by boy-bands, hip-hop and, worst of all, the outright pestilence that was the Spice Girls, when looked at through the eyes of ‘Top of the Pops’ it’s easy to see how the ‘90s was a terrible decade for everybody involved, and its legacy is still sorely felt right up to the present day. Compared to the general music of the ‘80s and the preceding decades, culture took a nose-dive. Also movies seemed to go downhill, with the only vaguely memorable films being things like Jurassic Park and Titanic, which in themselves were hardly revolutionary except for the amount they cost to make, while everything else in the cinema was either a terrible sequel or an inferior remake. Nowhere is this more evident than the close of these years with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. And fashion! Gods, wasn’t that a nightmare? Either schizophrenic, short-lived and eye-stingingly awful, shell-suits, or else bland business-wear.

          If any of these heavy-handed generalisations has made your blood-boil, then good; that was the effect I was hoping for. If you agreed with it all, then I’m hoping to point out where you’re wrong. You see, there was a lot of really good stuff in the ‘90s, but it has all been overshadowed by the hideous popular culture that one sees if merely looking at an overview. These worse aspects have also, I reckon, been conflated by the dirty hand of the Internet, controlled as it is by the memes of cynical ‘80s kids who are for some reason convinced that their own decade was the peak of culture and vibrancy, and was squashed suddenly when the year 1990 came around. Worse still, the ‘90s generation has been quickly suckered in by this myth, and have become all too eager to denounce the decade of their childhood, the decade that had neither the all-powerful Internet nor the flashy ‘80s culture that their elders idolize. With one hand these ‘80s kids point to the films, music and television of their salad-days, while with the other they contrast it with the more sober and undecided feeling of the ‘90s. The ‘80s knew what it was about, while the ‘90s existed apparently just for the sake of it. Now here’s where we put those misconceptions right.

           

              The music of the ‘90s was never terrible to the exclusion of all good music – sure there was the appalling shit that clogged up the radio-waves and perpetuated a desire for national suicide, just like there is today, but you just have to look past all that to see that good music was far from dead. Things like REM and Tori Amos were very popular, and captured a spirit in their music which beforehand had not been heard, a spirit unique to the ‘90s, while below the surface could be found groups and musicians whose artistic output equalled and exceeded the quality of most things found in days gone by, without having to be tied down to a specific decade, and which had the advantage of being influenced by all the music that had gone before and thus allow them to push the boat out yet further. Heavy Metal, Rock music, Punk Rock, Jazz and even Classical could all be found in this decade, some of it better than ever, and you just had to resist the crap that the record companies tried to shove down your throat. The death of Freddie Mercury, meanwhile, did little to actually silence the all-powerful rock-band Queen, and the frequent resurfacing of their old hits gave a small island of respite for a music-starved world. People who actually liked music, as opposed to the people who were content to put up with the wank-stained likes of Boyzone they were subjected to on the radio day-in and day-out, were never lacking for decent listening, but more often than not they probably just mourned the loss of ‘80s music - music which wasn’t all great, I might add. After all, we only have to recall Adam Ant to see what happened when the ‘80s went too far.

          In terms of style and fashion, I think that perhaps the worst offences of the decade were only ever committed in urban America. I spent my childhood on the other side of the Atlantic, but I never remember southern England being overrun with stupid hairstyles or mish-mashed pastel-coloured odd-cut gymwear. People generally dressed normally, t-shirts, jeans, or grey suits if they needed to go formal. Okay, we were overrun by sweatshirts and jogging-bottoms (or sweat-pants I believe they’re called in the U.S, possibly the most horrible yet suitable name for an article of clothing yet devised), and it is an eyesore that has refused to leave. But compared to the ‘80s, I would say fashion was generally much better – especially the hair, after we had eradicated the Mohican and the Mullet, and when permed hair had once again been consigned to oblivion (okay I’m overstepping myself with the hair perms – they weren’t too bad, but did they have to be everywhere, like they appeared in the movies? Why was that style so popular?) Denim shirts, leg-warmers, padded shoulders and aviator jackets may have been more widely accepted back in their day, but they still looked awful. Thank God for the days of the 1990s when people started to dress normally again, with proper trousers and decently combed/gelled hair; and even the ‘grunge’ look doesn’t look so bad, when you look at what the ‘New Romantics’ were subjecting their fan-base to.

There are a few other things worthy of note about this great decade. The Movies may have gone downhill and unadventurous in the ‘90s,  but there are a few worthy mentions: the work of Quentin Tarantino for one, and odd spasms of greatness such as The Sixth Sense and Forrest Gump, films which were unencumbered by the pervasive culture of the previous decade and so therefore could focus on just being films – no need for a montage or synth-driven music-scores, which not even James Bond could escape. Independence Day could have appeared at any time, but we know it’s not from the ‘80s due to the lack of those cultural touchstones that almost became a staple of ‘80s cinema. And also let’s not forget that Toy Story was ‘90s film, as was the whole Pixar thing that spawned from it. And just because I couldn’t attach this little side note anywhere else, we also saw the rise of two great series’ of novels: J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Both are brilliant, surviving into the next century and providing excellent reading material for huge numbers of people.

Finally the crux of the matter, the thing which I reckon puts the ‘90s on the map as a genuine cultural hot-spot, making it just as worthy to be remembered and praised as ever the ‘80s, ‘70s or ‘60s for its unique contributions to civilisation – television! More specifically, well-observed and intelligent science fiction series’ which have left a noticeable impact on the world of today. Of course we had sci-fi all through the preceding decades, one or two of which were actually quite good, but the ‘90s witnessed an explosion of good TV series’ that were noticeably lacking up to that point, and have since fallen out of favour. Star Trek the Next Generation, its spin offs Voyager and Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, Farscape, Stargate SG-1, and to cast the net slightly wider we can include Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While less good than all these mentioned, the no-less fondly remembered Sam Raimi’s Hercules: the Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess were nevertheless great fun to watch. All of them were great shows, whose success continued right on through into the next decade, spawning a cultural triumph at the start of the 2000s with The Lord of the Rings films and the apex of the space opera, the new Battlestar Galactica. Meanwhile in terms of comedy we ended up with The Simpsons, and Fraiser, the second of which had a popularity that came to eclipse even that of its venerable ‘80s forbear Cheers. I suppose I might also begrudgingly include Friends on that list considering that it was an important part of ‘90s culture, but I never liked that show, so I won’t. All in all the 1990s was a good time to be watching television, just based on the small selection here that I’ve cobbled together off the top of my head. Unfortunately at some point mid-way through the ‘00s (the decade of the 2000s, in case that’s confusing, pronounced not ‘naughties, as Channel 4 would have you believe, but hundreds, as in nineteen-hundreds [1900s] and eighteen-hundreds [1800s]), the sci-fi’s that had been such a feature of the previous decade began to be seen less and less – although that’s not to say the decade was devoid of good television. After all, the work of Joss Whedon continued to excel itself despite repeated strangulations from the higher powers, and the first series of Heroes was genuinely amazing – but on this subject it must be stressed that Heroes was a one-shot wonder, the style and structure that had made it so thoroughly watchable at first only ever carried the seeds of its own destruction, and the subsequent seasons were a long and depressing codicil to something that had started off so well only to die, miserable and forgotten in a pool of its own blood and vomit still miles away from the finishing line. What was more depressing was to see the whole thing happen again in rapid-motion with the spin-off of Battlestar, called Caprica, which tried to pull the same tricks only to die just as pathetic a death after only one season. 'Crapica' was essentially the same quality as Heroes was after its first season; i.e. schizophrenic storylines, plot-holes like a sieve, and story-threads that trail off after a single episode. Also it had this really annoying quality that I like to call “profound statement of the week”, where one character gives another a short lecture about some vaguely spiritual random subject for no reason other than to try and make the show seem more meaningful than it actually is. It's about as far away from the quality of BSG as you can get. There were a dozen similar tales to Heroes and ‘Crapica’, but it was clear that most of them were just trying to recreate the success of their predecessors, to recapture the glory of the late ‘90s (and yes, I use that phrase without a even a hint of irony, because this is the heart of what this whole essay has been about), but they lacked the drive and knowledge and ardour that had made those things what they were. There was Star Trek: Enterprize, which completely failed to make an impression. Let’s face it; the ‘90s had something the late ‘00s didn’t.

Because the ‘90s did actually know what it was about; it was about looking forward to something, not just enjoying the here and now. It wasn’t just the last decade of the 20^th century, but the last few years of the ‘Second’ Millennium; one cannot help but see the year 1996 onwards as a hurry towards the finishing line. With the end of the Cold War and the promise of the Internet, our culture in the ‘90s was about the anticipation of the wonders of the future, whether for good or for ill, and the changing of that one number at the start of the year was a monumental occasion. I remember there were some retarded discussions around that time about whether the new Millennium began in the year 2000 or in the next year, 2001, because there was no year zero; it was never about precisely how many years there were, but about changing every single number in that four-digit date, most of all the one right at the front which during much of western civilisation had remained unalterably the number ‘1’, and will for the next 987 years be a number ‘2’. Those of us who lived through the ‘90s got to see that number change, and unless you don’t use the ‘Anno Domini/Common Era’ system that’s been a hallmark of western history for some considerable time, then that must surely be a fairly special moment. I know it was for me. I remember the last few years of the ‘90s quite well, how there was a general anticipation in the air for this new future, in which humanity had been released from its shackles by art and science, and that the threat of nuclear annihilation might actually go away. That’s why I think that sci-fi series’ suddenly gained this immense popularity during this decade – they had already been building firm foundations for themselves, and with a new era just round the corner the time was right to indulge our fantasies.

And now after all this, if you still think that the ‘90s was a cultural dead-zone filled with Neapolitan ice cream and ‘Play-by-Mail’ board-games, fit only for forgetting and for ridicule, then I pity you. I really do. There were things that happened that weren’t so good, such as the Spice Girls and sweat-pants, but then every decade had equivalents, including the glitter-spangled ‘80s. And in terms of culture, I wouldn’t trade He-Man and Transformers, cheesy hallmarks of the ‘80s, for Stargate and Babylon 5, pieces of ‘90s culture that were actually good, actually worth remembering for more than misguided nostalgia. This is not to say that I’m condemning the ‘80s, after all there is much that happened there that I love - the best example here is song ‘Flashdance’, which is a three minute encapsulation of everything brilliant about the ‘80s: bombastic, synthetic, but glorious beyond my ability to describe with mere words; I almost want to laugh at it, but it’s just too amazing to do so. The following decade seems to lack anything that so solidly places it in a good light, but all in all it was a good time to have lived though, and for all its faults, it has left the world a much better place for its happening. I’m glad to have lived through them.

[Disclaimer: These are always fun to do, so I’ll do one here. All this is my personal opinion, and as such you may have cause to dispute some or all of what I say. If you do, then well done! That probably means you’ve read the essay. If not, then finish reading it before you get down here. You might dispute my opinion that the Spice Girls were a terrible blight on the history of civilisation, even though this would in fact prove that you were insane, but we’re all entitled to our opinions. Whatever your thoughts on the matter, I’m merely trying to point out the ‘90s were in fact a good time to be alive, contrary to what a large proportion of Internet memes suggest by their barefaced condemnation of the ‘90s. If you have any alternative ideas, then you're welcome to let me know].