What do you Like/Dislike about the '90s?

Things I like:

* Gaming was much more diverse, as well as gender-inclusive than it is today. Maybe it's nostalgia, but I think the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 are the two best home consoles, next to the PS2. PC gaming was also great, thanks to a slew of classic simulation and real time strategy titles.

* This was probably the first decade during which you could be gay and still feel reasonably visible and have some friends. Obviously, there was still a ways to go, but LGBT people at least had real visibility in the media and were much more embraced in the right youthful circles.

* The technology struck a pretty great balance, especially by the late 90s in particular. Personal computers were finally standard, making several everyday tasks a lot more convenient, and gaming was also much more diverse, as I stated earlier, but the world wasn't so dominated by technology that it cost people their ability to think with nuance.

* Television made significant leaps over the stale 1980s, thanks to the diversification of available channels and new programs that weren't meddled by old guard studio executives to nearly the same degree.

* The politics of this period were pretty optimistic and peaceful. In spite of the occasional tragic news story, there wasn't this ridiculous feeling of impending armageddon like there is now.

* Overall, this was a great decade for movies, although action films weren't especially creative during the second half.

* Music, as a whole, was more diverse and colourful than ever, even in the mainstream. 1994 to 1999 were especially delightful years.

* Fashion during the last year and a half of the decade.

* S Club 7's debut in 1999! 

Things I do not like:

* I was too young to really have a full grasp of the youth culture at the time, but I do get a vague sense of their being a level of snobbish elitism to much of the culture, particularly in its complete and outright rejection of anything bright and commercialized. So much of the spirit that I love about the 80s was clearly gone for most of this decade and the only really started to return once the Y2K era rolled around.

* Except for the late 90s, this was definitely one of the lesser decades for fashion since the 1920s. In general, there was either too much baggy denim, too many dark, scroungy, depressing colours; or too little glamour. I'm not personally a fan of grunge fashion, sorry. Maybe it's just the fact that it's heavily influential to the mainstream lesbian culture of today that I've personally distanced myself from, but most 90s fashion just fails to capture my personal style. I like the Rachel and the bob, and actually I have a strong nostalgia for curtain-cuts as well, but personally, I prefer the 1960s and Y2K era when it comes to style. I don't despise the 90s in fashion – they're still easily better than the 2010s in that respect – but I don't really adore them, either.

* Like SharksFan99, I think the early 90s were fairly mediocre for popular culture, especially music, in particular. Too little creativity in rock aside from grunge, too much insincere peppiness in dance-pop, too many schmaltzy ballads of little substance, Mariah Carey excluded.

Overall, I think the 1990s were one of the best decades in history. I personally really wish I had experienced my adolescence during that decade, as opposed to only remembering my early childhood throughout the second half of it.

I agree. Gaming currently suffers from an image program, IMO. Even though female gamers are encouraged more than ever, there is still the stereotypical image that gaming is only for males in their teens and early-20s. It has only been fueled by games such as Call of Duty, Halo and Minecraft. This wasn't so much of a problem back in the '90s, as most games were gender-neutral and didn't target a specific demographic.

In regards to the Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64 and PS2, I agree that they were the best gaming consoles. I would also personally add the original Playstation to that category as well. Although, I guess it's all perspective. Someone who is around the same age as SkittlesCat is likely to prefer the PS4 and Xbox One more and regard them as such, since they grew up with them. 


Yep, I agree with that. Although, I think the Early-Mid 2000's were generally a good balance of technology as well. To be honest, you could argue that technology was pretty well balanced until around 2010, when the first tablets became available and smartphones exploded in popularity. 


This, I definitely agree with. In all honesty, i'm not a fan of 1980s television at all and there are very few shows from the decade that I actually like.


I can't dispute these two points. The movies and music are definitely some of the reasons as to why the '90s are personally my favourite decade for pop culture. 


At least you were able to experience the '90s, even if you were still a bit too young to fully grasp the pop culture of the time. Being born in 1999, I have absolutely no memories of the 1990s at all, which is quite frustrating, given how much I really like the pop culture of the decade. It's a "kick in the teeth" situation for me; being born in the decade that I love, but right at the end of it. 


That's understandable. Everyone has their own personal opinions over different aspects of pop culture. Apart from the music itself, the primarily reason as to why I relate/identify so much with grunge culture, is because of the themes of authenticity and individuality that it conveys. It's not superficial and that's one of the reasons why I like it as much as I do. 

Haha, true. Even though, if you had of been a few years earlier, you would have been able to experience more of the Early 2000s.

Regardless, I can still clearly remeber my personal life and pop culture of the majority of the 2000s.

I think video games as a whole have always been targeted more towards males than females, but the big distinction is that in the 1990s, the industry wasn't so overdriven with testosterone that only the biggest tomboys had any possible place in the gaming community. The Sims franchise was one of the most successful PC series of all time precisely because it appealed not just to guys, but to plenty of women, too.



The PS1 was definitely great as well, though I personally played the PS2 much more, even though we owned a PS1.



Yeah, I agree that the early-mid-2000s were really technologically balanced. In all frankness, I think I could live with technology available strictly through 2006 and be totally satisfied today, without really any feeling of inconvenience. I prefer the Y2K era because there wasn't as much bad music amidst the good stuff and the fashion was a bit more charming imo, but I'm absolutely nostalgic about the mid-2000s for a reason.



Indeed. Along with homophobia, AIDS was the achilles heel of the 1980s and the main reason it loses on an overall level to the 1990s for me.



This is largely how I feel about the 1980s. Because I love so much of the popular culture that came out of that decade, I seriously wish that my childhood had taken place throughout that decade so that I could appreciate all the carefree charm it provided while being primarily oblivious to the homophobia at the time. Still, I also wish I was older than just a little kid throughout the 1990s. It really bites that music started to really suck in the United States right around the time I turned 13, in 2005, because it really enforces how much I was born the wrong year. I think I would have hit the perfect balance if I had been born around the same time as Rachel Stevens, who's 39 right now.



You know, I do really like grunge music, it's just the fashion that I don't gravitate to quite as much. It's more a personal taste thing than anything else; I certainly don't recommend all the bright, bubbly, cheesy, girly stuff I'm into to everybody.

Actually, it's funny, because with regards to your comments about grunge culture conveying individuality as opposed to superficiality, I really think that what comes off as genuine versus condescendingly plastic can vary quite drastically by person. Conventionally, you would probably describe a manufactured bubblegum pop group like S Club 7 to be pandering, deceitful trash, but for me personally, their music and personality convey a serious sense of warmth and welcomeness that really resonates with me as a person, in spite of how cheesy and obnoxious they are to those who prefer a bit more edge to their music. Conversely, indie music and its correlative culture are supposedly a sanctuary of freedom of expression to numerous people of my generation, but for me personally, indie culture is like the absolute epitome of snobbish, hypocritical, unwelcoming loathsomeness at the very core of my deepest insecurities growing up. While at the same time I can totally understand how one person might fall in love with hipster traditions and mindsets, another, such as myself, is left feeling alienated and inferior, and thus ironically gravitating towards the bright, polished, commercialized media like S Club 7 and other Y2K era pop, simply because it more directly speaks to our personalities. I accept the fact that such stuff is primarily crafted by studio executives, but I still appreciate the performers themselves and also just feel more "what you see is what you get" about them, whereas a hipster type bullied by the pop crowd growing up might feel "what you see is what you get" with indie music, since their style is just so much more congruent with that particular subculture.

What I'm trying to get, I suppose, is that the individuality of grunge culture speaks to you the way the colour and optimism of S Club 7, epitomized especially in their song "Bring It All Back," resonates with me. In all honesty, I don't really perceive the grunge culture of the 90s to be nearly as elitist as the indie culture of today, but if the Simpsons episodes Homerpalooza and Summer of 4 ft. 2 are accurate to any degree, there are definitely certain aspects about 90s alternative culture that would have personally turned me off.

To a degree, yeah. I very much knew Britney Spears (who's also nowhere near my favourite pop singer of the Y2K era, despite how much I adore "(You Drive Me) Crazy" and "Stronger") and the Backstreet Boys at the time of their commercial peak, back when I was in 2nd grade, because my sister loved them and had their CD's playing in the car. I discovered the American Now That's What I Call Music! series in 3rd grade because my mom owned Now 8, and I soon collected the rest of the albums in the series to that point, which started in 1998 and therefore gave me a solid introduction to popular music from the late 90s and early 2000s. Funnily enough, it was actually because of Now 7, which included "Never Had a Dream Come True," that my sister got my dad to buy all of S Club 7's albums, since she was already familiar with the show, and I got constant exposure to all their songs that were big hits in other countries despite not charting in America.That all said, I was really only at the height of my awareness of top 40 music in 6th grade, during which I listened frequently to our top 40-oriented FM station and was still finding a lot of stuff I enjoyed. As I've stated before, I drifted away from pop music in 7th grade because it started to suck hard in America back then (despite actually being at its 2000s-specific height in the UK), and wasn't really in-tune with the charts again until 11th and 12th grade, before college caused pop to disappear completely from my life for a time.That's interesting, I sort of would've guessed you'd consider them non-individualistic because of how much you've stated you think Y2K era music is too cheesy. I'm glad you can at least recognize the sincere talent put into the group's albums, even if it was much more business-oriented than your favourite grunge and alternative bands at the time. I'm still sure there were lots of people who were in fact just as harsh to S Club 7 as I am towards Daphne & Celeste's "Ooh Stick You."
Yeah, I got the strong impression that, because it's The Simpsons, it wasn't an entirely accurate depiction of Gen-X culture but rather mostly a spoof, but I figured those episodes must have been based off of something at least partially true, hence why I brought them up. It's very evident, based on what I know, that 90s alternative culture was a direct backlash to a lot of the cheesy, commercialized media of the 1980s, which I've stated I absolutely love, and I can imagine it may have been similarly hard for me to be a fan of East 17 or Eternal the same way the indie crowd of now despises even my most favoured current pop acts like Little Mix and Clean Bandit.

Just out of curiosity, what do you dislike about the music?