The 90s

 

Decades are like snowflakes. They’re white and pointy, and all a little different. Sometimes I think about the 20th century and the decades therein. Nobody knows exactly how many decades were in that century, but it almost seems like there’s one every ten years or so.

I certainly have my favorites. I miss the Jazz Age because The 20s were so Roaring. The 30s were kind of depressing. The 40s thought war was the answer, which, according to a lot of t-shirts, is not. The 50s gave us the booming business of babies. The Swinging 60s was civil rights and counterculture. Most know the 70s as the decade I was born. The 80s was instant nostalgia. But the most forgotten decade of the 20th century has to be the 90s. In fact, I had to look it up to make sure it really was a decade. And yes, according to experts, the 90s apparently ran from roughly 1990 to 1999.

There was a lot going on in the 90s. The hit shows were “Friends,” “The Simpsons,” and the biggest was “Seinfeld.” But the show many people watched but now want their time back was “Beverly Hills 90210”. The biggest jump in television was probably that MTV stepped away from music television and gave us a new genre called “reality.”

The fashion of the 90s was all over the map. Neon. Leggings. Grunge. If you were into more pockets, you could now grab cargo pants. Hip hop gave us oversized baseball jackets and baggy jeans. In a change no one saw coming, baseball caps, largely worn backward in the 80s, were worn, wait for it, forward.

In sports, the Dallas Cowboys won three Super Bowls in the 90s. The biggest tennis player of the decade was Pete Sampras, who won fourteen grand slams. Michael Jordon won six titles with the Chicago Bulls in the 90s but promptly used up all the goodwill when he released “Space Jam.”

In the 90s, people listened to music on compact discs. The Sony Walkman is replaced by the Sony Discman. Try running with one of those. People enjoyed listening to Whitney Houston, The Spice Girls, and Mariah Carey. Nirvana led the grunge movement, but Cameron Crowe promptly ended it with his movie “Singles.” The Macarena was a song and dance that made everyone look bad. Gansta Rap and hip hop, from Public Enemy to Tupac Shakur to Snoop Dog, blew up. But MC Hammer had the best pants.

One personal story from the 90s: I was going to college in rural Vermont. A friend of mine owned a Mazda Miata. It was an impractical car for several hard winter months, but he loved it and drove it, and occasionally, I borrowed it. I would buzz around the small New England roads, top-down, heater on, music hopping, and enjoy the changing colors. But then he got a cassette (CDs were not ubiquitous yet) stuck in his tape deck. More specifically, it was a cassingle, a cassette with only one song per side. But he was several hours from the nearest place that could fix it, so, for several months, if you were in the Miata, you could listen to ambient road noise, OR you could listen to two versions of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” the hit single from “The Bodyguard” and, on the B-side, the instrumental version. Auto reverse meant the single would play, followed by the instrumental version, uninterrupted, ad infinitum. I suppose everyone has a different threshold for a Whitney Houston single on repeat, but I can tell you I am certainly a different, less agreeable person today than I might be otherwise.

Bob Dylan might have been talking about the 90s when he said, “the times they are a changing.” You probably got your first personal computer, started carrying a cell phone, and, if you were cutting edge, went on the internet and ordered a book – that’s all they sold – on Amazon. But your phone wasn’t a camera, it was hard to type out a text, and you weren’t on social media (Facebook was born in 2004). In light of so few distractions, you might have started to rollerblade. As the decade came to an end, many were terrified about Y2K, concerned that computers would be unable to handle the jump from the number 1999 to the next number in the sequence – 2000. Somehow the computers managed, and the world moved on. So should we.