As a gen-x’er, the rot seemed to set in with September 11 and the tech bubble bursting. Everything: politics, the economy, pop culture, seems to have been in decline since a vague high-water mark around 2000-2002.
9/11 really is where all our modern troubles began in a big way, we've been slowly, but surely, falling apart these last 20 years.
That's why I prefer the 2000s to today because it's a matter of degrees, the immediate aftermath wasn't as bad as the long-term effects.
At the time, I actually hated the pop culture of the 90’s - grunge, rap, Friends, Jim Carey comedies; but the past several years have made it seem like a golden age in comparison, to the point that I am now nostalgic for all that crap.
You're right, the 90s was lame in it's own way pop culture wise, I often noticed that as a kid in the latter half of the decade, watching 80s movies at the time like Goonies, Ghostbusters, Back to The Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, they were so much better than any similar contemporary movies I was seeing at the time which was usually garbage like the Roland Emmerich Godzilla, Michael Bay's Armageddon, crap like that.
The only major exceptions I saw being Men in Black, Starship Troopers, the Brendan Fraser The Mummy, The Truman Show and The Matrix, all of which were good, but still not quite 80s level (Starship Troopers is very close though, with the added bonus of being one of the first times I saw tits lol), there's also Galaxy Quest but that did come out at the tail end of the decade and I didn't see it until 2000, but it does count as a 90s movie.
The 90s was a good decade for animation both movies and TV and it was a good decade for "indie movies" ala Tarantino, but as far as live action big Hollywood movies go, while it started off strong (especially with Jurassic Park) for most of the decade it was pretty lame.
This applies not just to movies but to music and live action TV as well.
However what all 90s pop culture has in common, even the bad stuff, is it's all so incredibly
innocent today, so profoundly
naïve and that makes it charming today, you wonder what has happened to where our culture could once produce stuff like that but not anymore.
Maybe it’s the rise of woke combined with social media. The ever present fear that saying the wrong thing could cost you your job. I don’t remember that paranoia being as prevalent prior to Sept. 11. After that, you started seeing the fear creep in - first with watching what you joked about, or said at the airport (and god help you if you walked away from your luggage for few minutes). Now I have to shit poast anonymously on this site; just to say things everyone thinks, and actually used to be able to say freely.
9/11 made us a very paranoid, fearful society.
First it was fear about terrorism, now it's fear about "racism"
I don't miss those years a bit. 1990 onwards was just Clown World Lite until it went turbo in more recent times.
The decades I truly miss are the 70s and 80s.
You're not wrong, it was Clown World Lite, it's depressing to know I've lived my entire life in some version of Clown World.
In a fundamental way the US really lost it's way after the end of the 1980s, we had really seemed to crack the code back then, the confidence we had in ourselves and our culture back then was profound, but we let corruption set in, we allowed our confidence to be shook and we've been on a downward spiral ever since, with 9/11 being what really cranked up the heat.
But like I said, it's a matter of degrees, the rot started to set in back in the 90s, but it was so much milder than today, so much more deep below the surface, there was still a lot of holdover from good days of the USA throughout the 90s and even on into the 2000s, but starting around a decade ago or close to it, we really started to flat out collapse and here we are.
This is not doom posting though, this isn't an argument for despair, but it is a call to action, we do have our work cut out for us to try to fix our society and I do think we can do this.
