Pop Culture

Living in the 90s

The Australian, 28 December 2009

Nostalgia seems to be getting more and more impatient. Take television, for example. Hey Hey, It's Saturday, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place have recently been revived, only a decade after their cancellations, for a “new generation”. Two months ago, the gang from Seinfeld, perhaps the most celebrated sitcom of the nineties, had a much-hyped reunion on the series Curb Your Enthusiasm (starring Seinfeld’s co-creator, Larry David). For once, the overused phrase “They haven’t changed a bit” would have almost made sense. They had aged just 11 years since their final episode.

            Meanwhile, Triple J’s all-time “Hottest 100” list in August (their first such list in a decade) was headed by three songs from the 1990s. Number one was Nirvana’s 1992 song Smells Like Teen Spirit, the “anthem of a generation” by the “band of a generation”, from the “album of a generation” (Nevermind). As Triple J’s audience is too young to be part of that generation, there’s only one logical explanation: the nineties are back. And perhaps just a moment too soon.

“The reason for this is clear and almost stunningly obvious,” wrote Gen-Y reporter Steve Ciccarelli recently in a Philadelphia student paper The Temple News. “The kids that were 15 years old when Toy Story came out [in 1995] are now the new guard of popular media and by that effect pop culture… Are we out of ideas or was the decade really that stunningly great?”

            Nostalgia swings in two-decade cycles, playing with the memories of young and middle-aged adults, and convincing children that they missed the “good old days” (making them buy as many toys and DVDs as possible to make up for it). The eighties revival is still under way, even though possibly the best thing about the eighties was the sixties revival.

Yet even though 1990 was almost 20 years ago, the nineties still seem too fresh to be “revived”. It doesn’t seem so long ago when, thanks to Y2K, we were all waiting for civilisation to collapse in the first few minutes of 2000. Nonetheless, we already miss the nineties. This current decade was recently dubbed “The Decade from Hell” by Time magazine – with good reason. It makes perfect sense for the Gen-Y marketing pundits to return to the none-too-distant past, before 9/11, the Iraq War and Paris Hilton.

But the marketing geniuses still have a problem: how does one market the nineties? Right now, it still seems to be the gap decade between the fall of communism and the fall of the World Trade Centre. It doesn’t evoke a particular “mood” like the sixties, the seventies or the eighties. What exactly were we doing back in 1995?

Was there are particularly “nineties” fashion or musical style? For all their significance, Nirvana’s music and dress sense made them resemble countless hard-rock bands from ten years earlier. Oasis, perhaps the decade’s other seminal band, was not only inspired by the Beatles, but also took their guitar riffs and even some of their lyrics.

Here was a decade in which, offered many decades of DVD collections and a new device called the Internet (still spelt with a capital I), the youth were handed easy access to the past several decades of pop culture. Hence, they could pick and choose. The great movies and songs of the past were digitally restored, making them good as new. The highest-selling song was not by Nirvana or the Spice Girls, but a re-release of Elton John’s 1973 song Candle in the Wind (albeit one to commemorate the death of nineties superstar Princess Diana). The past was no longer a distant country.

It was also a decade when pop culture was scattered. While there were still many mass shared experiences, it was the first time in a century when nothing really stood out enough to symbolise the entire decade. No inescapable icons like the flappers and jazz clubs of the 1920s. No supergroups like the Beatles of the 1960s. No overpowering trends like the general excess in the 1980s. Seinfeld’s much-hyped final episode in 1998 lured 76 million US viewers, which wasn’t nearly as impressive as the 106 million who saw the finale of MASH in 1983. Seinfeld was America’s highest-rating series, but viewers had too much choice.

            Of course, that diffusion hasn’t changed. “Before the nineties, you’d be into the music that came out recently,” says Triple J’s music director Richard Kingsmill. “Now, in these days of downloading and personal playlists, the iPod generation listens to songs going back more than 40 years.” In Triple J’s all-time Hottest 100, the largest voting arc was 19-21-year-olds, “but seeing their favourites, you’d think it was a much older demographic.”

Nostalgia is not about accurately reliving the past, but idealising it. Perhaps the best of the nineties is waiting to be properly discovered. Even the indefatigable nostalgia for the swinging sixties has been partly driven by pop-culture relics, from Star Trek to the Velvet Underground, that weren’t widely popular during the decade itself.  Already, we have seen a reassessment of the short-lived and obscure 1994 television series My So-Called Life, the 1999 cinema flop Fight Club, and Jeff Buckley’s 1994 album Grace (which only ever made it to #149 in the Billboard charts), to name but three examples. In five years’ time, Generation-Z youngsters (and let’s hope that someone finds them a better label) will look back dreamily on the days when their parents protested against the Gulf War and listened to Hallelujah, though they were more likely protesting against university fees and listening to My Heart Will Go On.

Also during the nineties, so-called “indie” and “arthouse” movies became the norm at the box-office. Nonetheless, perhaps the archetypal Hollywood hit of the decade wasn’t Pulp Fiction or Clerks, but the rom-com You’ve Got Mail (1998). It featured two of Hollywood’s biggest stars (Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan), and revolved around one of the trends of the era. (Email chat still hadn’t lost its novelty.) Moreover, as typical for the nineties, it took its cue from an earlier film.

            You’ve Got Mail was about two rival booksellers who fall in love by sending emails to each other, unaware that they know (and despise) each other in real life. While it seemed like a new idea, it was based on the 1940 movie The Shop Around the Corner, starring Jimmy Stewart. Of course, they didn’t have email in 1940, so back then it was considered an avant-garde work of science fiction. (No, not really. It actually was a movie about two pen friends, with no reference to email. They missed a great opportunity there.)

            Naturally, You’ve Got Mail is already showing its age. If the film was remade next year, it would look remarkably different. (Perhaps Tweet Me, starring Owen Wilson and Kate Hudson as rival e-book distributors.) But the dated charm of You’ve Got Mail, set in a simple world of cottage bookshops and “old-style” computers, effortlessly returns us to a simpler time. Ditto the prescient satire of The Truman Show, or the high-school lingo and fashion of Clueless. Ready-made nostalgia. We don’t need 1990s movies revived with iStory, web comics, or Facebook accounts for the characters. But we’ll probably get them anyway.

            It’s what executives call “unaided awareness”. Why try to interest audiences in new stories, when you can show them something they remember fondly from their younger days? “Brands are the new stars,” says the chairman of Universal Pictures, Marc Shmuger. In the past decade, this logic brought back 1980s toys like the Masters of the Universe, thanks to toy companies like Toynami. “Everybody who was watching this stuff as kids is now grown up,” said Toynami’s Scott Tipton in 2004. “They’ve got some disposable income and they’re looking to recapture some of their childhood. I think you’ll see the same thing in about another 15 years on [1990s superhero team Mighty Morphin] Power Rangers.”

            A nineties revival is almost upon us, so we might as well enjoy it. Which raises the question: how did we enjoy ourselves in the nineties? Legally, I mean. The twenties had mah jong, the sixties had Twister and the eighties had Pac-Man. In the interests of marketing (and an attempt to find alternatives to Tamagotchi), what nineties leisure pursuits are worth reviving?

The Spice Girls Challenge

One of our favourite 1990s leisure pursuits, you might recall, was to get any group of five people and match each of them with their corresponding Spice Girl. Let’s relive the joys and thrills of the era by playing this game with, say, PMs and Opposition leaders of the 1990s. Bob Hawke, as a keen sports-lover, was Sporty Spice; John Hewson, with his notorious GST policy, was Scary Spice; Alexander Downer was Baby Spice; and Paul Keating, with his Italian suits and love of opera, was obviously Posh Spice. Not sure who Sexy Spice was, though.

The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

This was the coolest G-rated game at 1990s parties. The object was to link any movie actor to Kevin Bacon through no more than six films. Say you wanted to link Bacon to Errol Flynn. Bacon was in The Big Picture with Eddie Albert, who was in The Roots of Heaven with Flynn. See? If you’re really smart like me, this isn’t so hard.

            Since 2000, however, Bacon has made another 20 films, so it’s becoming too easy. Once you had to plough through three movies to link him with Helena Bonham Carter, but since Novacaine, it only takes one. We need a more challenging game. How about Six Degrees of Jacqueline McKenzie? Can you name a single movie the once-ubiquitous Aussie actor has made since 1999? (I can, but we’ve already established that I’m really smart.)

The Macarena

Most eras have a dance (the Charleston, the Twist, the Moonwalk) worth reviving. Sadly, the 1990s might have been an exception. Nonetheless, whatever form nineties nostalgia takes, perhaps this is one thing that we can count on. In a few years’ time, kids – too young to remember the original craze – will be able to dance every step of the Macarena.

            When this happens, we’ll know that nostalgia had gone too far.