Yeah I mean dude, with all due respect, if one of your top examples of great 90s TV is Saved By The Bell...well lets just say I don't think that really compares to The Wire or The Sopranos.
I'd rather be alive today & get to enjoy all the good shit from the past AND the good shit from today. Yeah, there's shite music today but guess what? The 90s gave us The Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, N*Sync, Westlife, Boyzone & an overload of terrible other boy & girl bands. You won't remember B*Witched. Well I do.
Disposable pop music is shite in every decade from the birth of rock'n'roll. The 60s that everyone looks back upon with rose-tinted glasses? Of hippy power, swinging London & all that? It was mostly bollocks. Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit didn't get to #1 in the chart, instead it was the Bee Gees. Doing a very bland song. The wonderful classic (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay by all-time great Otis Redding wasn't #1 despite being one of the most beautiful soul songs ever written. It was Esther & Abi Ofarim - Cinderella Rockefella. I'd never heard of it before.
It's easy to romanticise the past & forget the parts that were crummy. It really is. But I was there in the 90s (born in '84). It was fine. There was a lot of bad stuff, especially in the charts. Eurodance was massive! 2-Unlimited - No Limits. Eiffel 65 - I'm Blue Dabadee. Sash & a litany of fucking appalling tracks that all sounded the same like Ecuador & Encore Une Fois. The fucking Vengaboys. The Macarena. Which was EVERYWHERE! OH GOD THAT SONG. I don't think you can understand how bad that was without living through it. There was Cotton Eye Joe by I don't even remember who but it was bad. Daphne & Celeste. Vanilla Ice. MC Hammer. Peter Andre. Billy Ray Cyrus track Achey Breaky Heart, which surely deserves a spot in any good "worst songs ever" list. Britney Spears. I could go on but I'm having bad shakes remember some of these aural atrocities.
I'm not diminishing the decade, there's a lot of stuff that I love from the 90s musically. I mean early 90s hip-hop is considerably more of interest to me than Lil' Wayne, Nicki Minaj, T-Pain & all that lot. Grunge. Black metal mother fucker! Almost all the must have black metal records came out in the 90s. In fact 2 of my top 5 records ever are from the 90s, Burzum - Filosofem & Electric Wizard - Come My Fanatics. But I'm more just pointing out that it's a lot easier to forget the bad stuff, especially if you didn't live through Lou Bega - Mambo No. 5
On the TV point I have to totally disagree. There is some great stuff, like Buffy The Vampire Slayer & Babylon 5, Star Trek DS9 & Father Ted, The West Wing & Oz (though I think most of those actually ran on into the '00s). But I think it's fair to say that the millenium so far has been a high point in the history of television drama series. From the American stuff that I mentioned earlier in the post there are amazing foreign stuff like Borgen & The Bridge. The Thick Of It. Band of Brothers. State of Play. I could go on.
I think my point is that it's cool to enjoy stuff from the past, but don't overlook what's going on right now. Yeah, there's Nickelback & Justin Bieber & the whole metalcore thing but I've got stuff by Sigh, Shining, Mastodon, Animal Collective, Outkast, Fennesz, etc ON TOP of all that awesome shit from the past. And that's coming from someone who probably listens to more stuff from the 60s & 70s & the contemporary era. Not trying to tell you what to think...just try to get you reconsider things a little.
Edited by user 12 September 2012 11:05:09(UTC)
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