I became a teen at the end of that decade, so the late 90's kind of holds a place in me.  That being said, I thought the late 90's was pushing the envelope as far as pop culture goes.

Then there was the Columbine High School Massacre happening which shocked the United States.

The late 90's brought out some good shows, such as Family Guy, That 70's Show, King of the Hill,  and if you were a pro-wrestling fan, the WWF Attitude Era was extremely entertaining at the time. 

Internet back then was a bit different than what it is now.  ICQ, MIRC, AIM was that era's Myspace, Facebook, etc...

Everybody was waiting for Y2K.  The amount of products made to prevent Y2K was amazing, especially those Y2K software disks.

Personally, I had good times in 1997-1998.  I traveled a lot, played football every other day and was with a lovely girl at the time too.

What do you guys think of the late 90's?  A good experience or bad?

WWF Wrestling hasn't been entertaining since around 1994

For me, the late 90s brought some great dance music, and some entertaining movies.  Other than that, nothing spectacular

Also became a teen, though I pretty much prefer older music than whatever was current. Though I liked "Family Guy", "Celebrity Deathmatch", "Mission Hill", and "South Park".

Though at that time I considered myself "too cool" for older cartoons like Looney Tunes, Mickey, Donald, etc, which I didn't realized at the time were originally aimed towards adults.

There's a lot I could say about the late 90's.

Although I'm definitely a mid-90's person, I've had some good times in the late 90's. I turned 18, graduated, and started college. They were my wild party years, well I was wild since I was 15 in 1995, but by the late 90's I wasn't a teenager anymore so it was more public partying like real clubs, lots of raves, bars, etc... I started "raving" when I was 15 too, but it was kind of a thing for me and some of the my friends in highschool, it wasn't a thing everyone was doing so it felt special to us, but it college it seemed like everyone was doing it. Music was still good, teen pop never bothered me. Really great tv shows were on during the late 90's as well. I remember my favorite show Charmed started in 1998, around the time I started college. I think fashion was so much better then than it is now, with all the variety of clothes and hairstyles. AOL LOL. I wasn't really big on computers and the internet until the 2000's.

Late 90's are really hated on here I noticed. I think because they're not quite retro yet. In a few years there will be late 90's nostalgia. All the 90's nostalgia is dedicated to the early 90's right now. I think it's too early for late 90's nostalgia and even a little too early for mid 90's nostalgia to be brought to the world and public just yet.

Being all that said, I'm still more of a mid 90's person than late 90's because of all the problems I had in the late 90's. I pretty much hated the world back then, but of course I look back on it. But the mid 90's is the only time of my life where I actually remember thinking at that time "My life is going the way I want it right now"

And in the late 90's I would think about the previous years and get sad because I never wanted the happiness to end. Especially when I heard a popular mid 90's song. (most likely a song from one of the summers)

I think the culture defining year of the late 90's is 1998. Or as some would say "the most "late 90's year" of the late 90's. I really have a hard time calling 1997 late 90's because it just wasn't the late 90's feeling to me. Besides the music, everything else was still "mid 90's." Everyone was still wearing flannel shirts and more casual clothes. Girls still had the "big scrunchie half pony tail on top of the head thing" going on, which was the biggest style of the mid 90's. If you don't understand, I think a girl with long, probably curly or wavy hair would put a large scrunchy around a small portion of her hair, on top of the middle of her head and just let it hang down. It looked like a flower was growing on their head.  :P

And the overall attitude was still the same. I don't remember too much use for the internet and cell phones in 1997, or at least the first half of the year. (I got my first cell phone in late 1997.) 1997 was kind of the year the mid and late 90's overlapped.

While I have to agree that the big hair trend died in 1993, it left kind of an after-affect. Curly hair was in style and it was generally a little poofy, or just had a lot of body to it, but it wasn't quite big, which went through 1993 - 1997.

However, 1997 was definitely a "late 90's year" for music. I remember the first time I heard The Spice Girls "Wannabe" it was me and my sister's 17th birthday and we were driving and it came on the radio and we both looked at each other like "umm... what the hell is this?" Spice Girls, Hanson, Backstreet Boys, and White Town all came out that year, early in the year. I remember thinking to myself in 1997 that there were some interesting music fads going on, but I didn't have a problem with it at all.

I guess I've said enough..

Everyone was obsessed with technology, especially the Internet. 1997 was the year MTV hyped up techno as "the next big thing." And then in the next year, 1998, like half the alternative rock bands in the country scrambled to release techno-flavored albums, virtually all of which tanked. You had The Matrix, the Pets.com puppet, the dancing baby, Office Space, the Y2K freak-out... everything was computers, computers, computers! It's funny how excited everyone was over this brave new world, compared to now when everyone and his mom has a Twitter account and the mainstream news media is doing stories on YouTube videos.

There was a lot of energy and no one seemed to know what to do with it. We could all tell things were changing, and it was sort of exciting, but it was also sort of scary. It was like you were getting two simultaneous messages that you were supposed to hold in your head at once: "Computers are going to make us all rich!" and "Computers are going to KILL US ALL!" So there was a lot of panic. Specifically, moral panic. Columbine really served as a dumping ground for all our cultural anxieties. People were freaked out about teenagers, who were now starting to completely dominate the media (teen dramas, teen pop music, etc. etc.) and they were also freaked out about technology. A lot of people blamed Columbine on the Internet, just because Eric Harris had a website. Of course, more blamed Goth culture (even though neither of the shooters were Goth) or Marilyn Manson (even though neither of the shooters listened to Marilyn Manson) out of paranoia over youth culture.

My eighth grade year was sort of framed by disasters. In the beginning of the school year, Matthew Shepard was killed. Then, towards the end of the school year, Columbine happened. The news media really seemed hung up on this narrative of innocent children being slaughtered. (See also: JonBenet Ramsey) Maybe they were keying into the zeitgeist in some way. Maybe one of the reasons we were so paranoid about technology was because we feared that it would take away our innocence, or our humanity, and we expressed that by obsessing over news stories about dying kids. Or maybe I'm just trying to draw connections where there aren't any. After all, the mid-00's gave us "missing white woman syndrome."

Anyway, Matthew Shepard's murder really shook me up. I was just starting to realize I was gay and beginning to slowly come to terms with what that might mean, and then this young guy is brutally tortured just for being gay, and it's all over the papers. That had a huge impact on me. It really drove home to me: "You're not welcome here. Most people hate you. Someone will probably try to kill you." Which is probably not the healthiest message for a thirteen-year-old boy to internalize. Then I started high school a few months after Columbine. The climate was paranoid; I really felt like the faculty and staff were all scared of the students. They'd installed metal detectors in the doorways. They'd upped the security. Everyone was suspicious of any kid who dressed or acted a little differently. It became even harder to be different, which is really saying something. So on a personal level, just speaking for my life, those years really, really sucked.

At the time, I strongly felt this need for something new and exciting in pop culture, specifically in music. Grunge was dead and there was nothing to replace it, and there was all this awful teenybopper music, and I was just like, "God, give us another Kurt Cobain!" I remember feeling sort of resentful of my older brothers, who got to be in college during the early 90's and do the whole Gen X thing. I felt like they got to be a part of something, whereas my peers were just listening to the Backstreet Boys and shopping at Abercrombie & Fitch and generally being mindless consumers. I was waiting for The Next Big Thing, some kind of zeitgeist-defining new movement that would draw us all together and make us think, "YES. This is what it means to be alive in the late 90's." And then there just sort of... wasn't any. I don't think I was alone in this, either. You could hear it happening on the radio throughout the mid-to-late 90's: "Women's music is going to be the Next Big Thing! Wait, no, techno is! No, it's nu-metal now! Hey, look, pop-punk!" It seemed like we were just throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and looking to see what stuck, and nothing did.

Here's an interesting article on movies of the time and how they reflected the overall feel of the late 90's: When America Crashed Into the Sky. The author is wrong about when the dot-com bubble burst (it was 2000, not 1998), but overall she makes a thought-provoking point:
The ’90s will most likely be remembered as a Golden Age. At no other point in history had so many people been so rich. At no point in the future will the affluent of our culture be quite so affluent again. (That is, unless we manage to sidestep Peak Oil by inventing cars that run on fairy dust and happy thoughts.) For teenagers and young adults, it seemed quite likely that they’d be able to work for a few years in the tech industry, make an obscene amount of money, and retire before they even so much as lost their youthful acne. All in all, things were looking up.

So what kind of screenplays did people start writing around this time? Stories about people trapped in artificial, shallow, and deeply unsatisfying worlds. Mostly these were fictional allegories (The Truman Show, Pleasantville, The Matrix). Fight Club and American Beauty took the theme a little more literally. Such stories are common in science fiction, and occasionally surface in popular movies. But five of them, all released within the span of about a year? As I said, pop culture tends to reflect the general mindset of its culture. So apparently, amidst the greatest economy the world had ever seen, and will ever see, the richest nation in the richest culture in the richest time in history was collectively thinking: I’ve got to get out of here.

I looooovvvvvvvvvvvvvvvveeeeeeee the late 90's!

Sorry if I seem too excited.  ;D The late 90's was one of the happiest times in my life. It will always have a place in my heart because it was the epitome of my childhood.

I loved watching the WB cartoons in the morning of Animaniacs and Fox Kids with their cartoons also.

I loved the music during this era and television.

TV after 2004 was never the same and they don't make cartoons like they used to anymore. Also, as about 80% of the people on this board says, music of 00's suck!

1997-2000 was so fun.  http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/01/bdaybiggrin.gif http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/01/anim-jjd.gif

LATE 90s!!  :D

I was in my late school age years in the late 90s and I'll tell you something,
I'm SO glad I was there to experience it.

I loved the late 90s!
Some of the best Backstreet Boys stuff was released in the LATE 90s.
And I am a huge fan.  ;)
Same with Britney and all those other pop fiends.

The television was never better, either.
There 90s I think had the best television of all time.
That was what cartoons were SUPPOSED to be like.

The games that kids played in the 90s in general were amazing.

It was just a better time.
We actually had sheesh to do besides sit around on our electronic stuff.
Granted, old people are going to think I'm insane for thinking the 90s didn't have electronics,
but seriously,
look how much sheesh we have these days to do that we never had then?
Crazy, right?

If I ever had to go back in time.
The late 90s is where it's at, tell you what.

1997 sucked for my personal life. My fave NBA team finally made the NBA Finals but lost to the Chicago Bulls. 1998 was good and I graduated High School, leased a new car and got a new job. My favorite NBA team the Utah Jazz lost the championship again to the Chicago Bulls because of Michael Jordan. 1999 was ok actually except for the music I mean Britney Spears why is he so famous and I even asked that now. Boy bands and teen-pop were everywere so that was like the first time I questioned the music scene.

1999 my favorite race car driver Rusty Wallace dominated the Daytona 500 but lost the race because of Jeff Gordon's move on the apron of the racetrack to take the lead away from Rusty. The strike shortened 1998-1999 NBA season is well remembered because thats when the league went in a downward spiral popularity wise for about 10 years until the 2009 NBA playoffs because of the Cleveland Cavs being good because of Lebron James, Kobe and the Lakers, and The Denver Nuggets making a good rin in this years playoffs with Carmelo Anthony and cast-offs from other teams like Chris Anderson(New Orleans Hornets), Chuancey Billups(Detroit Pistons), and Kenyon Martin(New Jersey Nets.)

The late 90's, as well as the early 2000's were probably *the* time to be a kid, preteen, and a teenager or just young. With the flashy clothes and the carefree feel, along with all the teen idols that were singing and on tv. Technology was booming but not overdone.

there were a lot of school shootings in the late 90s. kentucky, oregon and of course columbine.
i was a teen in the late 90s and i do miss those days. i listened to all types of music from
britney to marilyn manson. watched dawsons creek, trl. went to the movies a lot, mainly
to see horror movies like scream, the faculty, urban legend.
life seemed easier back then

I became a teen at the end of that decade, so the late 90's kind of holds a place in me.  That being said, I thought the late 90's was pushing the envelope as far as pop culture goes.

Then there was the Columbine High School Massacre happening which shocked the United States.

The late 90's brought out some good shows, such as Family Guy, That 70's Show, King of the Hill,  and if you were a pro-wrestling fan, the WWF Attitude Era was extremely entertaining at the time. 

Internet back then was a bit different than what it is now.  ICQ, MIRC, AIM was that era's Myspace, Facebook, etc...

Everybody was waiting for Y2K.  The amount of products made to prevent Y2K was amazing, especially those Y2K software disks.

Personally, I had good times in 1997-1998.  I traveled a lot, played football every other day and was with a lovely girl at the time too.

What do you guys think of the late 90's?  A good experience or bad?


I became a teenager in 1998, so most of the mainstream pop culture was aimed at my age group around that time(nu metal esp.) I personally liked the early 00's better than the late 90's(went through some hectic stuff around 1999). I absolutely loved the year 2000(even if it's not part of the late 90's), I had a blast that year, esp the summer part.
I hate to admit it but in the late 90's I was very into the nu metal scence(like Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit 8-P).

I became a teenager in 1998, so most of the mainstream pop culture was aimed at my age group around that time(nu metal esp.) I personally liked the early 00's better than the late 90's(went through some hectic stuff around 1999). I absolutely loved the year 2000(even if it's not part of the late 90's), I had a blast that year, esp the summer part.
I hate to admit it but in the late 90's I was very into the nu metal scence(like Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit 8-P).


Don't worry man, I was into Creed during the late 90s.  Apparently everyone loved Creed, Limp Bizkit, etc.. in the late 90s and it was such a big deal that they had really high selling records.  Nowadays everybody hates them.

It took a few years after the Fairness Doctrine, but right-wing media companies can arrange for Rush Limbaugh to be on 3 hours a day in 5 time zones on 1200 stations.  Now he's got Sean Hannity, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, Mancow, and a thousand other corporatist clowns out there endorsing the WORST in America -- The swagger, the ignorance, the John Wayne attitude, the monolingual stubbornness!  It's like Thomas Hobbes directed by P.J. O'Rourke.  I mean, the sh*t was scary!  When I was a kind you never dropped an f-bomb in public.  If you did, you better have a darn good reason!  I watched a lot the Generation Y people grow up without rudimentary family structural stability.  They don't address moral or ethical questions.  They just ask, "What's in it for me?"

Again, I claim no scholarship of Thomas Hobbes, but this sounds like a problem where the Republicans learned to read philosophy, Democrats hung around at Oprah's Book Club.  Who is our highest profile philosophy professor now?  William Bennett.  Come on, the guy's a fraud. 

If they set the Bible aside after prayer and studied philosophy from Socrates to Sartre they might have been able to right the economy much more quickly if the went by Milton Friedman's Kill the Poor campaign!
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/12/evil7.gif

Above all though, take those poetry courses in your undergrad years.  So what if you have to do some extra homework and the credits aren't going toward your degree.  If you are going to be in news copy writing, advertising, public relations, movie rights, I get a cut of the action right?  Nobody who studied poetry was in college in the 2004 campaign.  They came up with the slogan for Kerry/Edwards.  "Help Is On The Way."  It specified neither the one offering the help nor the one receiving the help."  It sends you a message to have faith in a generic political promise.  If members of Kerry's staff studied more poetry they would understand why "Help is on the way" is a crappy campaign slogan!  Using words to convey an ideal of freedom and a maximum on living.  "Hope" and "change" are concepts.  You can do what you want them. 

Our civilizations will change our ways when we admit we must coexist.  Perhaps we should not be using 19th century technology, the gasoline powered internal combustion engine = the car.  Maybe we have learn how to live in autonomous neighborhoods, including the guys you CAN'T vote off. 

The late 90's were good for me, especially 1999 and 2000 (I associate the year 2000 culturally with the late 90's, since it is part of that same era). What I think of most when I think that time is Playstation 1 and Nintendo 64. Musically, I listened to a lot of hip-hop and R&B, and some of my favorite artists at the time were Next, Joe, KC and Jojo, Jon B, Rome, Rakim, Outkast (the Aquemini album), Jay Z (Hard Knock Life), Jagged Edge, Common, and many others. In '99 and 2000 I started to get into more electronic music, such as Vengaboys and Basement Jaxx. For TV, South Park is the show that best represents that era. Family Guy as well, though that show didn't gain popularity until well in the 00's (after it got canceled once). As for movies, my favorite one that takes me back to that time is "The Fifth Element". "Office Space" was a classic as well, and the first Matrix.