This is how I would group the 90's in different eras.

1. Very Early 90's (Late 80's extention) (1990-Early 1991):
Quintessential year: 1991

2. Early 90's (The Grunge Era) (Late 1991-Early 1994):
Quintessential year: 1994

3. Mid 90's (Late 1994-Early 1996):
Quintessential year: 1996

4. Late 90's (Late 1996-Early 1998):
Quintessential year: 1997

5. Millennium Era (Late 1998-Early 2001):
Quintessential year: 1999

This is how I would group the 90's in different eras.

1. Very Early 90's (Late 80's extention) (1990-Early 1991):
Quintessential year: 1991

2. Early 90's (The Grunge Era) (Late 1991-Early 1994):
Quintessential year: 1994

3. Mid 90's (Late 1994-Early 1996):
Quintessential year: 1996

4. Late 90's (Late 1996-Early 1998):
Quintessential year: 1997

5. Millennium Era (Late 1998-Early 2001):
Quintessential year: 1999


That's not bad at all. I notice how you separated the late 90's and the millennium era. I understand this is from your viewpoint since you lived in the 90's as a kid, and I know I've seen you on another website before, I just can't get it from the top of my head on here.

I can sort of see why you would split late 1996 - 2001 into two separate eras, since a lot of the most popular things introduced during the earlier era began to decline as the second began to phase in.  Bad Boy Records, for example, was certainly no longer top dog in hip hop by 1999, nor were the Spice Girls that popular anymore.  Also, Seinfeld ended in May 1998 and The Simpsons got truly bad in November 1998.

That being said, I still personally consider the end of 1998 through the summer of 2001 to be mostly an expansion upon late 1996-early 1998 culture, because for the most part the key trends of that period (South Park, fifth generation video games, the rapid growth of the Internet, the flowering of teen pop and glam rap, etc.) only grew more prevalent with time, even if some of it was through different incarnations (the Spice Girls passed the teen pop princess torch to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, while Puff Daddy passed on the torch of glam rap to Jay-Z).

This is how I would group the 90's in different eras.

1. Very Early 90's (Late 80's extention) (1990-Early 1991):
Quintessential year: 1991

2. Early 90's (The Grunge Era) (Late 1991-Early 1994):
Quintessential year: 1994

3. Mid 90's (Late 1994-Early 1996):
Quintessential year: 1996

4. Late 90's (Late 1996-Early 1998):
Quintessential year: 1997

5. Millennium Era (Late 1998-Early 2001):
Quintessential year: 1999


As a person who was there, I can tell you that late '91 and 1992 were the last time humanity lived in that "very early '90s" era you speak of. The grunge era was in full swing from 1993 to 1994.

This magazine article was from 1993: http://s632.photobucket.com/user/awesometasha/media/howtobegrunge.png.html

As a person who was there, I can tell you that late '91 and 1992 were the last time humanity lived in that "very early '90s" era you speak of. The grunge era truly began in 1993!!!!

This magazine article was from 1993: http://s632.photobucket.com/user/awesometasha/media/howtobegrunge.png.html


So the constant circulation of Smells Like Teen Spirit, Come As You Are, and the like meant hardly anything?  Granted, grunge was more established in 1993 than in 1991-1992, but the movement certainly didn't just "begin" in 1993.

So the constant circulation of Smells Like Teen Spirit, Come As You Are, and the like meant hardly anything?  Granted, grunge was more established in 1993 than in 1991-1992, but the movement certainly didn't just "begin" in 1993.


In those days, Smells Like Teen Spirit was thought of as an anthem that sounded like nothing else at the time.

This was the real 1992: http://sausagetherat.deviantart.com/art/1992-72108151

I just mean that an entertainer doesn't have to be popular during all ten years of a decade to truly define it.  Madonna was still big for most of the 1980s anyway, even if she wasn't a familiar face in 1980-1982, whose most popular artists anyway were 70s stars who had changed their style, like Donna Summer and Olivia Newton-John.

I knew what you meant and I still stand by what I said.

The series was cancelled in 1996, and its popularity drastically plummeted, anyway, after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.  There was the Next Mutation live action series during the 1997-1998 school year, but it was such a flop that it was cancelled after one season.

The same deal deal goes with the Ninja Turtles as C+C Music Factory and Ren & Stimpy - hanging on by a thread does not mean just as important to the decade's culture as during the peak period.  I don't think anybody would think of 1995 and be reminded of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the way they would with 1990, even though the original cartoon was still airing.


Ren and Stimpy wasn't 'hanging by a thread' in 1993; their merchandise was flooding stores back then.

Ren and Stimpy wasn't 'hanging by a thread' in 1993; their merchandise was flooding stores back then.


That's because of the original show's 1991 + 1992 episodes, not the stuff from when John K. was gone and Billy West was voicing both Ren and Stimpy.

That's because of the original show's 1991 + 1992 episodes, not the stuff from when John K. was gone and Billy West was voicing both Ren and Stimpy.


People were watching the '91 and '92 episodes from the spring of 1992 to the fall of 1993.

Aside from U2 (who were extremely different in the 90s, anyway), none of the groups you listed really achieved serious mainstream success in the 80s aside from some appearances on the alternative charts.  They're considered classic acts in music enthusiast communities, but a lot of people wouldn't discover their work until much later.  I'll give you that alternative rock started to garner a bit more attention in 1989, but it was still glam metal, 80s radio rock type of songs that were achieving the greatest success.  After about a year or so since the success of Smells Like Teen Spirit, the 80s-style bands either disappeared from fame or changed their style to fit the times, like Bon Jovi and Aerosmith did.


Incorrect, R.E.M. for example had two top 10 pop singles in the 1980s (The One I Love in 1987 and Stand in 1989). Other alt records, such as Fast Car by Tracy Chapman or What I Am by Edie Brickel both had major pop radio success as well in the late 1980s. That more acoustic driven, rootsy sound was starting to catch on then in the mainstream even though it was 4 or 5 years from peaking. The Pixies would be an example of a band that got instant critical acclaim, even if their mainstream appeal wasn't really there yet.

Again, N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton wasn't a significant mainstream success, despite its rave reviews and impact on future hip hop records.  Even then, its production sounds nothing like what was up ahead for Compton and resembles the old school hip hop records of the time.  Until Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang came out, hip hop as a media force was mostly  a dance genre with benign lyrics and a vague sense of rebellion, but nothing compared to the anger and defiance of authority that gangsta rap brought to the table.  It also didn't have nearly as many synthesizers and was still exiting its DJ roots.  MC Hammer, Sir Mix-A-Lot, and the like fell completely off the radar after gangsta rap entered the masses, while LL Cool J attempted to emulate the new style on 14 Shots to the Dome with little success (he would reinvent himself again for Mr. Smith).

Music is surely always changing and it did after Straight Outta Compton, but gangsta rap was certainly around prior to The Chronic and it's too simplistic to pretend that The Chronic was its start. Also, rap's angst driven bent could be traced at least as far back as 1982 with The Message, which became a major hit in several countries (hit #8 in the U.K.). Rap did become increasingly edgy as the 1990s went along, but lighter pop rap was still around even in the middle of the decade (Skee-Lo).


I said that the rate of change was slower during that seven-year span, not that it was static.  It's just that 1985 and early 1991 still feel like they're part of the same greater era, after which a there was a dividing line that caused the world to feel like a different decade altogether.

And I think you're either really overestimating the differences between 1991 and 1997 or you're really underestimating the differences between 1985 and 1991. In both cases they seem about equally spaced apart in my mind, falling in line with the calendar. It's not like the 1963-75 period, which had widely recognizable massive cultural changes in a short period of time.



As far as what was still on television (Cheers, The Cosby Show, Full House, etc.), the technology available (the Internet not yet known much about, the NES still dominating the video game world, especially thanks to Super Mario Bros. 3), or the global politics (there was still a Republican in office, the Soviet Union still existed).  there was really more in common between the 1980s in general than there was with the 1990s in general.

In 1990, Seinfeld, Twin Peaks, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and The Simpsons were all popular on television and SNL was beginning its great revival. Stuff like Cheers, The Cosby Show, and MacGyver had declined in popularity and shows like Family Ties, ALF, and Miami Vice were off the air. The Berlin Wall had fallen and everyone knew the USSR was no longer a legitimate threat, Saddam was the political villain of that time. Plenty had changed since the mid 1980s on that front. So... if you're going to use arbitrary cultural points as a benchmark for how similar two timeframes are, I just have to point out that it goes both ways. 


I'm sorry for my carelessness about the math, but regardless, having to refer to April 30, xxx3 and August 31, xxx6 for every three-part decade seems pretty absurd when it fails to reflect the general vibe of popular culture or take into account those events that change everything.  It's certainly not like the world of September 11, 2001, for example, was part of the same global mindset as September 10, 2001.

And the general vibe of popular culture never does change overnight, so using any one date to mark its "beginning and end points" is silly. Either use simple math to make it somewhat objective or don't try to generalize it at all.


That's why I consider that style strictly representative of the late phase of the 80s, during which Bush the Elder was president and the Soviet Union was collapsing once and for all.  By 1993 or even 1992, the songs you listed would have sounded quite outdated.


Bush was president until early 1993, and there's no way that Snap sounded outdated in 1992-93, when they had another massive hit with Rhythm is a Dancer. And that other track sounded like your prototypical hip house/Miami Bass track, a genre which held on through the mid 1990s.


Well, standards for what pop culture affects the overall feel of the world varies by perspective, hence why a lot of people like you prefer to just stick to calendar dates, but I don't think these dates are random when you frame them in terms of a greater whole.  If the 80s were defined, in general, by things such as the end of the Cold War, conservative presidential politics, the release of MTV, new wave, hair metal, 8-bit video games, and The Cosby Show and Cheers being the most popular television shows, then it's easier to categorize most culture from 1990 with that decade than with the age of the Internet, Clinton, gangsta rap, grunge, mainstream alternative rock, Friends, Frasier, Sega vs. Nintendo vs. Sony, etc.  Most culture from 1990 and the first half of 1991 feels like a senile incarnation of what had been popular earlier in the 80s, rather than the fresh, groundbreaking framework for future trends to come, as was the case with 1992.


Obviously the early part of the 1990s feels different from the last part. That's true of every decade. There were superficially "80s-esque" things that held on until halfway through the decade. But it seems like generalizing by using random benchmarks is an endless, circular way of looking at things.

As it is, I simply take issue with the hyperbolic statements like 1990-91 were "the 80s" and 1991 had more in common with 1985 than it did with 1992, neither of which make any sense. 

Incorrect, R.E.M. for example had two top 10 pop singles in the 1980s (The One I Love in 1987 and Stand in 1989). Other alt records, such as Fast Car by Tracy Chapman or What I Am by Edie Brickel both had major pop radio success as well in the late 1980s. That more acoustic driven, rootsy sound was starting to catch on then in the mainstream even though it was 4 or 5 years from peaking. The Pixies would be an example of a band that got instant critical acclaim, even if their mainstream appeal wasn't really there yet.

Bands like Poison, Guns N' Roses, Huey Lewis & the News, and Heart were still the majority through 1991.  Artists like Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman were one-hit wonders, at least during the 80s.  Out of Time was R.E.M.'s most commercially successful album, even though they did achieve some attention throughout the 80s.  If we're talking only about when acoustic rock was standard and not just a niche, then that wouldn't be the case until 1992/1993.

Music is surely always changing and it did after Straight Outta Compton, but gangsta rap was certainly around prior to The Chronic and it's too simplistic to pretend that The Chronic was its start. Also, rap's angst driven bent could be traced at least as far back as 1982 with The Message, which became a major hit in several countries (hit #8 in the U.K.). Rap did become increasingly edgy as the 1990s went along, but lighter pop rap was still around even in the middle of the decade (Skee-Lo).

The Chronic was definitely gangsta rap's breakthrough as a mainstream industry.  After it came out, songs with loud synthesizers and relentlessly profane lyrics were a standard on the mainstream charts, while clean rappers like MC Hammer were being brushed off as dated and irrelevant.  The Message was little more than a novelty at the time of its release, while instead acts like LL Cool J, Run-DMC, and the Beastie Boys pioneered hip hop's original entrance into the mainstream. 

Skee-Lo's I Wish was a bit of a novelty for its time, since it's a rap song about a guy who talks about not fitting in rather than bragging about his wealth and power, but it's definitely nothing like MC Hammer or Vanilla Ice, even though its lyrics are completely clean.  It's a song about life in South Central LA, in keeping true with the gangsta rap trend of the era, just through an alternate perspective.

And I think you're either really overestimating the differences between 1991 and 1997 or you're really underestimating the differences between 1985 and 1991. In both cases they seem about equally spaced apart in my mind, falling in line with the calendar. It's not like the 1963-75 period, which had widely recognizable massive cultural changes in a short period of time.

Honestly, 1997 is much more removed from 1991 than is 1985, for a lot of different reasons.

In 1991, gated drums, hair metal, retro house, and new-jack swing were still the dominant forces in popular music, with alternative rock still on its way into the mainstream.  In 1997, gangsta rap and grunge had both come and gone, teen pop was starting to become popular, and rap was already much more similar to what it was in the early 2000s, with glossy beats and materialistic subject matter.

In 1991, the 16-bit era was just taking off, but a lot of people still owned NES's, as they did in the late 80s; in 1997, both the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were irrelevant, and the 3D era of gaming was in full swing.  Sonic the Hedgehog may have been a popular and groundbreaking game at its release, but fundamentally, it's just an edgier answer to Super Mario Bros., which first came out in 1985; by contrast, something like GoldenEye 007, released in 1997, is from a completely different universe than anything that existed in 1991; the same goes with 1996's Super Mario 64.

In 1991, the Internet technically existed but nobody actually used it.  In 1997, the Internet was a prominent and fast-growing trend, not to mention things like AIM already existed.  In 1991, there was a Republican in the Oval Office, as was the case in 1985, whereas in 1997, a Democratic President was already on his second term.

Maybe not as relevant, but I also think the amount of change that occurred between 1963 and 1975 is somewhat exaggerated.  Most people seem to focus on the creative revolution in popular music and the signing of groundbreaking civil rights legislation, but I still can't help but feel that the 60s as a whole, as well as the early 70s, are just very old-fashioned, focusing on things like fashion, technology, cinema, and television.

In 1990, Seinfeld, Twin Peaks, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and The Simpsons were all popular on television and SNL was beginning its great revival. Stuff like Cheers, The Cosby Show, and MacGyver had declined in popularity and shows like Family Ties, ALF, and Miami Vice were off the air. The Berlin Wall had fallen and everyone knew the USSR was no longer a legitimate threat, Saddam was the political villain of that time. Plenty had changed since the mid 1980s on that front. So... if you're going to use arbitrary cultural points as a benchmark for how similar two timeframes are, I just have to point out that it goes both ways.

Seinfeld and The Simpsons had not yet fully established their identities in 1990.  Most people agree that both shows had somewhat rocky first seasons, not to mention The Simpsons in its first two seasons was, in many ways, just an animated version of Roseanne, another sitcom about a dysfunctional working class American family, and it didn't tackle more truly ambitious issues until about 1992.

Though you did have a fair amount of new shows in 1990, the feel and tone of these programs did not drastically change until a year or two later.  Even with some 80s staples off the air or declining, 1990 was still the prime period for shows like Full House, Saved By the Bell, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which were primarily popular in the late 80s and early 90s, but not afterwards.

Even though the Cold War was technically over since 1989, the USSR's transition out of Communism was still a significant and rambunctious global trend of 1990 and 1991.  The former subjects of the Soviet Union had case-by-case revolutions during that time, and even after they officially adopted democratic constitutions, the transition into capitalism was not a smooth one.  The USSR had been collapsing since earlier in the 80s, and the events of 1989-1991 were really the culmination of that era's factors.

Saddam Hussein was not a significant political concern for very long.  The Gulf War was remarkably short, and after its conclusion, focus instead shifted towards the initiation of neoliberal reforms and intervention of other countries' unrest, like Rwanda and Yugoslavia.

And the general vibe of popular culture never does change overnight, so using any one date to mark its "beginning and end points" is silly. Either use simple math to make it somewhat objective or don't try to generalize it at all.

First off, sometimes it does change pretty much overnight, particularly in the case of a major world tragedy like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor.  Second, even if most change occurs during a gradual period of time, there are usually certain periods during which the rate of change accelerates as significant incoming trends clash with worn out old ones.  The last third of 1996 and first half of 1997 is one example, as during that period, 2Pac and Biggie passed away, teen pop became popular, fifth-generation games completely overtook fourth-generation ones, grunge disappeared for good, and Great Britain elected a new prime minister to the Parliament.  This is very different compared to, say, the interval of 1949 to 1954, during which Elizabeth II became Queen of England, the Korean War occurred, Stalin passed away, and Eisenhower became president, yet remarkably little changed about the feel of society within that period, at least considering its length.  I'm not saying 1954 is completely similar to 1949, but my point is that there was pretty much just as much significant change within the 1996-1997 school year as there was during 1949 and the entire first half of the 50s.

Bush was president until early 1993, and there's no way that Snap sounded outdated in 1992-93, when they had another massive hit with Rhythm is a Dancer. And that other track sounded like your prototypical hip house/Miami Bass track, a genre which held on through the mid 1990s.

Rhythm is a Dancer is a very, very different song from The Power, though.  It sounds just like the eurodance acts of the mid-90s like Real McCoy, La Bouche, and Masterboy, not the 1989-1991-era house that bands like Technotronic, C+C Music Factory, and Black Box represented.  I also don't think Wiggle It would have been popular beyond the early 90s.  Again, eurodance had become the dominant genre of the time by then.

Obviously the early part of the 1990s feels different from the last part. That's true of every decade. There were superficially "80s-esque" things that held on until halfway through the decade. But it seems like generalizing by using random benchmarks is an endless, circular way of looking at things.

80s culture was definitely past its peak by 1990, but 90s culture had still hardly fully established its own identity that year, at least one that would define the decade as a whole.  You did have some mildly new things that year, but most of it did not last long or create a significant framework for the future, and those that would, like The Simpsons, were still developing their identity.  Especially, too, with fashion still dominated by bright colors, crimped hair, and mullets, 1990 was more pseudo-90s than it was pseudo-80s, as the 80s trends still held more influence that year.

As it is, I simply take issue with the hyperbolic statements like 1990-91 were "the 80s" and 1991 had more in common with 1985 than it did with 1992, neither of which make any sense.

You misread my statement.  I said that the period from 1989-1991 felt more like the mid-80s (imo, 1984-1988) than the period from 1992-1994.  Obviously, 1991 is not identical to 1985, but it still shares more in common with the few years directly preceding it from an overall perspective than with those immediately following it, not just in terms of what music and shows were popular at the time but also the overall feel of the time.  This means the rate of significant change was much faster between 1991 and 1993 than between 1985 and 1991.  1993 was very much entrenched in 90s angst, represented by grunge, gangsta rap, and obscene television shows all being popular, whereas 1991 was still caught in the clean, flashy, and conservative atmosphere that dominated the 80s, even if that feel was starting to fade a bit.

I only consider 1990 and the majority of 1991 "the 80s" in a spiritual sense, not a literal one.  Just as nobody would look at The Twist and Whole Lotta Love and say they're from the same greater era, even though they're both 60s songs, nobody would ever say Unskinny Bop fits better alongside You Oughta Know than Rock of Ages, despite being closer in age to the former.

Bands like Poison, Guns N' Roses, Huey Lewis & the News, and Heart were still the majority through 1991.  Artists like Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman were one-hit wonders, at least during the 80s.  Out of Time was R.E.M.'s most commercially successful album, even though they did achieve some attention throughout the 80s.  If we're talking only about when acoustic rock was standard and not just a niche, then that wouldn't be the case until 1992/1993.

Obviously AOR/glam metal were more popular still in the late 1980s, but other rock sounds were definitely creeping into the mainstream and by 1990 it was hardly outlandish to see other types of rock artists have success or get played on MTV. The fact that this could be a top 15 hit in 1990 should demonstrate that

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxkJHX7ukKE




The Chronic was definitely gangsta rap's breakthrough as a mainstream industry.  After it came out, songs with loud synthesizers and relentlessly profane lyrics were a standard on the mainstream charts, while clean rappers like MC Hammer were being brushed off as dated and irrelevant.  The Message was little more than a novelty at the time of its release, while instead acts like LL Cool J, Run-DMC, and the Beastie Boys pioneered hip hop's original entrance into the mainstream. 

G-Funk had a nice popular period between 1993-95, but grittier hip hop remained pretty underground throughout the 1990s. Stuff like Nas, Mobb Deep, or Wu-Tang Clan received widespread acclaim but struggled to cross over onto the pop charts at all. Pop rap and songs about booties remained pretty in.


Honestly, 1997 is much more removed from 1991 than is 1985, for a lot of different reasons.

In 1991, gated drums, hair metal, retro house, and new-jack swing were still the dominant forces in popular music, with alternative rock still on its way into the mainstream.  In 1997, gangsta rap and grunge had both come and gone, teen pop was starting to become popular, and rap was already much more similar to what it was in the early 2000s, with glossy beats and materialistic subject matter.

In 1991, the 16-bit era was just taking off, but a lot of people still owned NES's, as they did in the late 80s; in 1997, both the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were irrelevant, and the 3D era of gaming was in full swing.  Sonic the Hedgehog may have been a popular and groundbreaking game at its release, but fundamentally, it's just an edgier answer to Super Mario Bros., which first came out in 1985; by contrast, something like GoldenEye 007, released in 1997, is from a completely different universe than anything that existed in 1991; the same goes with 1996's Super Mario 64.

In 1991, the Internet technically existed but nobody actually used it.  In 1997, the Internet was a prominent and fast-growing trend, not to mention things like AIM already existed.  In 1991, there was a Republican in the Oval Office, as was the case in 1985, whereas in 1997, a Democratic President was already on his second term.

1985 was noticeably different on the music front from 1991. New Wave was still going strong and synthpop was everywhere in 1985, hip hop was just getting its feet under it, house music was completely unknown, booming AOR was in. Few people had home computers in 1985, by 1991 they were common. Most people used vinyl or cassette tapes in 1985, by 1991 it was almost strictly CD's. The Game Boy was a completely different universe than anything that was around in 1985, and by 1991 Game Boys were everywhere.

Clinton was a conservative Democrat and HW Bush was a moderate Republican, so their presidential policies were almost identical. The political spectrum didn't shift much between 1991 and 1997, especially with the big Republican takeover in the 1994 midterms. Whereas 1985 to 1991 saw a radical shift in the Cold War mindset of the country. The USSR had cratered and was fairly irrelevant as a geopolitical foe by the time the 1990s rolled around. In 1985, Red Dawn still seemed like a modest possibility.


Maybe not as relevant, but I also think the amount of change that occurred between 1963 and 1975 is somewhat exaggerated.  Most people seem to focus on the creative revolution in popular music and the signing of groundbreaking civil rights legislation, but I still can't help but feel that the 60s as a whole, as well as the early 70s, are just very old-fashioned as a whole, just focusing on things like fashion, technology, cinema, and television.

That's because you weren't alive in that time period, so everything in your mind just gets grouped under one collective "old-school" guise. It sounds like you were born in 1992, hence why you think anything before 1992 is "another level of old" and why you seem to see 1990 as an exact cultural replica of the entire decade that came before it. You weren't alive to see it, so it feels foreign.


Seinfeld and The Simpsons had not yet fully established their identities in 1990.  Most people agree that both shows had somewhat rocky first seasons, not to mention The Simpsons in its first two seasons was, in many ways, just an animated version of Roseanne, another sitcom about a dysfunctional working class American family, and it didn't tackle more truly ambitious issues until about 1992.

Sounds like you're grasping at minor differences. The Simpsons was huge in 1990 and had a pretty distinct identity by that point, and Cheers in 1990 wasn't anything like Cheers in 1984.


Though you did have a fair amount of new shows in 1990, the feel and tone of these programs did not drastically change until a year or two later.  Even with some 80s staples off the air or declining, 1990 was still the prime period for shows like Full House, Saved By the Bell, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which were primarily popular in the late 80s and early 90s, but not afterwards.

The tone of Twin Peaks was way different than anything on popular TV that had come before it. And that was the runaway new hit success of the 1989-90 television season.



Saddam Hussein was not a significant political concern for very long.  The Gulf War was remarkably short, and after its conclusion, focus instead shifted towards the initiation of neoliberal reforms and intervention of other countries' unrest, like Rwanda and Yugoslavia.

What? Saddam was a huge concern through the entire 1990s (HW Bush was almost assassinated in 1993 in Kuwait), right on up to 2003. Iraq was the U.S.'s main foreign political concern by 1990, and it would stay that way through the entire decade when the two countries continually remained on the brink of war and the U.S. consistently launched air strike campaigns against Iraq whenever it felt bored.

I'm not saying 1954 is completely similar to 1949, but my point is that there was pretty much just as much significant change within the 1996-1997 school year as there was during 1949 and the entire first half of the 50s.


Sorry,but since you weren't alive in that former period and are just barely old enough to remember the latter one, I'm not sure how qualified you are to say that with any degree of confidence. If you're looking at 1949 versus 1954 for example, the advent and further rise of television alone in that timeframe would make for a noteworthy cultural difference between the two. How noteworthy? Not sure I'm qualified to say that either since I wasn't alive, but I can guess that "the feel" of things was still consistently changing.


Rhythm is a Dancer is a very, very different song from The Power, though.  It sounds just like the eurodance acts of the mid-90s like Real McCoy, La Bouche, and Masterboy, not the 1989-1991-era house that bands like Tecehnotronic, C+C Music Factory, and Black Box represented.  I also don't think Wiggle It would have been popular beyond the early 90s.  Again, eurodance had become the dominant genre of the time by then.

The two Snap hits sound largely similar to me and it fits well into the overall eurodance genre. The late 80s/early 90s house scene sounds way more similar to mid 90s eurodance than it does any of the previously popular 1980s dance or freestyle music sounds. Hence why the two are often grouped together. 


80s culture was definitely past its peak by 1990, but 90s culture had still hardly fully established its own identity that year, at least one that would define the decade as a whole.  You did have some mildly new things that year, but most of it did not last long or create a significant framework for the future, and those that would, like The Simpsons, were still developing their identity.  Especially, too, with fashion still dominated by bright colors, crimped hair, and mullets, 1990 was more pseudo-90s than it was pseudo-80s, as the 80s trends still held more influence that year.

1990s culture is not one static entity. A singular culture never became "fully established" because it was literally always diverse and literally always changing, like with any other time period. Everything that happened between 1990 and 1999 is also literally encompassed into 1990s culture. It is what it is. If it happened in that decade, then it's relevant to what the decade's "identity" was. That means everything from Alias' supremely soft rock hit "More Than Words Can Say" in 1990 to Sugar Ray's bouncy "Every Morning" in 1999 could adequately sum up 1990s culture. If it happened in that 10 year span, then it's all apart of its identity.


You misread my statement.  I said that the period from 1989-1991 felt more like the mid-80s (imo, 1984-1988) than the period from 1992-1994.  Obviously, 1991 is not identical to 1985, but it still shares more in common with the few years directly preceding it from an overall perspective than with those immediately following it, not just in terms of what music and shows were popular at the time but also the overall feel of the time.  This means the rate of significant change was much faster between 1991 and 1993 than between 1985 and 1991.

January 1991 (early 1991) does not in any way, shape, or form feel closer in cultural attitude to January 1984 than it does to December 1991 (late 1991). Or even December 1994 for that matter. And why would it? Two points mere months apart are going to be more aligned culturally than two points 5-6-7 years apart. Shouldn't be a surprise.


  1993 was very much entrenched in 90s angst, represented by grunge, gangsta rap, and obscene television shows all being popular, whereas 1991 was still caught in the clean, flashy, and conservative atmosphere that dominated the 80s, even if that feel was starting to fade a bit.

But that is still a generalization, since I can still find hit songs from 1993 that look like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENZ3XbxCRZs

and hit songs from 1991 that look like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M8GszEN9MM

See what I mean about music and culture always being diverse?

Obviously AOR/glam metal were more popular still in the late 1980s, but other rock sounds were definitely creeping into the mainstream and by 1990 it was hardly outlandish to see other types of rock artists have success or get played on MTV. The fact that this could be a top 15 hit in 1990 should demonstrate that

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxkJHX7ukKE

Like Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman were in the late 80s, Michael Penn was a one-hit wonder in 1990.  Compared to hair metal and pop rock, acoustic and alternative rock as industries were little more than a niche until 1992/1993.  Even in 1985, you had John Mellencamp, who had a very rootsy sound that would help him remain relevant on the Billboard Hot 100 well into the 90s.  His Scarecrow album isn't totally the same as the acoustic and alternative songs of the late 80s and early 90s, but my point is that those genres weren't entirely a world away in 1985, even if they were mostly confined to the underground that year.

G-Funk had a nice popular period between 1993-95, but grittier hip hop remained pretty underground throughout the 1990s. Stuff like Nas, Mobb Deep, or Wu-Tang Clan received widespread acclaim but struggled to cross over onto the pop charts at all. Pop rap and songs about booties remained pretty in.

What about Biggie?  He may have rapped over much more radio-friendly beats than Wu-Tang, Nas, and Mobb Deep, but his debut album is just as much of an acclaimed masterpiece as its more underground contemporaries.  Its subject matter is in no way watered down, talking about the harshness of ghetto life, the struggle to survive, and finding ways to outmuscle rivals.  The same applies with Ice Cube and 2Pac, both of whom achieved mainstream fame since 1993.  Honestly, hip hop as a mainstream force would never again be as gritty as it was in the mid-90s except for Eminem.

Pop rap remained popular throughout the entire decade.  Just look at Will Smith, Waterbed Hev-era Heavy D, and Phenomenon-era LL Cool J.  Songs about booties never faded and, if anything, peaked 2004-ish.

1985 was noticeably different on the music front from 1991. New Wave was still going strong and synthpop was everywhere in 1985, hip hop was just getting its feet under it, house music was completely unknown, booming AOR was in.

New wave remained popular through the early 90s, even though it had evolved somewhat.  Duran Duran and Tears for Fears both had big hits in 1993, and the most significant album of 1990 was Depeche Mode's Violator.  INXS was also still huge around that time with Suicide Blonde and Disappear.  Many rock and pop acts popular in 1991 were also big in 1985, like Huey Lewis & the News, Heart, Sting, George Michael, Whitney Houston, Simple Minds, Dire Straits, Van Halen, and John Mellencamp.  Mainstream hip hop in 1991 was more similar to underground hip hop from 1985 than most 90s hip hop.

Few people had home computers in 1985, by 1991 they were common. Most people used vinyl or cassette tapes in 1985, by 1991 it was almost strictly CD's. The Game Boy was a completely different universe than anything that was around in 1985, and by 1991 Game Boys were everywhere.

I disagree, home computers were definitely a significant industry by 1985, especially since video game consoles were so unpopular that year.  The original Apple II was released in 1977, and the Commodore 64 was out since 1982.  While CD's were definitely popular in 1991, cassettes were still the preferred music format by a small margin.  While the Game Boy revolutionized the portable market,  1985 still had Game & Watch and Tiger Electronics Handhelds, the latter of which remained very popular in 1991.

Clinton was a conservative Democrat and HW Bush was a moderate Republican, so their presidential policies were almost identical. The political spectrum didn't shift much between 1991 and 1997, especially with the big Republican takeover in the 1994 midterms. Whereas 1985 to 1991 saw a radical shift in the Cold War mindset of the country. The USSR had cratered and was fairly irrelevant as a geopolitical foe by the time the 1990s rolled around. In 1985, Red Dawn still seemed like a modest possibility.

Clinton and Bush the Elder were both pretty moderate politicians, but there were definite shifts when the former became president.  Proposals for universal healthcare and gay rights were not a thing until Clinton stepped in in 1993, and NAFTA was significantly modified from its initial form under Bush.

1985 was the year Mikhail Gorbachev became premier of the Soviet Union, a position he would hold through Christmas 1991.  Ronald Reagan was already starting to negotiate with the new premier to put an end to Cold War tensions, not to mention the socioeconomic state of the USSR was a complete mess, making it evident that the Cold War was on its way out soon.

That's because you weren't alive in that time period, so everything in your mind just gets grouped under one collective "old-school" guise. It sounds like you were born in 1992, hence why you think anything before 1992 is "another level of old" and why you seem to see 1990 as an exact cultural replica of the entire decade that came before it. You weren't alive to see it, so it feels foreign.

First off, I don't see 1990 as an "exact cultural replica" of the preceding decade; 80s culture was very much in its senile phase by that point, but I categorize it more with that decade because the 90s had not yet established much of an identity for itself; that was more the case by 1992 and the end of 1991.

Second, old-school hip hop, or at least the "golden age of hip hop," are popular terms that usually refer to the genre during the late 80s and early 90s, beginning with Run-DMC's Walk This Way and ending with the death of extensive sampling as the heart of the genre via the Gilbert O'Sullivan case, as well as the subsequent rise of synthesizers in the genre beginning with Dr. Dre's The Chronic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_hip_hop#Time_period

Sounds like you're grasping at minor differences. The Simpsons was huge in 1990 and had a pretty distinct identity by that point, and Cheers in 1990 wasn't anything like Cheers in 1984.

The Simpsons was a massive hit overnight, but it was still a very different show in 1990.  In its first two seasons, Bart was the central character instead of Homer, Lisa was still a faithful christian instead of a liberal activist (even invoking the Ten Commandments in one episode of season 2), and Homer was little more than a doofus father with a big sensitive side, not the wisecracking lead character he would become during the show's golden period, which most people cite as season 3 through season 8.  In 1990, The Simpsons was little more than an animated show about the hardships of American family life, not significantly different in tone from other shows from the late 80s, but by 1992, it had evolved into a juggernaut of social satire of all different topics, the jokes traveling at a much faster paced and the subject matter more eclectic.

The tone of Twin Peaks was way different than anything on popular TV that had come before it. And that was the runaway new hit success of the 1989-90 television season.

Considering Twin Peaks was on the air for little over a year, that's not saying a whole lot.

What? Saddam was a huge concern through the entire 1990s (HW Bush was almost assassinated in 1993 in Kuwait), right on up to 2003. Iraq was the U.S.'s main foreign political concern by 1990, and it would stay that way through the entire decade when the two countries continually remained on the brink of war and the U.S. consistently launched air strike campaigns against Iraq whenever it felt bored.

The United States absolutely crushed Saddam's forces in the Gulf War and didn't even opt to sack Baghdad when it had the chance.  Even though Saddam was probably America's biggest political enemy in the 90s, his level of threat was nowhere near as large as the Soviets were during the Cold War or Al-Qaeda was after the 1998 embassy bombings.  It's because of this that the most significant political conflicts of the 90s after the Gulf War were the Bosnian War and the Rwandan Genocide.

Sorry,but since you weren't alive in that former period and are just barely old enough to remember the latter one, I'm not sure how qualified you are to say that with any degree of confidence. If you're looking at 1949 versus 1954 for example, the advent and further rise of television alone in that timeframe would make for a noteworthy cultural difference between the two. How noteworthy? Not sure I'm qualified to say that either since I wasn't alive, but I can guess that "the feel" of things was still consistently changing.

Once again using "you weren't alive back then" as your argument is a pretty weak justification for me not understanding a time period from several decades ago.  On top of the various sources of information at my fingertips ripe for analysis, whether it be online articles, music, novels, or movies, it's also possible to formulate an opinion of the period based on what other people, who actually were alive then, have to say about it.  I won't admit to knowing the early 50s by heart, but I'd say I at least have a basic understanding of what the major trends and issues were at the time, and in most threads I've seen that discuss the span of cultural decades, most people refer to the late 40s as the beginning of 50s culture, since they were too different from the World War II era, and the early 60s as the end, since it was predominantly after that time that most non-pseudo-50s, quintessential 60s culture started to become dominant.

Even if television was more popular in 1954, it definitely still existed in 1949.  The dominant music of both years was crooner ballads, country, and other forms of vintage pop.  Cool jazz was also starting to replace bebop by 1949.  Fashion had not changed very much.  Considering 1949 and 1954 are half a decade apart, very little changed about the primary fundamentals of society during that time, whereas 1955 and 1956 alone would introduce sweeping things like rock & roll, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, James Dean movies, and the Highway Act of 1956.  Just as it's unrealistic to say that pop culture remains static within eras and sub-eras, you can't realistically expect the rate of change to be completely constant across history, either.

The two Snap hits sound largely similar to me and it fits well into the overall eurodance genre. The late 80s/early 90s house scene sounds way more similar to mid 90s eurodance than it does any of the previously popular 1980s dance or freestyle music sounds. Hence why the two are often grouped together.

Maybe that's your opinion, but in terms of the types of synthesizers used, melodic style, etc., Rhythm Is a Dancer is a lot more similar to something like Mr. Vain or Another Night than it is to Gonna Make You Sweat or Ride on Time.  The Bush '41-era house is much hollower and percussion driven, whereas the mid-90s stuff like Rhythm Is a Dancer has fatter beats, less repetitive melodies, and synthesizers driving the production instead of rave hits and percussion.  In fact, house-style music was popular as early as 1987, when M/A/R/R/S's Pump Up the Volume came out.

1990s culture is not one static entity. A singular culture never became "fully established" because it was literally always diverse and literally always changing, like with any other time period. Everything that happened between 1990 and 1999 is also literally encompassed into 1990s culture. It is what it is. If it happened in that decade, then it's relevant to what the decade's "identity" was. That means everything from Alias' supremely soft rock hit "More Than Words Can Say" in 1990 to Sugar Ray's bouncy "Every Morning" in 1999 could adequately sum up 1990s culture. If it happened in that 10 year span, then it's all apart of its identity.

January 1991 (early 1991) does not in any way, shape, or form feel closer in cultural attitude to January 1984 than it does to December 1991 (late 1991). Or even December 1994 for that matter. And why would it? Two points mere months apart are going to be more aligned culturally than two points 5-6-7 years apart. Shouldn't be a surprise.

Once again, I never said 1990 was exactly the same as the 80s in general.  You act as though I think pop culture remains static within small intervals, but really I see it more as a scale with two sides, one being old, established culture on its way out and the other being new, incoming culture that still has yet to fully develop itself.  Of course there were some changes coming in 1990, but for the vast part, the year does not represent the spirit of the 90s as a whole as heavily as it does the 80s.

But that is still a generalization, since I can still find hit songs from 1993 that look like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENZ3XbxCRZs

Even though Joey Lawrence was a member of NKOTB, the song you linked to is quintessentially early 90s, imo.  It still has a new-jack swing feel, like most pop hits did at the time, but the 80s-style gated drum instrumentation from songs like Don't Be Cruel, Tender Lover, and She Ain't Worth It is completely absent, instead replaced by more updated, 90s-esque production.

and hit songs from 1991 that look like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M8GszEN9MM

See what I mean about music and culture always being diverse?


To be fair, Mind Playing Tricks On Me sounds much more like a 1993 rap song than a 1989 one, but songs of that flavor were still of the minority in 1991, not to mention that particular track wasn't even a top 20 hit as songs like 2 Legit 2 Quit and Good Vibrations were.

Like Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman were in the late 80s, Michael Penn was a one-hit wonder in 1990.  Compared to hair metal and pop rock, acoustic and alternative rock as industries were little more than a niche until 1992/1993.  Even in 1985, you had John Mellencamp, who had a very rootsy sound that would help him remain relevant on the Billboard Hot 100 well into the 90s.  His Scarecrow album isn't totally the same as the acoustic and alternative songs of the late 80s and early 90s, but my point is that those genres weren't entirely a world away in 1985, even if they were mostly confined to the underground that year.

They pretty much were a world away in 1985. There's no way that Michael Penn song would have been a radio hit in 1985. Mellencamp changed his sound a lot by the time the 1990s rolled around and his pop hooks were pretty trimmed down at that point. I wouldn't consider his early-mid 1980s stuff in the same ballpark.

What about Biggie?  He may have rapped over much more radio-friendly beats than Wu-Tang, Nas, and Mobb Deep, but his debut album is just as much of an acclaimed masterpiece as its more underground contemporaries.  Its subject matter is in no way watered down, talking about the harshness of ghetto life, the struggle to survive, and finding ways to outmuscle rivals.  The same applies with Ice Cube and 2Pac, both of whom achieved mainstream fame since 1993.  Honestly, hip hop as a mainstream force would never again be as gritty as it was in the mid-90s except for Eminem.

Yes, with Biggie, Ready to Die was a major hit but his actual hit singles were still pretty pop friendly (Big Poppa, One More Chance remix, Hypnotize, Mo Money Mo Problems). The grittier stuff was acclaimed but hardly having crossover radio success at the same rate. You can find a lot of examples of poppy sounding rap having radio success in that 1993-1996 period, even if the image was decidedly grittier than the 1980s.


New wave remained popular through the early 90s, even though it had evolved somewhat.  Duran Duran and Tears for Fears both had big hits in 1993, and the most significant album of 1990 was Depeche Mode's Violator.  INXS was also still huge around that time with Suicide Blonde and Disappear.  Many rock and pop acts popular in 1991 were also big in 1985, like Huey Lewis & the News, Heart, Sting, George Michael, Whitney Houston, Simple Minds, Dire Straits, Van Halen, and John Mellencamp.  Mainstream hip hop in 1991 was more similar to underground hip hop from 1985 than most 90s hip hop.


A lot of those folks remained popular well into the 1990s. Sting, Whitney Houston, John Mellencamp, George Michael, Van Halen, INXS... all were scoring hits through 1995 and in Sting and Whitney's cases all the way until 2000.


I disagree, home computers were definitely a significant industry by 1985, especially since video game consoles were so unpopular that year.  The original Apple II was released in 1977, and the Commodore 64 was out since 1982.  While CD's were definitely popular in 1991, cassettes were still the preferred music format by a small margin.  While the Game Boy revolutionized the portable market,  1985 still had Game & Watch and Tiger Electronics Handhelds, the latter of which remained very popular in 1991.

Fortune data actually shows 1991 being the year that CD's started to outseld cassette tapes, technology had definitely changed a lot through the late 1980s.

http://archive.fortune.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0707/gallery.music_sales.fortune/19.html


Clinton and Bush the Elder were both pretty moderate politicians, but there were definite shifts when the former became president.  Proposals for universal healthcare and gay rights were not a thing until Clinton stepped in in 1993, and NAFTA was significantly modified from its initial form under Bush.

Nixon and others actually endorsed universal healthcare in the 1970s and gay rights began really being a thing in the late 1960s when the hippie era was ongoing. Gays had already made significant inroads between 1963 and 1993.  The political shift between 1991 and 1993 was small compared to previous political shifts, even compared to 2008.  Bush and Clinton were very similar.


1985 was the year Mikhail Gorbachev became premier of the Soviet Union, a position he would hold through Christmas 1991.  Ronald Reagan was already starting to negotiate with the new premier to put an end to Cold War tensions, not to mention the socioeconomic state of the USSR was a complete mess, making it evident that the Cold War was on its way out soon.

The Cold War tensions were still very real in 1985. See "Rocky IV" or "Invasion USA". Silly action movies to be sure, but still showing that the focus of the time was on the USSR and fighting communism. By 1991 that really was no longer the case.


First off, I don't see 1990 as an "exact cultural replica" of the preceding decade; 80s culture was very much in its senile phase by that point, but I categorize it more with that decade because the 90s had not yet established much of an identity for itself; that was more the case by 1992 and the end of 1991.

But 80s culture is an incredibly broad thing, encompassing 10 years of various items from all sections of society. Some things in "80s culture" still haven't died out. People still say "like" all the time, just as one example. The 90s began establishing an identity for itself on January 1, 1990. It really is that simple.

Second, old-school hip hop, or at least the "golden age of hip hop," are popular terms that usually refer to the genre during the late 80s and early 90s, beginning with Run-DMC's Walk This Way and ending with the death of extensive sampling as the heart of the genre via the Gilbert O'Sullivan case, as well as the subsequent rise of synthesizers in the genre beginning with Dr. Dre's The Chronic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_hip_hop#Time_period

Yeah, that's all pretty subjective metrics IMO. Sampling was and still is big in the genre (Kanye West?) and synths in hip hop were around right from the start. I don't think you're going to see any perfect agreement on what exact years constitute the Golden Age of Hip Hop.


The Simpsons was a massive hit overnight, but it was still a very different show in 1990.  In its first two seasons, Bart was the central character instead of Homer, Lisa was still a faithful christian instead of a liberal activist (even invoking the Ten Commandments in one episode of season 2), and Homer was little more than a doofus father with a big sensitive side, not the wisecracking lead character he would become during the show's golden period, which most people cite as season 3 through season 8.  In 1990, The Simpsons was little more than an animated show about the hardships of American family life, not significantly different in tone from other shows from the late 80s, but by 1992, it had evolved into a juggernaut of social satire of all different topics, the jokes traveling at a much faster paced and the subject matter more eclectic.

Of course the show evolved, but as a cutting edge animated show with off color humor, it was a lot different from any of the 1980s sitcoms. Right from the start.


Considering Twin Peaks was on the air for little over a year, that's not saying a whole lot.

It was one of the most popular shows on television in 1990. Brief success, but big nonetheless and the show was a huge influence on later programs like The X-Files.


The United States absolutely crushed Saddam's forces in the Gulf War and didn't even opt to sack Baghdad when it had the chance.  Even though Saddam was probably America's biggest political enemy in the 90s, his level of threat was nowhere near as large as the Soviets were during the Cold War or Al-Qaeda was after the 1998 embassy bombings.  It's because of this that the most significant political conflicts of the 90s after the Gulf War were the Bosnian War and the Rwandan Genocide.

Point remains that Saddam replaced the Soviet Union as the U.S.' chief political foe, beginning in August 1990 with the invasion of Kuwait and continuing more or less through 9/11. Saddam was actually an American  ally during the mid 1980s. Totally different from a few years later.

Once again using "you weren't alive back then" as your argument is a pretty weak justification for me not understanding a time period from several decades ago.  On top of the various sources of information at my fingertips ripe for analysis, whether it be online articles, music, novels, or movies, it's also possible to formulate an opinion of the period based on what other people, who actually were alive then, have to say about it.  I won't admit to knowing the early 50s by heart, but I'd say I at least have a basic understanding of what the major trends and issues were at the time, and in most threads I've seen that discuss the span of cultural decades, most people refer to the late 40s as the beginning of 50s culture, since they were too different from the World War II era, and the early 60s as the end, since it was predominantly after that time that most non-pseudo-50s, quintessential 60s culture started to become dominant.

That's all well and good, but speaking of trying to understand previous era's culture and then making silly statements like a few months in 1996 had more cultural change than a five year period in the 1950s seems inherently contradictory. You can't effectively compare the 1950s to a period in which you were actually alive, since your cultural understanding simply isn't going to be the same and there's going to be an inherent personal bias involved with one and not the other. You're far more likely to overly rely on generalizations about the 1950s as opposed to your own experiences when you were actually alive.

Even if television was more popular in 1954, it definitely still existed in 1949.  The dominant music of both years was crooner ballads, country, and other forms of vintage pop.  Cool jazz was also starting to replace bebop by 1949.  Fashion had not changed very much.  Considering 1949 and 1954 are half a decade apart, very little changed about the primary fundamentals of society during that time, whereas 1955 and 1956 alone would introduce sweeping things like rock & roll, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, James Dean movies, and the Highway Act of 1956.  Just as it's unrealistic to say that pop culture remains static within eras and sub-eras, you can't realistically expect the rate of change to be completely constant across history, either.

Television was massively different already by 1954 and was having a much bigger impact on national culture. In August 1949, there were an estimated 2 million TV sets in the U.S. By 1953, that number had already risen over 25 million and over 50% of American households had television by that point. Rock and Roll got its start in the early 1950s, before 1955-56, even if its mainstream success really took off then.  Early rock songs like 'Rock Around the Clock' and 'Shake, Rattle, and Roll' were released in 1954 and early doo-wop songs like 'Sh-Boom' were hits in 1954. Elvis got his first big break in 1954, releasing 'That's Alright'. Jazz and country changed a fair amount between 1949 and 1954. Desegregation was just beginning to gain ground in the 1954 period, with Brown vs. the Board of Education being one of the first major supreme court victories for civil rights.

Those are just a few pretty obvious examples of cultural changes that were becoming evident by 1954.

Maybe that's your opinion, but in terms of the types of synthesizers used, melodic style, etc., Rhythm Is a Dancer is a lot more similar to something like Mr. Vain or Another Night than it is to Gonna Make You Sweat or Ride on Time.  The Bush '41-era house is much hollower and percussion driven, whereas the mid-90s stuff like Rhythm Is a Dancer has fatter beats, less repetitive melodies, and synthesizers driving the production instead of rave hits and percussion.  In fact, house-style music was popular as early as 1987, when M/A/R/R/S's Pump Up the Volume came out.

That synthesizer alone dates it significantly from mid 1990s Eurodance. That doesn't sound anything like La Bouche or anything on the radio in 1995-96.

Once again, I never said 1990 was exactly the same as the 80s in general.  You act as though I think pop culture remains static within small intervals, but really I see it more as a scale with two sides, one being old, established culture on its way out and the other being new, incoming culture that still has yet to fully develop itself.  Of course there were some changes coming in 1990, but for the vast part, the year does not represent the spirit of the 90s as a whole as heavily as it does the 80s.

Obviously 1990 looks more like 1989 than it does 1999. It also looks a lot more like 1992 or 1993 than it does 1984 or 1985. This is pretty intuitive stuff.

Even though Joey Lawrence was a member of NKOTB, the song you linked to is quintessentially early 90s, imo.  It still has a new-jack swing feel, like most pop hits did at the time, but the 80s-style gated drum instrumentation from songs like Don't Be Cruel, Tender Lover, and She Ain't Worth It is completely absent, instead replaced by more updated, 90s-esque production.

See what I wrote about Rhythm is a Dancer. There's no way that Joey Lawrence, Dino, or Jeremy Jordan would have been scoring hits a few years later yet they were popular in 1993. That whole New Jack era was seen as a leftover 80s relic by the middle of the decade. That Joey Lawrence video? Way closer looking to the late 1980s than it is to the 1995-1999 era.


To be fair, Mind Playing Tricks On Me sounds much more like a 1993 rap song than a 1989 one, but songs of that flavor were still of the minority in 1991, not to mention that particular track wasn't even a top 20 hit as songs like 2 Legit 2 Quit and Good Vibrations were.


OPP was a #6 hit in 1991 and has a pretty typical East Coast Hip Hop '90s flavor to it.

They pretty much were a world away in 1985. There's no way that Michael Penn song would have been a radio hit in 1985. Mellencamp changed his sound a lot by the time the 1990s rolled around and his pop hooks were pretty trimmed down at that point. I wouldn't consider his early-mid 1980s stuff in the same ballpark.

Get a Leg Up and Again Tonight were pretty much a continuation of the sound he had on Scarecrow.  His style didn't truly change until 1994, when he came out with Wild Night.

Yes, with Biggie, Ready to Die was a major hit but his actual hit singles were still pretty pop friendly (Big Poppa, One More Chance remix, Hypnotize, Mo Money Mo Problems). The grittier stuff was acclaimed but hardly having crossover radio success at the same rate. You can find a lot of examples of poppy sounding rap having radio success in that 1993-1996 period, even if the image was decidedly grittier than the 1980s.

He and 2Pac were still really socially conscious, despite also being much more radio friendly.  Coolio fits in the same boat; Gangsta's Paradise was the biggest song of 1995, and despite its poppy interpolation of Stevie Wonder, its lyrics are as blunt about ghetto life as you can get (Fantastic Voyage is in the same vein).  Going even further, Wu-Tang Clan member Method Man had a bunch of hit singles throughout 1995.  Compared to almost everything released from Can't Nobody Hold Me Down and beyond, the mid-90s were a pretty angsty time for hip hop.

A lot of those folks remained popular well into the 1990s. Sting, Whitney Houston, John Mellencamp, George Michael, Van Halen, INXS... all were scoring hits through 1995 and in Sting and Whitney's cases all the way until 2000.

They did have success throughout the 90s, but their releases were either less consistent or stylistically different than from the mid-80s to early 90s.

Fortune data actually shows 1991 being the year that CD's started to outseld cassette tapes, technology had definitely changed a lot through the late 1980s.

http://archive.fortune.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0707/gallery.music_sales.fortune/19.html

They were still pretty balanced out at the time, CD's didn't truly dominate cassettes until the mid-90s.

Nixon and others actually endorsed universal healthcare in the 1970s and gay rights began really being a thing in the late 1960s when the hippie era was ongoing. Gays had already made significant inroads between 1963 and 1993.  The political shift between 1991 and 1993 was small compared to previous political shifts, even compared to 2008.  Bush and Clinton were very similar.

Bush the Elder almost completely abstained from LGBT issues during his administration, whereas the Clinton administration was the first time they were significant at the executive level (since Reagan had basically brushed off the AIDS crisis).  Bush and Clinton very much contrasted each other as individuals, with the former being a wealthy and grandfatherly family values man, whereas Clinton was a former rock & roll dude who resonated much more with Generation X than the Baby Boomers, who predominantly backed Bush.  Their policies may not have been that different, but they still represented completely different eras through other means.

Nixon was definitely liberal compared to Barry Goldwater, but his administration was still mostly made possible by those sick of the policies made under Kennedy and Johnson throughout the 60s.

The Cold War tensions were still very real in 1985. See "Rocky IV" or "Invasion USA". Silly action movies to be sure, but still showing that the focus of the time was on the USSR and fighting communism. By 1991 that really was no longer the case.

Maybe 1985 is too early a starting point to say such, but certainly by 1986, when Gorbachev initiated his glasnost and perestroika policies, the Cold War was significantly declining.

But 80s culture is an incredibly broad thing, encompassing 10 years of various items from all sections of society. Some things in "80s culture" still haven't died out. People still say "like" all the time, just as one example. The 90s began establishing an identity for itself on January 1, 1990. It really is that simple.

If you're going only by calendar dates, then yes, but if you're going by evident pop cultural patterns that shape the overall feel of a period, then that hardly holds true.  I don't really want to dogmatically claim that the early 90s didn't begin until December 1991, because perception of when cultural eras began and ended completely varies from person to person, making calendar dates the only consistent definition, but I also certainly won't call The Little Mermaid a film that truly defined the 80s, nor will I call Unskinny Bop representative of 90s culture.  Even if it's technically accurate to refer to them as such, their style clearly reflects the following and preceding decades from the ones during which they were released, respectively.  Honestly, I would understand where you're coming from, because the subjective nature of cultural eras makes it difficult to talk about them on a consistent level, but the fact that you keep having to make your own cultural arguments to counter my own perspective of cultural eras frankly proves that you're not completely immune to this type of thinking, either.

Yeah, that's all pretty subjective metrics IMO. Sampling was and still is big in the genre (Kanye West?) and synths in hip hop were around right from the start. I don't think you're going to see any perfect agreement on what exact years constitute the Golden Age of Hip Hop.

Well, there was certainly a pretty fast and dramatic shift in mainstream hip hop once Nuhtin' But a 'G' Thang came out, even if gangsta rap's peak wasn't until a bit later.  You can't really call the rate of change a flat constant when some songs, albums, and movements clearly make a larger impact than others.

Of course the show evolved, but as a cutting edge animated show with off color humor, it was a lot different from any of the 1980s sitcoms. Right from the start.

Seems you're biasing your argument to make it seem like the show was COMPLETELY different from other television shows in its first season, when really the first crop of episodes was hardly of the same style as seasons 3 through 8.  Just because it was a primetime animated sitcom isn't that big of a deal; The Flintstones were a huge success decades before, and even in the late 80s, The Jetsons made a big comeback.  This is all my take, of course, but the point is, I won't call the Simpsons' first season a complete 180 just because it took off at the beginning of the 1990s.

Point remains that Saddam replaced the Soviet Union as the U.S.' chief political foe, beginning in August 1990 with the invasion of Kuwait and continuing more or less through 9/11. Saddam was actually an American  ally during the mid 1980s. Totally different from a few years later.

Again, this is a contrived argument to make it seem like 1990 was heavily tied to the rest of the 90s decade.  The United States had already been dealing with other political foes in the Middle East like Ayatollah Khomeini (whose successor was also anti-American), and considering how insignificant Saddam was to the broader events of the 1990s decade following early 1991, it's not really accurate to put him in the same category as Osama Bin Laden and himself in the 2000s, or Joseph Stalin in the early post-WWII era.

That's all well and good, but speaking of trying to understand previous era's culture and then making silly statements like a few months in 1996 had more cultural change than a five year period in the 1950s seems inherently contradictory. You can't effectively compare the 1950s to a period in which you were actually alive, since your cultural understanding simply isn't going to be the same and there's going to be an inherent personal bias involved with one and not the other. You're far more likely to overly rely on generalizations about the 1950s as opposed to your own experiences when you were actually alive.

That's pretty ageist and distrusting.  I feel like you're only bringing up this argument in order to nullify my idea that the rate of cultural change is not constant.  Anybody can look up the specifics about the 40s and 50s with enough research, and even if somebody lived during that period, it doesn't mean their perception is entirely accurate.  The fact that there's so much disagreement about when the 2000s became the 2010s here is testament to that.

Television was massively different already by 1954 and was having a much bigger impact on national culture. In August 1949, there were an estimated 2 million TV sets in the U.S. By 1953, that number had already risen over 25 million and over 50% of American households had television by that point. Rock and Roll got its start in the early 1950s, before 1955-56, even if its mainstream success really took off then.  Early rock songs like 'Rock Around the Clock' and 'Shake, Rattle, and Roll' were released in 1954 and early doo-wop songs like 'Sh-Boom' were hits in 1954. Elvis got his first big break in 1954, releasing 'That's Alright'. Jazz and country changed a fair amount between 1949 and 1954. Desegregation was just beginning to gain ground in the 1954 period, with Brown vs. the Board of Education being one of the first major supreme court victories for civil rights.

Those are just a few pretty obvious examples of cultural changes that were becoming evident by 1954.

Rock and roll had basically no mainstream presence in the early 50s.  Even though Les Paul had popularized the electric guitar, he was already famous in the 40s as well, so that argument is null.  If anything, rock and roll had pretty strong roots going back to Hank Williams' 1947 hit, Move It on Over, which sounds conspicuously similar to Rock Around the Clock.  Elvis Presley did not get any significant Billboard hits until Heartbreak Hotel in 1956, after rock & roll had already become a significant cultural force.

Harry Truman desegregated the US military in 1948, and anti-lynching campaigns were well underway by that point, due to African American veterans' unfairly hostile treatment following the War.  The Brown v. Board of Education was just one of many landmark events during a greater era of civil rights resurgence, which began in tandem with the rise of the suburbs and winded down not long after Kennedy was assassinated.

While television was far, far more prominent in 1954 than 1949, its rapid growth still had not yet ended.  It's still reasonable to categorize 1949 and 1954 as part of the same era, which represented television's general ascent into the mainstream.

That synthesizer alone dates it significantly from mid 1990s Eurodance. That doesn't sound anything like La Bouche or anything on the radio in 1995-96.

It totally sounds like the songs from Real McCoy's Another Night album, which were popular throughout 1995.  Even Amber's This Is Your Night, popular in 1996/1997, has pretty similar production to Rhythm Is a Dancer.

Obviously 1990 looks more like 1989 than it does 1999. It also looks a lot more like 1992 or 1993 than it does 1984 or 1985. This is pretty intuitive stuff.

Will you at least admit that the rate of cultural change is not constant, even if decades only truly begin by their calendar dates?  You already stated before that the period from 1963-1975 had massive cultural change, so I don't see how it's not possible for the 1991-1993 to have changed more rapidly than 1985-1991.  Whether or not you agree with my take on it is not the point; it just feels as though you're treating your own opinions about the rate of cultural change as fact, when it's entirely dependent on what factors impact somebody's perception the most.  The rise of grunge, for instance, was not going to affect somebody who hardly listened to rock in the first place as much as somebody whose life was centered around the biggest rock songs of the day.  It's all artificial and subjective, making January 1, xxx0 to December 31, xxx9 the only definitive way to refer to a decade, but that doesn't also mean the numbers on the calendar truly affect how somebody feels about the period they're living in.

See what I wrote about Rhythm is a Dancer. There's no way that Joey Lawrence, Dino, or Jeremy Jordan would have been scoring hits a few years later yet they were popular in 1993. That whole New Jack era was seen as a leftover 80s relic by the middle of the decade. That Joey Lawrence video? Way closer looking to the late 1980s than it is to the 1995-1999 era.

Well, new-jack swing was still the major sound of the early 90s, even though production style started to change around 1991.  If anything, new-jack swing still had a clear influence towards the end of the 90s as well, as exemplified by teen pop anthems like Everybody (Backstreet's Back) and Are You Jimmy Ray?.  The major thing that distinguishes these songs from late 80s new-jack swing is the lack of gated drums and crystal synths, iconic of 80s music in general.

OPP was a #6 hit in 1991 and has a pretty typical East Coast Hip Hop '90s flavor to it.

Its success on the Billboard Hot 100 was still pretty short lived, in spite of its high peak position.  Its rank on the End of Year Chart was merely #94.

Get a Leg Up and Again Tonight were pretty much a continuation of the sound he had on Scarecrow.  His style didn't truly change until 1994, when he came out with Wild Night.

Songs like Lonely Ol' Night or R.O.C.K. in the USA both sound way too poppy and trendy to be apart of his 1990s discography. The heartland rock vibe certainly doesn't seem especially comparable to early 1990s alternative.

He and 2Pac were still really socially conscious, despite also being much more radio friendly.  Coolio fits in the same boat; Gangsta's Paradise was the biggest song of 1995, and despite its poppy interpolation of Stevie Wonder, its lyrics are as blunt about ghetto life as you can get (Fantastic Voyage is in the same vein).  Going even further, Wu-Tang Clan member Method Man had a bunch of hit singles throughout 1995.  Compared to almost everything released from Can't Nobody Hold Me Down and beyond, the mid-90s were a pretty angsty time for hip hop.

Method Man only had two top 40 hits in the 1990s, one of which was a collaboration with the already popular Mary J. Blige. Raekwon snuck in a top 40 hit, but the edgier East Coast stuff was pretty conspicuously absent from mainstream radio for most of that period. Angsty compared to the 1980s, but not surprisingly the rap chart hits of that time were still predominantly a product of pop hooks and radio friendly production.

They did have success throughout the 90s, but their releases were either less consistent or stylistically different than from the mid-80s to early 90s.

Of course, but no one sounds the same for more than an album or two at a time, and if they do then their listeners generally lose interest fairly quick.


They were still pretty balanced out at the time, CD's didn't truly dominate cassettes until the mid-90s.

Interesting, so 1993 and 1991 weren't really that different on that front  ;)

Bush the Elder almost completely abstained from LGBT issues during his administration, whereas the Clinton administration was the first time they were significant at the executive level (since Reagan had basically brushed off the AIDS crisis).  Bush and Clinton very much contrasted each other as individuals, with the former being a wealthy and grandfatherly family values man, whereas Clinton was a former rock & roll dude who resonated much more with Generation X than the Baby Boomers, who predominantly backed Bush.  Their policies may not have been that different, but they still represented completely different eras through other means.


I'd be careful not to overstate Clinton's influence on gay rights. It was pretty minor, and Don't Ask, Don't Tell was his most noteworthy angle and it seems hard to argue that it really did much to advance the cause in comparison with other developments. Clinton was younger and hipper than Bush, but the main reason why he was more popular than Bush was simply because of the tech fueled economic rebound of the mid 1990s. Which didn't really kick in until 1994 or even 1995. There was a strong degree of ambivalence and even antipathy towards Clinton up until that time.

Maybe 1985 is too early a starting point to say such, but certainly by 1986, when Gorbachev initiated his glasnost and perestroika policies, the Cold War was significantly declining.

The Cold War began breaking down there, sure. And the U.S. had a radically different Middle East policy at that point still. The U.S. continued to support and train Afghan rebels right on up to 1988 when the Soviets left. The U.S. also began to distance itself from Saddam only after March 1988, following the gas attack on Kurdish villages. Foreign policy wise the early 1990s years are pretty similar to one another, while the 1985-89 period generally saw fairly noticeable changes.


If you're going only by calendar dates, then yes, but if you're going by evident pop cultural patterns that shape the overall feel of a period, then that hardly holds true.  I don't really want to dogmatically claim that the early 90s didn't begin until December 1991, because perception of when cultural eras began and ended completely varies from person to person, making calendar dates the only consistent definition, but I also certainly won't call The Little Mermaid a film that truly defined the 80s, nor will I call Unskinny Bop representative of 90s culture.  Even if it's technically accurate to refer to them as such, their style clearly reflects the following and preceding decades from the ones during which they were released, respectively.  Honestly, I would understand where you're coming from, because the subjective nature of cultural eras makes it difficult to talk about them on a consistent level, but the fact that you keep having to make your own cultural arguments to counter my own perspective of cultural eras frankly proves that you're not completely immune to this type of thinking, either.


I don't consider any one thing to be "truly" representative of an entire decade's culture, since 10 years of time across the entire cultural spectrum is going to be incredibly vast and far-encompassing and impossible to summarize with any degree of simplicity. There's no one thing that is going to manage to be a standalone represenation of the 1980s or 1990s or any decade. And cultural eras are ill-defined for that exact reason, they're bookended by trivial or subjective differences that often only become apparent with advanced hindsight.  As a history buff, unless you have extremely strict criteria in defining everything you analyze, you're going to have a pretty tough time coming up with any precise dates for such things. Me personally, I am fascinated by cultural changes but I fail to see the point in labeling everything into eras and pigeonholing things into neat little timezones. I just like to recognize that mass culture is incredibly diverse and always ever-growing and oscillating. To what extent is always pretty impossible to say.


Well, there was certainly a pretty fast and dramatic shift in mainstream hip hop once Nuhtin' But a 'G' Thang came out, even if gangsta rap's peak wasn't until a bit later.  You can't really call the rate of change a flat constant when some songs, albums, and movements clearly make a larger impact than others.


Mainstream rap was just a baby still and was literally always growing increasingly eclectic before 1992-93. The fact that De La Soul, Public Enemy, 2 Live Crew, and N.W.A. were all sharing success in 1989 would point to that. The Chronic helped to allow for G-Funk and gangsta rap to briefly take over the rap charts, but it wasn't really that far out of left field by that point. Remember, gradual changes, not overnight ones.

Seems you're biasing your argument to make it seem like the show was COMPLETELY different from other television shows in its first season, when really the first crop of episodes was hardly of the same style as seasons 3 through 8.  Just because it was a primetime animated sitcom isn't that big of a deal; The Flintstones were a huge success decades before, and even in the late 80s, The Jetsons made a big comeback.  This is all my take, of course, but the point is, I won't call the Simpsons' first season a complete 180 just because it took off at the beginning of the 1990s.

That's because it was evident right from the start that The Simpsons was decidedly more sardonic and mature in tone than any popular animated program that had come before it. Unlike The Flintstones or Jetsons, it was aimed largely at older audiences.  Of course the show's characters changed around in later seasons, but the overall tone was embedded in its beginnings and didn't change too much. Trying to pretend it was really close to Growing Pains or some similar cheeseball family sitcom seems kind of silly.

Again, this is a contrived argument to make it seem like 1990 was heavily tied to the rest of the 90s decade.  The United States had already been dealing with other political foes in the Middle East like Ayatollah Khomeini (whose successor was also anti-American), and considering how insignificant Saddam was to the broader events of the 1990s decade following early 1991, it's not really accurate to put him in the same category as Osama Bin Laden and himself in the 2000s, or Joseph Stalin in the early post-WWII era.

The Bosnian War and Rwandan Geonicde, which you described earlier as defining events, were both pretty inconsequential to U.S. foreign policy. It wasn't until the 1999 NATO campaign in Kosovo that American troops really interacted with Milosevic, and the U.S. never even sniffed Rwanda. So yes, it's pretty accurate to say that Saddam was the defining political foe of the decade for America, and our country's relations with Iraq were consistently the most tense of the time, from 1990 up to at least 2001. I'm assuming that we are both American, so yes, I am writing this with an American perspective in mind.


That's pretty ageist and distrusting.  I feel like you're only bringing up this argument in order to nullify my idea that the rate of cultural change is not constant.  Anybody can look up the specifics about the 40s and 50s with enough research, and even if somebody lived during that period, it doesn't mean their perception is entirely accurate.  The fact that there's so much disagreement about when the 2000s became the 2010s here is testament to that.

The fact that there is so much disagreement about when the 2010s or any decade  "actually"began here is a testament to the fact that people on this site for some reason like to ignore the calendar for the sake of microanalyzing a bunch of largely trivial things and testing some unprovable hypotheses.

Rock and roll had basically no mainstream presence in the early 50s.  Even though Les Paul had popularized the electric guitar, he was already famous in the 40s as well, so that argument is null.  If anything, rock and roll had pretty strong roots going back to Hank Williams' 1947 hit, Move It on Over, which sounds conspicuously similar to Rock Around the Clock.  Elvis Presley did not get any significant Billboard hits until Heartbreak Hotel in 1956, after rock & roll had already become a significant cultural force.

Rock was obviously a significant enough cultural force by 1954 to inspire the actual recording of some of the first classic rock (and doo-wop) songs. That's a pretty big step.

Harry Truman desegregated the US military in 1948, and anti-lynching campaigns were well underway by that point, due to African American veterans' unfairly hostile treatment following the War.  The Brown v. Board of Education was just one of many landmark events during a greater era of civil rights resurgence, which began in tandem with the rise of the suburbs and winded down not long after Kennedy was assassinated.

Sure, and then Brown v. Board of Education was arguably (most historians would argue) the most significant civl rights step up until that point.

While television was far, far more prominent in 1954 than 1949, its rapid growth still had not yet ended.  It's still reasonable to categorize 1949 and 1954 as part of the same era, which represented television's general ascent into the mainstream.

IMO that's akin to saying 1993 and 1998 are under the same blanket as far as the internet goes (its "general ascent"). In actuality, they're not, since the inernet was hardly a cultural hot item in one year and then five years later it was comparatively massive.

It totally sounds like the songs from Real McCoy's Another Night album, which were popular throughout 1995.  Even Amber's This Is Your Night, popular in 1996/1997, has pretty similar production to Rhythm Is a Dancer.

Other than Mr. Vain and More and More (both 1993 hits), I can't think of many other big Eurodance tracks with synths as prominent as Rhythm is a Dancer. That deep synth sound certainly dates it even by the standards of a couple years later.

Will you at least admit that the rate of cultural change is not constant, even if decades only truly begin by their calendar dates?  You already stated before that the period from 1963-1975 had massive cultural change, so I don't see how it's not possible for the 1991-1993 to have changed more rapidly than 1985-1991.  Whether or not you agree with my take on it is not the point; it just feels as though you're treating your own opinions about the rate of cultural change as fact, when it's entirely dependent on what factors impact somebody's perception the most.  The rise of grunge, for instance, was not going to affect somebody who hardly listened to rock in the first place as much as somebody whose life was centered around the biggest rock songs of the day.  It's all artificial and subjective, making January 1, xxx0 to December 31, xxx9 the only definitive way to refer to a decade, but that doesn't also mean the numbers on the calendar truly affect how somebody feels about the period they're living in.

Things do advance depending on the times, but I consider large scale sociological changes to be the most encompassing and important and perhaps the easiest to define. I'm not going to try and pinpoint the rate of change. All I know, as a naked eye obserer, is that the Civil Rights landscape of even the American South in 1963 and 1975 are very different. The cultural restrictions on things like music, art, and film are noticeably different in 1963 versus 1975. The attitudes towards family, country, sex, and individuality are very noticeably different in 1963 versus 1975. These things are seemingly more tangible and discernible to the naked eye than the small-scale stuff from within grunge or Sega. Comparatively, the late 1980s or the early 1990s and really the last four decades as a whole are pretty stagnant. Socially, our country hasn't changed tremendously fast since the 1970s, which is why that period probably feels massively closer to now for most younger people than the only slightly older first half of the 1960s do.

Well, new-jack swing was still the major sound of the early 90s, even though production style started to change around 1991.  If anything, new-jack swing still had a clear influence towards the end of the 90s as well, as exemplified by teen pop anthems like Everybody (Backstreet's Back) and Are You Jimmy Ray?.  The major thing that distinguishes these songs from late 80s new-jack swing is the lack of gated drums and crystal synths, iconic of 80s music in general.

New Jack Swing probably still has an influence on popular music, but it's obvious that that tag effectively died after the early part of the 1990s. As I said before, there's no way that the NJS hits of the early 1990s were going to be played lock-step on the radio with the R&B scene of the rest of the decade. There was an easy-to-discern difference in their style. And that Joey Lawrence song/video? They were considered laughably dated by 1996.

Its success on the Billboard Hot 100 was still pretty short lived, in spite of its high peak position.  Its rank on the End of Year Chart was merely #94.

Okay? It was still a big hit, and it peaked in the fall of 1991 so obviously its year end position wasn't too high. Just goes to show there was a wide range of popular music at the time, as there was in 1985, 1987, 1989, or 1993.

Even though Joey Lawrence was a member of NKOTB, the song you linked to is quintessentially early 90s, imo.  It still has a new-jack swing feel, like most pop hits did at the time, but the 80s-style gated drum instrumentation from songs like Don't Be Cruel, Tender Lover, and She Ain't Worth It is completely absent, instead replaced by more updated, 90s-esque production.



You said alot of stuff that I could agree with, but I just wanted to point out the Joey Lawrence wasn't a part of New Kids on the Block.  It was Joey McIntyre.  (Who BTW had a solo hit at the end of the 90s with "Stay the same.")  Easy mistake to make, they kinda have similar looks.  Joey Lawrence had more of an acting presence then music, for me.  He played alot of cheesy characters for a lot of cheesy sitcoms.  But Joey Lawrence also had some success as a 90s singer, just solo, not with a group. He said that he liked singing better (Joey Lawrence said, I should say.)  ;-)  Now I'm getting confused.

Songs like Lonely Ol' Night or R.O.C.K. in the USA both sound way too poppy and trendy to be apart of his 1990s discography. The heartland rock vibe certainly doesn't seem especially comparable to early 1990s alternative.

Poppier than Wild Night and Key West Intermezzo?  Seriously?  ???

Method Man only had two top 40 hits in the 1990s, one of which was a collaboration with the already popular Mary J. Blige. Raekwon snuck in a top 40 hit, but the edgier East Coast stuff was pretty conspicuously absent from mainstream radio for most of that period. Angsty compared to the 1980s, but not surprisingly the rap chart hits of that time were still predominantly a product of pop hooks and radio friendly production.

Bring the Pain came close to breaking the top 40, but the fact that he had two top 15 hits at all is pretty significant in its own right.

I never tried to argue that "underground"-style rap was popular in the mid-90s, I only tried to make the point that the biggest songs of the era also had more aggressive or socially conscious lyrics than any other era for rap and was certainly a huge step away from the day of MC Hammer, as well as later artists like Nelly and 50 Cent.

Of course, but no one sounds the same for more than an album or two at a time, and if they do then their listeners generally lose interest fairly quick.

Well, the point is that the majority of them began to drastically change their style to a degree they hadn't any time during the 80s or the very beginning of the 90s.  The same goes with groups like Bon Jovi and Aerosmith, who were riding high off the multi-platinum success of their previous albums from the late 80s but then abandoned their hair metal sound in order to keep up with the times once 90s culture was truly underway.

I'd be careful not to overstate Clinton's influence on gay rights. It was pretty minor, and Don't Ask, Don't Tell was his most noteworthy angle and it seems hard to argue that it really did much to advance the cause in comparison with other developments. Clinton was younger and hipper than Bush, but the main reason why he was more popular than Bush was simply because of the tech fueled economic rebound of the mid 1990s. Which didn't really kick in until 1994 or even 1995. There was a strong degree of ambivalence and even antipathy towards Clinton up until that time.

Well, gay rights didn't become a headlining issue until 2009, during the time the gay marriage movement began to really pick up steam, but it was mostly around Clinton's administration that LGBT issues became a truly divisive issue between Democrats and Republicans (the ratio of support/opposition didn't differ much between the two parties in the 80s).  The period between 1988 (Reagan's last year in office) and 1993 (Clinton's first year in the Oval Office) wasn't really that drastic on a technical level, but Clinton has still become much more of a 90s icon than Bush has, largely because the Bush presidency was caught in-between between 80s Reagan and 90s Clinton.

I don't consider any one thing to be "truly" representative of an entire decade's culture, since 10 years of time across the entire cultural spectrum is going to be incredibly vast and far-encompassing and impossible to summarize with any degree of simplicity. There's no one thing that is going to manage to be a standalone represenation of the 1980s or 1990s or any decade. And cultural eras are ill-defined for that exact reason, they're bookended by trivial or subjective differences that often only become apparent with advanced hindsight.  As a history buff, unless you have extremely strict criteria in defining everything you analyze, you're going to have a pretty tough time coming up with any precise dates for such things. Me personally, I am fascinated by cultural changes but I fail to see the point in labeling everything into eras and pigeonholing things into neat little timezones. I just like to recognize that mass culture is incredibly diverse and always ever-growing and oscillating. To what extent is always pretty impossible to say.

I think the cultural eras are significant in that they each have a distinct overall color to them.  They evolve gradually, to be sure, but there's usually a general frame of time when you can feel the shift having occurred.  The events of late 2008, for instance, felt much more drastic, at least to me, than those of 2007.  Within the course of only a few months, my school advisor lamented about the prospects of another Great Depression, Barack Obama set a milestone by being the first black person to be elected President of the United States, Proposition 8 passed in California, thus galvanizing the gay marriage movement; and an eccentric, bright-haired, sunglasses-wearing dance diva named Lady Gaga now had the #1 song on iTunes.  All of those having occurred (plus others at the time, which I picked up on later), I very much felt like I had entered a completely new era, even though culture typically associated with the 2010s decade had not quite fully formed yet.  The point is that the period following the end of 2008 had a very different feel and personality than early/mid-2008, even though technically 2009 has more in common with 2008 than not.

Mainstream rap was just a baby still and was literally always growing increasingly eclectic before 1992-93. The fact that De La Soul, Public Enemy, 2 Live Crew, and N.W.A. were all sharing success in 1989 would point to that. The Chronic helped to allow for G-Funk and gangsta rap to briefly take over the rap charts, but it wasn't really that far out of left field by that point. Remember, gradual changes, not overnight ones.

Prior to The Chronic, gangsta rap didn't come anywhere close to contending against the MC Hammers, LL Cool J's, and Tone Locs of the day, nor were synthesizers a vital part of urban music in general.

That's because it was evident right from the start that The Simpsons was decidedly more sardonic and mature in tone than any popular animated program that had come before it. Unlike The Flintstones or Jetsons, it was aimed largely at older audiences.  Of course the show's characters changed around in later seasons, but the overall tone was embedded in its beginnings and didn't change too much. Trying to pretend it was really close to Growing Pains or some similar cheeseball family sitcom seems kind of silly.

Well, I compared it mostly to Roseanne, which premiered in 1988, on the dawn of the Bush '41/End of Cold War period, since it was primarily a sitcom about a dysfunctional working class family that tries hard to come out swell.

The Bosnian War and Rwandan Geonicde, which you described earlier as defining events, were both pretty inconsequential to U.S. foreign policy. It wasn't until the 1999 NATO campaign in Kosovo that American troops really interacted with Milosevic, and the U.S. never even sniffed Rwanda. So yes, it's pretty accurate to say that Saddam was the defining political foe of the decade for America, and our country's relations with Iraq were consistently the most tense of the time, from 1990 up to at least 2001. I'm assuming that we are both American, so yes, I am writing this with an American perspective in mind.

People were very much aware of the Bosnian War and Rwandan Genocide, even if the US Government didn't intervene with them all that much.  Far and large, the 90s were a peaceful period for the United States, whose main focus was really to establish NAFTA and consolidate its status as the sole superpower of the world.  Even though he was the country's biggest foreign threat before the Nairobi bombings, Saddam in the 90s was an ant compared to Stalin, Hitler, Khrushchev, and the like.

The fact that there is so much disagreement about when the 2010s or any decade  "actually"began here is a testament to the fact that people on this site for some reason like to ignore the calendar for the sake of microanalyzing a bunch of largely trivial things and testing some unprovable hypotheses.

I think most of them are just expressing their perspectives about what factors primarily defined popular culture during certain periods of time.  These elements aren't trivial when, in combination with each other, they help constitute the overall tone or feel of a period.

Rock was obviously a significant enough cultural force by 1954 to inspire the actual recording of some of the first classic rock (and doo-wop) songs. That's a pretty big step.

From the underground, it was beginning to thrive, but the pop charts of 1954 were still completely dominated by crooner ballads, swing, and vintage pop.  Rock Around the Clock may have technically come out in 1954, but it went largely unnoticed until 1955.

Sure, and then Brown v. Board of Education was arguably (most historians would argue) the most significant civl rights step up until that point.

But it didn't mark the beginning of a new era, it only furthered trends that were already set in motion since the end of World War II.

IMO that's akin to saying 1993 and 1998 are under the same blanket as far as the internet goes (its "general ascent"). In actuality, they're not, since the inernet was hardly a cultural hot item in one year and then five years later it was comparatively massive.

The interesting thing is that televisions actually existed as far back as the 30s or even 20s, but the late 40s was really when it first began its climb to significance, in the same way that the Internet didn't truly begin to climb in popularity until the release of Windows 95 in 1995.

Other than Mr. Vain and More and More (both 1993 hits), I can't think of many other big Eurodance tracks with synths as prominent as Rhythm is a Dancer. That deep synth sound certainly dates it even by the standards of a couple years later.

Well, eurodance songs were pretty few and far in-between in the United States, but songs like The Power and Gonna Make You Sweat were long gone from the mainstream by 1992.

Things do advance depending on the times, but I consider large scale sociological changes to be the most encompassing and important and perhaps the easiest to define. I'm not going to try and pinpoint the rate of change. All I know, as a naked eye obserer, is that the Civil Rights landscape of even the American South in 1963 and 1975 are very different. The cultural restrictions on things like music, art, and film are noticeably different in 1963 versus 1975. The attitudes towards family, country, sex, and individuality are very noticeably different in 1963 versus 1975. These things are seemingly more tangible and discernible to the naked eye than the small-scale stuff from within grunge or Sega. Comparatively, the late 1980s or the early 1990s and really the last four decades as a whole are pretty stagnant. Socially, our country hasn't changed tremendously fast since the 1970s, which is why that period probably feels massively closer to now for most younger people than the only slightly older first half of the 1960s do.

Well, I think a lot of people would argue the end of the Cold War, the ascent of the Internet, the dramatic increase of acceptance towards LGBT issues, the more politically correct portrayals of minorities, 9/11, dominance of mobile technology, etc., have had just as seismic an effect on popular culture as the events from 1963 to 1975, if not even more so.  For what it's worth, it's actually pretty easy to argue that the 70s were not fundamentally very different from the 50s, as the atmosphere of both decades was defined by the suburbs, television, plus a lack of things such as popular home video game consoles, the Internet, cable television, walkmans, CDs, VHS, and home computers.  Even with bands like Led Zeppelin, Queen, and Pink Floyd existing by 1975, I think it's actually safe to say that everyday life was fundamentally more similar to the 50s during the 70s than the 90s or even much of the 80s, despite the transformation in attitudes.

New Jack Swing probably still has an influence on popular music, but it's obvious that that tag effectively died after the early part of the 1990s. As I said before, there's no way that the NJS hits of the early 1990s were going to be played lock-step on the radio with the R&B scene of the rest of the decade. There was an easy-to-discern difference in their style. And that Joey Lawrence song/video? They were considered laughably dated by 1996.

Just because the label wasn't really used doesn't mean it wasn't relevant.  If anything, it went through a sort of renaissance beginning with No Diggity, starring and produced by Teddy Riley, one of the key innovators of new-jack swing in the first place.  Even if the style was disguised as "pop hip hop" or "club r&b," it certainly brought the new-jack swing feel further into future.

Poppier than Wild Night and Key West Intermezzo?  Seriously?  ???

Yes. The hooks on both of those songs barely even register.

Bring the Pain came close to breaking the top 40, but the fact that he had two top 15 hits at all is pretty significant in its own right.

I never tried to argue that "underground"-style rap was popular in the mid-90s, I only tried to make the point that the biggest songs of the era also had more aggressive or socially conscious lyrics than any other era for rap and was certainly a huge step away from the day of MC Hammer, as well as later artists like Nelly and 50 Cent.

But socially conscious stuff was only slightly more likely to be popular in the mid 1990s. I mean, you have a handful of 2Pac hits and a few tracks like Gangsta's Paradise, but the majority of rap influenced stuff on the charts was still pretty party oriented in 1993 or 1994 or 1995. I don't consider Tag Team to be all that different from MC Hammer.

Well, the point is that the majority of them began to drastically change their style to a degree they hadn't any time during the 80s or the very beginning of the 90s.  The same goes with groups like Bon Jovi and Aerosmith, who were riding high off the multi-platinum success of their previous albums from the late 80s but then abandoned their hair metal sound in order to keep up with the times once 90s culture was truly underway.

Those artists all changed during the 80s, Sting for example changed a lot through the 1980s, his solo stuff is all quite varied from his Police work. Aerosmith never went full glam metal, they were always a blues/hard rock mix, and Get a Grip could easily pass for 1989 and isn't very different stylistically from Pump. Same with The Bodyguard soundtrack with Whitney Houston, released in 1992 but could easily pass for 1989. Both of those albums were big hits. These people stayed popular and for the most part changed their styles rather gradually.

I think the cultural eras are significant in that they each have a distinct overall color to them.  They evolve gradually, to be sure, but there's usually a general frame of time when you can feel the shift having occurred.  The events of late 2008, for instance, felt much more drastic, at least to me, than those of 2007.  Within the course of only a few months, my school advisor lamented about the prospects of another Great Depression, Barack Obama set a milestone by being the first black person to be elected President of the United States, Proposition 8 passed in California, thus galvanizing the gay marriage movement; and an eccentric, bright-haired, sunglasses-wearing dance diva named Lady Gaga now had the #1 song on iTunes.  All of those having occurred (plus others at the time, which I picked up on later), I very much felt like I had entered a completely new era, even though culture typically associated with the 2010s decade had not quite fully formed yet.  The point is that the period following the end of 2008 had a very different feel and personality than early/mid-2008, even though technically 2009 has more in common with 2008 than not.

The economic collapse of late 2008 is an easy to pinpoint major event that likely contributed to quicker social changes around it. Other high impact events, like 9/11, JFK getting assasinated, Pearl Harbor, or the 1929 stock market crash are similar in that regard. 1991 to 1993 didn't have that, unless you consider Rodney King, the 1992 election, or Waco to be majorly impactful national events.

Prior to The Chronic, gangsta rap didn't come anywhere close to contending against the MC Hammers, LL Cool J's, and Tone Locs of the day, nor were synthesizers a vital part of urban music in general.

All of them used synths to some extent or another. LL Cool J's biggest hit in the 1980s was dripping with synth production (I Need Love).

Well, I compared it mostly to Roseanne, which premiered in 1988, on the dawn of the Bush '41/End of Cold War period, since it was primarily a sitcom about a dysfunctional working class family that tries hard to come out swell.


It was quite a bit more clever, biting, and sardonic than Roseanne. You could maybe compare it to Married with Children, which was one of the first family sitcoms to have some bite and be aimed at largely older audiences.

People were very much aware of the Bosnian War and Rwandan Genocide, even if the US Government didn't intervene with them all that much.  Far and large, the 90s were a peaceful period for the United States, whose main focus was really to establish NAFTA and consolidate its status as the sole superpower of the world.  Even though he was the country's biggest foreign threat before the Nairobi bombings, Saddam in the 90s was an ant compared to Stalin, Hitler, Khrushchev, and the like.

Aware or not, neither of those events shaped our foreign policy. And you keep referencing the Nairobi bomings, but honestly Al-Qaeda was still just a blip on the radar until 9/11, even with the subsequent USS Cole bombing in 2000. Saddam was just as high profile in the country as previous dictators and easily trumped anyone else. If you compared Saddam's national profile on September 10, 2001 to Osama Bin Laden's, it wasn't close.

I think most of them are just expressing their perspectives about what factors primarily defined popular culture during certain periods of time.  These elements aren't trivial when, in combination with each other, they help constitute the overall tone or feel of a period.

I think it's mostly just endless hand-wringing and subjectivity. Pop culture changes and historic trends can be fun to talk about, but when the progression from simply talking about them is constant generalizations and microanalyzing of calendar dates, it gets tiring.Don't you think it looks silly having 46,000 discussions on when the "early" part of a decade "really" ended. I mean, honestly? Who cares?

From the underground, it was beginning to thrive, but the pop charts of 1954 were still completely dominated by crooner ballads, swing, and vintage pop.  Rock Around the Clock may have technically come out in 1954, but it went largely unnoticed until 1955.

It still isn't accurate to say that rock wasn't around in 1954 or that music wasn't progressing rapidly. It very much was beginning to be.


But it didn't mark the beginning of a new era, it only furthered trends that were already set in motion since the end of World War II.

Some consider it to be the birth of the actual Civil Rights movement. I agree that civil rights first became an increasingly apparent factor after World War II, but that continued to amplify in 1954.

The interesting thing is that televisions actually existed as far back as the 30s or even 20s, but the late 40s was really when it first began its climb to significance, in the same way that the Internet didn't truly begin to climb in popularity until the release of Windows 95 in 1995.


Yep, and the internet existed in some form or another as far back as the implementation of ARPANET in 1969. You could call the 1970s or 80s the "early internet era" and it wouldn't be entirely inaccurate.

Well, eurodance songs were pretty few and far in-between in the United States, but songs like The Power and Gonna Make You Sweat were long gone from the mainstream by 1992.

Are you talking about house influenced dance songs? There was tons of house still on the radio in 1992. Top 10 hits like Move This by Technotronic (recorded in 1989) or Please Don't Go by KWS or CeCe Peniston. Dancey house songs were in that year.

Well, I think a lot of people would argue the end of the Cold War, the ascent of the Internet, the dramatic increase of acceptance towards LGBT issues, the more politically correct portrayals of minorities, 9/11, dominance of mobile technology, etc., have had just as seismic an effect on popular culture as the events from 1963 to 1975, if not even more so.  For what it's worth, it's actually pretty easy to argue that the 70s were not fundamentally very different from the 50s, as the atmosphere of both decades was defined by the suburbs, television, plus a lack of things such as popular home video game consoles, the Internet, cable television, walkmans, CDs, VHS, and home computers.  Even with bands like Led Zeppelin, Queen, and Pink Floyd existing by 1975, I think it's actually safe to say that everyday life was fundamentally more similar to the 50s during the 70s than the 90s or even much of the 80s, despite the transformation in attitudes.

People still mass in suburbs and use television frequently, and the layout of our country's infrastructure hasn't altered too dramatically since the 1950s/60s. Obvviously technology has been changing a lot in the last few decades, it always is, and the internet has had a big impact on how we communicate, but social attitudes really haven't been altered too much since then. The increasingly identifiable acceptance of gays for example stems from the 1960s and 1970s, the first gay pride parade was in 1970 and the the first openly gay politician was elected in 1977. Those are things that still felt a world away in 1950.

Just because the label wasn't really used doesn't mean it wasn't relevant.  If anything, it went through a sort of renaissance beginning with No Diggity, starring and produced by Teddy Riley, one of the key innovators of new-jack swing in the first place.  Even if the style was disguised as "pop hip hop" or "club r&b," it certainly brought the new-jack swing feel further into future.


No Diggity simply doesn't sound anything like late 1980s or early 90s New Jack, even if it was influenced by it. Like I said, the NJS production standards of the time quickly aged anything from that 1987-93 period. By 1996, all of it felt decidedly outdated.

Yes. The hooks on both of those songs barely even register.

Wild Night has sort of a cheesy dance influence, almost like the Offspring's Pretty Fly (For a White Guy).

But socially conscious stuff was only slightly more likely to be popular in the mid 1990s. I mean, you have a handful of 2Pac hits and a few tracks like Gangsta's Paradise, but the majority of rap influenced stuff on the charts was still pretty party oriented in 1993 or 1994 or 1995. I don't consider Tag Team to be all that different from MC Hammer.

Whoomp! (There It Is) is definitely party rap, but I actually see 1993 as more of an early 90s year anyway, with part of the reason being that party rap like that was still in its prime and gangsta rap influences had not yet fully established themselves over new-jack swing.  The Quad City DJ's were really the premier party rap producers of the mid-90s, but they didn't completely dominate the edgier stuff, either.

Those artists all changed during the 80s, Sting for example changed a lot through the 1980s, his solo stuff is all quite varied from his Police work. Aerosmith never went full glam metal, they were always a blues/hard rock mix, and Get a Grip could easily pass for 1989 and isn't very different stylistically from Pump. Same with The Bodyguard soundtrack with Whitney Houston, released in 1992 but could easily pass for 1989. Both of those albums were big hits. These people stayed popular and for the most part changed their styles rather gradually.

With Sting, I was really only referring to his solo work beginning in 1985, though a lot of the songs from Synchronicity fit perfectly with his later work as well.  Get a Grip has a completely different sound from Pump, lacking the head-banging metal anthems of that anthem in favor of a sort of alternative approach.  I don't see where your comparisons are coming from there.

The economic collapse of late 2008 is an easy to pinpoint major event that likely contributed to quicker social changes around it. Other high impact events, like 9/11, JFK getting assasinated, Pearl Harbor, or the 1929 stock market crash are similar in that regard. 1991 to 1993 didn't have that, unless you consider Rodney King, the 1992 election, or Waco to be majorly impactful national events.

There was also the grunge explosion, the official dissolution of the Soviet Union, the commercial launch of the Internet, the election of Clinton, and the release of Dr. Dre's The Chronic, all of which were vital foundations for the culture and events of the 90s in general.

All of them used synths to some extent or another. LL Cool J's biggest hit in the 1980s was dripping with synth production (I Need Love).

But it uses that ultra-80s electric piano, not the growling, squealing synthesizers that became standard in urban during the mid-90s.

It was quite a bit more clever, biting, and sardonic than Roseanne. You could maybe compare it to Married with Children, which was one of the first family sitcoms to have some bite and be aimed at largely older audiences.

Not really in season 1, to my recollection.  Maybe a few episodes had glimpses of what would define the show later on (i.e., There's No Disgrace Like Home's satirization of family psychologists/therapists), but most of them were cheesy, slow-paced, and predictable, like Bart the Genius, Bart the General, Homer's Odyssey, and The Call of the Simpsons.

Aware or not, neither of those events shaped our foreign policy. And you keep referencing the Nairobi bomings, but honestly Al-Qaeda was still just a blip on the radar until 9/11, even with the subsequent USS Cole bombing in 2000. Saddam was just as high profile in the country as previous dictators and easily trumped anyone else. If you compared Saddam's national profile on September 10, 2001 to Osama Bin Laden's, it wasn't close.

The Nairobi bombings were still more significant than pretty much anything Saddam did after the Gulf War.

I think it's mostly just endless hand-wringing and subjectivity. Pop culture changes and historic trends can be fun to talk about, but when the progression from simply talking about them is constant generalizations and microanalyzing of calendar dates, it gets tiring.Don't you think it looks silly having 46,000 discussions on when the "early" part of a decade "really" ended. I mean, honestly? Who cares?

Yeah, this thread is pretty decadeologic, which dooms it from the beginning, though I think it's particularly annoying when people try to shove their definitions down your throat.  I have my own reasons for seeing 90s culture as beginning and ending a year and a half late, but I know others disagree.

It still isn't accurate to say that rock wasn't around in 1954 or that music wasn't progressing rapidly. It very much was beginning to be.

If mainstream prevalence is what we're referring to, then 1954 had basically nothing.  And again, rock and roll had key roots in the late 40s, as well, so not much distinguishes the two times in terms of rock's significance in popular culture.

Some consider it to be the birth of the actual Civil Rights movement. I agree that civil rights first became an increasingly apparent factor after World War II, but that continued to amplify in 1954.

It brought more visibility to the Civil Rights movement, maybe, but it didn't totally shift the tide of progress that was already set in motion.  It's because of all the activities black activists did in the late 40s and early 50s that things such as the Brown v. Board of Education victory were made possible.

Are you talking about house influenced dance songs? There was tons of house still on the radio in 1992. Top 10 hits like Move This by Technotronic (recorded in 1989) or Please Don't Go by KWS or CeCe Peniston. Dancey house songs were in that year.

First off, those were all released before Rhythm Is A Dancer and More and More.  Second, they had a slightly different style than 1989-1991.  In fact, the version of Move This that garnered significant radio airplay was not the original version from the Pump up the Jam album, but a 1992 remix, which significantly more prevalent synth and a juicier beat.  It was still house, to be sure, but in 1992, house was definitely beginning to evolve into something different.  1993 did have Robin S.'s Show Me Love, but again, that track had significantly more modern instrumentation than the hollow, percussive style of songs from 1989-1991.

People still mass in suburbs and use television frequently, and the layout of our country's infrastructure hasn't altered too dramatically since the 1950s/60s. Obvviously technology has been changing a lot in the last few decades, it always is, and the internet has had a big impact on how we communicate, but social attitudes really haven't been altered too much since then. The increasingly identifiable acceptance of gays for example stems from the 1960s and 1970s, the first gay pride parade was in 1970 and the the first openly gay politician was elected in 1977. Those are things that still felt a world away in 1950.

Stonewall was a huge turning point for the gay rights movement, but the LGBT community didn't begin to truly develop more mainstream acceptance until a few decades later.

No Diggity simply doesn't sound anything like late 1980s or early 90s New Jack, even if it was influenced by it. Like I said, the NJS production standards of the time quickly aged anything from that 1987-93 period. By 1996, all of it felt decidedly outdated.

I agree it sounded like nothing in the NJS category that ever came before it, but it was still a new-jack swing renaissance of sorts.  It may not sound the same, but it essentially reimagined the genre during a time when its popularity had faded, eventually paving the way for a lot of millennial-era songs.  The song was really the turning point where gangsta rap influences in popular music were replaced with something totally different (even though ironically it features Dr. Dre).  After No Diggity, most pop urban songs began to lean more towards complex, catchy percussion rhythms rather than simple beats backed by a ton of synths.  No Diggity doesn't even have a bassline at all, only a loop of a Bill Withers guitar clip that goes along with the track's infectious beat.

Since you consider 1993 mid-90s where I don't, I'm not gonna argue here, but otherwise, the rest of the mid-90s (1994-1996-ish) were a pretty bleak time for the world's favorite blue hedgehog.

1993 was the strongest year of the core '90s (first Clinton term). As we were moving away from that year, the pop culture introduced in the early '90s (1990, 1991 and 1992) was starting to jump the shark. 1994 and 1995 were still core '90s years, though.


Actually, I hardly consider 1997 a mid 90s year aside from maybe January.  It's ironic, too, because I feel like I'm usually in the minority, arguing that 1997 was late 90s and not core 90s like most people seem to think.  However, I would definitely not consider 1996 late 90s, even though the last third of the year was somewhat transitional (death of 2Pac, release of Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider, and Super Mario 64; No Diggity reaches #1 on the charts, Bill Clinton gets reelected, Alice in Chains stop touring).

You are most certainly entitled to your own opinion, but so am I.  ;)


But if you're so adamant about the early 90s beginning with the corresponding calendar date, in January 1990, then why do you also insist that 1999 doesn't qualify as a 90s year at all?  Is that year where you would pin the beginning of the early 2000s?


Curb Your Enthusiasm and Law and Order: SUV (the Elliot Stabler episodes) both premiered in 1999; so yes, I would definitely pin that year as the start to the 2000s since both shows ended in 2011 (the first year of the 2010s, IMHO). We were obviously headed for the 2010s when we were living in the 2000s. I hope that clears up everything.

the early 90s and the late 90s just seem like a world apart almost two different decades (heck even the mid 90s as well 1996 and 1997 were completely different from each other and that was only 1 year apart)


What decade isn't a split decade?

What decade isn't a split decade?


I think every decade had their split eras.

Wild Night has sort of a cheesy dance influence, almost like the Offspring's Pretty Fly (For a White Guy).

It's a cover of a Van Morrison hit and as such it sounds pretty blues influenced. I don't think it's overly similar to his 1980s hits.

Whoomp! (There It Is) is definitely party rap, but I actually see 1993 as more of an early 90s year anyway, with part of the reason being that party rap like that was still in its prime and gangsta rap influences had not yet fully established themselves over new-jack swing.  The Quad City DJ's were really the premier party rap producers of the mid-90s, but they didn't completely dominate the edgier stuff, either.

But you said earlier something to the effect that 1993 is as far removed culturally from 1991 as 1985 is. Sounds like you're contradicting that now.

With Sting, I was really only referring to his solo work beginning in 1985, though a lot of the songs from Synchronicity fit perfectly with his later work as well.  Get a Grip has a completely different sound from Pump, lacking the head-banging metal anthems of that anthem in favor of a sort of alternative approach.  I don't see where your comparisons are coming from there.


No head-banging metal anthems on Get A Grip? A lot of that album sounds pretty head-banging. Pretty similar to their previous material. It wasn't some dramatic style shift for them, not sure why you'd think that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VknERdz82c4

There was also the grunge explosion, the official dissolution of the Soviet Union, the commercial launch of the Internet, the election of Clinton, and the release of Dr. Dre's The Chronic, all of which were vital foundations for the culture and events of the 90s in general.

I would argue that none of those things were landmark national events, other than the 1992 election which wasn't too sweeping a change in hindsight since Clinton and Bush were pretty similar politically and social attitudes didn't change very much around it.

But it uses that ultra-80s electric piano, not the growling, squealing synthesizers that became standard in urban during the mid-90s.

G-Funk which was popularized in the 1990s was a different production style from 1980s rap, but synths were still commonly used in rap a long time before The Chronic.

Not really in season 1, to my recollection.  Maybe a few episodes had glimpses of what would define the show later on (i.e., There's No Disgrace Like Home's satirization of family psychologists/therapists), but most of them were cheesy, slow-paced, and predictable, like Bart the Genius, Bart the General, Homer's Odyssey, and The Call of the Simpsons.

That show caught flack from parent groups right off the bat for the bad behavior of Bart and the seemingly negative influence of Homer. Other than MWC, family sitcoms weren't getting that kind of attention back then.

The Nairobi bombings were still more significant than pretty much anything Saddam did after the Gulf War.

Like I said, that event was a blip on the national radar and was fairly quickly forgotten after August 1998. The media coverage devoted to Iraq and Saddam was far more significant than the coverage devoted to Al-Qaeda in that timeframe and Saddam's reluctance to comply with U.N. weapons inspections was a consistently major story and one that ultimately contributed to the 2003 Iraq War. I'm not sure how you can argue this if you were alive at the time. U.S. military operations against Iraq occurred sporadically too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_missile_strikes_on_Iraq_(1993)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_missile_strikes_on_Iraq_(1996)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Iraq_(1998)

Yeah, this thread is pretty decadeologic, which dooms it from the beginning, though I think it's particularly annoying when people try to shove their definitions down your throat.  I have my own reasons for seeing 90s culture as beginning and ending a year and a half late, but I know others disagree.

Decadeology is way too common on here and is banned for a reason.

If mainstream prevalence is what we're referring to, then 1954 had basically nothing.  And again, rock and roll had key roots in the late 40s, as well, so not much distinguishes the two times in terms of rock's significance in popular culture.

Shake, Rattle, and Roll being a top 10 hit in the fall of 1954 at least shows that rock had emerged from the underground by then. It's like comparing 1982 and 1977 in terms of hip hop.


It brought more visibility to the Civil Rights movement, maybe, but it didn't totally shift the tide of progress that was already set in motion.  It's because of all the activities black activists did in the late 40s and early 50s that things such as the Brown v. Board of Education victory were made possible.


Seems like you're splitting hairs about what was a pretty major national event that at least differentiated one year from another.

First off, those were all released before Rhythm Is A Dancer and More and More.  Second, they had a slightly different style than 1989-1991.  In fact, the version of Move This that garnered significant radio airplay was not the original version from the Pump up the Jam album, but a 1992 remix, which significantly more prevalent synth and a juicier beat.  It was still house, to be sure, but in 1992, house was definitely beginning to evolve into something different.  1993 did have Robin S.'s Show Me Love, but again, that track had significantly more modern instrumentation than the hollow, percussive style of songs from 1989-1991.

They were all released at roughly the same time, between summer 1991 and summer 1992. House music literally has evolved every year that it's existed, to where we are now with dubstep. I don't consider the house scene of 1992-93 to be dramatically different from the previous several years at all, and a song like Everybody Dance Now would still have been a big hit a couple of years later.

Stonewall was a huge turning point for the gay rights movement, but the LGBT community didn't begin to truly develop more mainstream acceptance until a few decades later.

Gays didn't begin to receive extremely widespread acceptance until just recently, and in some cases and places they still don't. But I certainly don't consider 1991 or 1992 or 1993 or 1994 to be some turning point for the gay rights movement.

The songs on "Get a Grip" don't really scream 80's to me. The videos are very 90's.

The songs on "Get a Grip" don't really scream 80's to me. The videos are very 90's.


1993 was the first year of 'the core '90s'.

The songs on "Get a Grip" don't really scream 80's to me. The videos are very 90's.


I don't see the songs on that album as a big style departure from their previous album at all. They don't sound anything like grunge or 90s alternative.

I do, but many people's opinions on how the '90s progressed are divisive. I, like most people, see 1990-1993 as the early '90s, 1994-1996 as the mid '90s, and 1997-1999 as the late '90s. I think "core '90s" should represent every era of the '90s just a little bit. That's why I consider 1994-1997 "The Heart of the '90s".

I do, but many people's opinions on how the '90s progressed are divisive. I, like most people, see 1990-1993 as the early '90s, 1994-1996 as the mid '90s, and 1997-1999 as the late '90s. I think "core '90s" should represent every era of the '90s just a little bit. That's why I consider 1994-1997 "The Heart of the '90s".


Humanity was headed for 1993 while we were living in the years 1990, 1991, and 1992. 1993 brought an end to the early '90s (1990, 1991 and 1992) as we were being introduced to the new pop culture icons that were still popular at the start of 1996, such as Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Leprechaun, Mulder and Scully. Unfortunately, some people did not pick up on this until 1994. '93 was not a year of the early '90s, that's all I'm saying.

the early 90s and the late 90s just seem like a world apart almost two different decades (heck even the mid 90s as well 1996 and 1997 were completely different from each other and that was only 1 year apart)


Yes, but the spirit of the year 1990 stayed around, in all of the other years of the '90s, until 1999. All though out the '90s, Americans watched scripted teen shows on Saturday mornings, played with Tiger Electronics handheld games, wore controversial shirts to school, enjoyed listening to white rappers, and bashed the sequels to their favorite '80s movies; so the '90s did have an identity as a decade. As we were moving away from the year 1990, we were slowly watching the atmosphere of that time (1990) die off with each passing year.

Think about it:

In 1990, everyone still went to the roller skating rink after school to have fun.
Then, around the start of 1991, rollerblades were released. Rollerblades were "in" from 1991 to sometime in 1996 or so and ice skating became popular in the late '90s.

I was nostalgic for 1990 and 1991 while I was living in the late '90s, but those years did not seem ancient to most people at that time.

I'd divide the 90s at 1995, since that's the point at which the Internet and the Web started to become well known to the general public, and widely accessible in the rich countries of the world.

Symbolically, it's also the year Full House went off the air. Pop culture became far more "adult" in terms of obscene content after 1995. Globalization was truly kicking into gear as well as foreign markets started to gain a lot of importance. This also marks the point at which the Islamist movement became firmly anti-American, as Bin Laden formally declared war on America in 1996.