You’re probably tired of hearing about it, and can’t possibly fathom how so many people share such a tight bond over something as trivial as a period of time - especially a time predating facebook. Trust me when I say we have our reasons, and this is above and beyond the superiority complex you might perceive it to be.
North American 90s kids identify with the decade of their childhood with a loyalty that seems foreign to millennials. This could be because much of what the tables have to offer you hardly seems worth claiming. Where your generation has its very own mass produced eyes-glued-to-the-screen heaven full of all the latest impersonal tech gadgets, 90s kids were thrilled with feeding their Tamagotchi pets or comparing beanie babies. (And, let’s be honest, most of us still collect Pokemon cards.) We didn’t have the same option to bury our faces in technology – we had no choice but to connect, and do it for real, not with wifi.
It should be noted that North American culture has been based deeply in the whitewashed male-dominated media, and has only gotten more extreme in this respect with each passing generation. On the surface, what 90s kids mainly claim with valor are the music, television, and trends that defined pop culture during their childhoods. Keep in mind, that’s only the surface. It takes a whole lot more than that to form this kind of pride in the 90s and such deep disdain for the millennial generation. Don’t worry, it’s nothing personal.
The generalities and stereotypes perpetuated by the entertainment industry were much the same as now, but, as we 90s kids will quickly remind you, we had no power over it and that isn’t what we claimed as our own. We were more interested in things like picking the color of the power ranger we were going to be or which pogs we had. Did we always notice that the black ranger, Zack, was black and Trini, the yellow ranger, was Vietnamese American? Of course not! We just wanted their outfits.
Those of us who notice this sad fact too late actually have our happy memories of the show tainted for the rest of our lives. I pointed it out to a Hot Topic cashier while purchasing my blast-from-the-past pink ranger t-shirt, and he promptly thanked me for ruining his childhood.
No, the 90s weren’t perfect, as evidenced by the subpar acting and blatant racism, but there was a lot more to it than a few duds that made it past the entertainment industry’s filters. What 90s kids are clinging to is an optimism that is sadly lacking in the millennial generation. One that was present in the media surrounding us, but is lacking in the media surrounding you.
Despite the Power Rangers, 90s kids had other, better shows to call their own. The Cosby Show, while it may have started in 1984, played all throughout our childhoods and gave us incredible role models. When I was tiny I remember watching Rudy, who was the youngest and the one I identified with, and wishing with all my might that I could someday have her beautiful skin color. I didn’t realize yet that I would be stuck a pasty white or that these little differences in skin tone were a big deal to some people.
Family Matters was my youngest brother’s favorite show before he died. Jaleel White was his idol. I know, who would think that Urkel would be someone he would identify with? My brother was special. Once, when it was on at my grandma’s house, there was an episode where Grandmother Winslow told a horrific story about racism that made me hide in the closet and cry for a full 20 minutes. I just couldn’t believe the cruelty people were capable of.
These shows had things to teach and values to share. Important and life-altering stories were being told right in front of us. It was finally becoming okay to view equality in the mainstream. Black women like Mrs. Huxtable could be successful lawyers and Ellen Degeneres could come out as lesbian on public television and people would still laugh at her jokes and watch her sitcom. Roseanne Barr could speak her mind loudly and advocate women, the working class, and the LGBTQAetc. community. She even had a highly respected vegetarian character that was willing to give animals a voice before veganism was cool.
The Golden Girls were playing loyally throughout our childhoods and were able to represent independent senior women who kept each other strong and happy without men around. They taught, and continue to teach, us moral lessons about honesty and loyalty. They brought light to issues senior citizens face, such as how they can sometimes be manipulated and scared into giving away money. They also contributed to bringing exposure to the gay community and helped women stop feeling so anxious about aging and the terrifying thought of losing our overly-valued youthfulness.
Back when MTV actually still played music, (that’s right, millennials, once upon a time that was the point) there was a show actually devoted to a brainy, intelligent cynic called Daria. She made shockingly astute and deep observations about humanity and called attention to the deepest flaws lining our society. It was a hilarious and insightful show that has never been equaled since.
Even if you didn’t enjoy sitcoms or mature cartoons as much as I did, Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel and Cartoon Network had been recently developed for child-friendly programming. We had Doug, All That, Keenan and Kel, The Rugrats, a slew of brand new Disney movies like Mulan and Pocahontas, Clarissa Explains It All, and my personal favorite, So Weird, which featured a young female lead being raised by her widowed rock-star mother.
That’s right – for once, Disney killed the dad off! And to boot, two strong females who didn’t need husbands or boyfriends to pave their futures were doing what they loved and traveling all over the world. And the girl always saved the day. Those channels were 90s kid oriented. They didn’t even show commercials for adults. It was all about us. Everything we saw seemed so progressive and so hopeful.
This optimism is best observed when we compare the music that we listened to then versus what you kids are stuck with now. In the 90s, the music at our disposal was upbeat and littered with hopeful messages or sometimes deep, borderline spiritual, undertones. They left us with the distinct impression that we can and should do anything we were compelled to do to change the world, and that the world was a huge place full of great potential for good.
The 90s also brought us grunge, the genre where men wore dresses because they didn’t believe being a woman was shameful, and the Riot Grrrl movement, which put women’s oppression in the spotlight. It provided a specific platform where women could express their rage at a male-dominated world that tries hard to keep women serving men in every possible way. Riot grrrls demanded empowerment. It was a powerful underground culture that was dedicated to reclaiming all of the degrading names haunting women and bring attention to these critical problems.
In the more mainstream music scene, the Spice Girls took the “girl power” mantra into the lives of young teenyboppers everywhere. Outside the pop genre, Sarah McLachlan hosted the first Lilith Fair, a highly successful and unique festival featuring many of the strong female musicians of the time. These women gathered together for a moving and empowering event that helped the world to see the beauty and strength of female creativity. Its message was able to reach the lives of millions of people and plainly display the power women were capable of.
If you think that’s something, rap didn’t always center on being a gangster, being violent, and degrading everyone around you. Tupac Shakur was a brilliant lyricist and his music brought depth into the mainstream, where millions of people were able to relate to his message because it was genuine. Even he stood up for the ladies and did his best to share his unique progressive perspective with his listeners.
His brand has been replaced by a slew of rappers who glorify consumerism and violence. They took the fashion of wearing their pants below their asses (originally done to show men were open for prison sex) and waddle around obliviously as though they stand for something greater when the sad fact is that they are being exploited. Representing a world full of prison sex and violence is so far from a real culture that it’s saddening to see the people who take it so seriously. It’s like they’re pulling their pants down for the racist media to spank. They don’t see it that way, they actually act like violence, materialism and a jail sentence are important and defining of their values.
Besides rap, there was some really catchy house music. The songs that people once went dancing to were upbeat and powerful, sometimes sexy or sultry but never as bad as what we hear now. In the 90s we had women asking men to “be my lover” whereas the millennials go out to the clubs and have men telling women to bend over. I feel like I could just end it here to make my point. I know this is a long one and many of you might wish I would, but I’m not quite done yet. Sorry, millennials.
These musicians are a long way away from what we are hearing now. The millennial’s generation is so steeped in skanky, skuzzy sexuality that it isn’t hard to wonder why nine year olds are trying to look like sex symbols before they even understand what sexuality really is. You can’t be present to millennial media longer than three minutes without a balking reminder that children aren’t given the option of innocence anymore.
In fact, once it was discovered that taking the good girl image of Britney Spears and sexing it up was the subject of so much media attention and controversy, that has been all they’ve been wanting to do ever since. They build up little millennial pop stars so that they can tear them down in a blaze of media tabloid glory to keep their ratings up and their albums selling. (Justin Bieber, anyone?) Sexuality is actually being pushed on younger and younger children. And I’m pretty sure it isn’t just my twisted imagination that one of the Yo Gabba Gabba characters looks like a diseased penis.
In fact, millenial’s shows are full of sexual undertones and kids obsessed with dating and swapping girlfriends or boyfriends, and their commercials are full of phallic symbols and advertisements that can critically damage their self esteem and make them feel as though they are nothing without buying a product or dominating somebody. They are subconsciously being encouraged to assume psychologically damaging and increasingly more sexual roles before they are mentally or physically prepared to create their own identities, sexual or otherwise.
90s kids didn’t have to worry about that. The worst we had was Baby Got Back, Sex and Candy and maybe the Divynls singing about how they touch themselves when they don’t want anybody else. Even those were mild compared to what young, vulnerable millennial children are exposed to every day. The 90s were precious to us because there were still people out there, in the business, working to protect us. It might have just been because they didn’t know what they could get away with yet, but either way we were given comfortable little filters.
Not now. Now there are younger and younger kids with phones and internet access who have millions of superficial songs and ads impressed upon their minds daily. The millennial’s media is doing unfathomable psychological damage and prompting them to assume the role of sexual prowler or object. These ads purposefully create voids within them that they feel only material objects provided by said company can fill. It either creates people obsessed with sexuality who need more and more fucked up things to get off or people so repulsed by it that they don’t feel like they belong anywhere on the sexual spectrum.
No, sex and sexuality aren’t inherently bad things, but the industry that is using it to brainwash people into spending more and more money and losing touch with their own inherent values is. Teaching kids to turn to a new pair of shoes or a meaningless fuck instead of turning to introspection is a huge mistake. The millennials have the distinction of being the first wave of drones in an increasingly severe consumer culture.
The distinction is that the media knows what it can get away with it now and the millennials have been initiated since birth. The values being taught to you by the media are not optimistic like ours were. They are bleak and shallow. Now that the internet is available to almost everyone in North America and some kids have facebook profiles from the time they’re born, the corporations know exactly what our interests are and have psychologists working to find the ways kids are vulnerable so these corporations can make more money and create life-long customers and brand loyalty.
In the 90s, we thought it was really cool because the internet was this brand new thing that was hitting our schools and homes by storm. Yahoo was the search engine of choice and the possibility of unlimited information sent our young minds reeling with possibilities. We were taught how to do internet searches in 6th grade – something your generation seems to know inherently from birth. We couldn’t check our pockets every three minutes to witness the internet’s wonders and scroll through our all-important facebook updates.
We had no idea yet the extent that corporations were willing to go in order to advertise with this new resource. Now that it exists, facebook has taken away our individual expression and used our interests as market research so that they can advertise properly to us every time we check it. 90s kids were so excited about the possibilities of the internet that we never considered the ways it could actually just box us in.
We didn’t see this coming, millennials. And you, well, you never even had a chance to see anything else. All the freedom was gone by the time you could read. While we started out getting to write our own facebook bios, you just get to pick and choose from the pre-existing options that were summarized by our original words. You got stuck with the void left by corporate moguls more concerned with turning a profit than with giving you a chance to learn who you are without their influence.
You have never had much of a choice about tuning out the sex-crazed music or avoiding the impressions that seeing a thousand ads daily leaves on your minds. While we had edgy, you have porn. You were born clinging to a rapidly decomposing possibility of personal growth and changing the world, and before you could even talk, Yahoo was overtaken by Google and that possibility vanished right into their wallets and oppressive “sex-sells” mentality.
They gave us a lot more credit than they give you, and you should be really pissed off about that. Thing is, a lot of you don’t even really understand, and if you are pissed, a lot of the time you don’t even know what it is you’re angsting about so you just pick a topic and blow up the internet with half-cocked judgment calls. You see everybody out there seems to have a cause, something to care about, so you grab one and try to identify. What you can mildly identify with becomes a huge endeavor and you put more of your oppressed anger into it than legitimate understanding.
Even those of you who want to be better people are missing something fundamentally by steeping yourself in nothing but internet culture. You’re not out there living it enough to actually understand and advocate it. Millennials overcompensate and cry wolf over every little thing instead of really understanding the problem. Growing up only to observe this mind-boggling phenomenon is why so many 90s kids have banded together and bonded over the deterioration and utter corruption of childhood that we so narrowly missed.
It could have been us, millennials, but it wasn’t. It’s you. That’s like missing the flight that crashed in flames over the ocean because of a cat giving birth on the road that nobody had the heart to hit or move. Talk about a near-death experience. We miss the 90s. It isn’t because we feel superior to you. Most of us just wish to God we could take you there with us. We want to take you to a time when it was still safe to be impressionable, safe to be a normal kid.
Many of you are our younger siblings, our cousins, our nieces and nephews. The fact that you missed the 90s is like how it is knowing that my amazing brother died before the younger kids ever got to know him. Our hearts yearn to give you what we had because we just know you would be better for it. We want to help you take back what the corporate world is so deliberately robbing you of. Your innocence and your God-given right to learn who you really are inside without so much corporate influence.
90s kids know better, and most of us are willing to teach you what we know. We were the last generation allowed to be children, and we bond over this like war veterans, survivors. We take these small things that represent childhood innocence and cherish them because we deeply miss their significance and hope for you to see it too. We were set up to believe we would have a progressively changing world at our fingertips, but the world didn’t deliver and we’re here to tell you about it.
So that’s it, millennials. That’s the big deal about the 90s. While we may miss the good shows, the good music and the good atmosphere, it’s really a lot more than that. The 90s were the last generation to be able to say, “I didn’t have or want a cell phone when I was five years old.” or that “I went on the internet when I was ten and I didn’t see anything pornographic.” We were the last age of childhood innocence, and we want to work with you to make that innocence possible again.
Work with those of us trying to make a change. Really make an effort to understand the environment you were born into instead of scoffing about how your generation is just as good, if not better. It’s not about competing, it’s about finding the small cues that allow you to acknowledge your own strengths in a world telling you they don’t exist without something or someone else. There’s still hope, you just have to find it outside of the media and internet.
If you build your foundations right, you, too, can be like us. The cool 90s kids. There are movements yet to be made and we will continue to fight for your childhoods.
With love and surge,
Amanda