Do you think the 90s seem old yet?

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Would you guys believe I still walk around with a Discman? I just don't care for the luxury of being able to carry more than 20 songs with me.

And don't get me started about those young whippersnappers with their DS's and their 5th generation Pokémon! Why, in my day we had 150 Pokémon and one Mew! AND WE HAD TO SHARE THE MEW!

Yes, this question is an age sort. Whether an era seems "old" is based entirely on the age of that person when the era happened. Once I passed 30, time seemed to speed by so quickly that literally every pop culture phenom got put in my mental "new" bin and never did get re-categorized as "old" because so little time seemed to have passed.

You gotta be kidding. Their "Unplugged" cd is, no joke, among humanity's greatest musical achievements.

The station I listen to most often has a flashback lunch, from noon 'til one they play a bunch of older stuff. Nowadays it's basically all the stuff I was listening to in high school.

I remember the first time I bitched about the crap kids listen to nowadays with no sense of irony. Realized what I'd said and felt absolutely ancient.

My favourite Nirvana albums are In Utero or Outcesticides. Though I'd agree the Unplugged had a once in a lifetime influence on people's lives, including mine.

The 90's still seem like it was last year to me. Then I suddenly remember that the things I'm remembering happened 15 years ago. Also, kids these days don't understand my Simpsons references anymore. A travesty, I say.

D'oh!

I even hear like teenagers on Yahoo Answers on YouTube hate on today's music and pop culture. I think that's kind of proof that it objectively sucks.

IMO pop culture started sucking around the year 2001, maybe even slightly earlier. I used to think the late 90s sucked, but they are actually pretty classic compared to what's followed them. Even the Backstreet Boys sound almost like 'good music' now compared to Katy Perry or some garbage like that.

So to you, MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, and The Bodyguard might as well be the same era as Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Linkin Park?

I'm not MrXxx but I'm in his age group (middle aged) so I'll give you my answer.

The way it feels is as though there are only a handful of years between those two sets of things, 5 or maybe 8, 10 at most. I know that if I googled the gap would be much larger than that. I'm not going to bother googling because I've run into this over and over when talking to younger people. I'll mention a movie I thought was from 2 years ago and they'll get nostalgic about how they were 12 when it came out. Or how they were in kindergarten when they first heard a song I could have sworn was released 5 years ago. I can put things somewhat in chronological order (I know that Vanilla Ice precedes Lady Gaga) but I fail at getting the time gap correct.

The 90s are almost like yesterday for me. I can hardly believe that we're no longer in the decade just after the 90s; we're now in the decade after the decade just after the 90s.

Welcome to the club. Your door prize is a collection of items you didn't realize were retro.

If you're male, like me, you also get a complimentary receding hairline.

When looking at design, things have rapidly gotten older, and it's amazing how rapidly technology and society have changed. Our first computer after I was born (apparently, my parents had worked with the things throughout the 1980s), was in the attic, in the mid-1990s. We had internet, set up by a proper professional, and I thought it was really cool, but I was only allowed a few minutes of internet every day because we had data caps that, apparently, filled with as little as large images. In primary school, the cheesy advertising image of amazed white children in geeky clothes sitting around a screen that is starting to display an image was as close to the truth as you could get. Little over twelve years later, children that age have high-speed internet on their phones.
I also remember how my parents forced me to eat things I didn't like - almost any vegetable - for a week in exchange for Age of Empires, which I then played for days on end. Until this day, I maintain that Age of Empires taught me more English than all of those years in school.

Society, too, seemed very different where I live. It seemed much more laid-back, pre-9/11 (which, amazingly, Firefox deems a legitimate word) and just generally much more friendly. The adults must have had more issues, but there did not seem to be anything disastrous going on that required my attention or responsibility. Perhaps that's where my nostalgia comes from. It felt special to count down to the year 2000, but I'm done with this millennium already after twelve years of going through it.

But yes, and almost everyone I know in my age category can confirm this, the 1990s were a much better time for us. I'm just hoping we won't have to say that about this decade during the next decade.

Something that disconcerts me a little is how all the veteran celebrities are aging. Cliff Richard is 71, Tom Jones is 71, Bowie is 65, Robert Plant is 63. I mean, in the 90s they were already 'old' in my perception, (around 50-ish), but they weren't entering the "danger zone" so to speak. When I saw the recent Star Trek movie in 2010 I think it was, I was almost horrified to see how much Nimoy had aged when compared to last time I saw him in an episode of Next Generation. Of course, some of that may have been intensified in make-up, because future Spock was supposed to be ancient in that film, but still...

I was also reminded of this aging thing when in 2008 I read an article on how this was the 50th birth year for Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson. In the 90s, of course, they were 30-somethings.

I agree with this, absolutely. For me, what seems furthest removed about the Nineties is a feeling of general optimism. Say what you will about Bill Clinton, but his administration balanced the budget, reduced crime, and kept the economy solid. He deployed a lot of troops, but didn't enter into any major conflicts. I think overall people felt, "Yeah, this whole America thing is working out pretty good!"

It seems the Great Unravelling began with the Clinton sex scandal. He spent the last two years of his presidency not doing much, just trying to be a good boy. Then came the fiasco of the 2000 election. Bush and Cheney's tyrannical arrogance. 9/11, and the resurgence of hyper-conservatism. Meaningless wars. Economic meltdown. Justin Timberlake and Beyonce. The 21st century only seems to get worse and worse.

I think it really depends what you're looking at. When you talk about grunge, when you talk about even the more euro-electronic stuff like Garbage, Sneaker Pimps, Esthero, etc. yeah - its all stuff that 'feels' like today. I think the only way today feels different is that we're feeling the power of T Pain and Timbaland on every club dance floor and that whole sort of trance/hip-hop fusion that's been blasting almost everything else out since the mid 2000's and even reshaping most of the new hip-hop beats and turning them more in a trance-type direction.

The funny about it though too - when you listen to some late 90's stuff as well - like Uplift Mofo or Mother's Milk by Red Hot Chili Peppers, or when you listen to skater/thrash metal that also either doesn't feel dated or, conversely, even feels fresher than a lot of what's playing right now.

Overall though I'd have to agree - looking at music and culture as a chronology where everything a few decades back is supposed to feel older - I think that was strictly a 'my generation' and a few behind it phenomenon. I get the impression that the freshness of ideas is relative to the artists and that you may have some people cyclically trying to bring some things back but they just won't be wildly different anymore.

The best way I'd explain it - in medieval Europe there was no such thing as 'oldschool' nor would your parent's music seem wildly dated. I think its been pretty close to being that way for most of human history, we've lived - in the back half of the 20th century - in wildly extraordinary times. What we're used to in that sense isn't the most accurate facsimile of how the flow of history works or how things will be from now on. I get the impression where, like my medieval Europe analogy - at least with music - we'll be back to little or no generation gap within a few decades. We've hit our mind blowing innovations and there really isn't much elsewhere to go. Even any new styles invented in the next 20 or 30 years will seem like they're two other things we're familiar with combined and hence I think the sonic space for our kids or grandkids to listen to something that alienates us really isn't there any longer.