Then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin and U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1994. (Wiki)
Long before Tom Brokaw christened his “Greatest Generation,” Baby Boomers inaugurated the trend of iconizing the 1960s that was their generational crucible.
The peace sign, long hair, and incense-soaked head shops pretending to sell “tobacco products” softened the blow of news that a friend was killed or injured in Vietnam. To belong to a generation became a bill of goods. So we bought the trend of labeling generations by name, rather than time. And we bought it hook, line, and sinker.
Any label affixed to a generation is a grievous error. It is not labels that define us, but eras. Words count, but time arguably defines us more than oral or written signifiers. And is it not time, or a time, that we celebrate?
Still, and ever since some marketing wag slapped Generation X on those who followed the boomers, we have endured a succession of generational taglines, with millennials (born between 1981 and 2000) and Generation Z (born between 2001 and 2020) in their wake. There is nothing in the alphabet after Z, which bodes ill for anyone born after 2020. But do not count the marketers and their adjacent demographers out yet. They will think of something, and perhaps come full circle to start at the beginning with Generation A.
Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard’s truism that “Once you label me, you negate me” holds true because it translates well to groups of people and eras. Label a group, or label an era, and you kill its collective spirit. We do not need names and labels. We need memories, music, and attitudes to celebrate.
The 1990s was the greatest decade most of us now living share in recent memory. It was productive, mounting an international celebration and rebuilding to the end of international Soviet-dominated communism, but also mostly carefree. If the economy was not stronger than during any of the three decades before 1990, it was at least robust enough to surprise most of us. By the time the Clinton scandal erupted in 1998 most of us were too busy to pay close attention, except to moan in derision every time cable news showed another clip of Ken Starr’s limousine rolling up the streets of Washington D.C. Genocide in Rwanda echoed the horrors of World War Two, as did the disintegration of former Yugoslavia. The Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King verdict placed a bookmark on racial strife that would be revisited for a later date. For the most part it was a decade when suffering at home, and worldwide, held steady at medium temperatures. It gave us bracing, thrill-seeking popular music—hip-hop and rap went big; British bands gave us a second invasion—and the publishing world was just getting started with memoirs and historical fiction that would have us turning pages faster than a nascent Amazon.com could ship out titles. Most of all, the Internet—yes, with a capital “I”—had yet to calcify into the partisan slop fact-checking bumped up against conspiracy memes of our current “brain rot.”
Yes, nostalgia comes cheap. Yes, hindsight is twenty-twenty. But when contemplating the future scares us out of our wits more than it inspires us to get out of bed we rely on the past because its memories, more than any other available force of comparison, focus and contrast our efforts to form the present. There is a reason “Make America Great Again” prevailed over “I’m With Her” in 2016 and “Not Going Back” and “A New Way Forward” in 2024. That reason, if also somewhat nebulous because we all remember events somewhat differently, is the power of memory.
At a time when we sit mid-way through the 2020s, still smarting from the pandemic of 2020 and partisan venom sure to carry over into the next five years, it would do us all good to remember the 1990s. Historians today find the seeds of our current malaise in the machinations of both Newt Gingrich’s power plays and President Clinton’s reckless behavior, but back then most of us could shrug both off just enough to get on with lives that called us forward, into wherever we were headed. Perhaps a dogged determination free of brittle attitude and resentment is what we need more of right now. The best film comedies of the 1990s—most especially the creations of Canadian comedian Mike Myers, e.g. Wayne’s World (1992) and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)—had that ethos in spades. For whatever reason, Americans seem to have lost their capacity to be momentarily silly in favor of maintaining a strange state of permanent, although sometimes playfully ironic, distress. Political convictions intensely held and believed have their place, but they also wilt under fatigue if displayed and insisted upon for too long. The contrast between any election season of the 1990s and any election season starting in 2016 is almost too much to bear.
We seem unable to acknowledge the greatness of the 1990s not because we cannot remember its halcyon spirit but because we refuse to. As Americans we have grown too earnest and sincere in our collective old age. This is in part due to demography—fewer of us are raising children—but also due in large part to a certain curmudgeonry and crankiness we refuse to shake off.
Human consciousness should never sit still, but move between poles of imagination demarcated by history, or what we call the past. The admission that you may never purchase a house of your own exists alongside the reality, even if distant, that most of our grandparents struggled to provide simple family meals during the Depression. The knowledge that climate change knocks louder on our world’s door with every passing year exists alongside the even more distant knowledge that a whole slate of animal species was made extinct by meteors crashing to Earth.
None of these exercises of the conscience is easy when sometimes all we admit to feeling is dread. Thankfully, however, we have some of the best tunes of the 1990s to comfort us. Short on time to browse the list in the previous link? I have an easy recommendation to make in The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” (No. 155). Like the decade from which it hails, it has a grace that seems effortless, a truth that is not overbearing, and a timeless motif played by orchestral strings that somehow never spills into monotony. Most of all, it is a song that bridges every decade before and after the 1990s back to its source, the greatest decade in recent memory, if not recent history. Play it for the New Year, and play it loud. Because if there is any decade that deserves more volume, it is the 1990s.
