“If only Pat Buchanan had beaten Bush for the nomination!”
“If only George Lucas had adapted the Zahn Trilogy instead of making the Special Editions!”
“If only Sega had won the fifth console generation!”
“If only Clear Channel hadn’t taken over top 40 rock radio!”
“If only they’d kept it in the bedroom!”
“If only they’d come here legally!”
If only …
Those are some of the refrains you often hear – especially from members of Gen Y in the throes of nostalgia and Zoomers who weren’t there – that all amount to the same crie de coeur:
“If only we could go back to the 90s!”
It sounds understandable at first. After all, the 1990s – the first half, anyway – were measurably better than Current Year Clown World.
But under the veneer of pining for better times lies a kind of shortsightedness that plagues online dissidents.
Because when you look at the chain of causation, the 1990s wasn’t a golden age. It was a decade of despair.
Regular readers will already be familiar with Cultural Ground Zero, which hit in 1997.
Yet it wasn’t an isolated phenomenon that happened in a vacuum. Instead, Western civilization was inundated with multiple Ground Zero events – all of which struck in the 1990s.
Music
Authors David V. Stewart, J.D. Cowan, and I have written at length about Music Ground Zero. A perfect storm of corporate and government corruption conspired to destroy rock and roll as the dominant genre and replace it with soulless pop written by a handful of cultists.
But if you go back and take an honest listen to music from 1990-1996, before the Clear Channel takeover, you’ll find a distressing trend. @FischerKing64 made the following observation on X:
Think about it. He’s right.
Back in the 80s, you had new wave Goth bands with runny mascara singing about how miserable they were. But they made no attempt to hide their misery. The point was to share it with everybody else.
The advent of normal-looking guys writing upbeat tunes that distracted you from their black pilled lyrics was a 1990s phenomenon.
Gin Blossoms, Blind Melon, and even Pearl Jam all performed that style of happy-sounding sad songs. And that’s just off the top of my head.
Are these dirges for the end of Christendom? Laments over the hollow victory at the end of the Cold War? Gray portents of the disaster to come?
American Christianity did begin a steep decline at the start of the 90s.
Some major acts of the time did seem to be telegraphing something.
Even the super bouncy “Right Here Right Now” by Jesus Jones has melancholy undernotes, at least in retrospect. It makes several direct references to disgraced historian Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” theory, for instance.
I’m still not 100 percent sure what was going on with early 90s rock music above and beyond the obvious. I do know that a good friend recently put together two big music compilations – one from the 80s and one from the 90s. The 80s mix got me pumped and energized, while something about the 90s songs set me on edge. I can’t put my finger on it, but there it is.
Television
If 90s music was low-key subversive, the same era was when prime time TV dropped any pretense and started pushing overt degeneracy.
Devon Stack, dissident documenter of all things debauched, just released the first video in a two-part series that dredges 90s TV subversion from the memory hole. [NSFW language warning]
Watching his exposé was a weird experience, akin to what I imagine hypnotic regression must be like. Because I clearly remember turning on episodes of Married … With Children, Designing Women, and even Star Trek: The Next Generation that hit me over the head with pro-sodomy propaganda. Yet much like the whimsical melodies that masked 90s songs’ dark messages, the humor and action of those TV shows overshadow the agitprop.
It’s like a weird, specific form of amnesia.
Note that we’re not talking Ground Zero-era shows like Friends. These are series that started in the late 80s and went mask off the second the calendar turned to 1990.
Unlike with the 90s music scene, we do have a key suspect in the degeneration of early 90s television. After the Ball, a gay propaganda manual by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, exploded onto the scene in 1989. Their fellow travelers in academia and media lobbied hard to inject their poison into mainstream TV.
And it worked. Overnight, sitcoms were flooded with good looking, sounding, and acting characters who were just as normal as -if not more so than – the regular male cast members. With the sole exception that they slept with other men. Meanwhile, sci fi fans had to endure countless preachy episodes revolving around ham-fisted allegories for gay acceptance. When a member of a race that reproduced through budding got shunned for having a fling with the dashing first officer, you could bet those bigoted plant people were in for a stern lecture from the moral busybody captain.
By the way, Stack has hinted that he’s got something extra dark in store for part 2 – and it involves something that happened in 1997. Get your popcorn.
Politics
Full credit to dissident blogger the Z Man for this one.
Donald Trump may have popularized “the Swamp” as a collective epithet for our permanent managerial class. But a previous president bears most of the responsibility for creating it.
And that former president was Bill Clinton.
Before anyone comments “But there’s always been corruption in Washington!” I know. We all know.
But the kinds of official malfeasance that dominated D.C. before the early 90s tended to be garden variety bribery and graft. It was the Clintons who brought a new type of grift to town.
As the Z Man explained, Clinton ran Arkansas in Big Man political machine style. The way it works is the boss gets the biggest slice of the pie, but he makes sure everybody down the chain gets a taste. That way, not only is the guy on top corrupt, so are half of his underlings. But nobody knows who’s honest and who’s not, so everybody’s too afraid to rat on anyone else.
The Clintons brought that dirty cop dynamic to the nation’s capital in 1993. It’s continued to this day, and that’s how you get FBI agents raiding political opponents’ homes and the DOJ throwing internet pranksters in jail with zero repercussions.
It’s also why controlled opposition Conservatives always want to turn the clock back to 1998. They sound like late 90s democrats because they are. And they long for their salad days, back when Uncle Rush raked Slick Willy over the coals for fooling around with White House interns.
The trouble is that by then, it was far too late. The Decade of Despair had done its evil work.
So if we can’t rewind the clock to the 90s, how do we get out of this mess?
Going back isn’t an option.
The only way out is through.
And it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
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The reason Y Signal has a lot on music in it is because I remember that shift really well. We went from ’80s bright and shiny to a weird groove in the early ’90s that was more dour, yet sonically more classic rock oriented with a blues edge, before charging back into a (far less successful) bright and shiny period by decade’s end. Then 9/11 hit, the industry became pure misery porn, and the industry imploded a few years later.
I think why people like myself like early ’90s music is because of that honesty where it felt like the people making the music understood we were missing something back then and many bands longed to find out what that was. It’s probably why Smashing Pumpkins lived as long as they did, since Billy Corgan did eventually find religion and was honestly searching, and why other bands faded away–they never found what they were looking for and turned insular instead. This was the last gasp of Gen X creativity before they would give up, in more ways than one. There is a reason most every big band from that time period seems to have had at least one member commit suicide. We were in a bad way, and no one was really paying attention to that fact. I would definitely not want to go back to this time.
If you want a perfect encapsulation of this era in song, I would suggest listening to “Misery” by Soul Asylum, which is about this very topic. Even better if you watch the video. It released in 1995, by the way.
This period should have been a wake up call, but it wasn’t. A few short years after this would be the era of mega mergers, nu metal, bubblegum pop factories, and Clear Channel. For all intents and purposes, the industry died because it made all the wrong choices, and it was already terminal by this point.
As for TV, yes, it was largely all like Devon said. Poison pill strategy was big at the time and, unless you mainly watched more classical family sitcoms like what aired on TGIF (which didn’t shove any of this in until they died in the 2000s) like I did, you were exposed to all sorts of degeneracy under the banner of “edge” and were taught it was cool. That’s why so many want to go back to the ’90s. They want to feel cool for supporting regime positions again. You can see the same thing with Star Trek fans who go on about the ’90s material like the RLM guys. They got a lot of what they believe because these shows told them it was Obvious and Logical to believe these things and have never really considered they could be wrong. Because they presented it in a nice attractive package.
I would also say, and this is far less contested, that movies also took a hard dip in quality in the 90s, too. Doing Cannon Cruisers has exposed me to a lot of B-movies and bombs that were actually quite great, but they’re mostly from the 1980s. The ’90s, partially thanks to the PG-13 revolution, both lead to an increase in the infamous Political Correctness of the times (how many kids movies became about saving nature preservations or the like from evil bald white men, plus the “wacky gay character” stereotype was everywhere) and the dumbing down of themes and ideas. The “epic” movie trend of the late ’90s is the perfect encapsulation of this mentality. You even have a whole generation of people now who are brainwashed into thinking movies before 1995 are unwatchable because they don’t contain these weaker elements. Ignorance is strength.
There just isn’t any going back, because it was one stop on a downhill slide. You can’t go back to any era. All you can do is take what works, discard what doesn’t, and try to build upon the good. We can’t do that until we finally get off the downhill slide and actually try, though. Until then, we’re just going to be pining for the times when the poison was less obvious.
Conservatives with one foot in the Pop Cult want to change the regime just enough to make supporting the official position cool again. You filled in a major piece of the puzzle there.
My mindless entertainment consists of listening to otherwise well meaning YouTubers attempt to tell Hollywood how to make money again. It’s funny to listen to well meaning people who genuinely want “Take the propaganda out Hollywood” and then insist that “They are not a prude, but…”. Also that we need to “have unity”. Also insist that entertainment should be “universal”. While it can be that, it’s weird, sad, and entertaining to have someone sincerely think that Hollywood’s 1990’s progressivism is universal and timeless.
They just want things to be “normal” again, which to them is the climate of back when Hollywood was head-patting as good boys for agreeing with their clearly correct political positions and worldviews, instead of screaming at them being racist incel chuds for dissenting.
They aren’t like those backwards, uncool, satanic panic believing Bible thumpers the movies and TV shows always coincidently portray as evil. They’re the cool guy with the backwards baseball cap cheering “Jerry!” and making gay jokes while winking towards gay folks that they’re actually one of the “good” ones on their side.
And that’s just it. They still think they’re that sensible centrist with obvious good takes and opinions that came to them naturally, instead of a former in-patient who wandered too far off the plantation one day and will never be allowed back without a total lobotomy.
There isn’t any going back to the way things were. The way things were was the middle of a downhill slide. It’s like going back to page 217 of a book because you hated the ending and think it’ll be different again if you just reread it again from an earlier chapter. It just doesn’t work that way.
Nearly every accusation the Left makes against Trump could be made (and usually was) against Clinton, with as much or more plausibility. When they start up, especially in the ‘sexual misbehavior’ or ‘accused rapist’ field, my Gen Y self keeps flashing back to the “I learned it from watching you!” PSA. : )
They know.
If Kirk and Madsen peddled gay marriage as a means to destroy marriage itself, what did they write about parenting?
Huh. I remember the decade kicking off with endless replays of somebody’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” cover (Ugly Kid Joe?), and Collective Soul’s “Shine”. And then, I turned off the radio, and have no idea what was going on in music until ~99/00 when I worked in food service and was stuck with nonstop top-40 cable radio for a year. Still have kind of a gastric reflux reaction to music that came out around that time– Sugar Ray and Sixpence None the Richer and Alanis Morissette and that bunch.
Still… I assumed the 90s sucked because everybody’s adolescence sucks. I remember 1997 in particular being the lowest pit of hormonal misery. I wore a hideous brown corduroy blazer the whole year as a way of wallowing in ugliness and preventing boys approaching me.
From here on out though, I’m just gonna blame Cultural Ground Zero for that, even though my own CD player was perpetually loaded with Mahler’s 5th. It, like, suited the bleak outlook, you know?
I remember this era so much because I was a teen and I hated the edginess and misery of the culture so much I escaped into 60s flower power worship. Which of course I later realized was a media-state-academia psy op all along.
It’s funny but as controversies show up in the modern culture war I can vividly remember the culture using the same talking points decades ago. When we had sex ed class I recall teachers belittling abstinence and promoting hedonism even in public school in the deep south. By the time Clinton was being impeached I was a 17 year old repeating “but they are consenting adults” line like a good progressive NPC.
After being red filled, when I look at the past, I can see that it’s always been this way. They are just cranking up the frequency.
Yeah, every social-cancelling woke BS campaign these days makes me flash back to the huge push to ban smoking everywhere. It is the same dang strategy: comply or be banned from existing in public. Demonize, ostracize, legislate.
1) Makes me feel old.
2) You’d think that someone would have come up with an effective counter strategy by now.
Similar with the gay acceptance/marriage thing. I was sympathetic to that one at the time. Not now, when I see that trans dominance and pedo acceptance were always part of the gameplan. These people are longterm strategists. I remember sympathetic articles and NPR stories about intersex people turning up in tandem around the same time– 99-01 maybe?– and thinking back like… oh, they were already mapping it out *then*?? Find the edge cases, people not at fault, make normies feel like they’re 5% of the population instead of like .001%, introduce *doubt* about sexual binaries to undermine resistance… that was sly. The evangelicals freaking out about it were right all along– and their freakout was used aikido-like to throw them on the floor. Game over.
But again, we’ve seen how this plays out, and we know what rules they play by. They’re evil. The fact that we haven’t come up with any effective or intelligent resistance after 20+ years though– that’s on us.
At least the 5th is only bleak for the first and most of the second movement.
In ’95 I was working as one of the assistant editors on a short film and was playing the 5th on a tape player while I busied myself reconstituting trims in a room adjacent to the editor’s. The editor, a woman in her twenties and younger than me, called me in and said, “That music makes me want to slash my wrists.” (The second movement was playing.)
A year later, there was a special screening at the Director’s Guild Theater in L.A. of “Independence Day.” The movie was so popular that the auditorium was packed a half-hour before start time. I thought, shucks, what a perfect captive audience for the entire first movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony played through the auditorium’s speakers.
“That music makes me want to slash my wrists.”
(chuckles)
It really is the perfect teen angst soundtrack. Was also fond of his 9th, and Janacek’s Sinfonietta with its long string of musical phrases that almost, but never quite, reach satisfying resolutions. I think it annoyed my mom even more than rock n’ roll would have. Grew up listening to their Zappa and Who records… Where does a teen rebel go after teething to zappa?
Mahler’s 3rd as a movie prelude though– 😀 way to fill the audience with an unbearable sense of dread! It’s mean how he keeps bringing in the flutes and reeds, all light and happy for a sec like oh, maybe things’ll be OK after all… and then right back to the tubas and basses and sinister french horns: NOPE haha suckers!
And after the successful gay push on TV, we got shows bringing in male to female transsexual characters, always played by an attractive female actress. I’ve run into people who truly believe that “sexual reassignment surgery” truly makes people into actual women, complete with working wombs and everything, and I suspect these TV shows are to blame.
While there’s a lot to like about Babylon 5, one thing that makes it sus to me–and one of many reasons to be deeply afraid of any reboot–was the fact that JMS apparently had this in mind for Delenn back in the 90s.
Women started pushing political correctness among friend groups in the early 90’s. The rot was strong in the 1990’s.
I wonder how much of the despair in the culture was caused by the collapse of Communism, which Leftoids always held out as a viable alternative to having to make a living? The sudden switch in 1990 would suggest a proximal cause.
If there had been a McCarthyite purge of Communists around then, I can’t help but feel a lot of today’s blocked sewers would not be a problem; but that was never going to happen, even though by all rights it should have. There is going to have to be a purge eventually.
This isn’t directly related, but instead ties more into cultural ground zero.
Nintendo released a commercial for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8D14d8RROQ
The commercial appeals to nostalgia for old Pokemon games. The thing is, they appear to be hearkening back to Pokemon X and Y (certainly it’s something for the 3DS) which is from 2013. Now 10 years is long enough for nostalgia, so that’s not unusual.
But note how they film these segments. The aspect ratio is 4:3, with rounded corners like you’d see on a CRT TV. The color grading suggests that they were going for a camcorder film sort of look. All of this is completely nonsensical for 2013, but how else are they supposed to communicate to the viewer that it is in the past? The only visual difference between the Japan of 2024 and the Japan of 2013 is that many more people wear masks 24/7, but they can’t exactly show that in a feel-good commercial. So they steal tropes from 80’s and 90’s nostalgia, as those are the last decades that are visually distinct from the present.
Y’all know the phrase “losing my religion” has nothing to do with Christianity or even religion, right?
Ah, Gin Blossoms! Great reference point. I was listening to the New Miserable Experience album recently and thinking much of this same stuff, that these jangly, melodic guitar-driven songs were often weirdly dark, lyrically. I was blown away by how musically detailed and intricate these songs were, with tons of care given to the crafting of the songs and guitar parts. It’s just a world of difference from the lazy (in my view) punk-derived power chord sound most associated with the early 90s. The best songs on that album, “29” and “Pieces Of The Night”, are more wistful or melancholic than the depressing vibe of the album’s first act.
Everybody thinks that Nirvana and grunge bands defined the sound of the early 90s, and while many of those groups were obviously angsty, it feels like a one-dimensional take on the time. As a kid in the 90s, I never even heard anything grunge until I was in high school in the 2000s. I barely knew it existed. It was a subculture, albeit an influential one. But I heard bands like Gin Blossoms all the time, my parents even had the CD which I listened to a bunch as a middle schooler or so.
I always felt like grunge wasn’t entirely authentic (which turned out to be totally correct), so the poppier, mainstream rock radio bands being so bleak felt far more significant and long-ranging in reach. I still hear songs like Hey Jealousy on the radio in public all the time. I never hear Nirvana.
An even better example of this is Matchbox Twenty. Granted, their debut was from 1996, so almost at Cultural Ground Zero, but still. They had all these hit songs, and I heard them – where else? – on the radio at the supermarket or whatever over the past year. And good grief, they’re bleak as heck, just incredibly pessimistic and dark. It’s kind of shocking that songs like “Real Life”, “Push”, or “Unwell” were such big hits, it doesn’t feel entirely organic. The songs sound pretty upbeat and catchy, but clearly depressing. The fact that I still hear this stuff in the background at the store all the time is surely a reflection of the soft dystopia in which we live.