dj_ivocha on 24/2/2020 at 23:09
Here's what I miss about the 90s:
1. Eurodance! :D
2. Being able to play outside wherever and whenever I wanted to, due to us living in a small town and people not having 17 cars per family of 3 and using 4 of them simultaneously. There was the bus to the city and occasionally some car, but just about all were old communist clunkers and people didn't drive like retarded squirrels on speed.
3. Having only two state channels on TV and nothing else (one of them only started broadcasting in the afternoon, the other in the morning, but still no 24 hour broadcast). As a kid I really appreciated what little amount of cartoons and kids' movies they would show (and most of those were fantastic - Tom and Jerry, The adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, Starcom, Captain Planet, Nu Pogodi, The Flintstones, Alf, TMNT, The Duck Tales, Inch High Private Eye etc.). Sundays at 19:00 was "The Disney Hour" with great cartoons and films. Twice a year there was a 3-4 hour long TV show for kids, where you could write a letter with a wish about some kids' show and they would show an episode after reading your letter on air. It was a great way to watch some old stuff again, since there was no Cartoon Network and most people didn't have a VHS and if they did, they didn't have many, if any, kids' shows on tape.
4. There was no mobbing in school, we were all more or less friends and it didn't matter if some where more "stupid" (rather, lazy) than the rest. Kids and/or their parents didn't beat up teachers and each other (that happens a lot in Bulgarian nowadays...) and the kids actually listened to the teachers.
5. Bulgaria on the semi finals of the World Cup 94!
The first point is not so important, but what I wouldn't give to have my daughter be able to experience her childhood as I did mine with regard to the other three points... :erg:
Before you wonder how come there weren't many cars on the streets and not many VHS in the homes and no gazillion cable TV channels during the 90s - it was in Bulgaria after the fall of Communism, so people were poor and hadn't been "corrupted" by the west yet (not even sure whether I'm entirely joking here or not).
Pyrian on 25/2/2020 at 05:05
Quote Posted by dj_ivocha
...the kids actually listened to the teachers.
Why is there this seemingly universal belief that when "we" were young, kids listened to their teachers (and don't now)?
Sulphur on 25/2/2020 at 05:45
Yeah, it's weird. I distinctly remember listening to no one as a kid, because fuck 'em. Teachers smeechers, back benchers 4 lyfe. Obviously, because I'm a fan of irony, I embraced training as a career path many years later.
Nicker on 25/2/2020 at 06:16
And that noise that kidzz these days call MUSIC!! Hurrrr.... :mad:
rachel on 25/2/2020 at 08:39
I miss the late 90s. Cold war was over, tech was booming, future looked bright... Then everything went sideways and turned into this dystopian bizarro shit we're in right now.*
* admittedly a rather reductive summary of the last 20 years
demagogue on 25/2/2020 at 11:12
I do remember that moment when big beat was all the rage and then suddenly it was country music everywhere. =L
Gray on 29/2/2020 at 02:35
I'm old enough to have had my first internet experience in 1989 when I was at college. At university, the internet was a new, wonderful world of clever, intelligent people, because it was pretty much just universities connected to it at the time. Yeah, sure, there were a lot of obvious nerd rage (which wasn't a phrase yet) about which was the best Star Trek episode, but largely, people were fairly clever even if they were wrong. Usenet was great for arguing about whether or not KMFDM were metal or industrial or possibly both. And also downloading partially nude pictures, one slow pixel per hour. Then, eventually, after usenet, ftp and gopher, came the next big thing: the world wide web. Great idea, just not much on it for the first few years.
Then came the commercialisation of the internet. Bleh. For the first few years, before there were any useful services on it, it just became flooded with loudmouthed morons and trolls. Fortunately, I was already old, grumpy, cynical and jaded enough to ignore most of them.
Many, many, MANY years later, actual useful internet commercial services became available, and we could slowly start using primitive versions of all the stuff we're so used to now. Like buying stuff, and arguing about which Star Trek reboot is worse than the other Star Trek reboot. How times have changed.
But the 90s was so much more than that. I'm only nostalgic about it now because I was still fairly young at the time. And I distinctly remember being so annoyed with people being nostalgic about the 70s, because I remembered the 70s and from my point of view they were absolute shit. Yeah, I miss certain events of me growing up, but almost all of that could have happened in any decade, just with different backing music. The internet did change things, and youth will never be the same again. Young people now will have it so much worse and better at the same time and won't even know it. Lucky miserable bastards.
[Edit]
For me personally, my personality was largely shaped by the music of the 80s and 90s, there was a whole revolution of new stuff coming out at the time, both technologically and thematically. Where I grew up, it was unacceptable to listen to more than one genre of music at a time, all the others were the enemy for some reason, but in the 90s all that was burst open and then all music was everywhere. True, most of it was, as usual, pure shit, but some of it was really really brand new and exciting. And boy, did that music change me. But that's a much longer story.
froghawk on 29/2/2020 at 03:37
Everyone lamenting the decline of music is lamenting the decline of mainstream music, not music itself. There's still loads of great stuff out there, it's just harder to find and you have to wade through heaps of shit to get to it.
That said, I do miss the sense of collective culture that came from having great music on the airwaves. Everyone knew most of the bands, and there's an ability to connect with people who grew up in the 80s or 90s over shared musical experiences that's missing now because everything is so diversified and everyone is listening to their own musical niche.
Gray on 29/2/2020 at 03:45
Music is a big part of nostalgia. I'm sure there's some great music being made right now, it's just not for me, because it's made by people much younger with a very different world view. I welcome the idea of new music, it's just that not much of it that I hear is any good, because I'm old, and I've heard it all before and done better. Up to about the 90s, every generation tended to make noisier music that would piss off their parents. Well, from the 90s onwards, that sort of shifted, and mainstream music became more bland and pointless, whereas so many more music genres were invented. There was no longer increasingly noisy music in the charts, just increasingly bland, but there was so much more to choose from now. It was both good and bad. That has continued. There must be tons of really awesome new music out there that I never hear, because I'm old, fat, slow and tired and can't be arsed. But I miss the anger of youth that you used to hear in the charts. I want young people to be angry, they should be. There's even more to be angry about now.
Gray on 29/2/2020 at 14:03
Oh. Oh! I think I finally got what's been bugging me.
Mainstream music, since the 1950s (or further back if you discount mainstream) used to be about rebellion, upsetting the older generation, finding your own place in the world, making noise, and then noisier noise, being angry about what was wrong, making statements, or SEX, or basically just tell people to piss off. Now, as much as I like many of the things that happened in the 90s, there was a distinct shift in the mainstream. True, pop music had always been commercial, I mean, just look at Motown, that was a music factory. But it shifted in the 90s. We got the bloody Spice Girls, as a pre-packaged product of "rebellion", for about two songs before they became the same lame old crap. Girl Power? Look a bit further back for that, please.
I think my point is that anger and rebellion came out of the charts. Everything had already been done. All the rebellion now just seemed lame and fake. But there were still proper things to get properly angry about, it just didn't hit the charts anymore, we just got bloody boy bands and factory made pop stars. Where's the anger? Where's the rage? Where's the proper upset now, when so many things are quite obviously a lot more shit now than it was at the time? Don't give me Prince Harry doing a duet with Jon Bon Jovi to raise awareness for the Invictus Games (noble as that may be), give me angry shouty teenagers blowing off steam about how the world is shit now and it's all our fault and we need to fix it. Anger! Shouting! Drum machines! Loud, noisy... noise things. Be more pissed off. You should be.