Ruminating on the 500th episode of The Simpsons, in his latest Bleat, James Lileks writes:
I watched the 500th Simpsons last night, because it was the 500th episode. I suspect many tuned in, just to see what they’d do, or to have their suspicions reconfirmed, or see if Barney is drinking again. It made me nostalgic for the 90s, and I’m never nostalgic for the 90s.
(ten minutes thinking about the 90s)
AdvertisementIt’s odd. The 90s were interesting. If there was a decade in my life I’d like to replay, that would be the one. The reason I have no nostalgia of the sorts you get for your teens and twenties is this: I was divorced from popular music. Not from popular culture, just the music. Early on in the 90s a switch flipped, and everything on the radio started to sound annoying or irrelevant, full of convictions I didn’t share. When that happens, memories lose their soundtracks. Maybe that’s it.
What were the sounds of the 90s? Here. I like quite a few. I remember listening to “All I Wanna Do” while watching the sun go down over Santa Monica Boulevard, which was a nice moment. I only remember “Buddy Holly” because the video came with a computer I bought. Otherwise, lots of songs whose artist had a made-up name with a hyphen, and “featured” two or three people of whom I was unaware.
I had the same reaction in the early 1990s to pop music’s change in tone as James did, but I attributed it to hunkering down in the business world, and turning my back for a time on a pop culture that I was previously saturated in. But in retrospect, while pop music was headed towards a blind alley back then, the movie industry had a pretty good run in the 1990s. On my shelves of DVDs and a few aging laser discs include the following titles from that era:
- Goodfellas
- The Crow
- Terminator 2
- Reservoir Dogs
- JFK
- The Fugitive
- True Lies
- Groundhog Day
- Apollo 13
- Pulp Fiction
- Schindler’s List
- Star Trek: First Contact
- Toy Story
- Austin Powers
- Starship Troopers
- Men In Black
- Dark City
- The Matrix
Yes, there’s plenty of nihilism in there, and particularly in the case of JFK, plenty of Manchurian Candidate-level paranoia. But all in all, the 1990s was a pretty good decade for popcorn-style summer movies and entertainment, and Hollywood and movie theater owners were rewarded accordingly. In 1997′s Air Force One, Hollywood asked for a president (played by Han Solo himself, Harrison Ford) who was a Vietnam-era veteran who knew his way around the business end of a jet airplane, and took no guff from terrorists. Two years later, George Clooney made Three Kings, in which he called out George H.W. Bush for not removing Saddam Hussein and finishing the job in Iraq.
Be careful what you wish for…
Leonid Brezhnev was General Secretary of the Communist Party and supreme leader of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982. He produced my favorite quote at the Soviet Union Communist Party Congress in 1972:
“The fundamental problem we face is that we can only distribute and consume what is actually produced.”
Imagine the grandeur of the event. Communist Party leaders from throughout the Soviet Union were seated before Brezhnev in a large convention hall. This was similar to a US national political convention, but somber and powerful. The Party controlled all aspects of Soviet economic life. They listened in deep respect to every word of their totalitarian ruler.
Brezhnev made the above statement. It was the equivalent of saying with heavy meaning, “Gentlemen, the fundamental problem we face is that 2 + 2 = 4″.
It illustrates the amazing fact that entire countries go crazy, the leaders unable to see the reality that is plainly in front of their eyes.
George Orwell: We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
Stimulus Produces Stagnation
The Left has never ever forgiven the country for silencing them during the brief couple months after 9/11 — not by shouting them down (however richly they derserved it) or taking away their right to free speech, but by snubbing them, ignoring them, brushing them aside like they didn’t matter: when flying flags from your car’s radio antennae and not only believing in but justifying and defending Western Civilisation was the expected social norm.
Never again must the Left lose its grip on the public microphone. Never again must their unicorn fantasies and Satrian constructs be openly mocked without fear of reprisal. Never again must the Left be shown by concrete tangible events to be utterly, utterly wrong.
If that means Hollywood must run itself into the ground with REDACTED and RENDITION, if that means that the MSM devolves into a nothing more than an obvious cheerleading palace guard, if that measn that academia must align itself with the misogynist, homophobic barbarians of jihad, so be it.
We recently watched an old Futurama episode from 2001 where brains are attacking the earth. The brains have the ability to make normal people extraordinarily stupid. There is a point in the episode where everyone makes a really stupid comment, and the robot, Bender, says something about joining a third party. But now Bender says “Let’s go join the Tea Party”…..
Some things inspired by the Orwell quote that VDH, Green, Whittle and others probably have repeated to exhaustion, but nevertheless:
1.) You cannot spend more than you make and prosper.
2.) You cannot encourage immorality and not have societal disintegration
3.) You cannot encourage, appease and coddle your enemies and not expect war and destruction.
4.) You cannot arbitrarily change the meanings of words and expect harmony in society.
5.) You cannot relentlessly attack the institutions of marriage and family and not expect societal anarchy.
6.) You cannot reward laziness, malfeasance, and apathy, while punishing thrift, innovation and hard work, and expect a healthy economy.
7.) You cannot take away basic guaranteed freedoms and not expect people to react violently.
8.) You cannot expect people to not defend themselves against the criminality and anarchy that your (the Hollywood-Leftist) worldview and relativism have fostered.
9.) You cannot create a parasitical class majority who pay no taxes and that feed off of the minority who do, and not expect an economic collapse.
10.) You cannot foment hatred, ignorance, and prejudice in the name of “tolerance” and expect a society of peace and harmony.
I only remember “Buddy Holly” because the video came with a computer I bought.
Yeah, and the one with the girl sitting on the curb with her band and throwing a football.
I agree that the 90s were pretty decent for movies and pretty lame for music, although it started to approve somewhat in the last half of the decade.
“ Early on in the 90s a switch flipped, and everything on the radio started to sound annoying or irrelevant,”
Whatever the reason, it was well and truly over by then. Plenty of great musicians have played on, even today, but they were older by then, and with the focus of the industry on the young, they, those new young, just didn’t have it, and there was no there there. A highly productive era in music was over, and that’s where the end began. The rot. Not worth the time nor the bother.
I never liked Star Wars. I fell asleep watching it when someone dragged me to a midnight showing of it in it’s first release. After twenty six minutes of tailers, and a very long hard working day I was not in the mood for it.
The decline of movies was well under way by the time 1977 rolled around, but I can see why people liked the movie because Han Solo was not about to let himself be enslaved nor killed, and, for the benefit of the audience, he lets the enemy guy state his inhuman terms, and mock Solo with his cruel plans so that we know Han had every right to kill him, and that picking his moment to do so is the mark of a person not to be trifled with. Good work Mr. Solo. Timing is everything.
Popular music has always been for the young. Most people disparage it when they get older because they have no ownership. It’s a simple progression like moving from Democrat to Republican. People like to think the the music of their youth is better, but the reality is (with a few exceptions) most people think the music at their coming of age was the best. I am one of the exceptions, because the I graduated at the peak of the disco era. No illusions about the quality there.
I think music has it’s ups and downs. Early 80′s were good. Late 80′s and early 90′s sucked (Couldn’t get into hair bands or grunge). But all along I have music in my collection from each era. There’s some remarkably good stuff being put out today. I think to say that there isn’t any good new music is more a sign of nostalgia than a real assessment of music.
I thought I-tunes and such made it possible for people to find the music that was good, far away or near, single song or album, without the prettification required for MTV. Kris Rusch wrote that musicians she knew could get dental work done, with the advent of independent downloads.
When did George Lucas stop being a man and turn into a PC wuss? And when did he cross over to the dark side and embrace Orwellian tactics to rewrite the history of Han Solo? Must be a curse for creating the Jar Jar Binks character.
I thought there was a lot of good music in the Nineties (I was born in 1957). Some of my favorite bands from that era:
Alice in Chains
Sheryl Crow
Morphine
Garbage
Godsmack
Indigo Girls
Lyle Lovett
Chris Isaak
Midnight Oil
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
PJ Harvey
Soul Coughing
Stone Temple Pilots
Collective Soul
The Offspring
Type O Negative
White Zombie
Toad the Wet Sprocket
Nowadays, less so, but I tend to favor the Brit retro-sounding bands like Kasabian and the Kaiser Chiefs.
bbbeard,
I was born in 1961. You have several of my 90′s picks on your list. I might add Counting Crows, Crash Test Dummies, Gin Blossoms, Chris Rea, Cowboy Junkies, Pearl Jam, Tool, Bush, Alice in Chains, and others. I still keep tabs on new alternative, and The Muse, Coheed and Cambria, Machinae Supremacy, Florence + the Machine, Foster the People, are in my collection.
I tend to dabble in non-radio music from time to time. In the 90′s, I picked up a lot of New Age and Celtic. More recently I’m into Japanese and Ambient genres.
I guess I always need new music. Old stuff gets “worn out” on the oldies and classic rock channels and I start to forget what was so great about them. But I’ve been told I’m different than most. For many, the music of their youth is as meaningful as ever. As I once heard, “I like to visit the past, not live in it” musically.