As Jimmy Fallon proved with the overwhelmingly popular "Saved By The Bell" reunion on NBC's "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" last week, '90s nostalgia is picking up steam.

In Sunday's New York Times, novelist Kurt Anderson argues that the '90s may have been the greatest decade ever, both from an economic and from a pop culture standpoint.

His argument is solid, but I lean toward the '80s for one reason and one reason only, a little political instability and economic uncertainty leads to better music.

His Op-ed piece revolves mainly around the politics of the time, but he did make this point about '90s pop culture:

In feature films, it was the decade of “Pulp Fiction” and the indie movement, thanks to which idiosyncratic, more-commercial-than-art-house masterpieces like those by Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne and Richard Linklater became plausible. It was also the decade in which traditional Disney animation came back from the dead and in which Pixar, with the first two “Toy Story” movies, reinvented the form magnificently.

THE digital age, of course, got fully underway in the ’90s. At the beginning of the decade almost none of us had heard of the web, and we didn’t have browsers, search engines, digital cellphone networks, fully 3-D games or affordable and powerful laptops. By the end of the decade we had them all. Steve Jobs returned to Apple and conjured its rebirth.

 

And it was just the right amount of technology. By the end of the decade we all had cellphones, but not smartphones; we were not overconnected or tyrannized by our devices. Social media had not yet made social life both manically nonstop and attenuated. The digital revolution hadn’t brutally “disrupted” whole economic sectors and made their work forces permanently insecure. Recorded music sales nearly doubled during the decade. Newspapers and magazines were thriving. Even Y2K, our terrifying end-of-the-millennium technological comeuppance, was a nonevent.

 

 

That last paragraph is dead on, but the article never really touched on how the music scene was changing rapidly in the '90s. So let's talk about music in the '90s.

The '90s were an interesting time for music, but not nearly as compelling sonically as the music that had emerged a decade earlier, in my opinion.

Musically, the '90s started out with a gritty, indie vibe led by the likes of Pearl Jam and Nirvana, but it rolled out on a bubble gum note, led by the emergence of boy bands (Backstreet Boys) and commodified girl power (Spice Girls).

Alternative rock was struggling near the end of the '90s and the fertile ground it once tilled was pushed one way when many alternative radio stations abandoned a wide playlist to lean toward the rock side of the spectrum, forcing female artists to look for airplay on pop stations. The huge inroads made by the female artists that made Lilith Fair a cultural event were pushed aside. The resulting pop backlash may have been too sterile to be seen as anything other than a money grab.

The '80s had much the same start, with a punk revolt to corporate rock to start the ten year period, leading to a pop reemergence in the middle to the end of the decade, but the difference was the pop schlock (Think: New Kids On The Block) was countered by a burgeoning hip hop culture that was extremely diverse, hair bands that pushed boundaries and the tail end of the New Wave movement that gave us alternative bands like New Order and Talking Heads.

To that end, I would argue the '80s were more interesting in terms of music. So what do you think of Anderson's argument? Was the '90s the best decade ever?

Let's take a trip back to the '90s with Smash Mouth's "Walkin' On The Sun", one of the top ten best selling songs of the decade.

 

 

 

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