Millennials, yes we are very nostalgic
Tom Pinney
I noticed a video on Facebook the other day that talked about how 90s kids are the most prone to nostalgia about the decade in which they grew up.
My first response was, just wait until 2000s kids get to adulthood, they’ll be super nostalgic as well.
But the video brought up some good points. 90s kids grew up in the richest and most rapidly-advancing decade to date.
It’s true; looking only at video games, we went from the Nintendo Entertainment System to the Super NES to the Nintendo 64. We also had the Sega, the Sega Genesis, and the first Playstation.
We watched the advent of DVDs and how it affected video gameplay when the Playstation successfully moved from cartridges to discs.
Computers started popping up in houses. The Internet was made publicly available.
Instant messaging set the groundwork for text messaging. Cell phones started to become more popular.
Look what was on TV: Seinfeld had just wrapped a very successful run on television, Full House and Family Matters were setting the example for family-oriented programming at the beginning of the decade, and Friends came along to let younger adults in the 90s know that life could be great no matter what happens just as long as you have a group of friends who have your back.
Saturday morning cartoons were actually a thing, and they weren’t bad. We had the “old-school” Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry, but we also had Freakazoid! (which was basically Deadpool but 100 million times cleaner), Animaniacs, and Road Rovers (which revolved around superhero dogs).
We had Earthworm Jim and the Mighty Ducks (which was about ducks who played hockey and also saved the world), not to mention the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Pokemon. We had Gargoyles; we had the Tiny Toons!
You bet we got bit by the nostalgia bug!
Do we millennials tend to live in the past? …Yeah, maybe… But you can’t deny that every generation, every decade has something great associated with it.
Let’s go back to the 40s, the advent of swing music and jazz music. The 50s, Elvis. The 60s, the British Invasion and Hendrix. The 70s, disco and The Fonz. The 80s had the perfection of rock, plus the advent of about 10 types of specialty metal (hair metal, glam metal, and … whatever KISS was…)
Yes, a lot of that has to do with music; they say you should write about what you know.
Strangely, music in the 90s is the only thing I can think of to apologize for. 90s pop music paved the way for the Top-40 abomination of the 2000s.
From Justin Timberlake, we got Justin Bieber. From Britney, we got Katy. From *NSYNC, we got One Direction. (I am so, so sorry.)
And it wasn’t even just limited to pop. We went from true, hearty, lyrically beautiful country music to the cluster of awful we have now.
In the 90s, we had Tim McGraw, Diamond Rio. We had Alabama, Vince Gill, Leann Rimes, the list goes on.
Now, it’s guys like Blake Shelton, Luke Bryan, and Florida Georgia Line making millions with platitudes and women like Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood who are famous for being in some sort of blank space (pun 1000% intended) between country and pop.
Millennial comedian Bo Burnham put it succinctly (if profanely): “Hear that subtle mandolin?/That’s textbook panderin’.”
Good grief, I sound like a cranky old man. At least the 2010s brought us the advent of a cappella bands like Pentatonix, right?
Point is, every decade has something great they can look back to and say, “That was what made us awesome.”
It’s not my fault that the 90s just had a lot of stuff.
