Should ’90s Nostalgia Be the New ’60s Nostalgia?

Should ’90s Nostalgia Be the New ’60s Nostalgia?

Boomer memories reigned over pop culture for decades, but maybe it's time to start idealizing a slightly more recent, endlessly varied musical era instead
TLC, Smashing Pumpkins
The 1990s contained musical multitudes, from TLC to the Smashing Pumpkins and way beyond. Ron Davis/Getty Images; Paul Natkin/Getty Images
The further we get from the Nineties, the more it looks like a series of musical golden ages all stacked atop one another, a kaleidoscopic moment when grimy hip-hop and future-shock R&B hit artistic and commercial peaks at the same time as a procession of fuzz-pedal-toting rock bands found themselves at the center of pop culture.

It was the best-ever era for one-hit wonders, even as major labels — suddenly uncertain in era when Nirvana or Wu-Tang Clan could beat out manicured product — also threw money at career artists from Fiona Apple to Outkast. As with the Sixties, so much happened all at once that we’re still trying to figure it all out, trying to grasp how Smashing Pumpkins, Mobb Deep, Nine Inch Nails, TLC, the Prodigy, the Spice Girls, Radiohead, Los Del Rio, Limp Bizkit, and Billy Ray Cyrus could’ve possibly shared temporal space.

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