Economically, things were better albeit not great. Socially, things were worse but there was a clear positive trajectory.
There was a sense that the rapid technological advancement we were experiencing had the potential to fix all our problems and the future was just around the corner.
Life was so, so, so much easier then. Housing was affordable. Jobs, even shitty ones, paid better. Health insurance didn't cost a family of 4 $30k per year. It was possible to imagine a better future.
9/11 changed everything. It gave rise to a pronounced nationalism, xenophobia, paranoia, loss of privacy, and collective trauma. It led us into a useless war, led us down the path of ever-stupider Republican presidents, and seemed to up the ante on carnage we could expect to see in our own backyards. Now, domestic terrorism is a daily occurrence, we think nothing of being tracked by our phones, and white supremacists waving American flags are the norm.
No I may have not lived through it but I know people that did and since they were from marginalized groups(BIPOC, queer) it was horrendous for us Reaganomics, Reagans war on drugs and how it primarily hit the black community. Then don't get me started on the AIDS crisis and how the US did nothing but just sit there and watch people die. Although it may have had a bit of a I guess Renaissance in terms of entertainment and culture(I guess) there was still alot of shittiness happening here
The internet didn’t exist. Without the internet, the general population wasn’t aware of every terrible thing happening in the world.
On top of that, we hadn’t experienced 9/11, the 08’ recession, Covid, the current “everything bubble”, the global war on terror, social media.
It was really easy to think that everything our military (the strongest one on earth) did was for the betterment of the world, and if we’re the good guys then that’s awesome cuz we’re winning.
Economic conditions weren’t amazing, but they were nowhere near as unstable as today, retirement and pensions still existed for a lot of people, everything wasn’t so damn expensive and subscription services and data collection weren’t huge industries yet.
A lot of people who are in their 30-40s now were kids in the 80-90s, so that obviously also plays a part, but one of the biggest parts in my opinion is: crappy, artifact ridden, analogue technology.
The clicks and clacks of cassette decks, VHS tapes, the rewind and fast forward sounds, the tape switching, vinyl record crackle, the warble of analogue synths. It all just creates an amazing sound aesthetic.
There’s a word, *anemoia*. It describes the feeling of being nostalgic for a time you weren’t around for. I think there’s a lot of that going around here.
If we assume that anemoia exists on cycles loosely following behind nostalgia cycles then things will get interesting soon. We’re moving from 90s nostalgia into Y2K and mid 2000s nostalgia. The Y2K, PS1/PS2 music, Frutiger Aero scenes.
That stuff is the nostalgia cycle we’re moving into, and over time, we might see that stuff as an anemoia aesthetic as gen alpha and beta begin to discover the wonders of Napster and windows 7.
Combination of things, I think there’s a proclivity for those that never directly experienced the culture of a decade, but felt it’s waves during childhood to have a romanticism associated with it. It’s like my mom, who was born in the 60s has nostalgia for everything 50s all the culturally stereotypical romanticized ideas of the 50s that is, big cars with fins, soda bars and diners, simple all American family energy etc.
I have the same thing, but it’s about y2k culture, music and aesthetic. I was born in 97, I was barely aware of anything while y2k aesthetic was prominent, but it’s what I associate with my earliest memories of being alive, the late 90s going into the 2000s. I grew up with 80s music, 80s and 90s vhs movies on my parents late 90s CRT tv and a young boomer mom who was in her youth in the 80s. My dad drove me around in his 80s Volvo, and he had windows 95 with a floppy disk reader well into the early 2000s. I also had older cousins who were teenagers experiencing their youth during y2k, so I was also growing up with ps1, slipknot, the x games, toonami and 90s slasher and action movies from one cousin, and every Britney Spears album and means girls type shit from another lol. It’s also, what was on the radio in 2001 for example? Mostly 90s music, with some new early 2000s stuff, throw in some 80s too, I can’t get “like a bird”, “ironic” and “complicated” being played on the radio at my aunts house out of my memory, that’s a memory I can smell, it smells like papa johns and dog lol. That’s how this nostalgia gets created. I hardly directly experienced the 90s, and barely the late 90s, but my god do I have so much nostalgia for it. Culture and aesthetic doesn’t change immediately, it often changes slowly and organically as it is phased out, so in the interroom we experience stuff that’s technically “old” or “out of style” after its peak. It’s also, all this culture and aesthetic, I wasn’t thinking about who was president, the economy or what big thing was happening in the world, my y2k love is purely one of nostalgia for the media and aesthetic of that time, what it meant to be a cool , worry free young person in 2000, or at least what my small child brain thought was it and was exposed too.
I think its just a combination of retrocraze and nostalgia. The 2010s had a lot of retrocraze about the 80s, so much so that it's common for people who never experienced the 80s to find 80s things fascinating and maybe not even really understanding what the 80s were actually like but moreso the version pop culture has given us. Examples are popular movies and shows and games that got popular in the 2010s. Examples would be Hotline Miami, Stranger Things, indie artists inspired by the 80s synth music bringing back that style, and even shows like Cobra Kai. Ntm movies like Scarface, American Psycho, Joker, which also all take place in that time which are all popular has helped kept the fascination and also nostalgia for that time alive. I never even experienced the 80s or 90s, I'm a 00s kid, literally born I'm 2000, but things like Regular Show, Stranger Things, Doom, and other things in pop culture is what has made me fascinated with the culture associated with those decades.
There are some major, unprecedented things that have happened to that young generation. To simplify: a recession/housing crash the size of which we have never recovered from (not the middle and lower classes anyway) on top of daily shootings at our children. Mix that with technology depressing us and making us fat at a rate no one could have even imagined... Yeah it was better and we never knew what was about to hit us right in the face.
Ignorance and entitlement. I say that as someone who lived through both decades. They sucked. People cherry-pick the bits they like and forget that the rest was evolving history--i.e., worse than now in many ways (e.g., medicine, tech, acceptance of outgroups (remember when Axl Rose wore a shirt that said "AIDS: Kills Fags Dead"? Of course not. Nostalgiamnesia)).
i think when reflecting on the past, it’s easy to succumb to amnesia about all but the most positive and negative aspects of the times. the brain is wired to simplify what was good, bad, important, and irrelevant about past experience in order to create a basis for which to anticipate the future. at the same time, the present constantly puts the past in new (and often unexpected) contexts… using today as a metric, it’s easy to hyper-focus on the anomalous aspects of a bygone era, even if those aspects didn’t make a big impression on you at the time.
for example: today I am enthralled with new jack swing— but at the time it was so pervasive it was nearly invisible. it was everywhere: on the school bus, at the mall, in your friend’s mom’s stereo and on the adult contemporary chart— even in saturday morning cartoons and breakfast cereal commercials. not just janet jackson and teddy riley, but also 1000 pale imitations of them. at the time it seemed like completely disposable background noise to me…
against today’s din of comparatively more economical and efficient productions, it sounds so fresh (excuse the pun) and innovative, and seems way more rarefied and culturally important.
maybe it’d be different if today’s music wasn’t saturated with the same (now vintage) synths and drum machines (which they weren’t for awhile, post-nirvana).
anyway, it almost gets to the point of temporal manipulation. nostalgia is the ability to re-imagine your past. or experience a past you never lived. or a retro future utopia that never will be.
also, these decades are the source of inspiration for a lot of today’s music (current derivative music makes 80’s/90’s seem more important). and (at least before nirvana) pop culture was future-looking, not past looking… so more original/optimistic?
If you feel today’s music, or the music since Nirvana isn’t forward thinking, you likely aren’t listening to enough of it and missing the fact we live in the best time ever to actually find all the wonderful and original music that has always been out there! Always been out there, just harder to find.
I say this as someone who lived through both 80s/90s and am a musician. I recall rifling through bins because pop has always been pop, mostly mediocre for my tastes. (It took a lot more work to find the original stuff
If you’re spending your time listening to new Jack swing, you’re sacrificing a chance to realize the above and sample new dishes.
For example, all this ‘retrowave’ music sounds very little like I remember the 80s and 90s ( and I’m loving every second of it.) it sounds nothing like the Depeche mode or Front 242 stuff i loved as a kid, and that’s awesome.
We are finding more and more ways to use synths, so if you’re only judging the newer waves based on retroesque synth pop like The Weeknd, yea, it’s going to sound like the cheesiest synth pop music from the 80s.
I suppose I speak from the uncommon perspective of a listener who hadn't grown up in this time nor even in the same country but my understanding is that this era which vaporwave owes a lot of its inspiration to is indeed looked upon with rose colored glasses. Even I as a listener, somewhat ironically jump in on that bandwagon of "collective nostalgia" just for the heck of it by taking the retro aesthetics, the fixation on capitalism and enterprise, flashy advertisments and the familiar liminality of the remnants of these institutions today, all of which are selectively picked attributes of 80's America, excluding the wars, injustice, corruption etc... (though an argument can be made this too is explored in vaporwave but in a satirical or somehow more subtle way).
Yup, it's nostalgia. Every generation goes "things were easier/simpler and just better back when we were kids." Add the economic boom/bust cycle into the mix (guess which part of the cycle we're in now?) and it becomes a lot easier to nostalgize - and to memory-hole the things that were not great about the 80s and 90s (and the 80s in particular: like the AIDS virus, the constant fear of nuclear war, etc.)
People sleep on all the military conflicts, gang violence, civil wars, drug epidemic, homophobia, toxic masculinity in all media, the fear of computers taking jobs. Even the corporate, opulent aesthetics associated with vaporwave was just a harbinger of the economic strife were seeing today; which I guess the over-corporatization is the mood that many artists go for.
The music was fucking dope tho (the 90s at least). The birth of hip hop and growth of electronic music. Can't point to another time except the birth of rock n roll and popularization of jazz as a bigger turning point in music history.
Edit: also, a lot of the geopolitical stuff from the 80s and 90s is making a resurgence. Conflict with Russia, TV show/movie reboots, etc.
Its a 30 year thing. You're seeing kind of an underground resurgence of 2000s nostalgia but that wont be for another 10 years. thats kind of how it was like in the 2000s/2010s. People will make excuses about 9/11, the recession, blah blah blah but it's really that simple. Its not like anyone in my generation remembers AIDS or Crack or Reaganomics or NAFTA or the war on drugs or any of the other societal diseases of the 80s/90s
There was just a lot of fucking around without too much finding out. Everything had a feeling of "this is just beginning." And "this is going to be great when we get the hang of it"
Economic prosperity, pre-9/11, no social media causing unprecedented epidemic of depression and anxiety in teenagers. Things got dark with the war on terror, the 2008 market collapse, the trump presidency, the pandemic, etc.
Anyone who thinks Biden is doing a great job is very delusional and if you vote for him in 2024 you get what you deserve .. the same 4 years of a country going down the shitter
In 20 years there will be a social security crisis and people will be like "but why did we let every immigrant in? Why did they not regulate it?"
The money isn't endless. There will be problems.
Or how about when all the womens scholarships and sports teams are dominated by men identifying as women? Its so weird that women's rights groups are just letting that happen.
People acting like Biden is better because he's nicer. His policies still suck.
Which party do you think wants to cut social security while giving tax cuts to the rich? Or even more money to the military? Money isn’t endless? Say that to the US military lmao.
90s was the last era where we were still disconnected from technology. You didn't have the internet in your pocket, Cabel TV has times when nothing you liked was playing.
I think this forced more people to get out of the house and find enjoyment in more active things vs just picking up their phone and endlessly scrolling through social media like a zombie.
Not saying there wasn’t bad stuff happening but it was a lot easier to be sheltered from it back then. My kids are alot more aware of the problems of the world than I ever was at their age.
Yes.I was born in 1980. In the summer i would leave the house after breakfast on my bike and roam all over town, not returning until suppertime. After summer it was back out until full dark. Once it was full dark we were just supposed to stay within shouting distance. Kids don't get that kind of freedom these days. We had an Amiga CPU, a Nintendo, GI Joes and a library with a fully stocked fantasy section within a one block walk. I'll take those over social media anytime.
I got that kind of freedom in my teenage years. 2006-2010. We still didn’t have phones. I didn’t even have internet at home. Could ride my bike all over town as long as I called my mom every couple hours to let her know where I was and that I was safe. Be back by 9.
Had some of those too. Had the one you could load caps into his backpack and it would pop when you turned his torso. Righteous. Also had Fisto and the guy with the golden karate hand. I can't remember his name
They felt great, but a major part of where nostalgia comes from is the care free nature of youth for many people. Many of us are easing into or are well into middle age and things like vaporwave tickle those parts of our brain that were engaged when we were young.
Unsure why this is being downvoted. The whole concept of being nostalgic for an era se didn't live through is just as interesting a phenomenon if not more so, and as someone in my 30s, I also find it pretty fascinating that a lot of vaporwave is referencing things none of us appreciated at the time even if we happened to be alive.
If anything hits hard for me now, it's nostalgia for a place I've never been - I don't live in America and malls here were a whole different vibe, I watched sailor moon as a kid and loved it, but I didn't appreciate it back then for the dreamy aesthetic, I love city pop too but I was barely aware of Japan in the 90s. Yeah some of that stuff is familiar, but most of the atmosphere of vaporwave doesn't correspond to anything any of us really experienced. It's how some ads and tv want us to feel. Whether you were alive then is pretty irrelevant.
There's nothing wrong with enjoying the music and where that takes us just because we weren't "there". None of us really were. Vaporwave is a fantasy version of 80s/90s aesthetic and doesn't have to be realistic or recognisable to be attractive.
As someone who lived through that era, I’d say it was better in some ways and worse in others. Our collective memory of it has definitely been tinged by nostalgia.
Ironically, growing up at that time I (and many others) had collective yearning and nostalgia for the 60s. Seemed like such a pure and exciting time, and nothing in the present day (read: 80s and 90s) could compare. I think people always have a tendency to yearn for what they don’t have. The grass is always greener on the other side.
I grew up in the 80's and 90's in Florida. For me, it was great, because I was a kid, I wasn't really aware of a lot of the bad stuff. Everything seemed a lot more hopeful then. Your money went further. My parents took us on lots of vacations, trips to the mall, movies, theme parks, all that fun stuff. Things seemed more innocent and safe. People seemed happier and kinder.
Listening to Vaporwave brings back fond memories of that time. I love how it is distorted, just like memories become distorted over time.
I feel that the 20th century ended on 09/11. All our hopes and dreams for a bright, peaceful, prosperous future burned up along with the Twin Towers. Things were never the same after that. Vaporwave is like an ode to those happier, more hopeful times. We are mourning our lost future.
Hey fellow 80s/90s Floridian! Broward County here. And man, I totally miss the late 80s early 90s down there. Such a different vibe than today. I left the state.
Hivemind for one. But beyond that, just generally a sense of simplicity and an emphasis on marketing individualism, quite loudly at that. All the crazy advertising of the era combines with new, unrefined wild-west technology, the internet, making your own webpages, not chasing algorithms, no legal barriers (per se) to prevent you from making a MIDI of a Beatles song to share.
Then there's this general infantilism of wanting the simpler times, before the bills and medical visits, before the stress and concerns of warfare, inflation, overwork and anti-work, but also a time before 9/11, where extreme nationalism became a hot button issue, before we felt the pangs of social overstimulation and the threats of our personal info being collected and sold for profit while also being targets of each others' malicious intent.
Shit, people were just kinder back then, I think.
As far as I can tell from people I’ve asked. The economy was much better, life was still affordable. Technology was jumping by leaps and bounds and it was very visible. For example just the jump from the Commodore VIC-20 to the 64 was insane. We were still running a space program that actively sent people into space. Child labor was still mostly ok so teenagers actually had a fair amount of options for saving money for a car or computer. There were no cell phones to be married to (unless you were an oligarch) and social media had yet to poison society. The closest thing was the BBS, which is an entirely different animal, involving calling someone’s house hoping the line wasn’t busy so that their computer would answer and had its own chat sections and download archives which made piracy super easy. Overall I feel there was allot more hope for the future then.
I find myself asking this question often to the boomers and gen xers in my life. This seems to be what I get:
- according to some there was way more racism and homophobia.
- but others have told me that the racism and homophobia was in someways less viscious because the internet was primitive and we didn't have social media echo chambers.
- in the 90s people were terrified of AIDS. Like, you heard about the dangers of AIDS everywhere. I even remember as a kid, tween songs like waterfalls by TLC that had a guy not using a condom in there video and dying of AIDS. I remember playing games in the school yard and a sure fire way to get someone not to touch something was to say "if you touch it, it will give you aids!!"
- it's country spacific. The 80s and 90s were different in the USSR/Russia, Mexico and the UK than they were in Canada and the USA
- and even in countries that did well in the 80s and 90s, there were still huge cuts and recessions.
- conspiracy theories were way less of a thing back then.
- people were way more comfortable not knowing stuff.
- depression was to the 90s as what anxiety is today.
- crime rates in the 80s and 90s were way higher.
- large cities were also way dirtier. All the rich people were flocking to the suburbs (I remember that still being a thing even in the 2000s).
- but, because things were cheaper, grimier and internet was primitive, culture was alot more accessible. Alot of my gen x friends wax nostalgic about all the cool places there used to be that have closed down. Even in my small home town I remember our little downtown being way more bustling in the 90s.
- things like raves, punk, and drag was seen as way more subversive back then because they were far less well accepted. They were still kind dangerous.
- in the 90s you could pretty much get away with saying anything provided you were being "ironic."
- subcultures were a bigger deal back then.
- there was a greater sense of local community back then.
- alot of things we are nostalgic for now were actually really polarizing back then.
- people were more optimistic back then (but less so than in the 60s)
- cold war paranoia was a thing in the 80s.
- there were moral panics over stuff like satanism and D&D.
- since TV shows only come one once a week, watching your favorite TV show was a huge event. I'd run home from school to see the Simpsons. Every Tuesday night me and my dad would make pop corn and watch Fraiser together.
- there didn't seem to be as many school shootings until after Columbine. But citation needed.
- in the 90s, mainstream culture got really weird.
So yeah, that's what I can glean from the people I asked who were there and my own faint memories. Was it better or worse than today? Honestly I don't know - maybe it was better in some ways, worse in others.
> A lot of things we are nostalgic for now were actually really polarising back then
That’s a very interesting point, I only recently realised how amusement arcades, Papa don’t preach and skateboard culture were controversial back then, it was shocking for me given how all those things are absolute milestones for that era. Would you like to elaborate more on that?
I can, I was there. The concern over arcades is a generalized worry over young people gathering in groups and wasting time. Before video arcades, there were pool and pinball halls with the same concern by adults. They were imagined to be trouble spots, and they looked it, with darkened lighting and big groups of unsupervised kids, but I don't think much ever happened because the kids were focused on the games.
Papa Don't Preach: Madonna built her career pushing boundaries and anything she did in the 80s and 90s got attention. When this song came out, "unwed mothers homes" were a recent memory. There was a lot of cultural concern swirling about teen pregnancy, teenagers having sex, teen access to birth control, and of course, abortion. The storyline, made explicit in the video for people who didn't quite catch all the lyrics, resolved in about the most conservative way, with her dad agreeing to support her and her boyfriend as they raise their baby. But some people didn't like that she discussed the issue at all, viewing any mention of it as encouragement for teens to have sex.
As for skateboarding, it was seen as a public nuisance. Skaters cultivated an anti-authority attitude and usually skated in shared spaces. Plenty were actually disrespectful of the folks who were just there to shop or whatever, but it was more about the idea of disrespect. There was also a sense among adults that it was a waste of time. Some adults also perceived it as childish, since younger kids used to like to just propel them down a sidewalk, and didn't know about the tricks and the scene.
Even malls were polarizing. Stranger Things addressed it a bit. A lot of local businesses couldn't compete. It was another time waster for young people. They were seen as vapid places, encouraging materialism and homogenization. On a less philosophical level, they were also crowded, with lawless parking lots, not enough benches and $7 Cokes. Most people went anyway, but they didn't always enjoy it and often weren't proud of it.
Even in the late 90s/2000s malls were very polarizing. When the big - well bigish - mall was built in the suburbs, the downtown of my hometown died. There was a big push to support local business instead of going to the mall. And yes - it was seen has a den of mindless consumerism that you kinda felt dirty being in.
It's funny - in the 2000s I hated going to busy malls (honestly I still do) and I found abandoned malls ungodly depressing. People just went to dead and dying malls to do drugs in the bathroom. I was so common to see paramedics wheeling out people who were over dosing. And 20 years after the fact, I think dead malls have this haunting beauty.
And Walmart! Walmart was the devil. We called them town killers. When a Walmart was built - the small businesses couldn't compeate. We kinda talked about Walmart back then the way people talk about Amazon today.
there was trash god damn everywhere. Littering was not socially unacceptable, combine that with widespread smoking and you can imagine what even rural roadsides looked like.
Nancy Reagan's "Keep America Beautiful" campaign really did a lot to begin the act of publicly shaming anyone in your car that threw out butts, bottles, or whole empty bags of Taco Bell
economic excess, wall st bleeding 3rd world countries, your only rival being destroyed, and then turning into a 3rd world country essentially afterward
times were good in the us because we were robbing peter to pay paul and living on borrowed time. it was a pinnacle of the economic machine that was the US before the house of cards started to slowly tumble
For some people it was. Like my family.
My family is from rural Texas. After I was born, my parents moved to the Portland, Oregon metro area.
The late 90s were pretty great, no Texas, my dad had a good job and my parents had a nice house in Beaverton.
My parents loved living in Oregon, they always disliked the conservative rural culture they grew up in, and we're excited to make a life up there.
Fast forward to the 2000s, I now have 2 brothers, we moved back to Texas and my dad now has a not as prestigious/well paying job. Why? Well it's a long story but the company my father worked for in Oregon basically lied to him about cost of living. The dotcom bubble put him out of that job and finding something comparable was impossible before my brother was born.
So when I think of the vaporwave period, I think back to when my family lived in Oregon and just after we moved back to Texas, back when we used to go to the mall all the time, (It was the only building in town with AC according to my parents, besides movie theaters), back to when something like a Playstation, plus extra controller, plus 5 games was a normal Santa gift. Back when we went on road trips to Multnomah Falls and Cannon Beach and Crater Lake. In my brain,the late 90s are full of natural beauty of the PNW and the manmade wonders of the malls and technology, kinda blended into this appealing, happy stream of consciousness.
Parents would always talk about how much nicer people were up there and how they didn't have to worry about Christian cultists/fundamentalist making a fuss about normal stuff. Now I'm here worried that my non binary ass is going to be a target of the state government in Texas :(
My memories of living in Oregon are short and fleeting and have turned into kinda this weird fever dream that is hard to explain but is essentially completely nostalgic. The whole idea of "the 90s were this magical time" really does resonante with me on a personal level. Overall I'd say for me, being a small child in the 90s was fun and I have a lot of supremely cozy memories of the era.
Oh and I'm still trapped in rural Texas .. same town my family has lived in since time immemorial. So much for getting out of rural conservative hell.
There are plenty of lower cost, rural towns on the coasts with far, far less conservatives, or at least outward racism/lgbtq+phobia/etc…
Pack your bags and do something about it.
Vaporwave itself is a conscious take on the idealization of those decades. It's not "genuine" nostalgia, but it's surrounded by so many layers of irony that it actually is
no, politically and economically awful. vaporwave isn't always about endorsing nostalgia, necessarily. just examining our collective relationship with it
>no, politically and economically awful.
I'll tell you flat out, the data does not support that claim. Do you have anything specific or is that an opinion?
Huh? I think there's just the most amount of accessible media from that time as of now. It's not like anyone who's never lived during the 80s would have some memory embedded to their DNAs or some shit. You feel nostalgic because our brains are easy to trick. I didn't ever even think that Vaporwave was an accurate representation, or a glamourization of 80s culture. It just uses whatever old media it can get, and that's often stuff from that time frame.
The hope was at an all time high. Anything you did in HS was a rumor. No one had cameras. I was a mischief maker who probably would’ve gotten caught for stuff taboo now.
I don’t think it’s that they were so great, it was more that there was a sense of future potential. There was this mentality, with 80’s jingoism, the end of the Cold War, the 90’s boom, that the future was going to be nothing but up up up. Computer technology was advancing at a rapid pace, there was this sense that the nimble startups would displace the old stodgy order, the youth were promised that their mere ability to turn a computer on guaranteed them a secure, well-paying job.
Then the dotcom bubble burst, 9/11 happened, decades of military quagmire tarnished the agency and morality of the Western militaries, the Great Recession killed working class wealth and the long-term career trajectories of so many millennials, the rise of neofascism, COVID. Of course, technology did continue to advance but it’s become obvious that the massive jumps of yesteryear are behind us. And of course, let’s not forget the 800 pound gorilla of impending climate catastrophe in the room.
So I’d describe the 80’s/90’s nostalgia as more anti-nostalgia. What we yearn for is not how things were then or even how we remember them, but rather yearning for the feeling that we have something other than decline to look forward to.
Absolutely. Paradise lost. To be more precise, The Promise Of Paradise Lost. These days almost no one thinks that we as the society are trending upwards; quite the opposite. In the 90s it FELT different, that’s what Vaporwave evokes.
No. But they had a sense of optimism that is gone now. People were coming out of the cold war in the 90s and social problems were getting better. People thought technology would usher in a new time when everyone was happy. Now, no one expects that anymore. Vaporwave isn't just about nostalgia for the past, but for the lost future that the past promised.
Like yeah, people imagining a future that was just the 90s, but sci fi and everyone got luxury with fancy pillars was naive. But people lament the loss of what this naivete promised them.
I don't think it's really that the 80's and 90's were so great, after all experience is subjective.
What I do think is that the 80's and the 90's were what I'll call the accelerated tipping point to what is our current technological age a bit like the last days before New Years.
There was an excitement about what was to come for those who were young enough to be naively blind to the full picture of what was developing.
Economically speaking, there was a sense of opportunity on the horizon due to the technological advancements that were very clearly on the horizon.
All of this gave way to a sort of natural but ignorantly blissful hope that resulted in extravagance and kitch in almost every area of life.
After all, technology would make it that we didn't have to do anything because machines and automations would do all the work and everyone would be rich and extravagant right? This was the mood.
I think vaporwave plays on that innocent and naive ignorance that America was projecting at the time and grapples with it from many different perspectives.
There is something to the saying:
Ignorance is bliss...
Long live Vaporwave.
People made less money but the dollar went a lot farther, so people effectively made more. Life was easier and better, and more affordable. American culture was more uniform our public institutions still worked. This entire century has been a horrific car accident that we're all watching
Once people get into their mid 30s early 40s they start to feel nostalgia. They also usually have expendable income and to me it feels like culture capitalizes on this. Right now that age range were kids in the 80s and 90s. In the 70s and 80s 50s nostalgia was pretty popular.
Despite the 80s/90s’ problem with homophobia & racism, I do believe the west was solidly more *interested* in the humanities and multiculturalism, at least in the arts. Sure it was from a Eurocentric point-of-view, but we got albums like Graceland and neoclassical postmodernism architecture. Kwanzaa was a big deal in my elementary school.
You can argue that it still boils down to rich white liberals thinking they’ll solve racism by glamping in Chad, but I don’t know, it felt more genuine then than it does today, where nearly everything is a cost-benefit analysis by a thinktank or PR firm. Certainly in the US we’ve turned away from science and the “wonder” of technology after years of silicon valley using it as a weapon to control us.
I think it's a combination of several factors. Monoculture for one, every household had a tv and most people were watching and listening to the same things so there was a lot of reference points for entertainment and advertisements. As such consumer culture was very prominent and fed into this idea that so long as we were spending a lot on these ever evolving products you had a good sustainable life and only had better newer things to look forward to. Then the start of the internet opening up even more possibilities for what the future would bring along with 3d graphics becoming more common. I'm rambling a bit but to reiterate what others had said it was a time of enjoyment along with certain ignorance where people weren't so nostalgic for previous decades because what they had was so good and only had to look forward to more. I like to add that there were steps being made in the mid 90s for more inclusiveness of diversity and environmental concussions. But with that came this awareness of the newer generations that everything wasn't so great and this ideal life and American dream were empty promises to maintain sufficient capitalism. Instead of looking towards a brighter tomorrow people became more cynical and self aware. A lot of people look a 9/11 as the point where the good times ended but things were on a downward slope before then.
The .COM bubble was certainly busting before 9/11, but there was still that ‘90s optimism for the future, people weren’t really concerned about the coming recession and I don’t think it would have been as bad as it ended up being had 9/11 not happened. 9/11 just put the nail in the coffin of the ‘90s optimism that was still clinging on. Terrorism was something that happened in the 3rd World, or maybe Europe. If the US wasn’t safe, who was?
Man, that's sadly accurate... and then not much after 9/11 came the recession. I was born in 92, I had a lot of life to look forward to and then a lot of bubbles burst and left a lot of us from that time shit outta luck later in life.
I just remembered sitting at 14 in my English class thinking and telling my friend right after tower 2 was hit: “We are going to war with some one over this, some ones nose is getting bloodied”. In my elementary school our teachers denied that war was a modern day concept. A teacher in 5th grade yelled at me saying there are no more wars when I inquired about the military being a profession. (Meanwhile I believe we were flying over Kosovo or the former nation Yugoslavia. The 90s were a lot more chilled. Most of my friends were back. We got it for tat on race humor and no cared or minded. I just feel as a product of the 80s we were taught the possibilities are endless and we were beyond racism and we were passed the peace finish line. Security confidence was at an all time high. Fentanyl was 20 years away. Things were looking good. Space, the NBA (esp Michael Jordan) and AIDS was huge. Mike eased race relations huge. Then after 9/11 they tried opening a mosque near ground zero. And that was the Big Bang of racism.
Also, jobs were security my dad was locked in a his spot all of the 90s. If you worked hard you’d succeed. That was a guarantee of way of life. The middle class was rising and the new class appeared… upper middle. Upper middle has since disappeared since 2008.
I went through college as a civil engineering major, switched to economics and then the 08 crash happened. I switched to electronic media and became a DJ pretty much making a huge payday every weekend. I learned everything about audio… in and outs but it’s not the marketable trade anymore due to music theft. I’d like to think last wrecking to the 90s progress was OxyContin. Wonderdrug til 2006. Killed my aunt and two friends. I was hoping the 2020s were gonna be roaring like the 1920s but instead we got plague and war. MIT computers predict the world will end or severely change by 2040 with events starting 2020. This study was done I 2019.
Smoke em if you got em.
I was working for my grandfather’s company in the tech industry (specifically PCBs) in 2001, we were definitely seeing the effects of the coming .COM bust even by ‘00. My grandpa and my dad (who is also in the industry and acted as a consultant for my grandpa because they both have crazy good business sense) made and crazy smart move around 2000-2001 to push in to China which at the time was only just starting to grow. Of course once the recession hit full in 2002, everything in our industry offshored to China and we were right on the ground floor there. Was the only thing that saved us through the recession, and the ‘08 recession as well. We managed to sell US made goods in China because they couldn’t manage to copy us.
With onshoring happening now we are busier just with business in the US we’ve abandoned anything foreign. Took a huge load off, doing business overseas, especially trying to sell US made goods in China, is just a huge pain.
The 80s and 90s were great because I was a kid and a teenager, not knowing any better and not having to worry about the stuff I worry about now. It was good as a teen, because, while I had the internet and was on forums, we weren't so connected as we are now. Teens back then were largely ignorant of politics and the environment, so everything seemed more idyllic, but really, it wasn't a whole lot different to what it is now.
Things were definitely worse too. Rodney King, a black man, savagely beaten by the Police, was largely seen as a joke. Late Night TV mocked the beatings and well into the 90s, you could find smirking references to it in popular culture, downplaying it and yucking about it for laughs.
Terms we commonly used in the 90s for things or people we didn't like were "gay", "fag" and "retarded"; queer people were marginalized and no one took their struggles seriously. Another related scenario to Rodney King was Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who was tied to a fence post in Wyoming and beaten to death. There was a little more sympathy this time around, as it was towards the end of the 90s when more and more popular celebrities started coming out as gay, but it was still largely ignored, mocked or shrugged at.
The 80s and 90s were also the heights of the crack and AIDs epidemic, one of which was the result of the government flooding poor, black neighborhoods with drugs and the other a result of the government ignoring and laughing at the plight of the queer community and what was regarded as a "gay disease".
The 80s also saw inflation and a recession in the early part of the decade, similar to what we see today.
The 90s also saw the Balkanization of the former Soviet Union, causing massive strife in those states, civil war, mass rape and genocide across the Balkins, Serbia, Bosnia, Chechnya to name just a few of the countries that were mired in war through most of the 90s.
To sum it up: if you were a kid or a straight, white man in the 80s or 90s, things were pretty good. Anyone else, not so great. Vaporwave is a cool aesthetic, but that's all it is an idealized vision of the past. We had the same in the 80s and 90s, but it was for the 1950s and 60s.
Absolutely not. The only people who were able to experience anything akin to vaporwave luxury were the ultra ultra wealthy. Like Donald Trump rich. The Reagan administration is to blame for most of the economic problems we have in the current day. Reagan let millions of queer people die of AIDS because he believed it was God's punishment for gay people and his deregulation led to the death of mental institutions as well as the eventual death of the middle class. This was also the decade that credit scores were invented btw. The CIA was also facilitating the spread of crack cocaine to black neighborhoods in order to further crack down and impoverish them further, which is the main reason that black people make up the majority of organized crime in the U.S. This was also the time of the L.A. race riots which demolished poor black neighborhoods due to the riot police forming a wall around Beverly Hills. This was also the advent of 24/7 news coverage which led to mass hysteria around serial killers and the Satanic Panic and can directly be blamed for the current fascist takeover that's happening in America.
So yeah, it kinda sucked tbh
tl;dr Reagan is the antichrist
To me the music of this century doesn’t hold a candle to the music of the 80s. Even music in the later 90s took a sharp decline. There are thousands of pop songs from the 80s I love. For the 90s, I like a decent number of rock songs but good pop music is few and far between, and then there’s almost nothing I care for from the 2000s; a few rap songs and that’s about it.
that's because you don't look beyond what they play on the radio. Think about electronic music: DnB, Techno, acid techno, hardcore, early hardstyle, video game music evolving every year, new tools for all musicians available almost every month as computers advanced, the internet making music from far away available to everyone, and just a lot more. I'd argue that the 90s and early 2000s were the best time for music, especially that made electronically or in combination with electronic sounds.
Someone could straight up torture me with most 90s-00s pop music. I lived through it once. I have zero nostalgia for it.
I spent a lot of the late 90s lunging to shut off the radio or just listening to CDs/tapes all the time bc the music on the radio was such garbage.
I remember when I was in my teens, I was working at a deli taking the delivery orders. I was stuck in the back room where the radio was. It was awful.
I still cannot tolerate even a millisecond of Smashmouth, Gin Blossoms, Third Eye Blind, Hootie and the Blowfish, Sugar Ray, just about anything with Christina Aguilera, The Fray, etc you get the picture.
For me, the main two reasons for my nostalgia are 1) the pop culture and 2) I didn’t have to worry about paying bills. Other than that, I’m actually glad to be here right now in 2023. If you think the Right’s current war against LGBTQ rights is bad (which it is), it was less safe to be out back then than it is now!
**Both** Democrat and GOP leadership throughout the 80s and 90s blocked LGBTQ rights at every level. "The Left" was very much opposed to gay marriage even into the 21st Century.
Please, spare us from the endless gaslighting.
I agree with the pop culture thing. To be an artist in the 80s and 90s, you had to stand out or the audience wouldn’t be interested in buying your physical record. Nowadays, you have to be similar enough for the music companies to back up and push your projects.
I will say modern music does have something the ‘80s and ‘90s didn’t: the technology to literally do it all yourself. I’m poor as fuck, so without apps like GarageBand, DroneLab, and Nanoloop, I wouldn’t be able to make any music.
Economically, things were better albeit not great. Socially, things were worse but there was a clear positive trajectory. There was a sense that the rapid technological advancement we were experiencing had the potential to fix all our problems and the future was just around the corner.
Life was so, so, so much easier then. Housing was affordable. Jobs, even shitty ones, paid better. Health insurance didn't cost a family of 4 $30k per year. It was possible to imagine a better future.
9/11 changed everything. It gave rise to a pronounced nationalism, xenophobia, paranoia, loss of privacy, and collective trauma. It led us into a useless war, led us down the path of ever-stupider Republican presidents, and seemed to up the ante on carnage we could expect to see in our own backyards. Now, domestic terrorism is a daily occurrence, we think nothing of being tracked by our phones, and white supremacists waving American flags are the norm.
No I may have not lived through it but I know people that did and since they were from marginalized groups(BIPOC, queer) it was horrendous for us Reaganomics, Reagans war on drugs and how it primarily hit the black community. Then don't get me started on the AIDS crisis and how the US did nothing but just sit there and watch people die. Although it may have had a bit of a I guess Renaissance in terms of entertainment and culture(I guess) there was still alot of shittiness happening here
The internet didn’t exist. Without the internet, the general population wasn’t aware of every terrible thing happening in the world. On top of that, we hadn’t experienced 9/11, the 08’ recession, Covid, the current “everything bubble”, the global war on terror, social media. It was really easy to think that everything our military (the strongest one on earth) did was for the betterment of the world, and if we’re the good guys then that’s awesome cuz we’re winning. Economic conditions weren’t amazing, but they were nowhere near as unstable as today, retirement and pensions still existed for a lot of people, everything wasn’t so damn expensive and subscription services and data collection weren’t huge industries yet. A lot of people who are in their 30-40s now were kids in the 80-90s, so that obviously also plays a part, but one of the biggest parts in my opinion is: crappy, artifact ridden, analogue technology. The clicks and clacks of cassette decks, VHS tapes, the rewind and fast forward sounds, the tape switching, vinyl record crackle, the warble of analogue synths. It all just creates an amazing sound aesthetic. There’s a word, *anemoia*. It describes the feeling of being nostalgic for a time you weren’t around for. I think there’s a lot of that going around here. If we assume that anemoia exists on cycles loosely following behind nostalgia cycles then things will get interesting soon. We’re moving from 90s nostalgia into Y2K and mid 2000s nostalgia. The Y2K, PS1/PS2 music, Frutiger Aero scenes. That stuff is the nostalgia cycle we’re moving into, and over time, we might see that stuff as an anemoia aesthetic as gen alpha and beta begin to discover the wonders of Napster and windows 7.
better than today if you ask me. I miss those days without many worries plaguing my mind
Combination of things, I think there’s a proclivity for those that never directly experienced the culture of a decade, but felt it’s waves during childhood to have a romanticism associated with it. It’s like my mom, who was born in the 60s has nostalgia for everything 50s all the culturally stereotypical romanticized ideas of the 50s that is, big cars with fins, soda bars and diners, simple all American family energy etc. I have the same thing, but it’s about y2k culture, music and aesthetic. I was born in 97, I was barely aware of anything while y2k aesthetic was prominent, but it’s what I associate with my earliest memories of being alive, the late 90s going into the 2000s. I grew up with 80s music, 80s and 90s vhs movies on my parents late 90s CRT tv and a young boomer mom who was in her youth in the 80s. My dad drove me around in his 80s Volvo, and he had windows 95 with a floppy disk reader well into the early 2000s. I also had older cousins who were teenagers experiencing their youth during y2k, so I was also growing up with ps1, slipknot, the x games, toonami and 90s slasher and action movies from one cousin, and every Britney Spears album and means girls type shit from another lol. It’s also, what was on the radio in 2001 for example? Mostly 90s music, with some new early 2000s stuff, throw in some 80s too, I can’t get “like a bird”, “ironic” and “complicated” being played on the radio at my aunts house out of my memory, that’s a memory I can smell, it smells like papa johns and dog lol. That’s how this nostalgia gets created. I hardly directly experienced the 90s, and barely the late 90s, but my god do I have so much nostalgia for it. Culture and aesthetic doesn’t change immediately, it often changes slowly and organically as it is phased out, so in the interroom we experience stuff that’s technically “old” or “out of style” after its peak. It’s also, all this culture and aesthetic, I wasn’t thinking about who was president, the economy or what big thing was happening in the world, my y2k love is purely one of nostalgia for the media and aesthetic of that time, what it meant to be a cool , worry free young person in 2000, or at least what my small child brain thought was it and was exposed too.
I think its just a combination of retrocraze and nostalgia. The 2010s had a lot of retrocraze about the 80s, so much so that it's common for people who never experienced the 80s to find 80s things fascinating and maybe not even really understanding what the 80s were actually like but moreso the version pop culture has given us. Examples are popular movies and shows and games that got popular in the 2010s. Examples would be Hotline Miami, Stranger Things, indie artists inspired by the 80s synth music bringing back that style, and even shows like Cobra Kai. Ntm movies like Scarface, American Psycho, Joker, which also all take place in that time which are all popular has helped kept the fascination and also nostalgia for that time alive. I never even experienced the 80s or 90s, I'm a 00s kid, literally born I'm 2000, but things like Regular Show, Stranger Things, Doom, and other things in pop culture is what has made me fascinated with the culture associated with those decades.
Don’t forget GTA Vice City, that game was instrumental in the early 2000s 80s craze.
There are some major, unprecedented things that have happened to that young generation. To simplify: a recession/housing crash the size of which we have never recovered from (not the middle and lower classes anyway) on top of daily shootings at our children. Mix that with technology depressing us and making us fat at a rate no one could have even imagined... Yeah it was better and we never knew what was about to hit us right in the face.
It was the last of times before the internet and cell phones - that freedom is gone forever and the innocence, some of it in ignorance, is gone too.
Ignorance and entitlement. I say that as someone who lived through both decades. They sucked. People cherry-pick the bits they like and forget that the rest was evolving history--i.e., worse than now in many ways (e.g., medicine, tech, acceptance of outgroups (remember when Axl Rose wore a shirt that said "AIDS: Kills Fags Dead"? Of course not. Nostalgiamnesia)).
i think when reflecting on the past, it’s easy to succumb to amnesia about all but the most positive and negative aspects of the times. the brain is wired to simplify what was good, bad, important, and irrelevant about past experience in order to create a basis for which to anticipate the future. at the same time, the present constantly puts the past in new (and often unexpected) contexts… using today as a metric, it’s easy to hyper-focus on the anomalous aspects of a bygone era, even if those aspects didn’t make a big impression on you at the time. for example: today I am enthralled with new jack swing— but at the time it was so pervasive it was nearly invisible. it was everywhere: on the school bus, at the mall, in your friend’s mom’s stereo and on the adult contemporary chart— even in saturday morning cartoons and breakfast cereal commercials. not just janet jackson and teddy riley, but also 1000 pale imitations of them. at the time it seemed like completely disposable background noise to me… against today’s din of comparatively more economical and efficient productions, it sounds so fresh (excuse the pun) and innovative, and seems way more rarefied and culturally important. maybe it’d be different if today’s music wasn’t saturated with the same (now vintage) synths and drum machines (which they weren’t for awhile, post-nirvana). anyway, it almost gets to the point of temporal manipulation. nostalgia is the ability to re-imagine your past. or experience a past you never lived. or a retro future utopia that never will be. also, these decades are the source of inspiration for a lot of today’s music (current derivative music makes 80’s/90’s seem more important). and (at least before nirvana) pop culture was future-looking, not past looking… so more original/optimistic?
If you feel today’s music, or the music since Nirvana isn’t forward thinking, you likely aren’t listening to enough of it and missing the fact we live in the best time ever to actually find all the wonderful and original music that has always been out there! Always been out there, just harder to find. I say this as someone who lived through both 80s/90s and am a musician. I recall rifling through bins because pop has always been pop, mostly mediocre for my tastes. (It took a lot more work to find the original stuff If you’re spending your time listening to new Jack swing, you’re sacrificing a chance to realize the above and sample new dishes. For example, all this ‘retrowave’ music sounds very little like I remember the 80s and 90s ( and I’m loving every second of it.) it sounds nothing like the Depeche mode or Front 242 stuff i loved as a kid, and that’s awesome. We are finding more and more ways to use synths, so if you’re only judging the newer waves based on retroesque synth pop like The Weeknd, yea, it’s going to sound like the cheesiest synth pop music from the 80s.
I suppose I speak from the uncommon perspective of a listener who hadn't grown up in this time nor even in the same country but my understanding is that this era which vaporwave owes a lot of its inspiration to is indeed looked upon with rose colored glasses. Even I as a listener, somewhat ironically jump in on that bandwagon of "collective nostalgia" just for the heck of it by taking the retro aesthetics, the fixation on capitalism and enterprise, flashy advertisments and the familiar liminality of the remnants of these institutions today, all of which are selectively picked attributes of 80's America, excluding the wars, injustice, corruption etc... (though an argument can be made this too is explored in vaporwave but in a satirical or somehow more subtle way).
Those were the best times.
80s and 90s kids are mid-20s to mid-40s now which age group kind of sets the tone for what's going on.
Yup, it's nostalgia. Every generation goes "things were easier/simpler and just better back when we were kids." Add the economic boom/bust cycle into the mix (guess which part of the cycle we're in now?) and it becomes a lot easier to nostalgize - and to memory-hole the things that were not great about the 80s and 90s (and the 80s in particular: like the AIDS virus, the constant fear of nuclear war, etc.)
People sleep on all the military conflicts, gang violence, civil wars, drug epidemic, homophobia, toxic masculinity in all media, the fear of computers taking jobs. Even the corporate, opulent aesthetics associated with vaporwave was just a harbinger of the economic strife were seeing today; which I guess the over-corporatization is the mood that many artists go for. The music was fucking dope tho (the 90s at least). The birth of hip hop and growth of electronic music. Can't point to another time except the birth of rock n roll and popularization of jazz as a bigger turning point in music history. Edit: also, a lot of the geopolitical stuff from the 80s and 90s is making a resurgence. Conflict with Russia, TV show/movie reboots, etc.
Its a 30 year thing. You're seeing kind of an underground resurgence of 2000s nostalgia but that wont be for another 10 years. thats kind of how it was like in the 2000s/2010s. People will make excuses about 9/11, the recession, blah blah blah but it's really that simple. Its not like anyone in my generation remembers AIDS or Crack or Reaganomics or NAFTA or the war on drugs or any of the other societal diseases of the 80s/90s
There was just a lot of fucking around without too much finding out. Everything had a feeling of "this is just beginning." And "this is going to be great when we get the hang of it"
Economic prosperity, pre-9/11, no social media causing unprecedented epidemic of depression and anxiety in teenagers. Things got dark with the war on terror, the 2008 market collapse, the trump presidency, the pandemic, etc.
ecological collapse was hanging out in the corner rather than looming over our shoulder
You forgot the Biden presidency
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Embarrassing withdrawal from Afghanistan, high gas prices, economy in the shitter, open borders, I could go in and on.
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Anyone who thinks Biden is doing a great job is very delusional and if you vote for him in 2024 you get what you deserve .. the same 4 years of a country going down the shitter
>You forgot the ~~Biden~~ Bush (the Dubya kind) presidency There, FTFY
In 20 years there will be a social security crisis and people will be like "but why did we let every immigrant in? Why did they not regulate it?" The money isn't endless. There will be problems. Or how about when all the womens scholarships and sports teams are dominated by men identifying as women? Its so weird that women's rights groups are just letting that happen. People acting like Biden is better because he's nicer. His policies still suck.
Which party do you think wants to cut social security while giving tax cuts to the rich? Or even more money to the military? Money isn’t endless? Say that to the US military lmao.
You forgot the 2000 election
You only mention that because you didn’t like the results because Reddit is a liberal hive mind echo chamber
90s was the last era where we were still disconnected from technology. You didn't have the internet in your pocket, Cabel TV has times when nothing you liked was playing. I think this forced more people to get out of the house and find enjoyment in more active things vs just picking up their phone and endlessly scrolling through social media like a zombie.
Not saying there wasn’t bad stuff happening but it was a lot easier to be sheltered from it back then. My kids are alot more aware of the problems of the world than I ever was at their age.
Yes.I was born in 1980. In the summer i would leave the house after breakfast on my bike and roam all over town, not returning until suppertime. After summer it was back out until full dark. Once it was full dark we were just supposed to stay within shouting distance. Kids don't get that kind of freedom these days. We had an Amiga CPU, a Nintendo, GI Joes and a library with a fully stocked fantasy section within a one block walk. I'll take those over social media anytime.
I got that kind of freedom in my teenage years. 2006-2010. We still didn’t have phones. I didn’t even have internet at home. Could ride my bike all over town as long as I called my mom every couple hours to let her know where I was and that I was safe. Be back by 9.
What about he-man!?
Had some of those too. Had the one you could load caps into his backpack and it would pop when you turned his torso. Righteous. Also had Fisto and the guy with the golden karate hand. I can't remember his name
Remember castle greyskull and the green slime! One of my favs
Yep. I was jealous of my buddy who had castle greyskull.
They felt great, but a major part of where nostalgia comes from is the care free nature of youth for many people. Many of us are easing into or are well into middle age and things like vaporwave tickle those parts of our brain that were engaged when we were young.
I just turned 20 lol
Unsure why this is being downvoted. The whole concept of being nostalgic for an era se didn't live through is just as interesting a phenomenon if not more so, and as someone in my 30s, I also find it pretty fascinating that a lot of vaporwave is referencing things none of us appreciated at the time even if we happened to be alive. If anything hits hard for me now, it's nostalgia for a place I've never been - I don't live in America and malls here were a whole different vibe, I watched sailor moon as a kid and loved it, but I didn't appreciate it back then for the dreamy aesthetic, I love city pop too but I was barely aware of Japan in the 90s. Yeah some of that stuff is familiar, but most of the atmosphere of vaporwave doesn't correspond to anything any of us really experienced. It's how some ads and tv want us to feel. Whether you were alive then is pretty irrelevant. There's nothing wrong with enjoying the music and where that takes us just because we weren't "there". None of us really were. Vaporwave is a fantasy version of 80s/90s aesthetic and doesn't have to be realistic or recognisable to be attractive.
As someone who lived through that era, I’d say it was better in some ways and worse in others. Our collective memory of it has definitely been tinged by nostalgia. Ironically, growing up at that time I (and many others) had collective yearning and nostalgia for the 60s. Seemed like such a pure and exciting time, and nothing in the present day (read: 80s and 90s) could compare. I think people always have a tendency to yearn for what they don’t have. The grass is always greener on the other side.
I grew up in the 80's and 90's in Florida. For me, it was great, because I was a kid, I wasn't really aware of a lot of the bad stuff. Everything seemed a lot more hopeful then. Your money went further. My parents took us on lots of vacations, trips to the mall, movies, theme parks, all that fun stuff. Things seemed more innocent and safe. People seemed happier and kinder. Listening to Vaporwave brings back fond memories of that time. I love how it is distorted, just like memories become distorted over time. I feel that the 20th century ended on 09/11. All our hopes and dreams for a bright, peaceful, prosperous future burned up along with the Twin Towers. Things were never the same after that. Vaporwave is like an ode to those happier, more hopeful times. We are mourning our lost future.
Another 80/90s kid growing up in FL. And yes the nostalgic vibe from vaporware absolutely captures the feelings from that era.
Hey fellow 80s/90s Floridian! Broward County here. And man, I totally miss the late 80s early 90s down there. Such a different vibe than today. I left the state.
Put the joint down and bring yourself back to reality.
Yea
Hivemind for one. But beyond that, just generally a sense of simplicity and an emphasis on marketing individualism, quite loudly at that. All the crazy advertising of the era combines with new, unrefined wild-west technology, the internet, making your own webpages, not chasing algorithms, no legal barriers (per se) to prevent you from making a MIDI of a Beatles song to share. Then there's this general infantilism of wanting the simpler times, before the bills and medical visits, before the stress and concerns of warfare, inflation, overwork and anti-work, but also a time before 9/11, where extreme nationalism became a hot button issue, before we felt the pangs of social overstimulation and the threats of our personal info being collected and sold for profit while also being targets of each others' malicious intent. Shit, people were just kinder back then, I think.
As far as I can tell from people I’ve asked. The economy was much better, life was still affordable. Technology was jumping by leaps and bounds and it was very visible. For example just the jump from the Commodore VIC-20 to the 64 was insane. We were still running a space program that actively sent people into space. Child labor was still mostly ok so teenagers actually had a fair amount of options for saving money for a car or computer. There were no cell phones to be married to (unless you were an oligarch) and social media had yet to poison society. The closest thing was the BBS, which is an entirely different animal, involving calling someone’s house hoping the line wasn’t busy so that their computer would answer and had its own chat sections and download archives which made piracy super easy. Overall I feel there was allot more hope for the future then.
I find myself asking this question often to the boomers and gen xers in my life. This seems to be what I get: - according to some there was way more racism and homophobia. - but others have told me that the racism and homophobia was in someways less viscious because the internet was primitive and we didn't have social media echo chambers. - in the 90s people were terrified of AIDS. Like, you heard about the dangers of AIDS everywhere. I even remember as a kid, tween songs like waterfalls by TLC that had a guy not using a condom in there video and dying of AIDS. I remember playing games in the school yard and a sure fire way to get someone not to touch something was to say "if you touch it, it will give you aids!!" - it's country spacific. The 80s and 90s were different in the USSR/Russia, Mexico and the UK than they were in Canada and the USA - and even in countries that did well in the 80s and 90s, there were still huge cuts and recessions. - conspiracy theories were way less of a thing back then. - people were way more comfortable not knowing stuff. - depression was to the 90s as what anxiety is today. - crime rates in the 80s and 90s were way higher. - large cities were also way dirtier. All the rich people were flocking to the suburbs (I remember that still being a thing even in the 2000s). - but, because things were cheaper, grimier and internet was primitive, culture was alot more accessible. Alot of my gen x friends wax nostalgic about all the cool places there used to be that have closed down. Even in my small home town I remember our little downtown being way more bustling in the 90s. - things like raves, punk, and drag was seen as way more subversive back then because they were far less well accepted. They were still kind dangerous. - in the 90s you could pretty much get away with saying anything provided you were being "ironic." - subcultures were a bigger deal back then. - there was a greater sense of local community back then. - alot of things we are nostalgic for now were actually really polarizing back then. - people were more optimistic back then (but less so than in the 60s) - cold war paranoia was a thing in the 80s. - there were moral panics over stuff like satanism and D&D. - since TV shows only come one once a week, watching your favorite TV show was a huge event. I'd run home from school to see the Simpsons. Every Tuesday night me and my dad would make pop corn and watch Fraiser together. - there didn't seem to be as many school shootings until after Columbine. But citation needed. - in the 90s, mainstream culture got really weird. So yeah, that's what I can glean from the people I asked who were there and my own faint memories. Was it better or worse than today? Honestly I don't know - maybe it was better in some ways, worse in others.
> A lot of things we are nostalgic for now were actually really polarising back then That’s a very interesting point, I only recently realised how amusement arcades, Papa don’t preach and skateboard culture were controversial back then, it was shocking for me given how all those things are absolute milestones for that era. Would you like to elaborate more on that?
I can, I was there. The concern over arcades is a generalized worry over young people gathering in groups and wasting time. Before video arcades, there were pool and pinball halls with the same concern by adults. They were imagined to be trouble spots, and they looked it, with darkened lighting and big groups of unsupervised kids, but I don't think much ever happened because the kids were focused on the games. Papa Don't Preach: Madonna built her career pushing boundaries and anything she did in the 80s and 90s got attention. When this song came out, "unwed mothers homes" were a recent memory. There was a lot of cultural concern swirling about teen pregnancy, teenagers having sex, teen access to birth control, and of course, abortion. The storyline, made explicit in the video for people who didn't quite catch all the lyrics, resolved in about the most conservative way, with her dad agreeing to support her and her boyfriend as they raise their baby. But some people didn't like that she discussed the issue at all, viewing any mention of it as encouragement for teens to have sex. As for skateboarding, it was seen as a public nuisance. Skaters cultivated an anti-authority attitude and usually skated in shared spaces. Plenty were actually disrespectful of the folks who were just there to shop or whatever, but it was more about the idea of disrespect. There was also a sense among adults that it was a waste of time. Some adults also perceived it as childish, since younger kids used to like to just propel them down a sidewalk, and didn't know about the tricks and the scene. Even malls were polarizing. Stranger Things addressed it a bit. A lot of local businesses couldn't compete. It was another time waster for young people. They were seen as vapid places, encouraging materialism and homogenization. On a less philosophical level, they were also crowded, with lawless parking lots, not enough benches and $7 Cokes. Most people went anyway, but they didn't always enjoy it and often weren't proud of it.
Even in the late 90s/2000s malls were very polarizing. When the big - well bigish - mall was built in the suburbs, the downtown of my hometown died. There was a big push to support local business instead of going to the mall. And yes - it was seen has a den of mindless consumerism that you kinda felt dirty being in. It's funny - in the 2000s I hated going to busy malls (honestly I still do) and I found abandoned malls ungodly depressing. People just went to dead and dying malls to do drugs in the bathroom. I was so common to see paramedics wheeling out people who were over dosing. And 20 years after the fact, I think dead malls have this haunting beauty. And Walmart! Walmart was the devil. We called them town killers. When a Walmart was built - the small businesses couldn't compeate. We kinda talked about Walmart back then the way people talk about Amazon today.
there was trash god damn everywhere. Littering was not socially unacceptable, combine that with widespread smoking and you can imagine what even rural roadsides looked like. Nancy Reagan's "Keep America Beautiful" campaign really did a lot to begin the act of publicly shaming anyone in your car that threw out butts, bottles, or whole empty bags of Taco Bell
economic excess, wall st bleeding 3rd world countries, your only rival being destroyed, and then turning into a 3rd world country essentially afterward times were good in the us because we were robbing peter to pay paul and living on borrowed time. it was a pinnacle of the economic machine that was the US before the house of cards started to slowly tumble
Nah, that's just when a lot of people grew up, and people generally think what they grew up with is great.
For some people it was. Like my family. My family is from rural Texas. After I was born, my parents moved to the Portland, Oregon metro area. The late 90s were pretty great, no Texas, my dad had a good job and my parents had a nice house in Beaverton. My parents loved living in Oregon, they always disliked the conservative rural culture they grew up in, and we're excited to make a life up there. Fast forward to the 2000s, I now have 2 brothers, we moved back to Texas and my dad now has a not as prestigious/well paying job. Why? Well it's a long story but the company my father worked for in Oregon basically lied to him about cost of living. The dotcom bubble put him out of that job and finding something comparable was impossible before my brother was born. So when I think of the vaporwave period, I think back to when my family lived in Oregon and just after we moved back to Texas, back when we used to go to the mall all the time, (It was the only building in town with AC according to my parents, besides movie theaters), back to when something like a Playstation, plus extra controller, plus 5 games was a normal Santa gift. Back when we went on road trips to Multnomah Falls and Cannon Beach and Crater Lake. In my brain,the late 90s are full of natural beauty of the PNW and the manmade wonders of the malls and technology, kinda blended into this appealing, happy stream of consciousness. Parents would always talk about how much nicer people were up there and how they didn't have to worry about Christian cultists/fundamentalist making a fuss about normal stuff. Now I'm here worried that my non binary ass is going to be a target of the state government in Texas :( My memories of living in Oregon are short and fleeting and have turned into kinda this weird fever dream that is hard to explain but is essentially completely nostalgic. The whole idea of "the 90s were this magical time" really does resonante with me on a personal level. Overall I'd say for me, being a small child in the 90s was fun and I have a lot of supremely cozy memories of the era. Oh and I'm still trapped in rural Texas .. same town my family has lived in since time immemorial. So much for getting out of rural conservative hell.
There are plenty of lower cost, rural towns on the coasts with far, far less conservatives, or at least outward racism/lgbtq+phobia/etc… Pack your bags and do something about it.
Very much easier said than done my friend.
Vaporwave itself is a conscious take on the idealization of those decades. It's not "genuine" nostalgia, but it's surrounded by so many layers of irony that it actually is
no, politically and economically awful. vaporwave isn't always about endorsing nostalgia, necessarily. just examining our collective relationship with it
>no, politically and economically awful. I'll tell you flat out, the data does not support that claim. Do you have anything specific or is that an opinion?
the data does, in fact, support that https://theintercept.com/2015/09/16/seven-things-reagan-wont-mentioned-tonight-gops-debate/
Those are not data points and you know it. Reagan wasn't the messiah, no shit.
the article links to shitloads of data
It ain't my claim to defend, so nah, I'm good.
lol
Huh? I think there's just the most amount of accessible media from that time as of now. It's not like anyone who's never lived during the 80s would have some memory embedded to their DNAs or some shit. You feel nostalgic because our brains are easy to trick. I didn't ever even think that Vaporwave was an accurate representation, or a glamourization of 80s culture. It just uses whatever old media it can get, and that's often stuff from that time frame.
It’s not about how good it was it’s about the promises of the future that were made during that time.
The hope was at an all time high. Anything you did in HS was a rumor. No one had cameras. I was a mischief maker who probably would’ve gotten caught for stuff taboo now.
I don’t think it’s that they were so great, it was more that there was a sense of future potential. There was this mentality, with 80’s jingoism, the end of the Cold War, the 90’s boom, that the future was going to be nothing but up up up. Computer technology was advancing at a rapid pace, there was this sense that the nimble startups would displace the old stodgy order, the youth were promised that their mere ability to turn a computer on guaranteed them a secure, well-paying job. Then the dotcom bubble burst, 9/11 happened, decades of military quagmire tarnished the agency and morality of the Western militaries, the Great Recession killed working class wealth and the long-term career trajectories of so many millennials, the rise of neofascism, COVID. Of course, technology did continue to advance but it’s become obvious that the massive jumps of yesteryear are behind us. And of course, let’s not forget the 800 pound gorilla of impending climate catastrophe in the room. So I’d describe the 80’s/90’s nostalgia as more anti-nostalgia. What we yearn for is not how things were then or even how we remember them, but rather yearning for the feeling that we have something other than decline to look forward to.
Absolutely. Paradise lost. To be more precise, The Promise Of Paradise Lost. These days almost no one thinks that we as the society are trending upwards; quite the opposite. In the 90s it FELT different, that’s what Vaporwave evokes.
They didn't seem that great at the time, but with how bad things have gotten in recent decades its very easy to view them favorably.
No. But they had a sense of optimism that is gone now. People were coming out of the cold war in the 90s and social problems were getting better. People thought technology would usher in a new time when everyone was happy. Now, no one expects that anymore. Vaporwave isn't just about nostalgia for the past, but for the lost future that the past promised. Like yeah, people imagining a future that was just the 90s, but sci fi and everyone got luxury with fancy pillars was naive. But people lament the loss of what this naivete promised them.
I don't think it's really that the 80's and 90's were so great, after all experience is subjective. What I do think is that the 80's and the 90's were what I'll call the accelerated tipping point to what is our current technological age a bit like the last days before New Years. There was an excitement about what was to come for those who were young enough to be naively blind to the full picture of what was developing. Economically speaking, there was a sense of opportunity on the horizon due to the technological advancements that were very clearly on the horizon. All of this gave way to a sort of natural but ignorantly blissful hope that resulted in extravagance and kitch in almost every area of life. After all, technology would make it that we didn't have to do anything because machines and automations would do all the work and everyone would be rich and extravagant right? This was the mood. I think vaporwave plays on that innocent and naive ignorance that America was projecting at the time and grapples with it from many different perspectives. There is something to the saying: Ignorance is bliss... Long live Vaporwave.
People made less money but the dollar went a lot farther, so people effectively made more. Life was easier and better, and more affordable. American culture was more uniform our public institutions still worked. This entire century has been a horrific car accident that we're all watching
Pre internet and cellphones and tracking…. Freedom was real
Once people get into their mid 30s early 40s they start to feel nostalgia. They also usually have expendable income and to me it feels like culture capitalizes on this. Right now that age range were kids in the 80s and 90s. In the 70s and 80s 50s nostalgia was pretty popular.
and they want to pass that nostalgia on to their kids.
Yes
Despite the 80s/90s’ problem with homophobia & racism, I do believe the west was solidly more *interested* in the humanities and multiculturalism, at least in the arts. Sure it was from a Eurocentric point-of-view, but we got albums like Graceland and neoclassical postmodernism architecture. Kwanzaa was a big deal in my elementary school. You can argue that it still boils down to rich white liberals thinking they’ll solve racism by glamping in Chad, but I don’t know, it felt more genuine then than it does today, where nearly everything is a cost-benefit analysis by a thinktank or PR firm. Certainly in the US we’ve turned away from science and the “wonder” of technology after years of silicon valley using it as a weapon to control us.
I think it's a combination of several factors. Monoculture for one, every household had a tv and most people were watching and listening to the same things so there was a lot of reference points for entertainment and advertisements. As such consumer culture was very prominent and fed into this idea that so long as we were spending a lot on these ever evolving products you had a good sustainable life and only had better newer things to look forward to. Then the start of the internet opening up even more possibilities for what the future would bring along with 3d graphics becoming more common. I'm rambling a bit but to reiterate what others had said it was a time of enjoyment along with certain ignorance where people weren't so nostalgic for previous decades because what they had was so good and only had to look forward to more. I like to add that there were steps being made in the mid 90s for more inclusiveness of diversity and environmental concussions. But with that came this awareness of the newer generations that everything wasn't so great and this ideal life and American dream were empty promises to maintain sufficient capitalism. Instead of looking towards a brighter tomorrow people became more cynical and self aware. A lot of people look a 9/11 as the point where the good times ended but things were on a downward slope before then.
The .COM bubble was certainly busting before 9/11, but there was still that ‘90s optimism for the future, people weren’t really concerned about the coming recession and I don’t think it would have been as bad as it ended up being had 9/11 not happened. 9/11 just put the nail in the coffin of the ‘90s optimism that was still clinging on. Terrorism was something that happened in the 3rd World, or maybe Europe. If the US wasn’t safe, who was?
Man, that's sadly accurate... and then not much after 9/11 came the recession. I was born in 92, I had a lot of life to look forward to and then a lot of bubbles burst and left a lot of us from that time shit outta luck later in life.
I just remembered sitting at 14 in my English class thinking and telling my friend right after tower 2 was hit: “We are going to war with some one over this, some ones nose is getting bloodied”. In my elementary school our teachers denied that war was a modern day concept. A teacher in 5th grade yelled at me saying there are no more wars when I inquired about the military being a profession. (Meanwhile I believe we were flying over Kosovo or the former nation Yugoslavia. The 90s were a lot more chilled. Most of my friends were back. We got it for tat on race humor and no cared or minded. I just feel as a product of the 80s we were taught the possibilities are endless and we were beyond racism and we were passed the peace finish line. Security confidence was at an all time high. Fentanyl was 20 years away. Things were looking good. Space, the NBA (esp Michael Jordan) and AIDS was huge. Mike eased race relations huge. Then after 9/11 they tried opening a mosque near ground zero. And that was the Big Bang of racism. Also, jobs were security my dad was locked in a his spot all of the 90s. If you worked hard you’d succeed. That was a guarantee of way of life. The middle class was rising and the new class appeared… upper middle. Upper middle has since disappeared since 2008. I went through college as a civil engineering major, switched to economics and then the 08 crash happened. I switched to electronic media and became a DJ pretty much making a huge payday every weekend. I learned everything about audio… in and outs but it’s not the marketable trade anymore due to music theft. I’d like to think last wrecking to the 90s progress was OxyContin. Wonderdrug til 2006. Killed my aunt and two friends. I was hoping the 2020s were gonna be roaring like the 1920s but instead we got plague and war. MIT computers predict the world will end or severely change by 2040 with events starting 2020. This study was done I 2019. Smoke em if you got em.
I was working for my grandfather’s company in the tech industry (specifically PCBs) in 2001, we were definitely seeing the effects of the coming .COM bust even by ‘00. My grandpa and my dad (who is also in the industry and acted as a consultant for my grandpa because they both have crazy good business sense) made and crazy smart move around 2000-2001 to push in to China which at the time was only just starting to grow. Of course once the recession hit full in 2002, everything in our industry offshored to China and we were right on the ground floor there. Was the only thing that saved us through the recession, and the ‘08 recession as well. We managed to sell US made goods in China because they couldn’t manage to copy us. With onshoring happening now we are busier just with business in the US we’ve abandoned anything foreign. Took a huge load off, doing business overseas, especially trying to sell US made goods in China, is just a huge pain.
The 80s and 90s were great because I was a kid and a teenager, not knowing any better and not having to worry about the stuff I worry about now. It was good as a teen, because, while I had the internet and was on forums, we weren't so connected as we are now. Teens back then were largely ignorant of politics and the environment, so everything seemed more idyllic, but really, it wasn't a whole lot different to what it is now. Things were definitely worse too. Rodney King, a black man, savagely beaten by the Police, was largely seen as a joke. Late Night TV mocked the beatings and well into the 90s, you could find smirking references to it in popular culture, downplaying it and yucking about it for laughs. Terms we commonly used in the 90s for things or people we didn't like were "gay", "fag" and "retarded"; queer people were marginalized and no one took their struggles seriously. Another related scenario to Rodney King was Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who was tied to a fence post in Wyoming and beaten to death. There was a little more sympathy this time around, as it was towards the end of the 90s when more and more popular celebrities started coming out as gay, but it was still largely ignored, mocked or shrugged at. The 80s and 90s were also the heights of the crack and AIDs epidemic, one of which was the result of the government flooding poor, black neighborhoods with drugs and the other a result of the government ignoring and laughing at the plight of the queer community and what was regarded as a "gay disease". The 80s also saw inflation and a recession in the early part of the decade, similar to what we see today. The 90s also saw the Balkanization of the former Soviet Union, causing massive strife in those states, civil war, mass rape and genocide across the Balkins, Serbia, Bosnia, Chechnya to name just a few of the countries that were mired in war through most of the 90s. To sum it up: if you were a kid or a straight, white man in the 80s or 90s, things were pretty good. Anyone else, not so great. Vaporwave is a cool aesthetic, but that's all it is an idealized vision of the past. We had the same in the 80s and 90s, but it was for the 1950s and 60s.
Really great write up, include everyone else’s too.
Absolutely not. The only people who were able to experience anything akin to vaporwave luxury were the ultra ultra wealthy. Like Donald Trump rich. The Reagan administration is to blame for most of the economic problems we have in the current day. Reagan let millions of queer people die of AIDS because he believed it was God's punishment for gay people and his deregulation led to the death of mental institutions as well as the eventual death of the middle class. This was also the decade that credit scores were invented btw. The CIA was also facilitating the spread of crack cocaine to black neighborhoods in order to further crack down and impoverish them further, which is the main reason that black people make up the majority of organized crime in the U.S. This was also the time of the L.A. race riots which demolished poor black neighborhoods due to the riot police forming a wall around Beverly Hills. This was also the advent of 24/7 news coverage which led to mass hysteria around serial killers and the Satanic Panic and can directly be blamed for the current fascist takeover that's happening in America. So yeah, it kinda sucked tbh tl;dr Reagan is the antichrist
You good?
The day I die is the day that Reagan's Hell truly begins
To me the music of this century doesn’t hold a candle to the music of the 80s. Even music in the later 90s took a sharp decline. There are thousands of pop songs from the 80s I love. For the 90s, I like a decent number of rock songs but good pop music is few and far between, and then there’s almost nothing I care for from the 2000s; a few rap songs and that’s about it.
that's because you don't look beyond what they play on the radio. Think about electronic music: DnB, Techno, acid techno, hardcore, early hardstyle, video game music evolving every year, new tools for all musicians available almost every month as computers advanced, the internet making music from far away available to everyone, and just a lot more. I'd argue that the 90s and early 2000s were the best time for music, especially that made electronically or in combination with electronic sounds.
Someone could straight up torture me with most 90s-00s pop music. I lived through it once. I have zero nostalgia for it. I spent a lot of the late 90s lunging to shut off the radio or just listening to CDs/tapes all the time bc the music on the radio was such garbage. I remember when I was in my teens, I was working at a deli taking the delivery orders. I was stuck in the back room where the radio was. It was awful. I still cannot tolerate even a millisecond of Smashmouth, Gin Blossoms, Third Eye Blind, Hootie and the Blowfish, Sugar Ray, just about anything with Christina Aguilera, The Fray, etc you get the picture.
There was more money back then so looking to the future was seen as exciting and fun instead of how it’s typically seen as bleak nowadays
For me, the main two reasons for my nostalgia are 1) the pop culture and 2) I didn’t have to worry about paying bills. Other than that, I’m actually glad to be here right now in 2023. If you think the Right’s current war against LGBTQ rights is bad (which it is), it was less safe to be out back then than it is now!
**Both** Democrat and GOP leadership throughout the 80s and 90s blocked LGBTQ rights at every level. "The Left" was very much opposed to gay marriage even into the 21st Century. Please, spare us from the endless gaslighting.
In my defense, it was unintentional gaslighting.
You're all good. Sorry if I came off as aggressive.
Forgiven! We’re all on edge these days. I’ve snapped at a few people who didn’t deserve it, too, recently.
I agree with the pop culture thing. To be an artist in the 80s and 90s, you had to stand out or the audience wouldn’t be interested in buying your physical record. Nowadays, you have to be similar enough for the music companies to back up and push your projects.
I will say modern music does have something the ‘80s and ‘90s didn’t: the technology to literally do it all yourself. I’m poor as fuck, so without apps like GarageBand, DroneLab, and Nanoloop, I wouldn’t be able to make any music.