The ’90’s were a great time to be young

Related: am I too young for nostalgia?

One recent morning over coffee, BBC Radio 6 started playing some songs from my youth. De La Soul, the Beastie Boys and Q Tip, Groove Armada and Fat Boy Slim. It was perfect music to wake up to, to shake off a dodgy night’s sleep. Great beats, fun, silly and playful lyrics, a sense of lighthearted joy and just …. being young. 

I really don’t want to be that bitch reminiscing about the halcyon days of her youth. I’m old enough to remember people who lived through World War 2 listening to Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra! I know people who went to and Woodstock and wept after JFK’s assassination — I’m too young for such nostalgia! Except, as 50 creeps ever nearer, I’m not really. And I’m genuinely grateful for the imperfect but vastly more free culture in which I came of age. Because whatever this sinister clown show is that we are all being subjected to today, it’s a cultural and social abomination. It’s fun-free. Everyone in popular culture is fucking miserable now.

We Gen X’ers were an undoubtably cynical generation, but we could also be playful. There was no sense of unbridled optimism — quite the opposite in fact. We definitely felt like we were getting the short end of several sticks. There was definitely a gloominess and navel gazing in the popular culture, centred mainly around the indie scene. But as a generation, there was something bouncy about us as well. We knew how to have fun, just for fun’s sake. Not everything was tinged with striving toward a purpose, like ending the patriarchy or building a world-changing tech start-up. We kind of knew that as a generation, we didn’t really matter. The major battles had been fought (or so we were told.) We were at the end of history. Might as well just enjoy it.

19 year old me and my ‘90’s hobo fashion choices

That was all wrong, of course. But how were we to know? We were just kids, hearing the tales of civil disobedience from our elders— be it in 1968 Paris, the anti-Vietnam War protests on American college campuses, or the Northern Irish civil rights movement. We absorbed the coolness of that but didn’t really have our own crusade. So we had music, and parties, and rave culture, instead. There was an underlay of light-left politics, of course, because the cool kids and the taste makers were the inheritors of the 1960’s counter-culture, and very often we were their actual children. But I don’t remember a single friend being a dogmatic psycho of the kind I frequently see today. And I was an actual member of an actual socialist party! Even the hard-core lefties were more chill than the average high school TikTok-er today.

This generation of young people seem to have all the debauchery and desperation of the 1970’s, but with dystopian flourishes, like AI and social media surveillance. Instead of Donna Summer or Led Zeppelin, now it’s fat demon Sam Smith and Cardi B (who I find charming as a personality, but her songs are some of the worst things I have ever heard.) Instead of cocaine, booze and cigarettes, young people these days have Adderall, Lexapro, and cross-sex hormones. Is that any kind of improvement — at all?

As a lot of you have experienced, there are costs associated with falling out with my class and tribe, though many others who left the left have paid more than I have. But one of the most alienating things is being so far away, morally, politically and socially, from peers with whom I otherwise share every cultural taste. Having grown up in the cultural left, I still share the aesthetic common to everyone in that milieu.  As a group, kids like us mostly rejected the low-brow and the commercial. Nowadays, because I hate the mainstream media so much, I watch MAGA media instead — a crime which in and of itself makes me worthy of ex-communication from my former tribe — and I come across the pro-Trump musical offerings that they sometimes share in an effort to claim some pop culture for themselves. I hate to be a snob about it, but the songs are terrible. Meanwhile, I watch on social media as my old friends and fellow partiers go from posting about how great Portishead was (hard agree), to posting about how great it is that their middle schooler is trans (hard disagree, to the point where we cannot be friends.) When it comes to taste, I am in permanent exile from my fellow indie kids. It’s lonely, to be honest. 

Those of us born in the late sixties and seventies and were the last free generation. Free from mental interference from our parents who didn’t pay nearly as much attention to us as the parents of Millennials and Gen Z would go on to do, free from the pressurised social media magnifying glass, and free from this terrifying mind virus turning so many of today’s youth into gender dysphoric nutcases. Growing up in that kind of freedom, as people my age and older can attest, was tremendous fun. We could party without having to justify it politically. We could hook up just because we thought someone was hot, without ever considering if our crush was a male feminist, or worrying he might try to choke us out because he grew up on rough porn. We were free to make mistakes. We could drink and take drugs without the danger of it ending up on social media. We could just be.

I remember similar musing from my own elders, fretting over whether Nirvana signalled some dark, new, sinister element among The Youth. I remember how old and dorky those elders seemed, because to my teen ears, Nirvana was cool and different and spoke for us. Having said that, when I was in my rebellious phase I was not being subjected to a marketing campaign to convince me to cut off my tits, or telling me the world was about to end because not everyone is vegan. In my elite, academically rigorous high school, I was being taught the Iliad and W.B. Yeats, not how to use butt plugs and dildos.

Oh, to be young again! But not today. God, it looks grim out there.