Re: teens in the 90s?

Written By: Brendan on 11/20/03 at 10:45 a.m.

I was born in 1980; a quintessential ‘child of the 90s’. The 90s changed radically, even moreso than the 80s, in my opinion (yes, I remember much of the 80s, too.) My own take is, the late 80s and early 90s (‘88-‘91) weren’t all that different. Neon everything, beanbag chairs, play-all-day arcades, Virtual Reality, NeXT Computer (Black Hardware, baby.) In Colorado, where I live, we still said “radical”, “dudical”, and “tubular” well into the late 80’s.

Grunge started popping up in the late 80s, and exploded in the early 90s. By the “angst-filled summer of 1992”, hair bands were out and grunge was king. This continued until 1994, when Kurt checked out. The ‘real’ 90s struggled on through the rest of 1994 and through 1995, with a brief Industrial music trend. Bands like Filter and Gravity Kills emerged, while Killing Joke released the most excellent ‘Pandemonium’ in 1994.

When I was a teen, I was rolling porto-potties down hills and blowing the doors off (with people in them), ripping off street signs, shoplifting, skateboarding, getting high on whatever I could find, buy, or steal, blowing up mailboxes with M-80s (real M-80s), and feeding Alka-Seltzer to squirrels. Kids nowadays don’t do the stuff we did.

The ‘real’ 90s died in 1996, when the Spice Girls emerged. That killed it; grunge was out, bubblegum pop was in. The modern Internet was going full force; everyone and their mother had an ISP account. Cell phones rung in school kids’ backpacks. Schools instituted totalitarian non-smoking bans, and cut their “smoking pits” (couldn’t smoke within one mile of school property.) Kids just a couple years younger than my agegroup ate this stuff up—they seemed like a different generation—and we learned that they, in fact, are (born 1982-2000.)

Ah, brings a tear to my eye. I was 16 when the 90s croaked. R.I.P 1990s.