That's very neat.

In the process of moving I dug up a bit of lost ancient technology; my Mini Disc player. Wonder how many remember that bit of weird in-between technology?

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/33...b7c-768-80.jpg

Anyway, point being, there is a ton of early 2000's downloaded tracks. Such an amazing cruise down memory lane of 2 decades ago to see what I was downloading and listening to.

Amen.

I've never had a TV! (For a few years I watched it occasionally when I lived with my ex; however, I ended up mostly watching the poker channel; everything else is fake superficial and boring.)

I did try Prime for a few years and watched a few great 1960s/70s movies - mostly westerns. Netflix is unwatchable garbage.

Music wise, I've been listening to electronic music (trance, house, techno, drum and bass, jungle, hip hop, EBM, disco, Euro, downtempo etc) since the late 1980s. I wouldn't say Orbital in 1991 or Carl Cox in 1995 were any better than the latest Essential Mix; however, maybe I was more excited by the tunes then? I understand the blatant self promotion more as I get older. I've never considered myself part of the "scene:" I never had posters of DJs etc on my walls, never rushed to buy tickets to clubs or raves, never was into the drugs or lifestyle. I simply enjoy listening to new music!

Rofina: in high school (early 90s) the rich kids had CD walkmans while us poor people made do with dated cassette players. I remember several techie nerds got into the MiniDisc c.1993 and I thought it was the future ... meanwhile I mostly bought vinyl records and cassettes. I bought an iPod in 2006 ... rather late to the game as I was addicted to downloading free music on Kazaa. I haven't paid for any music in twenty years.

I am not a huge U2 fan so I've only seen them live once, on the 360 tour a decade ago. The vibe was not like that at all, it was a generally older crowd (i.e. not a lot of high school/university age people) and it was also unseasonably cold for May which probably calmed things down a little bit.

But from what I remember hearing about the Popmart tour stop in Winnipeg in the late 90s, it was more along the lines of your experience.

I don't know what it was about the 90s and the silly aggression about everything right down to the t-shirts (NO FEAR) and music (nu-metal) but I hated that. I mean, I respect the right of people to enjoy nu-metal or whatever, but I don't think I ever voluntarily listened to one single song from that genre. Whatever I heard was just because it happened to be on the radio or in the background or whatever. Thankfully today's young people seem to have better taste.

Ah, the MiniDisc. Japan’s answer to the plain old CD; apparently it still has a following there. It had the advantage of being rewritable before CD burners were a thing.

North America was too far behind Japan to be an early adopter, stuck with cassettes into the late 1990s; by the time one could download anything one wanted, CD burners were mainstream here.

Then iPods/phones ended all that. Once and a while, I’d pick up a roadkill burned CD that was clearly hucked from an automobile and see if it actually had decent music on it. Almost invariably I would discover that it was thrown from the vehicle for reasons.

I don't have cable.

But I do have Netflix, Hulu+, Disney, Prime and AppleTV. :D

The 90s were very much a counter-culture decade driven by Gen Xers coming of age and rebelling against a lot of the cultural norms that existed and persevered throughout the Cold War. There's a ton of youtube analysis videos on it, but it's very easy to culturally see how this played out.

The Simpsons were the most popular show in the world for years - a mundane, normal family that contrasted heavily against wholesome families as they were portrayed in the 80s (Full House, Cosby Show, etc.). They swore and failed and weren't affluent. Ren & Stimpy, Beavis & Butthead. It's easy to see why these would be appealing considering what came before them and the mold that had been set and expected. The Simpsons weren't perfect and they displayed something which was very counter to the American Dream that had been set up for decades on American TV.

Wrestling increased in popularity, particularly when Monday Night Raw was introduced, with its anti-heroes becoming its most famous characters. Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, and Mankind were all examples of anti-hero and anti-authority figures, to the point of physically assaulting and beating up their 'boss' in Vince McMahon repeatedly as part of the main storyline, and using the corporate McMahon as its main antagonist.

NASCAR increased in popularity too, and its most popular driver for a long time was anti-hero Dale Earnhardt, who was willing to damage and push others out of the way to be successful.

Movies were an easy source of anti-heroes - and the 1999 roster of movies exemplified a society that was bored of the static, everyday, corporate lifestyle. Office Space, American Beauty, Fight Club, and The Matrix all feature protagonists who strip away from boring cubicles and office spaces to find out who they really are and to break free from mundane, corporate chains, and in some cases destroying them outright.

etc. etc.

9/11 ended all of that pretty swiftly. Combine that with the internet exploding and mono-culture as dictated by corporations was effectively over a few years later as options expanded.

I'm a bit reticent to overuse the phrase, but looking back the 90s really did have a bit of an "End of History" vibe. Post Cold War things seemed to be working pretty well, and what adversities there were didn't seem particularly unsurmountable. Obviously there was a lot going on that set the stage for 9/11 and associated geopolitical events that thrust us forward into an uncertain 21st century, but it didn't seem prescient.

In this kind of environment, teenage / counterculture rebellion and anger was harder to manifest against concrete goals beyond escaping that "boring office job" kinda life.
There certainly were bands that had a focus - Rage Against the Machine being an obvious one. But it was also the cultural environment where you could have an anarcho punk band that lived in squats ending up making a drinking / sports anthem (Chumbawumba). So yeah, "Break Stuff" had a bit more relevance to me than say, the somewhat directionless Free Tibet concerts.

Mike Judge is one of the greatest American satirists. I don't know if he'll be remembered as the Mark Twain of his time, but he will in my books.

I still watch reruns of 1990s Beavis and Butthead on Youtube, and they always make me laugh. King of the Hill was a great show, too. Probably the best portrayal of that cross-section of lower-middle class Sunbelt suburbia that formed the plurality of American society at the time. And even if he came out with flops like the Goode Family, I think he hit it out of the park one last time with Silicon Valley. Man, if any group needed to be knocked off their high horse in the last 10 years, it was the tech world.

But let's talk about Office Space. That movie was foundational for me. It taught me at a pivotal point in my late teenage years that a job - especially working for a coporation - is fundamentally bullshit and one should not stake their identity on work. There was a bit of a movement toward realizing this with movies like Office Space but, like a lot of things, it got snuffed out (as you say) with 9/11. Then it came back when the late David Graeber wrote Bullshit Jobs, and one of the silver linings of the Covid-19 pandemic might be that it becomes self-evident to a large swathe of people. I don't know about you guys but with WFH I've used my working hours to do anything but work, and stuff still functions.

I'm an early millennial that's about to reach middle age; the oldest millennials are already 40. At this point, I think we can write a fairly candid appraisal about the millennial generation. I'd say the one thing I'm pretty dismayed about is that people of my generation were go-getters, but go-getters in exactly the wrong things. One of those things is corporate work. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" is probably the most searing indictment of the Millennial generation but, before big tech, I saw people I knew with graduate degrees in Physics and neuroscience work for investment banks or management consulting firms. What do we have to show for this? We can't even own our own homes.

Office Space is one of my favourites. Idiocracy didn't receive as much attention but man was it prophetic about the direction of American culture.

It's weird because I've never really connected our generation (Millennials) with billionaire tech bros but I guess that is the case with some. Musk and Bezos and the Twitter guy are all Gen X though. So really it's mostly Zuck who is part of our cohort with thousands of powerless Millennial programmers doing his bidding. By and large I think the broader trait of our generation is the unaffordability of housing, the gig economy, and inheriting a Climate disaster. The other thing is the infantilization of us. We're fucking middle aged now and our parents still treat us like children and use the term "Millennial" itself as a kind of slur to tar us all as lazy and entitled. I have children now and both sets of grandparents still believe that they should be the centre of attention and the head of the family to whom all priority and deference should be given. Not sure if you or others have a similar experience but I see posts about it on social media.

I was too young to really get King of the Hill when it was originally running but i've watched some more recently and it really is great.

If anything, COVID has led to a lot of dissatisfaction with general work culture. Movements like r/antiwork are sentiments that have existed for a while now and have simply been pushed further by extenuating circumstances like global pandemics and tightening of corporate needs and wants. Millennials fell into the trap of the corporate world but it feels like Zoomers are realizing that a lot of it really is bullshit and that there's more to life than working for 50 years for some giant company that doesn't really care about you at all.

There's a Globe & Mail article today essentially echoing this sentiment. Millennials work hard and can't get half of what it got their parents. What's the point?

https://media.makeameme.org/created/...dd6bec1d08.jpg

On second thought, at least Zuck has hair, unlike the dome sported by that other alien, Bezos, and the wig worn by Musk.

https://www.hairguard.com/wp-content...transplant.jpg

:haha::haha::haha:

I think Musk has hair plugs. Probably transplanted from his ass. They look quite convincing though compared to others...

https://comicvine1.cbsistatic.com/up...0273-tumbl.jpg

The Kroeger years:

https://media1.popsugar-assets.com/f...Blond-Hair.jpg

:haha:

I wasn't a huge fan of King of the Hill when it originally aired as it seemed kinda boring at the time. When I went back and rewatched a few years ago (on a recommendation) I was blown away how good it was - different vibe but rivals the classic seasons of the Simpsons. It's aged extremely well IMO.

Speaking of Kings, remember this Canadian show of yesteryear?
• Video Link

And just for old times' sake. Back in the days when there was no Internet, and most people did not have cable TV.

• Video Link

:previous:

Not a bad show, especially for the first few seasons, but CBC didn't know when to pull the plug.

After all, how many novel story ideas could you possibly have regarding log salvagers on the BC south coast?????

By the time the CBC had the courage to do the right thing, Beachcombers was rivalling Coronation Street for longevity

This is the standard description of the 60s and the Boomers. It's really odd to describe the 90s like this. It wasn't like that at all.

The premise of a counterculture is that the mainstream culture is being challenged. Everybody who was living and breathing in the 1960s understood the challenge posed by civil rights-believing, Vietnam War-resisting long-haired dropouts doing drugs.

The 1990s, by contrast, were this:

Existential ennui was the order of the day for a large subsection of middle class kids in the West. We were going to be munching Big Macs and contemplating our navels around the world now that the Cold War was over, and a lot of artists/thinkers worried about the potential for nihilism. Per Radiohead:

"I'm just lying in a bar with my drip feed on
Talking to my girlfriend waiting for something to happen
And I wish it was the sixties
I wish I could be happy
I wish, I wish
I wish that something would happen"

• Video Link

So then substitute another word for counterculture. Forgive my ignorance. Rise of the anti-hero in the 90s in the absence of a cultural bad guy pointed society towards hierarchical bad guys rather than foreign, or at least questioning things like work culture or corporatism.

Well, the GenXer stereotype was that we were cynical, sarcastic and non-aspirational. Per movies like Slacker, Reality Bites, Singles, Trainspotting. Yeah, I was conditioned by my upbringing to question striving for wealth and power, an ideal of the 60s that was filtered through the cautionary tale of the 80s. We weren't going to change the world through peace and love (or by buying the world a Coke, more like!), as we'd seen how the Woodstock generation had turned into pastel-coloured corporate whores. Rather, we were stymied by what the point was of working for all of that if you just ended up coked out and divorced.

We wanted meaning. And we were left wanting.

I bought into that mentality hook, line and sinker. I really am a walking, talking GenX stereotype, I admit it. Naturally, it goes without saying that the Westerners pontificating about our meaningless existences were pampered middle class types who'd never had to worry about having food on the table. In 1994 I spent a month in Thailand contemplating the meaning of life and the boundless emptiness of the universe while being served mouth-watering curries by the children of cooks running beachside restaurant huts under towering palm trees.

Hindsight makes everything so easily caricatured!

Anti-heroes have been around for decades. The 90s weren't anything special in that regard. The other day I rewatched Taxi Driver. That was made in 1976. GenXers weren't rebelling against their parents. In fact, the Boomers were generally sympathetic to the GenX reticence to embrace corporate trappings.