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Partially inspired by a thread in Testing (), I did some thinking and came to a (admittedly rather lame) epiphany: For years, I'd always sort of forced myself to refer to "The 90s" as a separate, by-gone decade. They always seemed too recent and immediately relevant to talk about in the same sense as "The 60s" or "The 80s". Yet upon thinking on it, I realized that that's no longer the case; it's been nine years since 199- prefixed the current year, the culture and politics have changed so they are no longer recognizable, and in fact we are only a couple years away from starting the '10s. The 90s are long gone.

This sparked some curiosity on my part - if the 90s can be considered culturally discrete from contemporary trends, how does it differ? What do we look back on the 90s and see? One of the most immediately identifiable and iconic cultural symbols of any decade has always been the music, so let's look at that. What were the hits and the true 'classics' of the 90s, musically? I'm not talking about the hordes of crap that were manufactured and mass produced, or obscure underground music that happens to be good, but stuff that at least had some mainstream appeal and we can listen to and say, "Oh, that's the 90s."

So, let's list some. Any genre, as long as it's reasonably mainstream (i.e., no instrumental blackened symphonic death metal, please). Let's try to keep musical tastes and preferences out of the equation, especially as most of us (hopefully) remember the 90s pretty clearly. Just a compiled list of 90s Tunes. Here's a few to start:

Haddaway - What is Love? (1993 - Euro Dance)
Scatman John - Scatman (1994 - Euro Dance)
Rob Zombie - Dragula (1998 - Heavy Metal)
Eiffel 65 - I'm Blue (1999 - Euro Dance)

I found this Something Awful piece to be a scarily accurate summary of 90s US popular music/culture. Fortunately over in Europe we had techno and trance.

The 90's where indeed full of bitching techno.

Mostly eurodance and techno here. With a side order of imported and homegrown gangsta rap for all the schoolyard bullies and other gangster wannabes.

I have a sister two years younger than me, so Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls all the way!

Other than that, the 90's were a weird mish-mash of Eurodance, fad songs and decent pop. Babylon Zoo and Gala were a bit darker, Sin With Sebastian and Pet Shop Boys a bit lighter. All of these seem to have gotten about a million years of airplay and when someone says "nineties", that's what they sound like to me.

Anything past 1997 isn't really "90's" to me. It feels like around that time there was a shift away from the "genuine" 90's which were just a less cynical sequel to the 80's and into something like a "turn of the millennium" period. IMO there's a bigger gulf in sound between a random song from 1995 and 1998 than there is between a random song from 1995 and one from 1992.

And I listened to Samson en Gert, obviously.

The 90's, to me, were almost two separate, discontinuous cultural eras that happened to fall within the same 10 year span, the first being during the alt-rock era from 90' to 94' and the second being a deluge of bubblegum pop from around 96' onwards, with the aforementioned techno surge and a few novelties like the macarena and the Smashing Pumpkins falling somewhere in between. I was too young to be aware of any of the music that I ought to have been listening to, like Cryptopsy, which is the real kicker, but I recently rediscovered Everlast, who is alright in spite of his elementary rhyme schemes.

'Grunge' style stuff (primarily Nirvana), Stone Temple Pilots, and Pearl Jam are what I remember a lot of on the radio.

Fashions were mostly dominated by the "Retro" scene, in which clothing, glasses and hair from the 30's through the 50's seemed to be popular again. The "Goth" thing really took off, too.

Books & comics: the Vampire Lestast series, and "Sandman" by Neil Gaiman.

TV: Simpsons, X-Files, Millennium, and Babylon-5 for us nerds in the crowd. "Star Trek" had about 9 million shows on all sorts of different broadcasters, all of which died almost at once around the millennial mark. MTV was still fairly popular and had "Beavis & Butthead", picking up the crude humor mantle in the days right after "Ren & Stimpy". Popular regular programming seemed to be dominated by "Friends" and "Seinfeld". The news was all about Yugoslavia & Monica Lewinsky.

All in all, I actually rather liked the '90's. I found nearly all the pop culture stuff of the time to be either cool, fun and enjoyable or at least inoffensive; very little of it really irritated me. It was also my best times in the Reserves, a good job that didn't require any of my free time and I was able to get by on little needs and had maximum freedom, and I was doing my graphic novel and enjoying life a lot.

After 1993, techno started to disappear and trance and other chavvy stuff started to emerge to our detriment.

The first album I bought was The Fat of the Land by The Prodigy when I was 12 or 13. Shortly afterward, I bought their earlier albums, some singles I'd already heard. The thing you'll notice about all my selections is that they, in some ways more obvious than others, sound rather evil, and my pursuit of that sinister edge is what makes me listen to music more than anything else.

The Prodigy - Charly
The Prodigy - Out of Space
The Prodigy - Poison
The Prodigy - Voodoo People
The Prodigy - No Good (start the dance)
The Prodigy - Firestarter When the world was starting to go to shitty spice girls and other dirge, I had this.
The Prodigy - Breathe
The Prodigy - Smack My Bitch Up

Anyway, here's my other 90s dance nostalgia:

The Immortals - Techno Syndrome a song everyone should know.
2 unlimited - no limit
Culture beat - Mr Vain
Snap - Rhythm is a dancer
Reel 2 Real - I like to move it
The Outthere Brothers - Boom Boom Boom

90s rock/metal nostalgia:
NIN - Heresy a song I only discovered after 2000, tragically.
Fear Factory - Replica HAW!
Carcass - Incarnated Solvent Abuse (one of those early death metal songs I had before I knew the genre had a name)
Korn - Falling Away From Me I came a couple of years early for linkin park with my teenage angst, and we had something a lot meaner sounding, I don't know if it's just nostalgia, but the feel of the song is still absolutely immense. It will always be identified in my mind with suffering as a teen from chav bullshit, it was perfectly suited to ameliorating that.

Ace of Base are very 90ies.

I agree with the "split" in the decade around 94 or 95. Before that, alt-rock and even metal very still pretty big, after that, not so much besides the usual suspects (Metallica etc.). But mainstream 90ies, my god, awful awful awful. And the whole late-90ies rap-rock shit (Korn, Limp Bizkit) was awful, too.

In terms of decent music, the 90ies marked the goodbye to the awful 80ies sound with reverb on everything. There were dry, pumping drums again, which I remember as one of the central points of "the 90ies sound".

I'd say there was a 1980s hangover that didn't really end until 1993; 1991 was closer to 1984, while on the other hand 1997 was closer to 2004.

Some cokesuckers removed the Breathe video above, but this link works for now.

A couple of songs we should all remember:

When a couple o' guys who were up to no good...
A nightmare on MY street.

This old Tango adver is quintessentially mid to late 1990s (or very early 2000s). What is the so 1990s it hurts tencho track playing in the background, Zuul?

Big Orange wrote:This old Tango adver is quintessentially mid to late 1990s (or very early 2000s). What is the so 1990s it hurts tencho track playing in the background, Zuul?

It sounds like a remix of Felix - Don't You Want Me.

Adding the the bands already discussed there's: Dave Matthews Band, Matchbox 20, 10,000 Maniacs, Smashing Pumpkins, 2Pac, Salt-N-Pepa, Destiny's Child, Boomtang Boys, B*Witched, Venga Boys, Toy Box was just barely 90s, and Aqua.
I still remember when I first got the Aqua album Aquarium on tape. Aquarium featured such songs as, Barbie Girl, Roses Are Red, Lolipop (Candyman), My Oh My, Turn Back Time, Doctor Jones, and others.
I listened to that tape ALL the time... That song and Squeeze Toy by the Boomtang Boys... It wasn't until much later that I found out what all of my favorite songs actually meant...
Any other crazy songs from the 90s with hidden meanings like that?

Incidentally, some of my favorite music is from 1990s, even though I didn't discover these until mid-2000s. All these three are still active and sound distinctively the same, although most would probably agree with me that their current music is subpar by comparison.

Tori Amos - Crucify
from her Little Earthquakes album

Massive Attack - Teardrop
from their Mezzanine album

Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence
from their Violator album