I can’t remember the first time I admitted to not knowing anything about some cornerstone of 1990s or early 2000s pop culture. I can’t remember the last time, either. It happens a lot. I’ve grown more than accustomed by now to people’s jaws dropping, to the universally stunned tone of voice in which they say things like, “You never watched that?” I readily joke that I “basically wasn’t even alive in the ‘90s.”
But I still always wonder what exactly I missed.
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I was homeschooled from kindergarten through 8th grade. Homeschooling doesn’t always beget a stunning degree of pop-cultural isolation, to be sure -- that just kind of happened with me anyway. For most of my childhood, we didn’t have Internet access at our house. We didn’t really need it circa the late ‘90s, when dial-up still predominated and emails were never so urgent that they couldn’t wait for our weekly public library visit. (We joked that by only using the Internet at the local library, we were letting Bill Gates pay for our Internet access.) My parents didn’t see the point in paying for cable, either, so my sister and I were PBS kids through and through. We eagerly awaited the hour and a half every day in which our mother would let us watch some trio of shows -- usually Barney, Arthur, and (if you can believe it) Jeopardy!
All that isn’t to say I was kept completely in the dark. I always came away from the weekly library outing with piles of books, usually after asking my mother, “I know you said only seven, but can I get these too?” My sister and I did dance classes. We went to plays in downtown Tulsa and shopped for groceries at Whole Foods back when it was still Wild Oats. I saw Pokemon and Spongebob merch at Wal-Mart and stared curiously at the Yu-Gi-Oh cards stuffed into a gumball-machine-like-thing at the back of the store, near the restrooms. I saw Toy Story and The Lion King and Mulan… and yet.
There’s a specific breed of nostalgia for the ‘90s among those who grew up in that decade, I’ve noticed. To a degree, I think that’s because we perceive it as a simpler time, a more unhurried time -- before the Internet, before Web 2.0 and social media, before the Bush era and the Iraq War and 9/11 and the world coming at us faster than we can say Charizard. In a sense, the ‘90s were kind of a breather decade for the Western world, a decade-long moment between the Cold War and the war on terror. No wonder people miss the ‘90s so badly.
But at the same time, I think there’s more to it than that. I was struck, when I read Mickey Anderson’s article from last week, by how much of his concept of the ‘90s seems to revolve around pop culture, around stuff. That’s not the first time I’ve encountered this mindset, either; I posted a Facebook status a while ago, asking my friends what pop-cultural things I’d missed in the ‘90s, and they were a fount of suggestions, blowing up my notifications for the next several days. The list of things I’ve been told I need to catch up on, covering everything from the Spice Girls to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Fargo, is now 93 items long. Fitting, since I’m a ‘93 baby.
Any scholar of material culture could tell you that culture both shapes and is shaped by artifacts -- so maybe artifacts are my way in. If I explore the pop culture of the ‘90s, experience the things that were so formative for so many of my friends, I might figure out what they’re missing so much. What I’ve been missing this whole time.
