Mass Popular Culture: We Are Stuck in the ’90s Again

The Canadian folk-pop band Moxy Früvous sang of being “Stuck in the 90’s” even while they were still in the first half of the decade. Being Canadian folk singers, they imagined the decade they lived in as a right-wing dystopia in which broadcast political opinions amounted to little more than saying that the “homeless are stupid.” While daydreaming about a country that was uniformly left-wing, and punching at the likes of Pat Buchanan and GameBoys — two things on screens, not exactly in power — they lamented the lame lifestyle of punching the clock. They sing,

I’ve always been convinced that nostalgia is always for the last time you weren’t financially and administratively responsible for your own life. Someone else was paying the bills and filling out the forms. For a lot of Boomers, this was in the 1950s or ’60s. My last days like this were in the late 1990s. But then I look back and see that, even in my 1990s, people with their lives ahead of them already felt stuck. In Noah Baumbach’s 1995 coming-of-age comedy Kicking and Screaming, Max, played by Chris Eigeman, finds himself in paralysis just four months after graduating liberal-arts school: “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday,” he explains, “I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I can’t go to the bar, because I’ve already looked back on it, and I didn’t have a good time.”

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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The Canadian folk-pop band Moxy Früvous sang of being “Stuck in the 90’s” even while they were still in the first half of the decade. Being Canadian folk singers, they imagined the decade they lived in as a right-wing dystopia in which broadcast political opinions amounted to little more than saying that the “homeless are stupid.” While daydreaming about a country that was uniformly left-wing, and punching at the likes of Pat Buchanan and GameBoys — two things on screens, not exactly in power — they lamented the lame lifestyle of punching the clock. They sing,

I’ve always been convinced that nostalgia is always for the last time you weren’t financially and administratively responsible for your own life. Someone else was paying the bills and filling out the forms. For a lot of Boomers, this was in the 1950s or ’60s. My last days like this were in the late 1990s. But then I look back and see that, even in my 1990s, people with their lives ahead of them already felt stuck. In Noah Baumbach’s 1995 coming-of-age comedy Kicking and Screaming, Max, played by Chris Eigeman, finds himself in paralysis just four months after graduating liberal-arts school: “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday,” he explains, “I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I can’t go to the bar, because I’ve already looked back on it, and I didn’t have a good time.”