What happened back in 1989/1990?

I found a small detailed time line of some of the more major events from 1980-to-1989
Here

As for remembering, I was born in 1985. All I remember was awesome cartoons, Commadore 64 games, Painfully colorful clothing patterns (usually with various shapes in neon colors), Side ponytails, MTV and the good the bad and the ugly (the backstreet boy craze i didn't understand at all), chewing on Lightbrite pegs, and bugging my parents for change so I could buy Now and Laters and Cowtails.

reply to post by Partygirl


I don't know about that. People change based on the circumstances they find themselves in. I agree, people as a whole, barring special circumstances, don't really change. There will always be good times as there will always be bad, just depends. As for eating people, (btw barf) it's happened many times before, folks did it to survive, it's not a matter of change but of survival.

What you are feeling is called "getting older" and "growing up."

I said the same thing about the 1960s and '70s.

The biggest change from 1990 onward.... Computers in every home and MTV doesn't play videos 24/7 anymore.

Another 10 years and you can talk about thegood ol' days...LOL.

Originally posted by Partygirl
reply to post by TopherWayne

 

No. People do change. It's easier to be good in good times, it's easier to be bad in bad times. People ate other human beings to survive in East Europe at the end of WWII, I don't think those same people did it again afterwards.

i believe things have become more chaotic.
more mental problems,
more tiny scope of hope in life
more of a fear driven society
increase is family problems
children having sex waay too much
homosexyality, bisexuality and all the other alities
music has become a lifestyle for all
music is not music but lifestyles promoted by music industry which is motivated by dehumanizing people and basing everything on sex sells.

we are all pretty much bombarded with advertisments that slowly make us into conssumerists.

Many People started to be addicted to Heroin and Cocaine at that Time
because they could not handle all the Changes!

There was a huge and welcomed Egoism
and it was the beginning of the Rave-Culture in a big Scale!

I was born in 1979, so in 89-90, I was just a ten year old kid and remember it fondly. I was in grade 5-6, touring with the Canadian production of Les Miserables. Great story if anyone wishes to read it; students frustrated with oppression rebel against their government. Anyway, to the OP's question...

I think in the west, we began to really see the effects of Monetarist policies, "trickle down" economics, an acceleration of globalization and the decline of the welfare state. The media was conglomerated and a there seemed to be a new message. As a previous poster mentioned, heroes weren't heroes anymore; just look at professional sports. This was around the time salaries got out of hand, winning seemed more important than playing with loyalty and honor. The world seemed to shift towards a much more individualistic state

These are all blanket generalizations, but just my 2 cents

reply to post by Partygirl

Or you had all the Tarantino movies, where the good guys were a bunch of creepy foul-mouthed thugs. See, heroes weren't heroes anymore and bad guys had their good side. Everything got all mixed up, culturally.

That was nothing new. If you read second generation Noir / Pulp Fiction you can see this already happening. The name of Tarantino's movie wasn't very original. He was directly stating what influenced the movie.

I was born in 1981. To me the change came in circa 1991 and 1992. That is when music really turned and pop culture seemed to spin on it's head. Suddenly irony was king. Wings and Seinfield were getting big. Northern Exposure came along and changed up things in a subtle but big way.

America was figuring out to do with peace and tranquility. We didn't have any big bad enemies at the gate. We were kind of floating and looking for a new direction. Technology was exploding and the way we communicated was changing. Message writer pagers were becoming popular, bag phones (cell phones in a bag) were making headway in the market. Everything was changing.

Add to that the fact that peace didn't pay off the way we thought it would. The end of the Cold War was very anti-climatic. Unfortunately it also left a lot of people with no sense of purpose. There was no common bond. American's found a rallying point with Desert Storm but it was over quickly and faded in to history.

The nation ended up kind of lost and bored. This seemed to grow in to a sense of agitation and anger that was expressed in the music and culture. There was a sense that there should be something more awaiting those coming of age. We had been told that when the Russians stopped being communist all would be right in the world. American's would find a whole new world of freedom and prosperity at their door step. There was a lot more prosperity but it wasn't going to the middle class and poor. We had talks of NAFTA and jobs disappearing. A sense of anger arose from traditional middle class jobs sectors disappearing.

To me the 1990's seemed like a transition in to something more angry and bitter. I don't remember any great spiritual awakenings. I remember hostility and angst. Then as the internet and cell phones flourished there was a great driving apart that fueled the hostility and anger in whole new ways.

People became more disconnected as they became more "plugged in." Families started communicating via e-mail instead of phone or even face to face. Privacy eroded as phones followed us every where and we became biraged by the constant demands of life that years earlier would have seemed unimportant. Being connected stopped being about actual connections with people. It came to mean being burdened by electronics.

There were a lot of changes that occured and a lot of them really did permenantly change society. So, in a way 1989 really did have more in common with 1959 than 1998. The world really was a different place.

Imagine waking up in the morning to an actual alarm clock and putting a cassette tape in your boom box before taking a shower. Then transferring the tape to your Walk Man to listen to it while eating breakfast and reading the newspaper. If you got up before 7am you could catch the local news and find out the weather. If you missed that you could call a phone number to get the current temperature and daily forecast.

It is hard to express in words how much has changed in twenty years.

What happened - was after the strategic restructuring of communism vis a fake collapse - Multicultural Political correctness was foisted upon the western world to become its operating system.

In conclusion, America today is in the throes of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. In “hate crimes” we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it. It’s exactly what we have seen happen in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it’s coming here. And we don’t recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that it’s not funny, it’s here, it’s growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.

www.academia.org...

I don't recall anything very significant about 89-90. Sure, there were shifts in trends and styles and maybe even interests. But that always happens and will continue to happen. That is why each decade is defined in unique ways. The 90s were different than the 80s, just like the 80s were different than the 70s.

I was born in '73 and I remember watching old black and white reruns like leave it to beaver and that kind of stuff. While I was watching those shows as a kid, it seemed like it was from so long ago. It was ancient to me. Now, looking back, that was only what? 20 years old or something at the time? When I think about the last 20 years, it seems like almost no time at all has passed. That really puts it in perspective for me.

On a side note. When I was a little kid in the 80s, I thought that when my parents were little kids that the world was in black & white. Like an old B&W television. I don't know why I thought that. lol

Originally posted by TopherWayne
On a side note. When I was a little kid in the 80s, I thought that when my parents were little kids that the world was in black & white. Like an old B&W television. I don't know why I thought that. lol

Yes, me too. When my mum used to tell me stories of her childhood, I used to picture them in black and white!

Originally posted by MrRoboto
reply to post by fooks

 

HA!, I love the music from the 80's. It's so random. I find a lot of todays music is borrowing from that time frame.

less guitar oriented, tho and better dressed. i hope, has to be!

that was the big hair band era, disco finally died. lol!! but came back as hip hop.


the 90's borrowed from the 70's.

since 2001 i haven't listened to any mainstream music as much as i used too, at all, being in asia.

i can't wait for motown to come back someday.

Hmmmmm ... was the change more like 1991 or '92 maybe? I was watching the pilot of Northern Exposure, and the fashion is still very 80s ... the guy has a mullet for crying out loud.

Add to that the fact that peace didn't pay off the way we thought it would. The end of the Cold War was very anti-climatic. Unfortunately it also left a lot of people with no sense of purpose. There was no common bound. American's found a rallying point with Desert Storm but it was over quickly and faded in to history.

The nation ended up kind of lost and bored. This seemed to grow in to a sense of agitation and anger that was expressed in the music and culture. There was a sense that there should be something more awaiting those coming of age. We had been told that when the Russians stopped being communist all would be right in the world. American's would find a whole new world of freedom and prosperity at their door step. There was a lot more prosperity but it wasn't going to the middle class and poor. We had talks of NAFTA and jobs disappearing. A sense of anger arose from traditional middle class jobs sectors disappearing.

To me the 1990's seemed like a transition in to something more angry and bitter. I don't remember any great spiritual awakenings. I remember hostility and angst. Then as the internet and cell phones flourished there was a great driving apart that fueled the hostility and anger in whole new ways.

People became more disconnected as they became more "plugged in." Families started communicating via e-mail instead of phone or even face to face. Privacy eroded as phones followed us every where and we became biraged by the constant demands of life that years earlier would have seemed unimportant. Being connected stopped being about actual connections with people. It came to mean being burdened by electronics.

There were a lot of changes that occured and a lot of them really did permenantly change society. So, in a way 1989 really did have more in common with 1959 than 1998. The world really was a different place.

Imagine waking up in the morning to an actual alarm clock and putting a cassette tape in your boom box before taking a shower. Then transferring the tape to your Walk Man to listen to it while eating breakfast and reading the newspaper. If you got up before 7am you could catch the local news and find out the weather. If you missed that you could call a phone number to get the current temperature and daily forecast.

It is hard to express in words how much has changed in twenty years.

We've never really left the 90s have we?!

I don't think this present world is really any better, there's perhaps not as much profound grief as in the past, but I don't know, in a way, this age seems more hollow and meaningless. Everyone seems so depressed. It feels like a sham world not the real world.

Originally posted by okamitengu
the world was quiet.

the wall had come down, communism was dead. we had no great enemies in the world.

for the first time in 100 years, there was a calm.

And there was neon color t-shirts and parachute pants.

The 90's was a whole lot of "let's try this out" and "Oh, god, why did we try that out??"

Very similar to the 80's in that regard...

reply to post by m1991


The guy with the mullet was the disc jockey, right? Chris? He had been in jail for awhile and was a little behind. The show really represented the many generations of America and the sense of change and conflict each one brought to the American experience.

You have the retired astronaut that seems like a 50's cliche of "a man's man." The disc jockey was supposed to represent the hippy culture of the sixties and seventies. The doctor represented the generation coming up that felt entitled and was riddled with angst. So on and so forth. It was really a clever show early on that dealt with a lot of themse and issues in ways that made them quarky but interesting.

If you watch a few episodes and look at it from the long view you'll see how much it really said about a lot of things. It was a very modern existensial look at America. The timing was perfect as it really bridged the gap between modern and post modern society.

Some might even say it was an advocate or at least an early adopter of the post modern idea that change is constant and progress doesn't exist or is undefinable. I can see argung either side.

Born in 1965...yep, I'm an old-timer. Lived through it all. I remember the 80's as a time fueled by coc aine and money. The 90's brought in the DotComs and the bubble burst in 2000...One of the many reasons the economy started to decline.

Anyway, as we get older, we only remember how great it was "back in the day." We were younger, care free and didn't have all the grown up problems that we do in the second half of our lives. Ask your parents, they'll tell you the world has gone mad. Same things their parents were telling them.

Yes, the world now has more people and fewer jobs thanks in large part to new technology. What once took 100 people to do, now takes 10. Newspapers are obsolete and we have a 24hr news cycle that highlights the worst of humanity. We hear of a child being abducted in California and we tell our kids in Maine to stay inside. As we get older, we fear the things we didn't think about when we were younger.

Try ignoring this board and the news for a week and see if your outlook on life changes. Instead of focusing on what is happening in the middle east, focus on what is happening in your town. Instead of wanting things that others have, enjoy the things you do have.

Fear is the disease and Panic is contagious....Reason is the cure.

I'm a class of '89, I noticed change when Nirvana's Nevermind album came out in '91, the attitude of us young people shifted. We went from long hair, drinking Jack straight from the bottle and driving drunk listening to hair metal, oblivious to the real world to being self-absorbed, withdrawn, hating on our parents and losing our faith in the system all within one year of '91 and the apperance of grunge.

I went along with this change by becoming a goth, I gave up on college dreams and picked up the bottle as an excuse to escape the ennui that evolved around me. When the 90s ended, I crawled my way back to responsibility and sobreity as the era changed again, my generation was in there 30s and # had to get done as the technology evolved to be personal, we kept our entitlement of self-absorbtion but now we can take it on the go and share our banal feelings with the world, as ours was the generation of "Change".

I turned 8 on 8/18 of 1989. Apparently 8 is the luckiest chinese number. It was a horrible birthday, my Dad bought me a kite and I kept asking him to take me out to fly it and he just sent me to bed. No cake. All I kept thinking was, "stupid Chinese dont know nuthin!" Ah, to be 8 again when that was all that was wrong with the world.

As for a shift or change. I believe that happened in 1999. Of course, my daughter was born in 1999, so perhaps it was a shift in attitude on a personal level. It was also the year they began airing commercials for drugs on TV. Maybe, everyone around me went into a mindless drug induced stupor, I don't know!

The eighties did seem softer, safer. There were still freedoms, families, dirt roads and abandoned places to play. Fewer fences, more imagination, less distractions. It is strange to grow older, I wonder how our kids will feel about these times in the future?