19
votes
(The MTV show) Daria: The 90s neoliberal fantasia as seen from the point of view of a 90s teenager/millennial
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- Title
- CO-VIDs: the 90's neoliberal fantasia as experienced by daria morgendorffer, millennial
- Authors
- Innuendo Studios
- Duration
- 17:48
- Published
- Jan 28 2021
I was born in '87 and I think this video absolutely nails it.
11:35 in. I stopped and paused to write this quote down.
I dunno how true that is. The US 'War on Drugs' kicked off in '71 and is technically still ongoing, despite the recent change of stance in many States regarding marijuana.
Well, the war on drugs wasn't (isn't) nearly as important to people and the case of failure isn't nearly as dramatic as either of those (well, losing the war in terror hasn't been that big of a deal either IMO but apparently George XLIII got 80% approval ratings out of it, which I'll never understand.)
It was basically a rally-around-the-flag effect after 9/11, abetted by a deeply rotten and complicit media environment, and his support at any rate eroded to practically nothing over the course of his presidency. Bush left office as one of the most unpopular presidents in American history, pretty much universally despised, imagine Trump without his base. I'm much less confused about the path of Dubya's approval ratings than Trump's. I suppose AM radio and Fox News weren't enough to construct an alternate reality as complete as the ones Trump supporters live in today.
Sure, you can move the goalposts. But with "a forever war with an infinite and loosely defined enemy" as the only criteria, I would say the War on Drugs counts.
/pedantry ;)
Would you consider now to also meet that criteria?
Not OP (as in the guy you replied to) but I personally feel while currently we've stopped caring about Islamic terrorism and 'the war on terror', we do want to have a "forever war" with China, although we aren't there yet and won't be for a while, given how the US and China are tightly tied together via trade.
While Republicans aren’t pushing this in good faith, there is plenty of merit for the US to engage in such a cold war, right? The main problem we have right now is that the US is not in a state where we can just treat it as "the good guy" without ignoring fundamental aspects of American society.
How is this different from the cold war? China couldn't have a Gorbachev in power to stop this madness or something?
1,000 times this. Despite relatively keeping up with tech, they still think it’s the 70s as far as economics, education, and job opportunities.
In my dad’s day any teenager could just walk into a place of business and ask if they were hiring and probably get a job by the next day. I seriously struggled to find even the most mediocre job as a teen and young adult. I’ve probably filled out over 300 applications for low-end jobs since leaving high school, it was impossible.
My dad paid for state college all on his own just working part-time as a waiter at spaghetti factory. He lived in a frat house and partied his ass off. He graduated and entered the job market making a “measly” $40,000/y in medical sales in ‘84 and bought a house in ‘89 for $300k (now worth $1.5 million) and makes a little over $120k/y only working for 2 different companies in his lifetime. Stay at home wife, 2 kids, vacation home in Hawaii, and we never wanted for anything and went on several international vacations every year or so.
2008 Recession hit as I graduated highschool. Let’s just say my caliber of life is not quite up to par with his and my parents just don’t understand why I’m not doing it “right” like they did.
My fiancée and I don’t want kids either and that’s another thing. If we even wanted them the economics of it are absurd. My parents don’t understand and just think of us as children who won’t grow up and do “adult” things the proper way.
[EDIT] Another thing to note is how he openly admitted to smoking a lot of weed in highschool and college to me when I was a teen but “it was different then” and often compared today’s “genetically engineered” weed to heroin, toeing the Federal drug rules line. Now that weed is legal in California their house has wax pens in quite a few drawers.
An interesting video about how Daria exemplifies what teenagers/older millenials (now late 30s people) actually felt like in 90s America. It talks a lot about things of and unique to the 90s so if you're under 25 or so, a lot of context will be needed.
Can confirm, haven't even glanced at the video yet. Daria is basically a docudrama about how the 90's felt at that age.
I guess I will ask for context. Feel free to link an article if you don't want to write something about these.
I'll put the most general questions at the top:
If most of you weren't happy during the 90s, where is all this nostalgia coming from? If it's mainly just about the present being worse (which it obviously is), I assume that's kind of proof nostalgia isn't really a valid emotion? Maybe the 90s as an internet user is more worthy of nostalgia and that's what the 35+ year olds here are so nostalgic for, and not the rest of the world of the time?
Why does innuendo studios only mention the internet once, as a gen-X/Millenial divide? I assume the Internet wasn't that important then?
Innuendo Studios asks if being cynical as a teenager due to strong moral principles is accurate for gen-X-ers. If you're one of the handful of 50-year-olds on this site do you think that's accurate?
Why would people liken 90s teenagers to the lost generation given the lost generation was a product of WWI upending everything and undoing all the assumptions held about European society at the time? Young people today are a far better analogy for the lost generation than anyone else.
White nationalism and extremism in the 90s? Huh?
At the 6:53 mark Innuend studios plays 4 clips of 90s songs. Which songs are these and why are they so different apart from the lighting and choreography?
Bill Clinton being apparently a former activist was important for his campaign?
What's up with the stop abortion signs at the Bill Clinton rally at the 12:00 mark?
What was the 'something different' Obama promised exactly? All I know is he apparently promised hope.
I'm not the person you are responding to, but I'm just under the "old millennial" age cutoff, so I'll take a crack at a few of these questions.
I think it is entirely possible to feel nostalgic for eras that were personally difficult. I have a long history of depression and addiction, yet I can still look back at some of the more troublesome years and still have a sense of nostalgia. There are a lot of people who didn't enjoy their teenage years, but can still look back at some of the pop culture or era-defining lifestyles and miss them now that they're gone, especially when society is evolving at a dizzying pace. There are so many different motivating factors for 90s nostalgia, and they often depend on the age of the person reminiscing, but for many older non-marginalized people, the 90s represented a simpler time, at least culturally, economically, and politically.
I'm not sure how to answer this question without repeating exactly what he said. For the younger side of Gen-X (those born around 1980), the internet started popping up during their teenage years. Older Gen-Xers like my stepfather (born in the late 60s/early 70s) didn't experience the internet until their college years or early 20s. Contrast that with millennials like myself who remember hearing AOL's You've got mail! as a kid, used AIM in middle childhood, and helped usher in modern social media during high school and college. That's a pretty massive difference, which actually reminds me of a comment of yours that I'll never forget. You once mentioned that you started using youtube as a kid, which is basically incomprehensible for someone like me who didn't know about youtube until my senior year of high school. That gap between you and me is similar to the internet gap between me and a Gen-Xer, only replace youtube, smartphones, and video streaming with AOL, landline internet connections, and email.
I'm a little too young to answer these questions with any meaningful insight, so hopefully someone else can come in and provide something better. If you want to get an idea of the 'principled slacker' culture that was somewhat prevalent in the early/mid 90s, check out the movie Reality Bites - Ethan Hawke's character about sums it up.
Tale as old as time
This is actually why I wanted to respond to the post. I don't have all the correct songs to match the music videos, but this should still give you an idea of how different the pop culture was throughout the decade.
Exhibit A - 1990-92ish
Exhibit B - mainstream in 92, peaked around 94
Exhibit C - early 90s. Clearly intended for a different audience than the previous video
Exhibit D - late 90s
It's hard to understate how different these fads were during the 90s and how quickly they changed. I think about this fairly often, and I think that the cultural decades don't really align with the years. For example, the cultural fads that we might consider distinctly 80s don't really show up until around 83-85, and people like us might see images from the early 80s and confuse them with the 70s. The 60s is probably the easiest decade to notice this disparity, with the early 60s looking a lot like the 50s and the late 60s being The Sixties. The 90s had its own version of this and you can see it pretty clearly when you compare MC Hammer (Exhibit A) or Madonna's Vouge to Jay-Z or Britney Spears (Exhibit D). Watch that first TLC video (Exhibit C) and compare it to this one. Same artist, same decade, very different vibe. IMO, the early 90s is closer to the late 80s, the mid-90s was its own thing, and most of the late 90s seems to have stuck around until 04.
You're missing the second half of his promise, which was change. It's difficult to summarize the promise of the Obama campaign to someone who is only familiar with the outcome of his presidency, in part because it might make those of us who bought into it sound dumb, but also because politics were considerably different before the Great Recession. I'm going to dramatically simplify things here, but Obama's primary campaign in 2008 was similar to Sanders's in 2016 - the big difference being the issues voters cared about. Looking back, Obama was somewhat vague about a lot of things, but the thing that clearly set him apart from Clinton was his position on the Iraq War and the war on terrorism. Prior to the recession, the war was the biggest issue for voters, and his message of change was largely based on his call to end the war and change our foreign policy. Healthcare and economic policies became more important near the general election as we saw the economy unravel, and he definitely gave people the sense that he wanted to bring change and justice to those systems. He was also very successful in conveying the message of 'hope and change' in or political process, which gave people a sense of optimism that he could unite a country that was becoming increasingly polarized. Again, this is very simplified, but Obama's 2008 message was as much about change as it was about hope.
To briefly address one of your points about the internet: Yeah that's the strange thing about people around my age, we grew up with the internet but it was so different and frankly quaint to what kids have now.
We waited sometimes minutes for images to slowly download, page by page, and simple chat programs were pretty much our social media.
It's strange having this disconnect where I'm a product of the internet age yet feel so far behind kids today who have used a tablet since they were toddlers and have had social media accounts since they were a preteen or even younger. I play video games all the time but seeing a 10 year old play an FPS battle royale on their phone confounds me.
I feel connected enough to not feel like I'm ancient and I'm aware of most trends thanks to being so plugged into the internet for so long and yet I'm certainly still out of touch.
Definitely. I remember when the video ipod came out during my final year of high school. I was amazed by the fact that it could hold so much information and that it had a little color screen! I remember my friend telling me that the next step was to have a full screen ipod with touchscreen capabilities, and I called bullshit immediately. He wasn't even describing the iphone - the product he was describing didn't have any internet connectivity, camera, or phone capabilities, yet it still seemed too futuristic to me. I don't know how to convey the feeling that came with seeing such a huge leap in technology to someone who has grown up with it (at least from the perspective of a technologically blind ape like myself who didn't see any of it coming). I feel like my great-grandmother trying to describe life before the automobile.
Man this defined me as a young gen-x ers. See things like the lilith fair. I was 20 something when daria was on. I had no idea what it was about-largely because of my indignant morals i refused to watch tv except for the simpsons and the x-files. I was super staunch about separating my recycling, ditched my car and got fired from more than one job because i tended to be stinky from my bicycle commute.
This all started for me in high school.
Hmm. Today, when we feel something is unfair, we try to give a good reason to blame our political enemies for it and our side would fix it. Why didn't people do that in the past? "No talking about politics with friends" means only actual intellectuals and scientists talk about politics with eachother? People earnestly believed in civility?
I believe you may have replied to the wrong comment.
I'm pretty sure not. I replied to you because you're talking about how you relate to "the principled slacker" idea of the 90s, and if I've understood that idea correctly, that culture is based on feeling like the world is so unfair you can only look at it cynically, whereas when we look at what we think are injustices in the world today we largely try to find a political opinion to blame for it today, and I want to know why people apparently didn't do that.
I’m sorry I’m having a little trouble tracking you.
My stance was and mostly still is some kind of weird synthesis of bo lozoff, robert anton wilson, and wendell berry.
Principled, mildly absurdist, but ultimately optimisitc and very staunch. Not cynical.
I didn’t and don’t consider the world unfair, just short sighted and overly tied to biology. But i’m still essentially optimistic, I belive humanity will work it out.
I believe the western world has become more narcissistic both among individuals and collectively, that maybexplain your observations.
Thanks for reminding me that Innuendo Studios exists, this didn't get recommended to me for some reason! Good watch.