Again, we find the ’90s on our minds.  We ride a wave of nostalgia, seeking solace in those pre-COVID, pre-smart phone times. People and groups often feel nostalgic for the past when current circumstances are deficient, leaving us with a sense that something valuable has been lost, an unsettling discontinuity between past and present. Nostalgia often gets a bad rap: Critics dismiss it as regressive or reactionary, a sign that our view of the past is uncritically monolithic, making it easy to adhere to a rigid ideology. However, as those of us who study nostalgia can attest, it is also a complex, ambivalent emotion that can improve our personal and social wellbeing. In times like ours, immersing in a classic ’90s movie like Reality Bites may be a sign of emotional and psychological health, and a way of moving forward.

That millennials and Gen Xers are nostalgic for the 1990s is to be expected—we are typically nostalgic for the times in which we came of age. But the current ’90s nostalgia craze is a broader cultural phenomenon. Members of Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, are nostalgic for this decade that they didn’t even live through. Such “displaced nostalgia” is easily triggered by the way particular eras are represented in popular culture. Today we are awash in ’90s nostalgia, as evidenced by the resurgence of Friends and reboots of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Wonder Years, Saved by the Bell, and Sex and the City, among others. In the world of fashion, grunge has returned—witness the prevalence of distressed jeans—along with graphic tees, platform shoes, and cropped tops. Bands from the 1990s are also making comebacks: the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls. And books are dedicated to the decade.

In the early 1990s, my dissertation advisor, Jerry Markle, and I conducted a study that asked over 200 college students the question: “If you could step into a time machine and press any year to go to—forward, or backward in time—what year would you pick and why?” The majority of students, young Gen Xers at the time, chose decades they never knew firsthand, the most popular being the 1960s. Respondents, likely reacting to the ways that decade had been mythologized in pop culture, perceived the 1960s as a time when young adults had more freedom. As one student, who chose 1969, told us, “This was a time where it was acceptable to be lost and confused and not have an understanding of where tomorrow is going. We can’t do that today.” Students’ comments showed they associated the 1960s with music, free love, and drugs. A student who selected 1968 did so because “there was love in the air, lots of good drugs and the Grateful Dead had just begun…also, there was no AIDS and everybody was having sex.”

If we were to conduct that survey today, what would we find? What explains Gen Z expressing displaced nostalgia for the 1990s? Popular culture again may give us clues but there are other factors that explain the trend. Consider the key events that have shaped Gen Z: the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001; the Great Recession of 2007-2009; gun violence (Gen Z has been called the “School Shooting Generation”); weather disasters caused by climate change; extreme political polarization; and COVID-19. Faced constantly with disaster, it’s no wonder young people seek escape beyond their times.

They also seek escape beyond their technological milieu. The 1990s were the last decade before the internet and smart phones took over people’s lives and changed the way we consume culture. We still made mixtapes for ourselves or our friends, taking great pleasure in compiling songs onto cassette tapes. There was also more excitement in chance encounters—when you heard your favorite songs play on the car radio, or when a particularly juicy, train-wrecky installment of Behind the Music aired on VH1. Today, with streaming, we can binge almost any television program over a weekend. The built-in anticipation of waiting to watch your favorite shows on a particular night of the week is gone.

Technology has transformed face-to-face interactions and relationships, too. MIT social psychologist Sherry Turkle has warned of technology’s deleterious effects on our ability to meaningfully communicate with one another and build empathy. As much as our technological devices can do, they are no substitute for authentic human relationships, which feature raw emotion, complex verbal and nonverbal cues, and genuine concern about others’ wellbeing. Our young people, the born-digital generation, experience a great deal of digital stress.

In recent years, during class discussions about technology and stress, many students in my sociology classes have expressed a desire to opt out of social media platforms, and to put away their phones for a while. They report feeling an obligation to be reachable, all the time. And the inevitable social comparisons that social media platforms facilitate has concerning implications for mental health, as well.

A big part of the appeal of Friends, and perhaps a reason for its huge resurgence, could very well be the novelty of seeing young adults navigating relationships and experiences with one another, and not through digital devices. When the characters meet at Central Perk, their local café hangout, they interact face-to-face. In real life today, coffee shops are often filled with atomized individuals tuned into their phones or laptops. Cell phones have become a ubiquitous “involvement shield”—sociologist Erving Goffman’s term for a social cue indicating that the individual is not engaged in the physical space they are occupying. Surely, the (over)use of digital devices has adversely affected the vibrancy of public spaces, the sense of shared community with others, and awareness of what is happening in one’s surroundings. Perhaps the current nostalgic turn to the ’90s can facilitate an intentional rejection of being so glued to our phones.

Social psychological research shows that nostalgia can facilitate continuity of identity, protect against loneliness, and promote healthy connections with others. In times of great uncertainty, it may be healing to put on some ripped jeans and a baggy t-shirt, invite some friends over, and play your favorite mixtape (which probably features songs by Nirvana, Boyz II Men, and R.E.M). Nostalgic reverie can give way to a future-directed nostalgia that envisions a brighter future. It may be that we can all find some inspiration in looking back.

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The last decade of the previous millennium is suddenly all the rage, claiming a growing slice of our cultural mindshare. Monica Lewinsky is on the speaking circuit. American cable networks have served up series based on the O.J. Simpson trial and Anita Hill confirmation hearings, as well as remakes of everything from Twin Peaks to the X-Files. And, as we contemplate sending the Clintons back to the White House, the ’90s are framing many of the policy debates underlying this year’s presidential election. Clinton-era economic globalization, anti-crime efforts, welfare reform, and financial deregulation are all on trial this election year.

Nostalgia for the ’90s is triggered by plenty of contemporary prompts, but the trend is also a matter of generational scheduling. We’ve acquired the requisite amount of distance from the decade to allow it to come into focus as a distinct, coherent period of time, the way the 1980s came into focus for us in the last 15 or so years, and the way the “aughts” will in another decade or so. In addition, the children of the ‘90s are now coming into their own as cultural gatekeepers in movie studios and media, able to indulge in and share their personal nostalgia.

More than anything, the ’90s in retrospect were an exuberant interlude between the Cold War and the post-Sept. 11 era. Hardly anyone would dispute that. The debate is over whether you think we wasted this exuberant interlude by indulging in mindless pursuits of no lasting impact, or whether the decade stands, as Bill Clinton asserts, as a consequential time of sound governance, impressive innovation, expanding opportunity, and prosperity.

I am with Clinton in this debate, but it isn’t hard to see the appeal of the counterargument that this was a decade—as Seinfeld, the iconic TV sitcom of the ’90s referred to itself— “about nothing.” The notion is that American society, liberated from the decades-long nuclear standoff with the Soviets, was allowed to exhale, and focus on frivolity. Even in the political realm, the Inquisition of Clinton for his sexual peccadillos (or the peccadillos themselves, if you insist) can be interpreted as an admission that this was a new era of lowered stakes, when politics wasn’t constrained by the exigencies of confronting existential threats.

As a society, we struggled in the ’90s to assess risk, and this was as true in foreign policy as it was in the business world and in politics. The decade that started with much angst about declining American economic power (remember the odd popularity of Paul Kennedy’s history tome on the decline of great powers and worries about how Japan was taking over?) and a stubborn recession would end with strong economic growth and soaring financial markets amidst what then Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance.”

In foreign policy, the end of the Cold War allowed America to consolidate our capitalist model as the default for the international order. It also made policymakers far more tactical and opportunistic about weighing the costs and benefits of engaging American military power around the world, especially since we were no longer in a global contest with the Soviet Union. We oscillated between being enamored of our sole superpower status and being mindful of our historic reluctance to play global policeman. We were stunned at how easy it was to defeat Saddam Hussein’s army in the first Gulf War, but then chastened by the loss of 18 soldiers in a task force under the Joint Special Operations Command in Somalia. Soon thereafter, we tragically stood by as genocide took place in Rwanda. Later in the decade, somewhat belatedly, we led NATO to destroy ethnic Serbian militarism in the Balkans, but allowed looming threats from non-state terrorist actors to fester elsewhere, like Afghanistan, with fatal consequences in the 2000s. When it came to national security, it was the case-by-case decade.

However, the sense that we were no longer stuck in a divided, zero-sum world proved enormously beneficial for cross-border collaboration and economic expansion around the world. The Europeans transformed their common market into a full-blown union, with a shared currency; closer to home, the North American Free Trade Area was born; in Asia, the world’s most populous nation became more integrated into the global economy; and a loose set of governing trading rules became the World Trade Organization.

With nationalism resurgent in 2016, and even well meaning First World elites fetishizing locally sourced everything, I miss the spirit of those days: the recognition that we are all in this together, and the ambition to raise living standards around the world.

Globalization and technology exacerbated inequality within many countries over time. But it’s less often acknowledged that the single most important economic story of the past two decades is the unprecedented decline in dire poverty around the world, and the expansion of a global middle class. Many of the institutions and approaches from the ’90s may be under siege in today’s political climate, but their legacy continues to be impressive.

On the domestic front, too, the ’90s were the opposite of a wasted decade. The U.S. economy registered its longest economic expansion ever, from March 1991 to March 2001, creating nearly 25 million jobs in the period. Americans enjoyed rising wages, low inflation, and accelerating productivity growth, thus almost forgetting about economic cycles and the concept of risk. Uncle Sam benefited from the good times, as government deficits gave way to healthy surpluses. The financial exuberance around the internet’s adoption proved to be irrational in the end, with all the buzzy talk about a “new economy,” but the hype around the transformative power of the new technologies was well deserved.

For Americans living in cities, the decade saw a vast improvement in our physical surroundings as well. I lived in New York in 1990, then mired in the fearful mood captured in Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel. When I returned near the end of the decade after a stint away, I found Manhattanites as likely to be worried about the Disneyfication of their city as they were about their personal safety. Violent crime in New York declined by more than half in the 1990s, and public spaces throughout the city were reclaimed for public enjoyment. The same was true in cities across the country.

It’s as reasonable to second-guess the decade’s bipartisan anti-crime legislation and strategies as it is to second-guess our embrace of globalization in those years. But the conversation should start with a recognition of how much things improved. Pretending the 1990s were a wasteland of frivolity is a recipe for losing sight of that exuberant decade’s bountiful, lasting legacies.

 
*An earlier version incorrectly referred to the 18 Americans who died in Somalia as Marines. They were Army soldiers in a task force assembled from several branches of the military.

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“The ’90s,” as Zócalo Public Square publisher Gregory Rodriguez put it, “were rough” on Los Angeles. Rodriguez was moderating a Zócalo/Museum of Contemporary Art event at MOCA Grand Avenue provocatively titled, “Were the ’90s L.A.’s Golden Age?”

Tallying up the iconic Southern California disasters mentioned by the panelists over the course of the evening, the question might seem almost laughable. “But the reaction to the roughness was pretty extraordinary as well,” Rodriguez told an energetic crowd, many of whom clearly had lived through it. “There was this sense of vitality to the era.”

While the first half of the decade “was horrendous,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, the second half marked a comeback that built the Los Angeles of today, and gave the city a greater sense of self. He recalled a UCLA professor telling him he was “parochial” for choosing the L.A. economy as the focus of his scholarship. But after watching the city nearly fall apart, almost every major institution of higher education formed a department dedicated to studying the city. “We rediscovered Los Angeles as academics in the 1990s,” he said, noting that today it can be hard to keep up with all the literature written about the city, a sharp departure from the early 1990s.

“For me, Los Angeles in the ’90s was all about culture,” recalled MOCA’s chief curator, Helen Molesworth. “When the needle dropped on NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, something shifted for me and a lot of my friends.” That was 1988, but for her it was when the ’90s began. “L.A. was all of a sudden a place where culture was made,” she said. MOCA’s 1992 exhibition “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s” was a landmark event, as was watching the emergence of artists like Mike Kelley and Catherine Opie, “artists to be reckoned with,” said Molesworth. “The birth of L.A. as a culture engine is really the 1990s.”

Why, asked Rodriguez, did L.A. begin to take itself seriously in the 1990s?

Hollywood had always been the producer of mainstream culture for most of America, noted Harold Meyerson, the current executive editor of The American Prospect who served the same role at L.A. Weekly throughout the ’90s. The change came thanks to growing cultural legitimacy, but also to a political evolution that resulted from the chaotic events of the first half of the decade. It was “a story of the rise of a kind of Latino working class finally finding itself, finding an identity, and finding some power,” he said. The backlash in response to Proposition 187—a ballot initiative that banned undocumented immigrants from using state services including public education and non-emergency health care—changed Los Angeles politics. It birthed a new generation of Latino activists and brought together Latinos, the labor movement, and progressives in a coalition that changed the city and eventually the state then the country, Meyerson said.

Guerra elaborated on the changes brought about by this new coalition, including bringing Latinos into positions of political power, helping Los Angeles pass a 1997 bond measure allocating $2.4 billion to the building of new LAUSD schools, and passing propositions that led to the building of mass transit for those who couldn’t afford cars.

Turning to University of Southern California race and pop culture scholar Dr. Todd Boyd, Rodriguez asked how these changes, both political and demographic—as Anglos left the city and a Latino majority emerged—manifested themselves in depictions of Los Angeles at the time.

Boyd listed a number of movies that showed “Los Angeles as a destination but also as a unique identity”: Boyz n the Hood, Menace II Society, American Me, Boogie Nights, and Short Cuts. West Coast hip-hop emerged as a major force in music during this period as well. Today, the gang activity of the time and the way it seeped into popular discourse is “safe” and “nostalgic”; Straight Outta Compton was a blockbuster movie last summer. “But at the time, the elements that make up that film were taking place in the streets,” said Boyd. “It’s one thing to sit here now and look back on it fondly. But it’s another thing to have lived in the midst of it.”

These changes weren’t necessarily in evidence in the contemporary art world at the time, said Molesworth. In “Don’t Look Back: The 1990s at MOCA,” on view at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA through July 11, 2016, only one work makes any mention of the 1992 riots. It was made, said Molesworth, by an African-American artist in New York who was depicting a white German critic’s obsession with these events. “This was still an extremely white institution concerned with problems of whiteness,” said Molesworth. And at the time, they would not even have been called “problems of whiteness … because they were just the problems of the culture.” She added, “When we look back on the ’90s, we look through the frame of the current moment.”

As the event drew to a close, Rodriguez asked the panelists to reflect on what is better and worse about the Los Angeles of today versus the Los Angeles of the 1990s.

“There was an edge, a sense of momentum, having been through these hells,” said Meyerson.“Recovering from all this there was a certain sense of bouncing back.” He added, somewhat ruefully (and with the caveat that he is only a visitor to the city and no longer a resident), “I don’t get a sense of a kind of momentum and edge today.”

Boyd recalled visiting downtown Los Angeles before he moved here in 1992. “I just remember how amazed I was at how barren downtown L.A. was,” he said. “It was not centralized, and there really wasn’t much going on at all.” A few years later, he decided to move downtown; people thought he was crazy. Not anymore. “This has become the hottest part of L.A. To go from it being barren and nothing to being crowded with traffic, multiple cultural options, multiple dining options, to have witnessed this and to have had it grow up around me—is one of the most interesting changes to L.A.,” he said.

Before turning the discussion over to an audience question-and-answer session that touched on the decline of Westwood as a destination and the problem of homelessness from the 1990s to the present, Rodriguez turned back to the central question of the evening: “I think we can conclude that while we had an edge and sense of momentum in the 1990s, it was not L.A.’s golden era.”

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