Grooving to 90's music

I am completely in love with the 90's. This is the decade my older siblings were teens, and I became a teenager in the middle of the decade. I look at it with nostalgia, as my friends introduced me to Nirvana, gangsta rap, and of course the Internet. We had such hope during that decade, and some considerable delusion (in middle school I thought all the great movements were over - and I was sad because I felt like an activist without a cause).

We all just needed medication. Prozac would give everyone the chance to be happy at the cost of losing individuality; to be unhappy was to assert an individuality of one's own. That's one of the weirdest things of the decade - as a nation we were mostly happy. War seemed to be something that would now only be fought with planes and missiles and hardly any Americans would die in them (the other side was expected to die, brutally and with many casualties).

Music reflected our inner division - videos would be full of happy, day-glo colors while at the same time the lyrics would reflect dark times - paranoia, boredom, and the fear of losing individuality. At its core, the 90s was all about asserting your self and becoming unique. MTV fed on this desire, which eventually led in the reality shows of the next decade. There was strong fear (among the young anyway) of being a nobody - just another wage slave to the corporate treadmill. You had to do something brand new, and the Internet offered that chance for us to show off.

The NBC show Friends showed a lifestyle we all hoped to have - rooming with our buddies while we embarked on the path to success. The show suggested we'd all find a niche doing whatever it was we loved - and somehow our life would be successful. Seinfeld was about nothing; in many the decade was about nothing in particular. The biggest thing was just to be cool - and by that we meant taking it easy, living the mellow stoner's life, not worrying about plans but just making waves as drifted down the river of life.

We wanted to reject all commercialism, yet at the same time we were infused with it to a greater degree than previous generations. We wanted to stop the Man from putting us down; we were too lazy to really fight. We wanted to focus the world on the suffering of others; our ADD kept us from focusing long enough.

The 90s didn't end in 2000. They ended in September 11, 2001. Soon after that, humor was no longer carefree. Songs were more about being a member of our country, rather than being anti-social or too cool to  be labeled. After that day, we left the hopeful delusions of the adolescent Internet age and into a sobering adulthood.