5 Ways the '90s Made Us Strong
I fear for the newest generation. Their only problems are rampant unemployment, a violent authoritarian movement, and the 2018 Ebola Plague. They were never forged in the fires of the 1990s, forced to survive in the wild with a beeper and a mere three choices of hamburger chain.
Fact is, if you endured the '90s, you can make it through anything. To go outside in that decade was to step into a dreary world of flannel and coffee. The only thing not trying to kill you was Rage Against the Machine, but their idea of music was to saw through baling wire with a nail file. Not even your bleeding ears could distract you from the worst problems of the decade.
#5.
Communism
What was scary about it
Back in the day, the nuclear powerhouses were in constant struggle over how to destroy the middle class. Nobody wanted war, but if millions didn't die, how would we prove whose ideology was right? Kids today only fear nuclear apocalypse for fun, but in the early '90s, these were the ways we calculated ourselves dying:
You have to assume some of the mutants are friendly, though.
We were so scared of nuclear war our superheroes had radioactive origins just so we could pretend toxic immersion would be okay.
Actual sewer-dwelling reptiles love children for a very different reason
Making things worse
Superpowers were a priority for kids in the '80s, because our Russian foes were strong like bear. The only Soviet super-athletes not killing our movie champions in unsportsmanlike conduct were defecting here to steal huge scholarships from underprivileged chess-playing computers. This paranoia was red hot by the '90s! It wasn't till shortly after the Berlin Wall fell that we realized they were but pawns of the Soviet state, thanks to the attitude-changing documentary Gym-Kata 2: Ring Around the Russkie.
It turned out okay, though
Communism was an empty threat by the mid-'90s, but the psychological damage was done. To this day, Americans fear sharing. That, in turn, means more money to fill the emptiness in our lives with mercantile goods! Wooooo! I'ma buy me a jetski! I thank my God I'm a 'Merican!
#4.
AIDS
What was scary about it
Did you have sex after 1989? Holy condoms, Batman, you have AIDS! When you got done watching TV in the '90s, you knew two things: all clothes should be be denim, and two virgins having premarital sex causes AIDS.
HIV is not just a mere thing like a deadly pandemic. That bastard hates everything fun in life, like sex, heroin, and taking other people's blood. It also hates good music, dropkicking Freddie Mercury but leaving hair bands (margarine to glam rock's butter) free to screech their way into their own VH1 shows.
Thank heaven we finally found a cure for Vince Neil
Once musicians realized the disease was gunning for the best part of rock stardom, they fought back with the fury of a Tea Partier reading a history book. Madonna selflessly sacrificed her body on countless penises to show how risky that kind of behavior would be without her alien physiology. Non-stop campaigns educated the public about Bono's lab findings, including:
-AIDS is responsible for more cases of Very Special Episode than racism and bullying combined.
-You can contract HIV just by looking if you lean so close to the virus your eye touches it.
-HIV doesn't spread by hugging, unless the person is inside-out.
-They say you can't get HIV by kissing, but we're going to prove them wrong.
-We all die alone.
Eventually rock surrendered and became grunge, a music completely devoid of sex unless it was between two depressed flies on a rotting nectarine. That's why most alternative music videos look like rain spoiled your church's Salvador Dali-themed orgy.
Be careful. She might give you HIV
The only human beings who had sex that decade were Eazy-E and Sharon Stone. Eazy died a week after finding out his sore throat was actually-woah, AIDS! The only thing Ms. Stone got was an Oscar. You know what that means? HIV decided Sharon Stone was a little too intense for it to commit to.
Making things worse
Trying to remain celibate, our country crossed its legs and endured maximum Cindy Crawford. If you turned on MTV in 1992 and didn't gaze directly upon her glory, you got Denis Leary trying to rant his way into her (denim) underwear with comedy. Which never works, am I right, TV's Gillian Jacobs?
NBC.com
Women can't resist you when you mention them in an essay on AIDS
Your silence only proves my point.
Every day of the '90s was a high-stakes tease by The Most Beautiful Woman in The World, bait-and-switched for a lingering, burning death. My entire pubescence was spent running from Pepsi ads with condoms stuffed in my ears.
It turned out okay, though
At its outer rim, the judicious use of sex-parts is fairly low-risk. And before you take that as advice, remember that I'm drunk right now. Not while I'm writing this, but every time you read it. Regardless, if you wear condoms and have the foresight not to be born in Botswana, you could theoretically have a better chance of becoming an astronaut. And when you get to space, there's no HIV there, so enjoy that zero-gravity sex. Be sure to film it. I need something new in my porn.
#3.
The internet
What was scary about it
I don't want to spoil your notions of technological superiority, but in the time it takes you to read this sentence, the 1993 internet could upload your entire brain into a castle made of green grids using a 2400 baud modem. We capitalized it as Internet, and offered burnt sacrifices, for it was our god. You could hack a computer through the electrical outlet, and the smartest computers (2 gigs memory, 512mb RAM, and a pickle on the side because those are delicious) learned to control electrical appliances that had no circuitry at all, as seen in every movie about hackers except Hackers, which may have included that plot point, but absolutely no one saw.
Making things worse
"The 'net" as it was called by "cybersurfers" on the "world wide web" was a "dangerous" "place." Every week we had to fight off a Skynet or a Lawnmower Man with virtual reality gyroscopes, and you never knew when you'd be plagued by horrifying visions of dancing babies that weren't quite human. It was awesome, until Furries found others like themselves.
I don't know an acceptable way of suggesting a baby be struck dead
It turned out okay, though
Then, in 1995, teen boys discovered something amazing! Science proved the existence of a woman on the internet! Her name was Cindy Margolis, and her clothes were off. The series of tubes known as the interweb shifted its focus to sex. Ever since, kids no longer scavenge porno from dad's closet, or in my case, hobo campgrounds.
Um..why were you scared of Russians in the 90's?
ReplyI'm only 25 and I miss the 90's already, well, the parts of it I remember clearly anyway.
ReplySince when was the Cold War an issue in the 1990s? The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Iron Curtain officially eroded away in 1991. And while people were still dying of AIDS in the '90s, they were predominantly those people who contracted HIV in the 1980s, back when it was actually really scary to contract HIV. People who got it in the '90s had the benefit of effective anti-retrovirals that were capable of holding off the development of AIDS. Take a look at Magic Johnson for one shining example of how, in the '90s, HIV wasn't to be viewed as an automatic death sentence.
ReplyIt's incredibly clear to me that you weren't actually old enough to remember the 1990s and are thus only relying on what you learned in poorly written history books to talk about these things. For #5 you should've talked about the sharp increases in global and domestic terrorism -- 1993 was when the World Trade Center was the target of a bomb that only impacted its parking garage and in the late '90s American embassies in Africa and a US Navy ship docked in the Persian Gulf were all targets of a terrorist organization called Al Qaeda, and a shadowy figure named Osama bin Laden became one of the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted fugitives. And as for #4, safe sex was hammered so far into young people's heads that the idea of having sex with someone without wearing a condom was anathema. We were still just a few years removed from the dark days of AIDS and the images of Rock Hudson withering away to nothing, and remembered poor Ryan White and his struggles for acceptance. And later on we got a third reminder in the guise of the late Pedro Zamora of "Real World: San Francisco" fame, who shared with young America his battle with AIDS. There was no way that any young American with any working brain cells was going to have that happen to them, so condoms were de rigeur.
What about the Crystal Pepsi fiasco? There was a time when you were supposed to check your soda can for hypodermic needles. And porn was big online way before Cindy Margolis. AOL had about half a million chat rooms dedicated to whatever twisted s**t you could think of chock the f**k full of people emailing each other pics.
ReplyMost of this article is like virebel661 said straight outta the 80s but the environment was a big deal in the 90s. If you leave the water on when you brush your teeth the oceans will run dry sometime in your lifetime. If you use a nightlight it accelerates the melting of the polar ice caps. If you don't recycle then soda cans will cause landfills to reach upwards past the moon because thats the only logical progression.
gotta be that geek: turtles aren't reptiles. they're amphibians.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesNo, they're not. They are, in fact, reptiles.
Not sure if dim or just troll... (I like turtles.)
Tortoises are reptiles. Turtles are amphibians. There actually is a difference, you know.
Turtles are indeed reptiles; you're probably thinking of frogs. Better luck with the geeking gig next time.
This - is the '80s for the most part, not the '90s. Carry on.
ReplyCindy Crawford in "Mom Jeans", a tank-top and drinking a Pepsi? The best part of the 90s.
Replythe downside of internet porno in the 90's was that you could write, direct, score, and film one in the time it took for dial up to load the site.
ReplyAllison Brie is way prettier, but ya, good plan anyway. ^^
ReplyAttempting to get super hot Community star to notice you in an online comedy article... genius.
Replyis it just me or does leonardo actually look kind of gangsta in that pic?
ReplyI'm a child of the 90s(born at the end of 1990) and I have to say, even though at times, things got crazy for me, I survived.
ReplyWell, obviously since you wrote that reply. Jesus, this must be the dumbest post I've read on this site.
that and since you were a baby at the time, im guessing you didnt really care or even notice any of this s**t anyways. But yeah, thanks for wasting our time.
Never mind AIDS ('80s), ozone ('80s), and the Commies ('40s-'80s). It's a wonder we survived in spite of the Rodney King riots, OJ's acquittal, and domestic violence on every channel, let alone Ricki Lake and Roseanne Barr.
ReplyAnd then there was that terrifyingly under-qualified President.
OMG! It's all happening AGAIN!
We only had to put up with Bush Sr for 2 years in the 90's. I think you are over reacting.
What does everyone have against Glam? It's certainly one of the better fruits of the eighties. Unlike that Nirvana bulls**t.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesAlright, here's my impression of whoever came up with hair metal "hey, you know what would be so hardcore, first well get a bunch of ridiculous hairdos, listening? then well wear skin tight shiny red clothing, yeah, it's all the rage in the clubs I go to, what do you mean no women go there, I think I saw one walk in by accident once. well back to what i was talking about, then well play a bunch of amazingly cheesy rock ballads, what do you mean "what the hell", oh, I got it, well turn the gain knobs on our amps up, wont that be so hardcore?"
@ humanist I totally agree with you - sensitive seeming guys with mascara are definitely better than the grunge - I look like a dirty hobo who hasn't bathed in years style - I lived in Seattle and its pretty difficult to avoid coming into contact with water - there are lakes surrounding downtown - you can not step out of the house without falling into one (see the waterfront house of Lake Union in Sleepless in Seattle )- not to mention everyone knows how much it rains there thanks to Frasier. Don't know how Kurt managed to keep the hair looking so greasy and dirty - I think it was from Courtney's cooties.
@Trainee Dude, are you out of f**king periods or something? Is there a shortage? Would it kill you to put a goddammed stop in your sentence?
Yes, that Nirvana bullshit was so bad that people didn't discover it until '94.
Grunge bands may have, in your opinion, looked worse than hair bands, but at least their music was better. And im sorry, whats worse, wearing flannel and having long hair, or looking like a f*****g 7 year old girl that got into mommys makeup and decided to play dress up?
This article sucked balls.
ReplySorry, I had to register to say, this is the poorest and weakest article that I have ever read on Cracked.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesI dont always find akk of them interesting, so thats my problem. But this?
Just poorly written. Get a proper day job writer!
So proven by your use of the letter 'k' in place of an 'l'. Yay for proofreading!
Excellent use of strawmen, Terrene.
Excellent use of the wrong word, Shipton. That isn't what Strawman means.
They forgot the most important parts of the 90s. The rise of Prime Time for Teens (90210, Charmed, Dawson's Creak, Buffy the Vampire Slayer...), BAYWATCH. The rise of Alternative music.
ReplyOh, THE REAL WORLD!!!! I'm sorry, but if THAT doesn't say the 90s to everyone, I don't know what does!
The article isn't really about pop culture. Is there a way alternative music and teen soaps "made us strong?"
Yes, but is it really alternative if the only radio that plays it is Top 40?
someone, someone seriously needs to fact check this article. The USSR was dissolved by the 90s. There was no "communist fear". Even china's communism was forever changed and weakened after the 89 protests. also technically we still have aids today and it still doesn't have a cure.
Reply1990 counts as the 90s. The USSR didn't fall until late in 1991.
There are technically 2 different events considered "the end of the Cold War": The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR. The former happened in 1989, the latter in 1991. This made it confusing for me when playing MGS4 when they said something like "It's been 30 years after the end of the Cold War" and I was wondering "Which 'end of the Cold War' are they talking about?" After doing some math and comparing the logs, they considered the Berlin Wall falling as the end of the Cold War.
Yes, AIDS still exists, and there is no cure, but we know a lot more about it. Any educated person knows what not to do to avoid contracting the diesase. And that person also knows that non-sexual contact with an infected person is completely safe.
And people say Android is fragmented!
ReplyRandom Article Generator maybe?
As a child of the 90's, I found this hilarious.
ReplyMe too.