To celebrate all things ‘90s, the Star revisited some of the best (and worst) pop culture moments of the era. Here are the nine stories in this special package.
1. What was Toronto like in the ’90s? We looked back at what made the city great
It was the last decade of the 20th century and Toronto was different.
It was a time when we didn’t walk around staring at our phones; when the words “social” and “media” hadn’t been put together yet; when getting from one part of downtown to another didn’t involve soul-crushing traffic. The city looked different, too.
We did some research — OK, fine, we read some Reddit threads — for reminders of what made Toronto a fun place to be in the ’90s. From a winning baseball team, and a fresh basketball one, to local landmarks — some gone, some irretrievably altered — here are 10 things that resonated.
2. ‘Pulp Fiction’ vs. everything else: Why ‘90s pop culture became a struggle between irony and earnestness
For this unaccredited historian, the 1990s began on Aug. 8, 1989. That was my 30th birthday, and I didn’t have much going on aside from an advance screening of James Cameron’s “The Abyss.” And a resolution to quit smoking.
I left the preview with a vision of future movies both exhilarating and a little threatening. Would all upcoming sci-fi action blockbusters be accomplished with such technical panache and personal idiosyncrasy? And would they all be so “You never backed away from anything in your life! Now FIGHT!” stressful?
As it turns out, no, because they couldn’t be, of course.
But when I think about the decade that ended with unfounded worries about something we called “Y2K” and barely remember what the fuss was about (apparently all the world’s computers were going to forget to reset at midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, and then they would blow up and our brave new internet and email world would go with it), I put “The Abyss” on one side of what I see as the defining cultural divide of the 1990s. This was the decade in which irony and earnestness were at constant but constructive war with each other.
3. What are the best Canadian songs of the ‘90s? We asked musicians who were there to weigh in
What are the best Canadian songs of the 1990s? Who better to ask about the tracks that defined an era than the artists who were part of the scene?
Here are 11 songs chosen by 11 Canadian musicians, including Maestro Fresh Wes, k-os, Bif Naked, Raine Maida and more.
4. The ’90s produced a lot of great music, but we never want to hear these 8 songs again
The ’90s were a bountiful time for new music: the explosion of genres like grunge, Britpop and gangsta rap, plus the emergence of underground scenes like shoegaze and neo-soul. But the decade also produced some of the most egregious and tasteless pop songs of all time, many of which continue to haunt us to this very day.
We asked eight music writers to pick one song from the ’90s that they wish they never had to hear again.
5. How well does Gen Z know ’90s pop culture?
For millennials and Gen Xers, the ’90s were the centre of pop culture. Three decades later, has that decade’s impact changed (or waned)?
The Star’s Kelsey Wilson, Angelyn Francis and Richie Assaly hit the streets to quiz some zoomers — people born between 1997 and 2012 — on their ’90s knowledge. The results may surprise you.
6. From ‘Gremlins 2’ to ‘Blair Witch’ — these 10 movies shaped the ‘90s
It’s hard enough to make a list of the 10 best films of any given year, let alone a decade. Still, such exercises are typically easier — and more interesting — with the benefit of real hindsight, the great leveller against hype and recency bias. That said, this list — made up of one title per year from the 1990s — isn’t meant to represent greatness anyway.
A few of the movies on it are arguably masterpieces, and a few are most definitely not. Some of them are obvious picks and some are out of deep left field. What they all have in common — in their different and distinctive ways — is that they retrospectively and collectively illustrate something about their specific social, political or cultural moments. Taken together, they tell the story of where movies were in the ‘90s — and where they were heading.
7. The aughts were the Golden Age of television, but the ’90s laid the groundwork. Here are 10 shows that defined the decade
“Six Feet Under,” “The Wire,” “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men”: “prestige TV” has always been considered a 2000s phenomenon.
In fact, it began on the cusp of the 21st century, with the debut of “The Sopranos” in January 1999.
But if you go back further into the ’90s you can see the stirrings of what became prestige, or peak, television. It was a time when linear broadcasters were still willing to take chances, when cable networks were upstarts in the original programming arena and streaming wasn’t even a gleam in the eyes of executives.
Here’s a look at 10 shows of the ’90s that, for me, fit the proto-prestige bill.
8. ‘The Lion King,’ ‘Mamma Mia!’ — the ’90s are back onstage. Are we stuck in a nostalgia cycle?
Beginning in the fall, Mirvish’s marquees will look like a throwback from the ’90s. With a new sit-down production of “The Lion King” and a touring engagement of the ever popular “Mamma Mia!” two of the biggest hits from that decade will be back treading the boards. Then, in December, comes “Titanique,” a musical spoof of James Cameron’s “Titanic.” (Yes, also from the ’90s.)
It’s not just Toronto theatres. On Broadway, shows like “The Notebook” (based on the 1996 novel) and “MJ the Musical” (a jukebox production on the life of Michael Jackson) are proof that theatremakers are banking on old titles and names from a bygone era.
So what’s behind this trend?
9. Brilliant and polarizing, David Foster Wallace wrote one of the defining novels of the ‘90s. Three decades later, what does it say about who we are?
The 1990s was the decade when history ended. At least that was Francis Fukuyama’s provocative thesis in “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992), in which he interpreted recent events in the Soviet Union and China as a sign of liberalism’s world-historical triumph over communism.
Yet the cultural mood — captured by albums like Nirvana’s “Nevermind” (1991) and Leonard Cohen’s “The Future” (1992) — was angsty, gloomy, an unstable mix of ennui and rage. The fall of communism seemed to have made capitalism even more vapid and voracious. When, in 1997, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, starred in a Pizza Hut commercial, it seemed less like history had reached its rational conclusion and more like it had sat down at random and begun devouring itself.
“Infinite Jest” (1996), David Foster Wallace’s 1,000-page magnum opus, is above all an attempt to grapple with this malaise and its implications for human happiness.
