Why was weird "in" in the 1990s? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

So, I'm in violation of every rule of this reddit (throw away, no sources), but I would like to point out at 36 I'm the edge of gen-X that grew up during that time period.

What you call weird, I call pre-commerical Internet. The videos you pointed out are easily on YouTube, in many forms, and we had MTV. We had a lot of "alternative" music, which really meant a couple guitars and a guy that smoked too much making a kick ass video. Beavis and Butthead is Matt Judge.. and he is the great grandfather of everything you like today. He just had to sell it for millions because there was no Internet to freely post it.

On that note, we had the Internet... it just sucked. It was one AOL message board with crappy porn, Yahoo!, and everything else took forever to find. Even NFL shit was impossible to find a score because hey, it's the Internet and nothing was on it. Well, maybe Space Above and Beyond... that shit was all over the original Internet. The original Internet was one big, stupid phone book. You didn't go to Google and type tits... no you went to yahoo and clicked a billion slow loading directory links (30 seconds plus) to find one picture of tits 50 minutes later. Again, and again, and again.

Beck playing loser... well Beck just won a grammy doing the same thing as in 1995. NIN sold about a billion records and Closer is one of the best albums of all time, but I'm a Pretty Hate Machine fan myself. Think I still have the VHS of that somewhere. Music got "poppy" and "dancy" nowadays. It's only weird because times have changed and NIN actually started in 1988. I actually noticed this distinct "break" around 2002 when the 90s music just stopped being made.

Videogames were also pretty damn new. Yea we had the N64 and soon after a really expensive PS1, but that was sanitized and an actual "computer game" sold for $25 bucks to the Nintendo game going for $65. That's in 90s money which is basically 150 today. On the computer you could make the Wolfensteins and Doom... because that was loser shit and nobody would ever see it. Bad Mojo was art at it's finest, and I bet under a couple thousand people ever played it. But, you could still buy it in Best Buy, driving your 1995 Pontiac Sunbird, for $30.

It really wasn't weird in the time period, it was what we had and what was popular at the time. Music wasn't pop and dance, the computer game was cheap, MTV really was cutting edge television and the Real World (later addition Road Rules - Think early Survivor in a Camper) was the only reality TV around. Times were not simple or weird, but the Internet was dumb and slow. We used it for sex chat and then watched MTV on our land lines and smoked weed. Then we used our modems to dial onto our local BBS, talked shit to our neighbors, and then hacked a version of this one weird Star Wars game everybody got in the mail that actually had multiplayer death match in 1995... it took 5 years more for that to be replicated. Then we used land lines to beep our drug dealer's pager for a pickup at the local phone booth. Not kidding.

Welcome to 1995