2 days ago
Talk '90s to Me review — for a millennial, this is upsettingly joyful
If you're my age, listening to people talk about the 1990s is rather like being forced to endure a conversation about a legendary party you weren't invited to. You might term the affliction generational fomo. Look, I'm glad you all had a marvellous time taking Ecstasy and voting for Tony Blair, but do you have to rub it in? I find myself assuming a glazed expression. 'A pervasive sense of cultural optimism, you say? Oh, [wincing] that sounds wonderful … and the music was brilliant too? How nice for you. And low house prices as well? [grimacing now] … well I'm glad you had such a good time … but if you'll excuse me I have to wail despairingly to myself in that corner over there.'
I would very much like to believe the Nineties were not all they were cracked up to be. Maybe the reasonably priced houses and inexorable spread of liberal democracy had a downside? Alas, the journalist Miranda Sawyer's brilliant (but upsettingly joyful) new podcast Talk '90s to Me confirms it was indeed a blast. Damn it.
'There is an optimism throughout the Nineties,' she observes to her second guest, the Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh (what Nineties podcast would be complete without him?). Welsh suggests the decade 'really started in '87 [or] '88'. The crucial factor was rave. 'People just started dancing in fields and factories.' Sawyer suggests that in the rave scene 'you got that mix of characters that wouldn't have met … spotty students, football hooligans'. That discovery of unexpected unity among different kinds of people led to 'a certain optimism that kick-started that decade'. Unity …? Optimism …? Truly, the past is another country. We millennials prefer to subsist in ever tinier cultural niches while using the internet to abuse anyone even slightly different from ourselves.
At least I can console myself with the thought that I would have loathed raving and taking drugs in fields. Blissfully dancing outside experiencing a sensation of ecstatic oneness with thousands of my fellow human beings sounds like hell on earth to me. It's one aspect of Nineties fun I'm glad I missed out on. In some ways I suppose it's nice to belong to a generation for whom introversion and social incompetence are de rigueur. And compared with that of your average pasty, porn-addled, bed-bound, TikTok-hypnotised Gen-Z misanthropist my social life looks like something out of The Great Gatsby.
• Do you remember the nineties? Try the throwback quiz
Welsh is rather stern on the dullness of the young. 'I was at a festival outside of Dublin at the weekend,' he says. 'And I'm thinking, I'm having a good time and I'm … I'm dancing. But the drug intake, the alcohol intake compared to how this would have been 20 odd years ago is just, it's practically nothing.' It's a weird unnatural inversion of the old days when puritanical elders used to chide the young for their fast-living ways. Instead, Welsh thinks young people should 'be getting out and having a bit of fun and causing a bit of mischief, you know?'. Have fun? Cause mischief? Absolutely not.
I liked Welsh's semi-mystical explanation for why the Nineties was so enjoyable. 'The Nineties was the last party,' he says. In the same way that before a 'tsunami the animals know that something's coming', people had an intuitive sense that 'the internet was coming', with the impending tyranny of algorithms, AI, big tech and the hollowing out of the cultural industries. So people thought 'let's take everything from every era we've enjoyed … because it might be a long time before we can have it again'. Nonsense, of course, but a compellingly eerie thought.
• The best podcasts and radio shows of the week to listen to next
I wonder if I'll ever make a podcast about the decade of my youth. Talk 2010s to Me with James Marriott. Episodes on austerity, Brexit, Trump, cancel culture, Snapchat, Victor Orban and Nigel Farage. What a golden age. I could reminisce fondly about my first years in the big city paying half my monthly salary to live in a tiny, filthy, cockroach-infested room above a KFC … Ah well, at least it was a decade suited to gloomy temperaments. Lots to complain about. Perhaps all that Nineties optimism would have grated on me.★★★★☆
Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
