Tag: 1990s

Loved and loathed in equal measure, one thing critics can’t take from this influential 90s band is their willingness to evolve musically.

How a band seemingly out of step with its times outlasted so many of its indulgent, in-step contemporaries.

The term “slow jam” became widely popular when a song performed by Midnight Star debuted in 1983.

An oral history of the night Nirvana recorded “Unplugged,” their most tender, original live performance.

Nineties relationship books had some serious issues, man.

When the nineties’ heart of whiteness met g-funk, it was the illest — and wackest — of times.

W.H. Auden named it 70 years ago, and our latest age of anxiety is one of Xanax, fidget spinners, and constant swiping.

The film, which turned 20 this week, feels incredibly out of step with our dystopian present.

The cover was striking: it showed a syringe. On the back cover one character leaned over a table, snorting cocaine. The calls from radio stations began, the advertising spots, the letters, above all the letters. Girls telling me about their first acid trip. Gay guys who’d been thrown out of their houses. Girls in love […]

Why can’t we let go of Mermaids-era Winona Ryder? Soraya Roberts at Hazlitt explores the last great pre-internet icon.

Writing for The Believer in February, 2014, Michael Schulman explored one of the most dramatic and memorable failures in American branding: Coca-Cola’s OK Soda. Marketed to Gen X’ers in 1994, the OK Soda brand died by 1995, though its artifacts live on in collector circles and advertising lore.

In the early 1990s, food delivery services on Manhattan’s Upper West Side sparked what New York Times writer Emily M. Bernstein called “the menu wars.” Everyone from dry cleaners to nail salons followed Chinese restaurants’ lucrative lead, placing paper take-out menus inside apartment buildings’ lobbies and mail rooms and under residents’ doors. Angry tenants demanded […]

Some of the best songs on The Secret History, Vol. 1 come from the summer of ’92, when the band went to London to appear on John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show. Songs like the moody ballad “Secret Knowledge of Backroads” (which later appeared on a Silver Jews EP) and the Pixies-esque “Circa 1762” show […]