How To Condense An Entire Decade Into Three Minutes

By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | January 18, 2024 |

By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | January 18, 2024 |

I’ve been going back and watching a lot of forgotten and semi-forgotten films from the ’90s recently. I was born in the ’80s, but properly ‘grew up’ in the decade that followed, and it’s easy to let nostalgia color one’s perception in such a scenario, but nevertheless, there’s something about the aesthetic and vibe of the ’90s that is extremely alluring these days.

The more I think about it, the more it’s just the simple fact of it being the last ‘pre-digital’ decade. It’s never quite that simple as you can’t divide eras so easily, and there’s obviously bleed-through across the margins in both directions, but for many people—at least in the Anglosphere of the Northern hemisphere—the ’00s were the decade when the internet became a mainstream utility, and the tide of the digital world became impossible to fight or deny. The ’00s is when the all-encompassing web that binds all of us now in a surveillance-capitalism Panopticon first properly showed signs of emerging. But back in the ’90s, this thing called privacy, now so quaint a notion, was still a realistic aspiration, often taken for granted.

But I digress and waffle. That was all just meant to be a preamble to say something like: ‘Isn’t it funny how the ’90s now feels so primitive and ancient, while the chart-dominating music we all jammed out to was often so futuristic-sounding, with some of the most glorious synths sounds ever captured?’ The answer is: ‘Yes. Yes it is.’ Now if only we could have a video right here to illustrate exactly this fact.

Oh, well, would you look at this! As it happens, we do:

They say smell is the most powerful sense there is when it comes to memory evocation. I’m not so sure anymore.