The 90s kids
and how they greyed.....
I watched the later seasons of The Crown recently. While being taken with the memory replay of all the Lady Di outfits that I had seen in coffee table books that my mother would borrow from the British Council library in Calcutta, I was most charmed and heartbroken by the meticulous reproduction of the 90s aesthetic. Especially hard to forget were the cordless telephones, the coming of the bricklike cellphones (at a time when only businessmen and important people had access to those), the cars (remembering our white 118NE in Calcutta in the 90s), the music recording and reproducing technology like walkmans. I remembered, watching the show, the first CDs brought to our house by my father on one of his trips abroad. They were some sort of jazz (which I didn’t care for), the Carpenters, Nancy Sinatra, Neil Diamond, Elvis Presley. More than the music that they delivered, one was absolutely flabbergasted by the CD as a thing. How sleek and fragile and mind-boggling! We were sure to have it scratched by our nails and mourn its quick death. The huge speakers and a Videocon music system arrived to do justice to all the CDs. And old, discarded desktop computer came home to be my first computer in 1999 or 2000, just as I was graduating from school.
Come the early 00s, we started stocking up on hard discs with foreign films, music that otherwise was not available in India, our laptops became slimmer, and dial-up connection speeds that routinely determined our faith in the universe. One started burning CDs and DVDs with books and movies and gifting them to love interests on birthdays. Dial-up speeds determined our access to culture- especially, niche cultural products. At lawschool, folks spent long hours in the computer lab. A college senior installed Linux and urged everyone to get into open-access OS thingies to address moral concerns. Everyone read Naomi Klein annd felt angry at corporate capitalism. My first feminist education began with Susan Faludi’s Backlash. We were into the morality of cultural piracy, and hence, the Copyleft. I read Lawrence Lessig and Arjun Appaddurai. Modernity was indeed at large. It seems the 90s are a part of history now. An actual history of modernity. With this accurate memorialisation in shows like The Crown, I have become a live museum piece. The person in the mirror doesn’t go to dance parties anymore.
[Enjoy Ace of Base, if you are here, and especially, if you hadn’t heard them before.]