90's music (plus gross generalizations)

I am feeling nostalgic. I recently acquired a "Top 250" compilation of 90's pop songs, and, I must say, it's awesome. For a long time I've said that 1992-3 was the best time for music. I'm not sure if I believe that now, but it's true that you can't have the same sort of collective moments for good music now, because basically everything good's fragmented. The only stuff that everyone hears now is the shitty ultra-commercial stuff. But come on, didn't Nevermind pretty much blow everyone's minds? Siamese Dream? Gosh, it's too bad the Smashing Pumpkins never did anything as good as that album...

Though, the main thing is that there was this sort of absent referent to all this angst, which made it even more pathetic (in a kind of good way). I mean, no one could really feel bad about much except their own existential struggle. Post Cold-War, pre-9/11, the focus was inwards. I don't even really think about it in same terms as the interwar period I study academically, because there was really visible tension then. In the 90s, we were too busy with OJ and MJ and John Bobbitt to realize all the shit that was going down. But yeah, I do think that it made people focus on the absurdity of the banal since there wasn't anything exciting going on on a larger scale (that people noticed).

Sometimes when discussing popular culture with my students I would make distinctions between culture pre- and post-9/11, and it occured to me belatedly that they probably don't even really remember pre-9/11. I mean, they do, but it's not like they remember much of the 1990's. It would be like me remembering before the USSR became Russia-et-al.