Paul Bergen's concert photography: Smells Like Teen Spirit

Ask some people, and they’ll say it was the decade of Nirvana, Britpop bands like Oasis and Massive Attack, and large open-air music festivals in general. Of designers like Helmut Lang and Tom Ford, who redefined style with his work for Gucci. Others, and this includes those who grew up in the nineties in particular, would say it was an era of bad taste with no long-term appeal. A time when people fawned over Miuccia Prada’s “ugly chic” aesthetic, wore tight tops, baggy pants and gaudy New Balance sneakers, and danced to songs like the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” or, even worse, “Macarena”. The beauty of it is, they’re all right.

Something everyone can agree on is that the nineties were the last decade in which people still smoked and drank in clubs without restraint and drugs still seemed like a fun thing to do. Though none of this was due to youthful rebellion. Rebellion in the nineties consisted in not rebelling, in passivity, or autoaggression. In the eighties, people had still demonstrated against nuclear power smelling of patchouli or for the hedonistic lifestyle with oversized shoulder pads. In the nineties, people let their shoulders droop as they sang along to songs infected with misanthropy and malaise.

Which shouldn't be understood to mean that nothing at all happened in those years. Quite the opposite, in fact. The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, and mobile phones and computer technology were developing at breakneck speed. The first cellphone had been sold commercially as early as 1983, but it did not reach the masses until ten years later. Anyone who didn't own a Nokia 1011 in the mid-nineties had sort of missed the boat. The same was true for computers. At the start of the decade, you were still called a geek if you had a personal computer at home; ten years later, you were a freak if you didn't own a PowerBook 100 from Apple (which came in sixteen different shades of gray). In any case, everything that already existed was digitized: People began reading on the internet instead of in books, writing messages by email or texting instead of sending letters. And as for music: The CD replaced the vinyl record and the cassette.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the nineties is that everything was possible. University students got tribal tattoos on their backsides and put rings through their noses. Office workers carrying whistles, pacifiers and glow sticks writhed in bunkers and warehouses during the first raves. The great range of musical styles was actually quite astonishing. Rock, which had been thought dead, celebrated a revival with bands like Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters, Oasis and Skunk Anansie. Drum and bass emerged in the U.K. Germany gave rise to the Eurodance and trance project Snap! with its pounding 4/4 time.

From today’s vantage point, the nineties seem like the last decade when all was still right with the world – though that’s nonsense, of course. But: September 11, 2001, was a watershed moment in history, as the attack on the World Trade Center inaugurated a new era of fear and prohibition. Seen in this light, the nineties were remarkable for their combination of levity and gloom. That’s rather ugly and crude, but that’s exactly why the nineties were so unique

The music photography book Nineties Spirit: Music Caught on Camera, with nearly two hundred color and black-and-white photographs, was published by teNeues. You can also find more photographs in rampstylw #27 "By the Way".