I remember going to see those Adrian Lyne films when I was going to see movies in the nineties, and I was jealous he wasn’t working at New Line.
In the early Nineties, after my first round of financial problems, I started a studio in Kensal Road in London right at the time when no record company wanted to hear anything from Leo Sayer.
Basically, I frittered away the Nineties making pop videos and being pretty self-indulgent.
When I first moved to London for university, I was already a big fan of Diesel because, in the nineties, Diesel was, like, the brand. The stores were the place to go. It wasn’t workwear like Levi’s or G-Star.
The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.
The fashion world is much more ephemeral than the film industry and moves at a faster pace, and it’s got even more frenetic since the Nineties; more paparazzi hanging about and it seems to me there are even more fashion magazines.
I mean, the death in the late eighties and early nineties really shook out a lot of hacks. The pond just sort of dried up for a lot of really bad comedians.
I love the Nineties because more than any other period of time, there was such an eclectic mix of styles going on. More so than in the Sixties and Seventies, when there was an overriding look and sound.
Life is different than it was in the Nineties. I’m a dad, and there are other things I have to get done in an afternoon than just being an artist.
In the eighties, we had the ladies who lunch, the power lunch – everything was power. At the beginning of the nineties, things changed.
I’m heavily influenced by the Nineties – I love juxtaposing a slip dress with trainers and a vintage leather jacket.
I remember thinking the Nineties were uncool: ‘I landed in the generation where nothing happens.’
Nineties hip-hop in particular really shaped what became the common pop cultural language that we all speak.
My sound definitely pays a lot of homage to the Nineties, but not just the dance music. There’s also breakbeats, R&B, the big ballads. It’s that whole era infused with very modern sounds.
I mean, I’d love to see ‘The Woman in Black’ in the Nineties on the rave scene!
Gerald Wilson was one of my mentors: he was in his nineties before he passed and, literally, every time I saw him, he’d be like, ‘Man, Kamasi, I’ve got this new thing! Nobody ever heard anything like this before!’ It’s amazing hanging out with somebody that was born in 1918.
When I started in the nineties, a sample size was a 4 and a 6.
It’s very difficult today for girls to become supermodels. There is a lot more competition, a lot of countries in the East have opened up so there are many more models than there were in the Nineties. Now they have to compete with famous actresses but also with, say, reality stars to be on the magazine covers.
When I worked with wildlife a lot in the Eighties and Nineties, I learnt the meaning of patience. And when I worked with trees, I learned the meaning of humility.
I was in the debating society at school, I was the president of the Oxford Union, and then I became an MP in the Nineties.
One of my favorite horror films of the Nineties was ‘Event Horizon.’
Ampeg made incredible guitar heads in the early Nineties and then stopped. And I don’t know why. The one we used had a nice clean, warm sound, and it blended well with the other amps that were in the studio.
I don’t spend much time listening to the records when they’re done. Usually I let go of it. Especially in the Eighties and Nineties – they were like product, almost.
My childhood closet was ornamented with U.S. jerseys of World Cups spanning the nineties and two-thousands – some of my favorite memories are from summers when, with a ball under my foot and a jersey on my back, I watched the U.S. team go up against the world’s best players in the largest sporting event on Earth.
Few in the Nineties would have ventured to prophesy that the remote dim singer of the Celtic Twilight would, in a new age, become the leading poet of the English-speaking world. None have disputed the claim of William Butler Yeats to that title.
Chris Ofili’s suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.
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