What was wrong with the 90's?

I saw The Doom Generation (1995) last night: it was in the cult section at the video store, looked interesting. Mixed feelings about it. Great directing: the film was edgy and exciting and visually very creative. And it had incredibly explicit sex and violence and Rose McGowan spent pretty much the whole film naked, so there's another plus. This, however, doesn't make up for an abominably bad script and downright unforgivable acting.

But it got me thinking about the 1990s. What was wrong with the world then? You had Bill Clinton, the internet, video games, a good economy, you'd think things were going well. But the culture of the times seems (today, anyway) garish and nihilistic. Things were ostensibly going well, but I have to think that Nevermind and Blue Velvet and Rent wouldn't have been made if there wasn't some unexplainable current of despair running through the American collective unconscious. Douglas Coupland probably knows what I'm talking about.

Then again, maybe avant-garde nihilism was a way of escaping the cultural wasteland of an increasingly corporate/consumerist society. But that doesn't make it good art.