The majority of the music and a lot of the media of the 90s was absolutely characterised by the sense of meaninglessness and nihilism and futility that was the zeitgeist of that era - think grunge music and Daria.

I guess that was counterposed by the exxxtreme marketing and media that was similar tone but I think that represented the sense that we were scraping the bottom of the barrel and in order to feel anything or to get a sense of purpose/power it had to be hardcore. (I guess it’s worth mentioning that there wasn’t always a clear distinction between the nihilistic media and the extreme media because often the two were blended together - stuff like Beavis and Butthead and early South Park are good examples of this, with early South Park leaning in really hard into parodying the previous eras of narratives in TV shows that were heavy on moralising; South Park could only ever have a moral aspect to its storylines when it was dripping with satire and irony.)

It might seem like those two are really incompatible but if you look at society at that time as if it were a chronically depressed person then it’s easy to grasp the sort of pendulum swings from emptiness and numbness to the high-energy, anxious, almost frantic state which only leads to a crash back into a deeper numbness that we’re talking about here. Or like the person who is overstimulated to the point that their senses are so dulled that it takes really extreme input in order for it to register and for them to feel anything at all which ultimately leads to being more desensitised.