“It was so much better in the 90s.” What a sad-eyed, pointless statement, you might think, from burnt-out 90s revellers as they sit, stuck, whinging in the inertia of their rheumatoid middle age. But it isn’t me. Several late teens and 20-somethings have said these words to me this year. They are in a reverie for a decade they know through our inescapable nostalgia industry, where every musical era lives alongside us in our dazzling digital age, through TV, films and books, a lucrative machine feeding sentimentality.

A generation is nostalgic for an era that belongs to its parents, indignant in the knowledge of freedoms lost in these creatively “risk-averse” times. But were the 90s “better”, really? A speedy gif-trawl through 1996 alone offers up persuasive evidence: the Prodigy’s Firestarter is No 1; Oasis the biggest band on Earth, selling out Knebworth, twice; Jarvis Cocker is the most famous man in Britain after his Michael Jackson bum-waft at the Brits; Blur, Underworld, the Chemical Brothers and the Manic Street Preachers are everywhere; the nation’s favourite film is Trainspotting; our best TV shows are the gripping human dramas Our Friends in the North and This Life; the idealistic Tony Blair is edging towards Number 10 (and not yet mad with power); England are in the Euro 96 semi-finals.

Twenty years on, the No 1 album is by Radiohead (from the 90s), our funniest TV show is Frasier (from the 90s), our most eagerly awaited new film is Absolutely Fabulous (from the 90s), the Stone Roses (from the 90s) are forever back-back-BACK (though the concept of “England”, generally, is definitely not from the 90s any more).

The 90s were berserk, arriving via the ploughed-up fields of Madchester in a kaleidoscopic explosion of neon leggings, ecstasy, Adamski’s Killer at No 1 and backflip bedlam on Dance Energy on BBC2. The culture-warping climate was buoyed by liberating global events: Thatcher was out, Mandela freed from prison, the Berlin Wall newly fallen. Early-90s Britain was soundtracked by singular weirdos, from narco-rock madmen Primal Scream to Icelandic sorceress Björk, an infinite dance of creative possibilities fashioned for all by the freaks. The year Kurt Cobain took his own life, 1994 (seeing off glum-faced grunge), British culture jack-knifed overnight, the pied pipers of Britpop leading a nationwide party on a yellow-brick road of hedonistic invincibility, our last great movement in outsider rock’n’roll tribalism.

Keith Flint of the Prodigy on stage in Glasgow. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

The Spice Girls, whose single Wannabe is 20 years old this week, changed everything. Arriving in 1996 they were created, ostensibly, as a female Take That, with Wannabe a perky-pop classic for 10-year-olds (no more, no less), whose vaguely positive, ultimately meaningless Girl Power slogan (which deemed Margaret Thatcher “the first Spice Girl”) belied their true legacy; they were the original pioneers of the band as brand, of pop as a ruthless marketing ruse, of the merchandising and sponsorship deals that have dominated commercial pop ever since. (For a while in the 2000s, as pop stars became portfolio fronts for clothing ranges, L’Oréal ads and celebrity fragrances, I thought about writing a book: Zig-a-Zig … Aaarrgh! How the Spice Girls Ruined Everything.)

By 1999 the landscape was unrecognisable, the Spice Girls’ mammoth sales “inspiring” an all-new, toothsome, unstoppable pop uprising both here and in America (much to the incoming Eminem’s belligerent horror), from sometime class-pop winners Britney Spears and *Nsync to Britain’s toddler-pop chancers Steps and Ireland’s Boyzone clones Westlife, a sex-free, fun-free, balladeering behemoth permanently at No 1 as the new millennium dawned. In eight swift years we’d gone from the Shamen’s Ebeneezer Goode at No 1 in 1992, a dastardly rave-pop homage to hallucinogenic delirium, to five drearily Identikit mini-marketing executives singing songs for funerals, forever blubbing on a stool.

Nostalgia isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s how we chart our history and analyse our evolution. By 2001, Noel Gallagher was already pin-pointing the trends and forces that have led us to the present day, hollering over the corporate takeover of not only the music industry but the actual planet, boiling in indignation over insatiable consumerism, hyper-capitalism, celebrity culture and the peddlers of weedy career-rock. Alternative music was submerged by the freedom-stifling accountants of what we’ve come to know as the global entertainment industry. “The Man,” Gallagher roared, “has taken over the world!”

For a while, though, back in the 90s, we had a tangible sense of togetherness, a belief in hope, in music’s purpose, as Gallagher also once said, to “celebrate the euphoria of life”. Here in 2016, in this summer of divisive, shattering cultural chaos, much of those bonkers 90s look all right.