The first video is Seattle, December 19?...aired as an New Years Eve special on MTV months before the music died.

no way i'm 'liking' spin just to download a bad covers album

I thought the same thing, but then I realized I come to a cubicle everyday and have already sold out.

What happened twenty years ago?  The Wall came down, the Iron Curtain fell (1989) and then the USSR itself broke apart (1991) --

but God forbid the well-placed and well-educated could re-assess -- God forbid that they could give Frank Fukuyama some credit; God forbid that they could suddenly jettison the tragic attitude of the 20th Century, and suddenly realize that, out of nowhere, the Enlightenment had won --

No, they were too tied in to the sensibility of the 20th Century -- their whole psuedo-intellectual status was built upon the idea that they knew how Duchamp's urinal, and Picasso's Demoiselles D'Avignon, and his Guernica -- that some rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born, that Corbusier and the Bauhaus should build Stalinist worker housing, and eventually, the postmodernists, at the end of the century, can go so far as to dismiss the misguided intelligence of the modernists, and skate along as insincere hipster rentiers --

But the red-diaper babies had made the march through the institutions -- to be a Commie in the 30s made sense; to be a crypto-Commie in the 90s made no sense, but your nuclear Wintours et al knew at least which side their cultural bread was buttered on, and so they boosted the flannel-and-doc-Martens-wearing Seattle scene -- why?  Because it was ugly, and because, at the time, it pretended to contend that America was fucked (GHW Bush's recession only lasted a year or two, but one could hope.) 

And today, we understand that the Seattle coffee-snobbery and the Seatttle/Portland axis was not really the last stand of some over-educated, over-designed "gritty" and "dark" (to use two 90s words) American Gotterdammerung, but rather, it was the first flowering of latte liberal gentrification, which goes on from victory unto victory. 

But they can't give up the sensibility of the 20th century -- whether they succeed or not, they take social credit over the fact that they, more than the rest of us, know about Duchamp's urinal, and Picasso's Guernica, and can explain why Beauty is suspect, and why Art can be about nothing but shock.

TL;DR

uhm...statements of alienation and an appeal to the whole rather than the material were no less relevant in the 90's than the 30's.Nobody was rejecting the Now they lived in in favor of some long-dead patron's whore a small minority tried to hang over their heads like millstone. You talk about slouching like your in a fevor or a dream and the Dead Flag Blues was right across the dial the whole time. We were filled with hope because we knew it was over there, somewhere, kept at bay untelevised for those with the balls to seek it out.

there was nothing shocking about power cords and urban blight and access to beauty and a rejection of so many name-dropped pop-art-collegiate-secret-handshake-Great White Men for just another Teen Spirit eu de toilet.

the 4 compact disc late night snake oil of enlightenment remaster-baitery is about you, not anything Ghrol is still twisting the Lady Reptile into a Gordian knot about.

Ne'er heard of it.