In the 90’s a lot of popular song were pretty political, remember Killing in the name of and even the skate pop-punk has pretty popular political song’s (Offspring, Blink Green-day). Actually political movies were also quite big in the 90’s/00’s (French Masterpiece La haine, or the whole work of Michael Moore).
I would expect to see that the people who were teens/young adult at the time would tackle all these issues 20-30 years latter when they’ll finally take the power and the reality is that everything got worse, than even talking about-it make you sound like a radical, and that the gen-X/Millennials totally failed to change something.
What happened ? and how did we fail ?
I think the basic premise of your question is kind of flawed.
Generational age brackets are always a little fuzzy, but most definitions tend to define millennials as people born from about 1981-1996
Which means come the end of the 90’s, the oldest millennials were just turning 18, the youngest were just entering preschool, the “average” millennial would have been about 10. Personally, I was 8 in 1999.
So most of us weren’t exactly politically-aware in the 90s, let alone actively criticizing anything besides homework. And a lot of us probably had parents who wouldn’t have let us listen to RATM because of the parental advisory sticker on their albums.
My main concerns at the time were things like video games and cartoons
Then right around the time we started to be old enough to really form political opinions, 9/11 happened and the world went insane around us.