Decades
xkcd.com
xkcd.com
The other day I was in the car with my 17 year old and a song came on the radio from the late 90s and she thought it was a new song. I didn't laugh because I've noticed the sameness to pop music myself and if I hadn't lived through it I probably couldn't tell either.
[EDIT] I gather someone may have thought I was taking a swipe at electronic music? I wasn't, but its enduring appeal for the commercial side of the industry is probably related to costs.
[EDIT] You can basically have most or all of your non-vocal tracks ready before stepping into the studio. Maybe even some of the backing vocals, if you sample.
[EDIT EDIT] see also: the state of movie soundtracks, which have in the last couple decades skewed towards rhythm-over-melody electronically-composed (and possibly finalized that way!) works, largely for reasons of cost and (related to cost) predictability.
On the other hand, if you were to play me an unfamiliar song from about 1965 to about 1980, I can, with pretty good accuracy, narrow down its release to within a year or two just by its sound. It's a game I like to play with the SiriusXM radio channel.
There's no doubt that pop music has become a lot more homogenized in the past couple decades, and the technological advances that drastically alter the sound of music are becoming fewer and fewer. Has there really been anything other than (the scourge of) Autotune that's really affected the sound of music in the past 20 years? The only other thing I can think of is digital sampling, which hit like a tidal wave around 1983-4.
However, I must vehemently disagree that you wouldn't immediately recognize something from the 80s. The sounds and styles of music in the 80s were much more distinct. Even my kids, who were born in the 90s, can immediately recognize song from the 80s by their sound.
Digital equipment also increased the amount of material with very high production values.
"One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to have to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. If blue jeans became unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on. Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing anybody wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed."
It seems to me (in fashion, culture, technology, art, etc.) that we consumers are the victims of a giant hill-climbing problem, and our current batch of corporations, in their relentless effort to optimize everything, have us stuck at some local maxima that they can't A/B test their way out of. This year's jeans are a variation of last year's. This year's smartphones a minor iteration from last year's. It's too risky financially to make a wave, or move us into the next generation. Those shareholders want their risk-free YoY growth after all.
As a child of the 90s, I remember 8th grade being all about fashion: baggy pants/shorts, high white socks, "stuffed" skate shoes, low hanging backpacks with band patches, etc. Our appearance was the primary means by which we performed identity and grouped ourselves and each other into cliques.
However, as the popularity of the internet rose, we were given a new means by which to express ourselves: AIM screen names and profile content, Xanga and LiveJournal custom styles and angsty post, etc. But, even in the 90s, our digital avatars were still small, manageable, and mostly disconnected from our REAL, in-the-flesh, identities--there was a degree of anonymity, particularly for those who wanted it.
At some point, with the rise of MySpace, Gmail, Facebook, Tumblr, and (more recently) Instagram and Snapchat, and the proliferation of smart phones, the barrier between people's real identity and digital identity disappeared. With less anonymity comes MUCH more anxiety. Ridicule for faux pas now are infinitely reproducible, potentially permanent, and move at the speed of light. I imagine if you talked to middle school students today, they'd be much less concerned with the fashion of their peers than the contents of their social media profiles--this seems to be semi-supported by this article[1]:
"In my dozens of conversations with teens, parents, clinicians and school counselors across the country, there was a pervasive sense that being a teenager today is a draining full-time job that includes doing schoolwork, managing a social-media identity and fretting about career, climate change, sexism, racism–you name it. Every fight or slight is documented online for hours or days after the incident. It’s exhausting.
...
It’s hard for many adults to understand how much of teenagers’ emotional life is lived within the small screens on their phones, but a CNN special report in 2015 conducted with researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Texas at Dallas examined the social-media use of more than 200 13-year-olds. Their analysis found that 'there is no firm line between their real and online worlds,' according to the researchers."
[1] http://time.com/magazine/us/4547305/november-7th-2016-vol-18...
People have started using "2000s" to describe the 2000-2010 decade. For example: "music of the 2000s" https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=music%20...
But that only became necessary in the past few years, before that you could just call it "pop music"
I think decades blur together enough that it takes a few years before people are comfortable generalizing them into a single term.
I think the 90s were easy since the 70s and 80s were so quirky. We haven't changed a lot in the past 27 years as much as 1977 to 1994. I blame it on the Internet and global shared experiences in media. Even the accents have died. Now I'm not complaining them Boston Accents were horrible!!!
Yes, although X-TREME!!! would have been considered an acceptable synonym, appropriately inflected.
The 60s invented so much (I'd argue youth/pop culture and the very "decade" category itself). The 70s had bellbottom pants and disco music (it's more of a pity-category that we even bother to name it). The 80s at least had MTV. The 90s... it's "my" decade, in a way, but I already struggle to even come up with stuff. It's like an off-brand 80s. The 2000s? Heck, did anything even happen in the 2000s? 9/11? MySpace? ...? It's hard to objectively judge stuff you're currently in but the 2010s look boring as fuck right now. Like, I couldn't come up with a single thing, culturally, the 2010s should be remembered for. Hipsters? They're just stealing everything cool from previous decades!
I feel like one of the other posters here is right: Pop culture is becoming less and less homogeneous, it's just picking what you like from any source you like. It's remixes of remixes and weird niche stuff celebrated for 3 months before people move on to the next shit. 10 years might simply be way too long to stay consistent, nowadays, while the smaller changes are too subtle to matter as a "category".
Um... smartphones? And the massive cultural shifts that accompany that?
So with the new access to email and the blazing economies, we sent around listicle emails with the title of "You know it's the 90s when". Classic listicles include:
- You eat standing up. - Your dining table is a flat filing surface.
She loves The Beatles and LFO.
The internet smeared culture all over the surface of life like wet paint.
The "generation gap" is dead and buried.
But I do agree that the internet has effectively quite reduced, if not eliminated, the "generation gap" my parents and my peers grew up with in the 60's to the 80's...
That's completely gone, now, and I just don't think we're going to see these dramatic decade-tagged cultural shifts any more.
Now in terms of movies, what you're saying is a little more true, but a lot of movies were aired on network TV, so eventually you would see a lot of the big ones. HBO was around in the 1970s as well, so there was an opportunity to see lots of movies that way as well.
xkcd's thesis seems to be premised on the idea that there are no catchy, and widely accepted, names for this decade and the previous one.
I've considered the same question and decided that music, fashion and other cultural touchstones are becoming less distinct from decade to decade than they were going back to the last century.
However, I've also considered that it may be the case that I'm simply less aware of the details of pop culture than I was 20+ years ago. I can hear a piece of music from 1965 to about 1980 that I'm not familiar with and pin it down to within a year or two just by its sound. Maybe it's possible to do that with music from the last 20 years, but I certainly can't do it.
> I can hear a piece of music from 1965 to about 1980 that I'm not familiar with and pin it down to within a year or two just by its sound. Maybe it's possible to do that with music from the last 20 years, but I certainly can't do it.
I also think some of what you're describing re musical trends is related to the above: Artists have a million outlets and tens of millions of tracks at their disposal to be influenced by, so the idea that there's a "sound of the year" as promoted by major labels and radio stations is just... gone. It's not like Justin Bieber songs are playing everywhere. He's a huge celebrity musician and I still would have to go out of my way to hear one of his songs. They just don't permeate my media sphere. Again, compared to the 90s when a hit song would be unavoidable.
Anyway: I don't think it's the sole cause. I think labelling decades was also simply a branding and marketing trend that has fallen out of vogue, maybe due in part to the simple problem of what to call the "aughties."
It's an interesting topic! I love the media environment today. God. When I was first tinkering with music in the 90s I would've killed for access to things like Spotify and SoundCloud. So amazing.
maybe for pop culture tastes (though I'm not so sure about that, access doesn't necessarily mean interest). there are huge social, political, and moral values differences between generations though.
I wouldn't be surprised if by the mid-2020s we've more or less abandoned the concept of decades in favor of an ad-hoc system of domain-based periods loosely defined within cultural groups - I'd say to some degree, we're doing that already.
With the exception of (the scourge of) Autotune, has any technology really changed how music sounds since the tidal wave of digital sampling in the early to mid 80s?
Similarly, the massive advances in computer graphics have radically altered movie making in the 80s through 2010 or so, but those advances are becoming much less noticeable from year to year.
Perhaps it's just me or or maybe my generation (those born in the late 70s) has a somewhat unique perspective on this but I think there were 3 pivotal developments around the end of the 80s / the beginning of the 90s:
- the fall of the Iron Curtain
- the advent of the World Wide Web and widespread use of personal computers and the internet
- globalisation becoming a considerable and perceptible factor in everyday life (mainly due to developments #1 and #2)
These developments to some extent caused cultural perceptions and distinctions - both spatial and temporal - to blur.
In my personal perception the 80s are still just 10 years ago.
I think it's got less to do with any world events and more to do with the fact that you reached adulthood around then. The mid-80s were about 10 years before you graduated. The 90s started 10 years before I graduated, so that's my "10 years ago" point. Meanwhile the people born right after I graduated are about to reach adulthood, which feels like an impossible reality.
I have experienced this for the 90s, when I grew up. It truly is freaky to have that brief realisation that T2 is over 25 years old.
The past two decades almost seem to blur into each other culturally. People basically dress exactly as they did 20 years ago as far as I can tell. Maybe that's because these two decades and the coming decade are my prime years and so I lack perceptive as a late 20 something who is still neither quite young nor yet middle aged.
And shortly before that, it was even worse. Home releases of movies? Haha, what's that? Maybe a super-expensive 16mm print will be available at some point for home projectors.
A short while ago mass media was far more ephemeral and inaccessible than it is now. Before that it didn't really exist, outside print. Want to hear music? Know anyone who can play it? No? You're out of luck. Better learn an instrument. Film? What's that? Maybe you can catch a stage show at the local harvest festival. Maybe your kids will stage something in the living room. That'd be nice.
We're not that far removed from those times. This has been a huge shift in people's relations to one another (to paraphrase Vonnegut, people's small artistic talents used to be very valuable to their friends, family, and community, but they're now in competition with the best in the world, rendering any expression of those talents low-value and eccentric) and to media itself. We've gained a lot, but more than a little's been lost. Sometimes it feels like we're drowning in media, and I'm not sure the trade-off of being able to watch Hogan's Heroes or whatever at a moment's notice rather than waiting for a rerun is entirely worth centering our lives on screens and speakers so completely.
Yeah, this is part of the driving force behind the resurgence of vinyl, cassettes, VHS, etc. Scarcity and physical presence are great ways to imbue a sense of meaning into media. This is something I have difficulty expressing to my older colleagues (I'm in my early 20s, many I work with are in their 40s or older).
"We" millennials no longer see a vinyl record as a means to the end of producing audio, the medium itself supposes to provide intrinsic value: the idea of "fidelity" has disappeared (remember "Hi-Fi"?) and has instead been replaced with some idea of "maximizing the experience" of engaging with the media.
The concept of "fidelity," is, in a sense, nonsensical in the world of fully electronic music (in the realm of movies, most audiences already have some sense that movies are inauthentic/there is no comparable "live" experience, so perhaps this discussion does not extend into that domain. That said, old VHS tapes are a fun source of obscure video footage, and digital video can still be somewhat hard to track down!). The word "fidelity" itself means (in my own words) "qualitative closeness of a reproduction to some original source" and what is the "source" for something produced completely in a studio, often without any acoustic instruments present whatsoever?
In the world of DJs and FL Studio or Ableton, many instead deal with some idea of "emotional fidelity" rather than "acoustic fidelity": how closely and intensely can we personally experience the (intended?) aesthetic/artistic qualities of a work? It is a meaningfully different experience to listening to one of my favorite disco records on vinyl (a record that, for all I know, buying secondhand in NYC, may have been played at the Paradise Garage) vs on YouTube.
This reminds me of the idea of "Hyperreality" in Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" -- music with its own internal aesthetic and emotional world, its own language, its own norms. Almost no relationship to some sort of physical reality (guitars, drums, etc) other than the fact that we must experience sound via acoustic waves.
> We've gained a lot, but more than a little's been lost
True. After a while you wonder what's the point of all these intense emotional experiences, does it really satisfy any of our needs as human beings? Does it bring us any closer together? Just because something feels more meaningful, does that actually make it more meaningful? There will be some interesting reflections on this period of digital abundance in about 20 years.
Film is another form of media that behaves in a similar manner. Why would I need to watch the new remake of movie X when the original is so readily available, and likely better.
I think the internet has worked to make media and culture diffuse much faster. Something new and interesting is suddenly everywhere and certain kinds of surprises, or hype or suspense similar to say, the Beatles landing in the US in the 60s, would be extraordinarily hard to replicate.
I would though, take a less dour attitude in regards to the future than you seem to have hinted at. I think society is adjusting to the this bombardment of entertainment, a more more people live fulfilling lives mostly detached from social media, you just won't find them on facebook :-).
As for the teens... well we are still in them, so yes they are just 'music, art, etc.' in the same way that I don't say: "So I was talking _English_ to a friend today..."
The earliest popular decade association I am aware of is the "gay 90s" image of the 1890s, which apparently was popularized in print media in the 1920s, roughly concurrent with (but independent of) the emergence of commercial radio. So, perhaps not before radio, but also not originally driven by radio, either.
Though funny enough, I think fashion from then is coming back in style. It was very clearly the last year before everyone got all caught up in 60s revival fashion with Austin Powers.
I don't get that same feeling if I look at movies and photos from 2007. Everything looks the same as today.
Some of those videos from that era were really elaborate, almost short films. Now we seem to have largely gone back to a more 80s-style, where the bands just perform.
First, people are now exposed to vastly more information that in 80s or 90s. This forges the diversity in taste and segregation of pop culture.
Second, trends come and go at faster cycle than before. If something on Youtube goes viral, this could be in pop culture for weeks and then vanished in the shadow of another fad.
For instance, I have never heard of "noughties"
https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/107437/there-are-70s...
Having said that, up til around then, times were grouped by the reigning monarch, at least in Britain: Georgian, Victorian, then Edwardian to cover 1901-WWI.