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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

"I’ve been into ‘80s/‘90s design for years, I can’t shake it, it’s just so full of fun and positivity."

80s music strikes me as this way. Even the breakup songs have this upbeat vive.

There's so much music these days, a lot of really interesting and innovative stuff. You just don't get to hear it because everything has to be written by someone like Max Martin to get on "popular" media. When you look at the catalog of pop songs him and his mentor are responsible for, it puts a lot of the music scene into perspective.

Maybe it’s a scientific research question. Maybe as everything pop / media was limited/produced/organized we as consumers could only be hit with heavy filtered (see nice and consumable from bigcorps) content ?

Maybe it was the fact that media didn't play as dominant a role in people's lives? You'd read the daily paper and then move on with your day.

As for the popular music, I dunno. I mean 80s music is distinctly optimistic in contrast with 90s grunge. Maybe it was an echo of the disco era of the 70s that bled into the music style?

I remember the 90s very well and it definitely was an optimistic period even though the music was mixed, with hip hop taking off amongst the gang violence of the early 90s. And grunge and emo with their much more emotional versions of rock. Still, seemed like the world was generally at peace and everything was getting better and people believed they were getting better.

In many ways the world is still getting better, but there seems to be a lot of tension today and I don't know what all the root causes of that are.

There is a "science" behind it, very good watch even if you know nothing about music theory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwgLAZ3AtaI

That's an awesome and informative video, and yes, I know nothing about music theory.

The positivity of ‘80s culture was a reaction to the darkness of the ‘70s, which were marred by political violence, the heroin epidemic, massive international tensions, and a lot of ‘60s acts trying to stay relevant by taking themselves way too seriously. At the time, a lot of the intellectual establishment criticized the ‘80s shift as vapid, shallow, and “commercial”, in the context of a rising yuppie culture based on banal materialism.

The ‘90s felt peaceful because the Cold War was over and Desert Storm was a walk in the park. Europe was uniting, political-correctness was rising (which helped minorities get more respect every day), and a lot of people thought that we could now move on from “capitalism vs socialism” to a capitalist society that could responsibly adopt the best bits of alternative systems.

> The ‘90s felt peaceful because the Cold War was over and Desert Storm was a walk in the park.

Desert Storm may have been, but that was the very beginning of the 1990s; the 1990s also included Somalia and the Balkans Wars, neither of which were walks in the park.

> and a lot of people thought that we could now move on from “capitalism vs socialism” to a capitalist society that could responsibly adopt the best bits of alternative systems.

The US basically abandoned any serious “capitalism vs. socialism” dialogue for the entirety of the Cold War plus the period of the neoliberal consensus Which overlapped and extended through the 1990s and 00s, and it also abandoned significant adaptation of capitalism during the same time period, which is unsurprising because the synthesis that Spurs such adaptation has always been, throughout the life of capitalism, driven by exactly the capitalism v socialism debate.

Interesting tidbit I recall from an interview with Steve Martin, a stand up comedian who became popular in the mid-late 70s:

"Mr. MARTIN: Yes. It sounds so frivolous now but it was a crucial decision then. I - you know, the Vietnam War was raging but it was winding down. America was very politically conscious. There were protests, you know, there was political humor everywhere, and I just sensed that the era was ending, that it - you know, it was a kind of - I don't like this word but it was an implosion because you know, you just can't keep taking drugs and have a philosophy, live on. People are dying, and you know, Charles Manson came on the scene and besmirched everyone with long hair. And so I decided, OK, I'm putting on a suit, I'm putting on a tie and I'm cutting my hair. And I cut every political reference out of my act, which was a staple for comedians at the time because it was such an easy laugh. You just mentioned the word Nixon or something - everybody would cheer, I mean, meaning because they didn't like him. And so that was, at that point, the difference between me and them." -https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=989365...

There's a lot of localization involved in these feelings as well. In Europe, the 90s were broadly seen as similarly upbeat as the 80s but perhaps a little less synthetic. In the UK, for example, europop, the Spice Girls, bubblegum dance (like the Venga Boys), jingly-jangly Britpop, etc. are more commonly associated with the 90s than grunge, alt rock, or punk revival as were more popular in the US. (When "retro" stations are playing "90s music" in the UK, they're not usually playing the Smashing Pumpkins or Dave Matthews Band, alas, but banal 90s pop.)

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