Two thoughts immediately come to mind on that:

1. It wasn't really until after World War I that the United States began to dominate the world stage and therefore play a major role in setting the tone.

2. Mass communication and easy movement across regions is probably an important element in creating a widespread national "meme" for an age. And the late teens are when those really started to come together with radio and movies making it possible for the entire country to be simultaneously consuming the same popular culture and the cheap automobile allowing for a level of personal freedom in movement hardly dreamed at before.

Hmm, I'm intrigued.

Again, I was 13 in 1990, so for me, the 90's were very specific pop-culturally, very different from the 80's. Grunge was a real deal for me, the same way disco was for people in the 70's or even, dare I say it, the Beatles were for that generation. I saw Pearl Jam on SNL and fell in love, buying Ten the very next day. I went to thrift stores and bought flannel shirts, tore my jeans, wrote bad poetry. I watched MTV daily then.

If you want to say that the 3rd wave of ska reeked of the 80's, then you're ignoring how much more mainstream the 3rd wave was (in America, at least, the 2nd was more hyped in the UK). Save Ferris, Dance Hall Crashers, Reel Big Fish, Goldfinger, almost-made-its like Mealticket and Skankin' Pickle...it was everywhere, and of course the bigger, more mainstream names of Sublime and No Doubt broke through into standard 90's fare.

Slacker culture was a real thing, and the ripples continue today. Before then the concept of living in your parents basement and working retail for years into your 20's was nowhere near as average and accepted. (Maybe it just appears this way, but appearances are what we're talking about here.) Clerks and Reality Bites are the obvious examples.

I think I'm officially too old now to help you with that one. Ask someone who was 13 in 2000...

I think of the guy on the huge bike.

Perhaps that can be pushed further to say that now that things have splintered into sub-cultures via the internet, these national memes are mostly no more.....or perhaps, that they now move so quickly that characterizing this decade will be much harder.

I don't think you can tell what the decade was about until it's years later and you can look back and see what's changed since.

The internet itself, while transformative, can't be said to be a "90's" thing. It's going to continue well into the future, and won't be a unique attribute of one particular decade any more than, say, the automobile was of the decade it transformed.


For something to be decade-flavorful, it has to have either disappeared or morphed nearly beyond recognition. If the styles and music of the 20's or the 50's had continued on, they wouldn't be the styles of the 20's or the 50's.



I dig CP's particulars about the 90's, but it all still seems a continuation of the 80's to me.

Off by about 20-30 years. The penny-farthing was at peak popularity in the 1870s, early 1880s.

You're right about that.

Here's the part where I just call you an old man. ;) I do believe that the older one gets the more things seem to be a continuation of the past. Already, I'm feeling these effects.

I can't believe I'm wrong about the bike! There goes my pre-WWI house of cards. (To be honest, I think Alex is right about pre-WWI America's lack of tone.)

Also, I agree that "the Post 9/11 World" is going to be the buzz phrase that sticks, same as "the McCarthy Era".

There's also the fact that for people who lived through the times the sense of the zeitgeist is going to be extremely different from person to person.

I'm only two years older than CP but I've never heard of most of the bands that she mentions as defining the era for her. For her grunge was real but for me (and I lived in Seattle at the time) it was something broadly mocked except for specifically the music. For my mom, coming of age during the late sixties, early seventies the counterculture was pretty much a non-event happening elsewhere.

Heck, while we all agree that there was something we label "the sixties" people have been arguing ever since the sixties over what exactly that was and its essential elements.

Good point on the nichification of culture. Maybe this decade will come to be known as the Balkanizing Aughties.

I think this decade will be more characterized by what has occurred with social networking and media revolution due to advances made possible by technology and the internet. Some of this started in the '90s, but this is the decade where it caught on with the masses.