Actually, most of the bands she listed were Ska bands, not nearly as big of a phenomenon as grunge was, with Southern California being the epicenter. So it's not too surprising that, especially someone as admittedly music-ignorant as you doesn't know them.

The 50s and 60s are VERY much defined by their car culture. Even though the car existed before, and existed afterwards, you can definitely point to the automobile and how it fit into the culture of that era as being connected with that era and only that era. Drive-in theaters, the iconic image of a diner with a battalion of fins parked out front, teens cruising the main drag a-la American Graffiti. These are uniquely 50s images, the fact that you could still find examples after that being irrelevant. So I have no problem defining the 90s by the mainstreaming of the internet and email, and the Milleni-Os by the emergence of social networking. While part of a continuum, the use of the internet in the 90s is very distinct from what emerged in this last decade and I think will be remembered as such. As different as the pre and post oil crisis car culture.

Of course there's going to be bleed over in either direction when trying to use the artificial dividing line of years divisible by 10. The Beatles' early success was with 50s music. It was well into the 90s before flannel really supplanted hypercolor shirts and acid wash jeans. But then, it's less about "this social trend was seen only in this decade," it's more about a few seminal moments and the cultural reaction to them.

Maybe so, but correct where I'm wrong about your list of stuff not being 90's (despite that you became aware of those things then).

Pearl Jam? 90's really? Could be wrong, but I thought they were around in the 80's. I'm no expert on Nirvana, but weren't they the epitome of grunge, and wasn't grunge an 80's phenom? Same with Gen X. I thought that was a term coined in the 80's. Need research. Where's Alex?

"Ska's 3rd wave?" Well I think 3rd wave says it all. Same with "Peak of Rave Culture," and "PC Gaming as we know it comes into being." All these phrases imply something existed before. I acknowledge your perception of these things coming to the forefront of culture in the 90's, but I knew them all quite well in the 80s' -- so it doesn't wash for me ... ya know, as an Old Man.

Maybe it is a function of age that cultural transfer points get indistinct, but I don't think so. I pretty distinctively remember the differences between the 60's, the 70's and the 80's. And not simply because I was young(er).



Really? Where? I've never seen any such arguments. It seems, and always has seemed from living through it and paying attention to most things referencing it, that the themes and essential elements of the 60's are pretty much agreed upon. Our mileage obviously varies.


And going to Betty's earlier point, even as a child, I was distinctly aware of the Sixties' distinctiveness from other decades, as it happened. It was a revolutionary era, and I'm pretty sure it was perceived that way by tons of people at the time.

But that point is more true for me of subsequent decades. I was aware of the 70's as a separate culture primarily for being so very different from the 60's ... and didn't really grok 70's culture till it was nearly over. Same for the 80's.


But in looking carefully now at the Nineties and the Naughites, I'm really not seeing any age-worn loss of perception. They're just relatively bland to the 8 preceding decades, and relatively the same as each other relative to those same 8.

I think to evaluate the high points of any decade, you imagine what a young person would say, to those who had gone before, "Oh my god . . .

"You did what?" "You had to do what?" "You had what?" "You didn't have what?" Measured that way, from a technological standpoint, at least, this decade is the decade of thinness, capacity and online transactions as the default preference.

Pearl Jam formed in 1990. Nirvana technically started in the late 80s, but Dave Gohl didn't join until 1990 and they didn't become popular until Nevermind in 1991. So as a cultrual point, those two are without a doubt products of the 90s.

And your insistence that something must exist exclusively in a particular decade to be considered iconic of that decade doesn't wash with me. It's not about exclusivity, it's about cultural impact. The internet can be traced back to the late 50s, but it is without a doubt a defining phenomenon of the 90s.

The internet is without a doubt a defining phenomenon of the 90s, but a particular USE of the internet (social media) is a defining phenomenon of the Milleni-Os (the same way that a particular USE of cars as a social tool for teens is a defining phenomenon of the 50s).

Coffee has existed for centuries. Coffee shops have existed for decades. But with grunge came the Seattle influence, came the rise of Starbucks. An defining phenomenon of the decade.

I think we need Madz and Tori in here. Describe to them checking your email once per day because you only had a few hours left that month to log into AOL, having a cell phone only in the car for emergency purposes, renting VHS movies from a store instead of having DVDs show up in the mail. Then ask again if the Milleni-Os (yeah, I'm not giving up on that one) are indistinct from the 90s.

As I said before, you can always find ways to blur that line. That goes for every single decade. Time isn't actually broken up into distinct units of 10 years, it just happens to be a period that generally encompasses enough cultural change that artificially drawing those dividing lines highlights some important cultural touchstones.

Excellent post.

I got to thinking... I wonder if people in Madz and Tori's generation can imagine life without the internet, cell phones, or even VHS/DVDs. We've come such a long way since I was their age.

Speaking for Madz - no she can't. Her battery on her phone dies and she's lost for the two hours it takes to re-charge it. God forbid she not reply to her friends texts instantly. God forbid they actually dial the phone and speak to one another.

She still has VHS tapes although now that we have Blu Ray even the DVDs are old technology to her.

I'm not sure she's ever even seen an encyclopedia.

I agree that was a great GD post with much food for thought.


But I don't see what the old technology argument has to do with it. One could say the same for people of my age ruminating on life without the refrigerator or the telephone. I suppose the best analogy is the transition from stuck-with-land-lines to cell phones. Is that some kind of 90's touchstone? I don't think so. And to me, it argues for the exclusivity factor. We'll have portable communications devices for the foreseeable future. I doubt anyone will associate that with any particular decade.

Would flappers be instantaneously 20's if they endured in the 30's? Poodle skirts as 50's if they remained in the 60's? I guess my examples work easiest with fashion, but I think this factor applies more widely.


It was earlier noted that the effects of the "distinct decades" seem to run from the 2nd or 3rd year to the next 2nd or 3rd year. Certainly true with the 50's clearly brimming through the early 60's, and the 60's clearly running thru the early 70's. So anything in the early 90's, I consider part of the 80's phenomenon. But that's just me ... as someone who has personally observed this lag-trend for nearly 5 decades.


And, heheh, perhaps Starbucks is an 80's thing ... but not coffee. If anything, I think coffee is more iconic of the 30's than the 80's ... but it certainly had peaks of popularity in both. So coffee goes to demonstrate my point. Continuous popularity for 80 years excludes it from the flavor of any particular decade. I think the same will prove true of the internet.

What I think this thread argues for is the fact that there is no rules committee on these things. Different people buy into them in different ways.

But when the National Board of Naming Approximately Decadal Quasi-Social Phenomenological Clustering is formed, I'll support your nomination to it.

Perhaps there's no rules committee. But I think the clear trend for people to have a definitive concept of The Fifties or The Seventies or the Twenties or the Sixites argues that there are definite guidelines, if not rules.

I agree people tend to have definitive concepts of those decades. I disagree that they tend to all be the same definitive concepts except in the broadest -- and therefore most meaningless -- strokes.

You and I don't even agree on whether they're primarily defined by pop culture or econopolitical events.

Plus, if only four decades have achieved such it is hardly remarkable that the last two haven't (if one agrees with you that they haven't). Especially since at least one of them (our conception of the '50s) is almost entirely fictional.