The Decade With No Name

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Alex

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

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.

any more than, say, the automobile was of the decade it transformed.

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.