The Decade With No Name

[Alex]

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.

[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.

[innerSpaceman]

Originally Posted by Cadaverous Pallor

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.

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).

Originally Posted by Cadaverous Pallor

Nirvana/Pearl Jam
Gen X's slacker culture
Ska's 3rd Wave, leading into Rockabilly, Swing, Punk revivals
Peak of Rave culture
PC Gaming as we know it comes into being

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).

Originally Posted by Alex

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.

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.