We’re not saying they’re the same, not overall. It’s that the fashions have changed much slower than they did in prior decades. Look at stereotypical 1960s fashion, then 70s, 80s, and 90s. All quite different far beyond mere fit and color palettes like you see between Friends and HIMYM.
What I’m saying is that things have fragmented such that there’s not defining cultural waves like there used to be. I mean, did dubstep ever get top 40 radio play? Kpop did, a little.
What’s going to take the place of it is things like the Instagram era, the Tik-Tok era, and so forth. Maybe video games will move forward- people will remember the various trends in video games like we did TV shows and music, I suspect.
And… FWIW, trap music being everywhere now, despite having gone mainstream in the 2010s is part of the point. If we still had well-defined decade trends, shouldn’t it have gone by now?
Not to be the naysayer, but I guess I will be the naysayer, but lately I’ve had stuff recommended to me by The Algorithm that is a dozen years old, so I suspect longer than you and I would normally think.
No. “Decade trends” don’t end on the 0 years. Cultural “decades” tend to overlap calendar decades, and depending on what part of culture you’re looking at, they don’t line up exactly. Like, the “80s,” for me, didn’t really end until about 1992? The 60s didn’t really start until a few years into the literal 60s, and didn’t end until the early 70s.
And you have your stereotype 2000s fashion (one can do a pretty amusing 2000s costume with skinny jeans, a hoodie under a blazer, shutter shades, and a trucker hat):
As some have noted, the decade stereotype was done by a small group which was blown up as “the” fashion. What was the stereotypical fashion of the 90s? Grunge? I was in highschool in the 90s. Few people wore grunge fashion. Probably there were more emo kids, goth kids, punk kids etc.
Heck, a lot of 90s high school movies made a joke of the cliquishness. I wouldn’t be shocked if the 60s, 70s, and 80s had similar.
I mean, I think trap peaked in the 2010s, so I associate it strongly with that decade, but of course its influence is going to continue. Disco is a 70s trend, but it’s around even now. Decade trends are amorphous continuums to me.
Dubstep is perhaps a faster burn of a trend. Seemed to be quite big in the early 2010s, with even sketch shows poking fun at “the drop,” but that one has fizzled more in popular culture.
I’m not arguing that they’re amorphous, just that hot trends that would have been “decade-defining” in the past are now extended/elongated and not as “hot”, and you can’t really pin them to a specific decade anymore.
I mean, 2001 was a WHOLE lot different than 1991, but not so much so than 2011. It is different, but the pace of change has slowed in most of the classic decade-defining things.
I think we define stereotypes and characteristics of decades past after the fact. In the 80s, I don’t think any of us looked at the girls with big hair courtesy of Aquanet and thought to ourselves, “This is definitely going to be associated with 1987.” It’s not always easy to define it while you’re living it or even shortly after it’s over.
And I say no to that. 2011 is very different than 2001. We went from the film generation to the digital generation. We went to a decade where EVERYBODY almost seems to have a camera on them. We went to a decade of social media. We went to post-9/11 travel restrictions. We went to having music on the go, first with iPods then with iPhones. We went to a culture that buys their music online vs physical media. We went to Youtube. How we interact and share experiences was completely different in 2011 vs 2001. We went to not needing maps, with phone GPS. We went to email and web on the go.
Sure, but when people talk about the defining stereotypes and characteristics of a decade, it’s traditionally been in terms of arts/culture/fashion, not technology. In that sense, 2001 and 2011 aren’t as far apart as 2001-2011. THAT’s what the thread is about, not whether things have remained static for 20 years. They haven’t, but in terms of arts/culture/fashion, the trends are longer and the amplitude is less. So they don’t really define decades anymore.
That’s why I commented earlier that I suspect younger people will define their decades differently- probably by the app/social media platform they used, or maybe by what they binge-watched? I don’t know. But I do know the earlier way of defining it doesn’t really hold up anymore.
Ok, I’ll take your word for it. However, is that just one album or a defining characteristic of the 01s? And is there a continuity of that type of music through the 90s?
I really do not know this at all, I do not know anything useful about the appreciation of music.
But technology does have a huge affect on the former.
In terms of fashion, you have that hairy hipster look of the 2011s that you didn’t have in 2001, for one. If you went to a bar in 2011, you’d see taps of IPAs and various other styles unknown to the average 2001 consumer. A bar in 2001 vs a bar in 1991 was largely the same. A bar in 2011 would have craft beers, rye whiskeys (which I could barely even find in 2003), hip bourbons, and maybe even some craft ciders (though that came maybe a few years later.) Mixology and advanced cocktail making was huge. If I went in a time machine from a 1991 bar to 2001, I don’t think I’d notice much a difference. Ten more years and I’d be lost.
It is fair to indicate that one album may not be representative, but in the last 90s to early 00s you did have this nu-metal thing. Linkin Park was part of a group that included Korn and Limp Bizkit which were big during the 90s.
I wonder with the music thing, because, to my ears, not much development has happened in terms of musical styles in the last two decades, and the overall quality seems to have gone down.
But, I’m an old fart. If what I am suggesting is true, it implies that young people now should often be blown away by hearing a track from the 90s or early 2000s, and agree that it could be a #1 track as is…do young people feel like that?
Or do they feel like, as great as an album like Nevermind is, it would sound old fashioned if a band released it today?
In terms of fashion, it occurs to me also that increasingly what we have is the superset. Most of the old fashions are still popular among certain communities. A time traveller from any of the last 10 decades (apart from the 70s) probably wouldn’t get much notice.
