Is 2012 culture much different from 1992 culture?

[Yllaria]

@DrFidelius

I became a parent in the early '90s, and so I have not paid any attention to popular culture in twenty-some-odd years. As both girls are now away at college I may have a chance to see what is going on in the entertainment world again, and wil return with a report in about six months or so.

I salute you. Better you than me.

@Spoke

However, I will say that it seems odd to me how many of today’s teenagers seem to enjoy a lot of the same music as their parents. That ain’t right.

Both this and any pop culture change slowdown might be because the pig in the python* has moved into late middle age. The ratio between the ages has shifted.

[Don_t_Panic]

@Simplicio

I watched the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series for the first time a few months ago. The shows original run strattled the time period when cel phones started to become ubiquitous, and it was kind of funny to watch the writers at first ignore them, and then have the characters constantly forget to take there’s with them as they left for supposedly super-critical and dangerous missions, so that the other characters couldn’t tell them whatever key plot-breaking fact they’d just learned.

I’ve linked to this before, but what the heck: No signal.

[An_Gadai]

@Martian Bigfoot

I’ve linked to this before, but what the heck: You’re making a modern movie, but you’ve got a pre-cell phone era plot? No worries, just use the “no signal” cop-out.

One of the guys is saying it to someone on the phone .

[kenobi_65]

@An_Gadai

Back then though rockabilly and punk did borrow huge amounts from the sartorial culture of the '50s. I know a guy who runs a club night that is all music from prior to 1959. It’s a huge success and you get people of all ages there, most of whom weren’t around or were very young when the music he plays was in the hit parade.

Even so, I suspect there’s a big difference in American culture (certainly, there’s an enormous difference in popular music) between 1950 and 1958.

[Simplicio]

@An_Gadai

Back then though rockabilly and punk did borrow huge amounts from the sartorial culture of the '50s. I know a guy who runs a club night that is all music from prior to 1959. It’s a huge success and you get people of all ages there, most of whom weren’t around or were very young when the music he plays was in the hit parade.

IIRC, the early 90’s was when swing made a brief comeback. So in 1992 they were stretching back 60 years (!) in at least some cases.

I think different time periods just seem more distinct the further we get from them, because we remember less and less, and so certain “big things” seem more and more prominent, and the time-period gets sort of characterized in our heads. In twenty years, 2012 will seem distinctive in a way it doesn’t now.

@Martian

I’ve linked to this before, but what the heck: You’re making a modern movie, but you’ve got a pre-cell phone era plot? No worries, just use the “no signal” cop-out.

I was going to mention this in my first post actually, but after watching Buffy I watched Angel, which started a few years later. There, the writers have the main character constantly losing cel-phone reception despite being in the middle of LA. So by that point they already seem to have discovered the “no-signal” dodge.

[Justin_Bailey]

@Simplicio

I was going to mention this in my first post actually, but after watching Buffy I watched Angel, which started a few years later. There, the writers have the main character constantly losing cel-phone reception despite being in the middle of LA. So by that point they already seem to have discovered the “no-signal” dodge.

To be fair, Angel spent the first few seasons trudging through sewers and searching abandoned warehouses A LOT.

[An_Gadai]

@Simplicio

IIRC, the early 90’s was when swing made a brief comeback. So in 1992 they were stretching back 60 years (!) in at least some cases.

I think different time periods just seem more distinct the further we get from them, because we remember less and less, and so certain “big things” seem more and more prominent, and the time-period gets sort of characterized in our heads. In twenty years, 2012 will seem distinctive in a way it doesn’t now.

I think the author of the article needs to look at more photos from 1992. There are many differences in youth culture between then and now, and numerous styles have come into fashion and disappeared again. I do think a lot of youth culture is more deracinated now. I don’t think it’s quite as tribal as it was when I was growing up. But that’s a sign of a big difference rather than things having stagnated in the last 20 years. Off the top of my head, as well as the technology that author acknowledged there have been the popularity of various forms of electronic music (I know electronic music predates 1992 but various genres have come to the fore), Japanese culture in general, high quality/budget cartoons, the rise and fall of nu-metal, the dissolution of the notion of cult in movies or tv shows, the rise and fall of Britpop, club culture, and there are plenty of others.

Especially from an Irish perspective a lot has changed in 20 years. Arguably there’s been as much social change in Irish society since 1992 as there was in the US between 1950 and 1970.

[Mahaloth]

@Spoke

However, I will say that it seems odd to me how many of today’s teenagers seem to enjoy a lot of the same music as their parents. That ain’t right.

It is weird. I had Alice in Chains on the other day at school(I teach) and some kids recognized it and were into it.

[CJJ]

Rather than specific elements of pop culture (e.g. whether a mystery plot could be easily resolved with a cell phone), IMO Andersen is really talking about a general sense of style rather than the very specific traits of pop culture. Yes, a mystery that assumes the non-ubiquitous existence of cell-phones can be clearly dated to the early-'90s, but as Martian Bigfoot note, this is far-too-often patched by current writers with the “No Service” trope. So although the reason for the lack of technology is new, the underlying plot & style elements didn’t change much.

A point he makes about old photos is a good example of what he means:

Not long ago in the newspaper, I came across an archival photograph of Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell with a dozen of their young staff at Morgans, the Ur-boutique hotel, in 1985. It was an epiphany. Schrager’s dress shirt had no collar and some of the hair on his male employees was a bit unfashionably fluffy, but no one in the picture looks obviously, laughably dated by today’s standards. If you passed someone who looked like any of them, you wouldn’t think twice. Yet if, in 1990 or 1980 or 1970, you’d examined a comparable picture from 27 years earlier—from 1963 and 1953 and 1943, respectively—it would be a glimpse back into an unmistakably different world. A man or woman on the street in any year in the 20th century groomed and dressed in the manner of someone from 27 years earlier would look like a time traveler, an actor in costume, a freak.

This seems 100% correct to me. When I react to, say, photos of older relatives from the 50’s or 60’s, it’s more than the fact they they look so much younger: The stylized poses, the clothes, and the cars all look of a particular age. Whereas if I look at photos of people from the early 90’s, it’s usually all about how much younger they look. If I didn’t know the particular person in the photo, I could be convinced in many cases that they were taken very recently.

And although I said I found the possible causes for this phenomenon to be less than persuasive, one did strike a chord with me–if only because it gels with my sense of the over-commodification of culture:

(L)ike any lucrative capitalist sector, our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability. Rapid and radical shifts in taste make it more expensive to do business and can even threaten the existence of an enterprise. One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to have to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. If blue jeans became unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on. Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing anybody wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed. Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses and style businesses have become multi-billion-dollar enterprises, a massive damper has been placed on the general impetus for innovation and change.

[JohnT]

@Spoke

However, I will say that it seems odd to me how many of today’s teenagers seem to enjoy a lot of the same music as their parents. That ain’t right.

Why? Is there any rule stating kids must like different music as their parents?

[kenobi_65]

@JohnT

Why? Is there any rule stating kids must like different music as their parents?

It certainly makes it more difficult for parents to say things like:

“Turn that damned music down!”
“You call that noise music??”
“Today’s music is corrupting our children!”

[Justin_Bailey]

@CJJ

A point he makes about old photos is a good example of what he means:

Not long ago in the newspaper, I came across an archival photograph of Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell with a dozen of their young staff at Morgans, the Ur-boutique hotel, in 1985. It was an epiphany. Schrager’s dress shirt had no collar and some of the hair on his male employees was a bit unfashionably fluffy, but no one in the picture looks obviously, laughably dated by today’s standards. If you passed someone who looked like any of them, you wouldn’t think twice.

This is the picture the author is referring to: The New York Times > Business > Image >

Aside from the quality of the picture, it’s a bunch of young adults in the quasi-dress clothes that have been the uniform of service workers for decades. I’m sure you can find similar photos depicted hotel/restaurant staff back to the 1930s.

[NDP]

@Spoke

However, I will say that it seems odd to me how many of today’s teenagers seem to enjoy a lot of the same music as their parents. That ain’t right.

Maybe, but that’s because there’s less of a “generation gap” attitude among kids and their parents regarding music. [GEEZER MODE] When I was growing up, no teen would ever willingly listen to anything their parents listened to. Your music was absolutely critical to establishing a separate identity from your elders. You had your own (cool) music and it was for you only. They had their (lame) music and it was for them only. Case closed. If your parents or somebody in their age group mentioned they “kind of liked” the same song you did, that was enough to banish the song–and perhaps even the artist–from your record collection.[/GEEZER MODE] Now, there’s less friction between the generations and less difference between them in their music. Also, the fact that over 100 years of recorded music is now available on-line has something to do with it. Kids are less likely to listen to music with generational ear-blocks.

[Freddy_the_Pig]

I just had similar thoughts while watching a Seinfeld rerun from the early 1990’s. Yes, the men’s hair was a little longer than it would be today, and yes, electronic devices were less ubiquitous. But for the most part, if I hadn’t known, I might have thought that the show was produced last week.

I didn’t have the same feeling watching All in the Family in 1992, or Father Knows Best in 1972. I remember because I did watch those shows in those years.

[Prox]

Throwing out technology is cherry picking too much, IMO. And I’m not just talking about cell phones on TV shoes. An enormous chunk of culture originates on the Internet these days. Trends start there. Many of them die, but many of them also grow and become a big part of mainstream culture. It’s may not but high culture in any way, but things like Rebecca Black & Shit my Dad Says have a clear impact on the larger culture, and they would’ve never, ever happened in 1992.

And I’m no fashion maven or anything, but there’s a pretty big difference between today’s hipster skinny jeans & the Ninety’s hip hop baggy jeans. Saying fashion hasn’t changed much is just focusing too much on the coincidence that flannel was popular in the early 90s and right now. I don’t remember anyone wearing it in the late 90s or early 00s

Really, why I think this comes down to is that culture is much more fragmented now then it was in 1992, and aging boomers are free to pick the fragments that they like (i.e., similar to 20 years ago) and ignore stuff they don’t

[ralph124c]

I don’t know-people still eat, drink, buy clothes, and compete with eachother for “status”. It is amazing that people in 1912 had much of the stuff we have today-although our technology is immeasurably superior.
In some ways, 1912 culture was better-they didn’t have Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga, or Oprah.
In this regard (the attention whores who become cultural icons), we seem to be moving backwards.

[TBG]

@Prox

And I’m no fashion maven or anything, but there’s a pretty big difference between today’s hipster skinny jeans & the Ninety’s hip hop baggy jeans. Saying fashion hasn’t changed much is just focusing too much on the coincidence that flannel was popular in the early 90s and right now. I don’t remember anyone wearing it in the late 90s or early 00s

Women’s pants/shorts/etc changed a whole lot too. Looking back at things from the early 90’s which were considered skimpy at the time look like they’re from the “mom jeans” school of fashion now.

[fiddlesticks]

I grew up (and became of age in 1992) in Wisconsin so the weather wasn’t necessarily conducive for tank tops, but they certainly weren’t the default summer-time outfit for young women in those days. Visible bra straps? I seem to remember them as a fashion faux pas at the time. I’m quite certain if a girl had shown up at school in a tank top with her bra straps visible in May of 1992 she would have been sent to the office and asked to go home and change or find a sweatshirt to wear the rest of the day.

[Jophiel]

@Spoke

However, I will say that it seems odd to me how many of today’s teenagers seem to enjoy a lot of the same music as their parents. That ain’t right.

I blame the Guitar Hero/Rock Band games.

[JohnT]

Blame the music. My daughter listens to pop music that isn’t indistinguishable from what was played in 1997… or 1987… or 1977. Rock music sounds the same as it did 10, 20, 30 years ago. Other than varying levels of talent, what’s the difference between Nickleback and Bad Company? Lady Gaga and Madonna? Coldplay and ELO? Weird Al and… well, Weird Al? It sure isn’t the vast difference that existed between Benny Goodman and Jim Morrison, or Frank Sinatra and John Lennon.

Even if it doesn’t sound exactly the same, there’s nothing in today’s music that is radically different than what was done 30 years ago, though the methods may have changed.

IMHO, the idea that, musically, a generational split (of the sort that appeared between the post-WW2 generation and the pre-WW2 generation) is the norm probably isn’t supported by the historical evidence.