One thing I’ve noticed that’s changed a lot is how 25 years ago, you hardly ever saw people walking around with masks covering the bottom half of their faces. Now they’re everywhere!
As aptly summed up by MAD Magazine in 1959:
(There’s a case to be made that we’re all MAD Non-Conformists now…)
The style of songs featuring a female singer with very forward vocals and minimal instrumentation seems pretty new to me. I’m talking about such artists as Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, etc. Lorde’s song “Royals” from 2012 is a perfect example, and it was a huge hit.
I can easily tell that none of these songs could be from the 90s or oughts.
You point out Lorde’s song… that was NINE years ago, which sort of bears out my point. Something nine years old at least in the half century between about 1950-2000 wouldn’t have sounded “pretty new”.
I thought the question was whether there has been cultural stagnation since the 90s. My point is that Lorde sounds nothing like the music of the 90s.
Sinead O’Connor did that in the late 80’s -early 90’s, and I’m sure there are others from that period.
Yeah, I really liked Royals, and I’d go so far as to say it represents a direction that music could lean into and develop into a new style.
But I don’t think it’s that unusual in itself, and anyway, one fresh track does not amount to much; we can find unusual tracks (and indeed, music way ahead of its time) from every decade.
The 90s had everything from the aforementioned Wannabe to The Prodigy’s Firestarter to Outkast’s Spottieottiedopaliscious.
Royals released in the 90s would absolutely have done very well, and been considered fresh. But something exceptionally fresh even compared to these? I don’t think so.
Sure, and I’m not saying that everything is the SAME as it was, but that the pace of change has been slow enough that we can look back at say… 2001 in a lot of things and see some contrast versus today, but we can’t look back at 2011 and see nearly so much contrast. Nor was 2011 all that far from 2001.
And really this slow-down seems to have started around 1996-ish, after grunge petered out. After that, things seemed to slow down quite a bit, to the point where it doesn’t seem like there are identifiable decade-ish long bursts of change anymore- just a very slow, steady pace that is hard to see happening.
Royals has already spawned a legion of imitators, as alluded to by Suranyi (Although there’s more to it than just what they mentioned, I don’t recall Sinead O’Connor being big on synthesizers or restrained emotions 
). My point is sometime in the next few years the style will fade or mutate and eventually will become one of many touchstones for the 2010s. So culture isn’t stagnant, it’s still moving on in ways that we can’t necessarily see until we gain some perspective.
Are you now saying grunge was a significant step in the development of popular music?
I love my Nirvana as much as the next guy, but to say that 3 guys with drums/bass/guitar playing blues chords is innovative is just silly.
If you remove a little bit of noise/feedback, those songs could have been written in the ‘50s.
Trap music has been mentioned a number of times in this thread. It only hit the mainstream in the 2010s and has gone on to define a lot of the music in the past decade (for example, Old Town Road is a mix of country and trap).
Crunk came in the early 2000’s and took over rap, then more or less disappeared by 2010. Don’t hear a lot of Nu metal lately either.
Right. You also had the garage rock revival, led by groups like The White Stripes, The Black Keys, The Hives, The Vines, The Strokes, which started in the late 90s and basically ended as a popular genre by 2010 (though Jack White and The Black Keys still put out albums now and then with various levels of success).
And related to that was the Post-punk revival at around the same period, but slightly later, with Franz Ferdinand, Spoon, Arctic Monkeys which also has mostly been left behind by the the mid 2010s.
Dubstep is another thing that has come and gone as a popular style since 2010 but has left a lot of footprints on music throughout the decade.
I’m not saying there haven’t been changes, it’s that the last thing that I can think of that really sort of had the combination of music, fashion and a general aesthetic that previous decades had was the mid-90s grunge era.
If someone says “grunge”, that basically is a phrase that evokes a specific era in time, specific music, specific fashions, and specific attitudes/ways of behavior. Similarly “Disco” does the same thing for the late 1970s.
But if someone says “trap”, “crunk” or “dubstep”, those may evoke a specific sort of music, but they don’t quite evoke the “whole package” so to speak.
That’s what I’m getting at; it’s not a lack of change, but more of a lack of concentrated(?) or maybe coordinated change that you can pin down in time. It’s like rather than everything sort of synchronizing every decade to be more or less definitive, fashion, music, and other trends are on slower and unrelated schedules, so that they don’t sync up periodically into definitive “eras”.
Don’t forget guys showing off their shapely ankles with shorter pant legs and no socks.
I guess it’s going to come down to a subjective judgement.
All of my teen years were in the 90s, so I guess to follow the stereotype I should find 2010s and 2020s music strange and largely distasteful.
But, on the contrary, I find it mostly vanilla, and I like the occasional song that seems to be doing something novel.
Btw, with regards to Royals, I just remembered that it’s not a song I heard when it came out; I heard it only a couple years ago at a friend’s house, in a mix of old and new music. I liked it. But it didn’t jump out at me as a new sound or anything. If I had googled it and it had said anything from 98 to 2019, I would not have been surprised.
That’s a good point, although there does seem to be a certain raver/clubber fashion aesthetic that goes with EDM, and a distinctive country/hippie look that people wear to Coachella.
Overall though, I still maintain that trends these days are more varied and less pervasive. They exist, and they come and go, but they’re harder to spot. I think when it comes to clothing, this may have something to do with both the rise of and backlash against fast fashion. People own more clothes than they used to because they’re cheaper. This allows wardrobes to be more varied. On the other hand, some are rejecting the concept and shopping at thrift stores, which further broadens the range of what you see.
There are some fashions from less than 20 years ago that got enough purchase to look dated now. Remember chunky highlights, those alternating inch-wide black and blonde stripes? Remember Crocs and Skechers Shape-ups, those hideous rocker shoes? Remember flash tattoos, the shiny silver and gold temporary tattoos that had a moment in the middle of the last decade, along with palazzo and harem pants? Or those yoga pants with the bootcut legs and the fold-over top in a contrasting color?
Own it: you’re all a bunch of old farts who could care less about fashion since you hit 30. And that was decades ago. (As am I) Fashion, music really is wasted on us.
Try to remember if your dad had a long spiky Mohawk in the ‘70s or an luscious perm in the ‘80s. Of course he didn’t, he was wearing dad clothes and doing dad things (as are we now). He didn’t care about your music, your “culture” or any other “important” trend. He was getting on with stuff and sometimes reminiscing about the good old days when Elvis wasn’t fat.
And I hope when I get old I don’t sit around thinking about it
But I probably will
Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture
A little of the glory yeah
Well time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, but
Boring stories of
Glory days, well they’ll pass you by
Glory days, in the wink of a young girl’s eye
Glory days
Everything is changing faster and more profoundly than ever. (At least since WWII). There has been no slump in development of culture since the ‘90s: if anything the ‘90s where the slump. “Gangnam Style” is more relevant in cultural development than Grunge, numetal or any other ‘90s genre (at least more people actively sought it out and listened to it).
I write this listening to a cover of a Metallica song: I know what I am talking about. My appreciation of music stopped around “song 5”. That doesn’t mean there were no great songs made, it means I got old.
Tell me you don’t know anything about the '80s without saying you don’t know anything about the '80s.
I can open up my HS Yearbook and see 75% of the girls have the same type of Big Hair, that hardly anyone had 10 years prior and hardly anyone had 10 years after. That doesn’t exist today.
While development isn’t stagnant, it is fragmented. It doesn’t coalesce into a particular style for a particular time. The '70s had a feel that was vastly different than the '60s, to the point that it was possible to have a “period movie” that was set 10 years prior. Can you really do that today? What would it look like?