Well, sure. Any arbitrary 10-year period is a decade. But when somebody talks about “the 80s,” they mean Jan 1, 1980 - Dec 31, 1989, and no reasonable argument can be made that it includes any dates in 1990. If you want to label them ordinally, sure, I’ll give you that technically the 9th decade of the 20th century is 1981-1990. But that’s not the same as “the 80s,” which is a cardinal set of numbers encompassing those years ending in 8x.
I think it’s more complicated than that though. Many events of the early 1970s are often pegged as happening in the 60s, and American Graffiti is set in 1962 but there’s no question it’s a movie about 1950s nostalgia.
These pictures were taken in summer of 1990. Is this the slacker/gangsta/grunge 1990s you picture when someone says “the 90s”?
We like to think of decades as neatly defined eras of 10 years but I would say the 50s actually lasted from about 1947 to 62, the 60s from 63-69/70, the 70s from 70/71-79, the 80s from 1980-91, the 90s from 92-05 and the present epoch began in the year 2006.
If you think I’m wrong, think about it - 1970 had more hippies and stereotypical 60s things than 1960. And I would argue the early 2000s are more stereotypically like people’s image of the “90s” than 1990 was.
You’ve been alive in 4 “decades” (defined, as above, as any 10 year period) - e.g.,
1982-1991
1992-2001
2002-2011
2012-2021
Unless someone wants to argue that a “decade” is only a ten-year period starting in a year ending in ‘0’, which seems over-specific to me.
And if you want to define “decade” as ten-year periods that exactly sub-divide a century, then it’s 4 decades again… (since in that case decades will be [xxx1-xx(x+1)0]. 
(d & r)
OK, more seriously, you have lived 3 full decades and started your fourth - counting from your date-of-birth (which makes the most sense to me, TBH)
I realize this is not really a serious argument but rather some self-serving reasoning to shoehorn yourself into the 1980s, but I don’t think this pop-cultural point of view is very strong. The grunge movement was well underway by the late 1980s, it was not as though Nirvana came out of nowhere all of a sudden. Of course, being a 90s baby, you would not remember this :D.
More importantly, politically speaking, 1989 is a far greater divide than 1991. You’re right that the SU lingered on until the end of 1991, but the fall of the Berlin wall and iron curtain and the end of communism throughout Eastern Europe are much more significant occurrences in the entire collapse of communism than the official end of the SU. Not only did that end communism in Eastern Europe, it also ended the cold war.
See, I don’t at all think it’s more complicated than that at all. Events of the early 70s happened in the 70s, not the 60s. I don’t know how you can argue otherwise and effectively communicate. Words are what we all agree them to mean, and I’m struggling to think of anyone (other than you, apparently) who would define “the 70s” as anything but “the years ending in 7x.”
I don’t understand why this is important to you, but if you’re into the generational thing, you’d be pretty much smack-dab in the middle of Generation Y/the Millennials by most definitions (which is usually c. 1982 - c. 2000). I consider myself “a child of the 80s,” but I was born in 1975. I don’t really remember much about the 70s, so it would be silly to identify myself with that decade, even if I am quite fond of it music. You would clearly be “a child of the 90s” for me. That’s what you grew up with–that was your culture. Just own it. There’s no “cool points” for being an 80s kid.
In Western culture, this argument just won’t fly because we count from birth. Consider, two children conceived on the same day and have the same due date, but one is born premature by a month. Even if they then have virtually identical development and effectively the same total existence from whatever point you want to count other than birth, one will be able to drive, vote, and drink a month earlier than the other. You could make this argument in a nother culture, though.
This is a slippery slope type of argument and it won’t work. When is someone old enough to remember the 80s? Is a kid an 80s kid if their first memory is Christmas 1989 and another not if his first memory is New Year’s 1990 even if they’re born on the same day? In my mind, that you can’t possibly have any memories of anything in the 80s is more that it works against you and would possibly be reason to drag kids born in late 1989 out than pull you in.
But you weren’t. The rest falls under the first argument.
I would agree that while technically the 80s run from 80-89 and the 9th decade from 81-90, that most people would say that culturally the 80s ended sometime in 91. This is probably your best argument in your favor, but really, I don’t think it helps because you’re technically born within an unofficial and disputed time period based on culture and can you, as a one-year-old, really make any sort of argument that you had any connection with the culture at that time?
But here’s the thing, this sort of thing affects everyone, that you’re 23 now, you really shouldn’t care anymore. For instance, I was born in '82, so sure, I definitely have some solid memories of the 80s, but when I was about your age, people would hear 198X birth year and immediately wince and associate me with people born in the late 80s still in high school or middle school, despite me being out of college and in a professional job.
Hell, I have fun playing with that whole thing. In 2008, during the presidential campaigns, I loved making people feel old by saying that people born in 1990 were going to be voting for president. In 2011, I changed that to people born in 1990 being able to legally drink. It sounds recent because, well, the 90s were only like 10 years ago.
But really, the thing is, no matter how much you want to be an 80s kid, there just isn’t any way you can justify that you are that isn’t contrived and, really, it’s ridiculous anyway. There’s this weird fascination with the 80s in pop culture in recent years with remakes of 80s things like Transformers, GI Joe, TMNT, He-Man, Thunder Cats, My Little Pony, etc. There’s also some resurgence of 80s new wave sound in music and some 80s styles. And though I have fond memories of a lot of those cultural things, there’s a ton of terrible cartoons, terrible music and terrible fashion that isn’t being remembered.
I think it’s only being remembered now because kids born in the 80s, and some in the late 70s with memories of the 80s, a huge part of the target demographic. Consider, people 18-34 right now were born from 78-94, the 80s are right in the middle of that. And so I imagine in several years we’ll start seeing more of the 90s culture popular and the 80s will start to look as lame as the 70s do now.
This thread is making me feel very old. I was born in 1957, so I just realized I’ve been alive in seven decades now. The 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, the oughts, and the teens.
See, I never got the sense that the 80s were considered “cool” by anyone. The appreciation of the 80s seems to be done with a little cheek, a dose of irony. The 70s were far cooler. And I would say the 90s are too.
Okay, even granted I’m a 90s baby, I’m also a child of the 90s. I spent my whole childhood nearly to my 10th birthday in the 90s. Born in 1990 does not somehow put me into the same category as someone born in 1998 or something, who is a child of the 2000s.
Anyway a couple points. Grunge was around in the late 80s but it was not a mainstream sound until the end of 1991/start of 1992. Grunge was around as early as 1983 in Seattle actually.
Prior to 1991/92, people were listening to REM, Guns and Roses, Poison, and the Scorpions. The only grunge band to have a big record in 1990 were Alice In Chains and that album doesn’t even sound that much different from a typical 80s metal album anyways.
I don’t really agree that 1989 is a bigger divider because it took two years for the system to completely collapse - unless you lived in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union itself was not doomed until the coup of August 1991. Yes they declared an abandonment of hostility towards the West but as long as they existed as a country, there was still an ideological battle with American capitalism going on. Most historians consider the Cold War to have ended with the collapse of the USSR on Christmas Day 1991, it’s only in the popular imagination that it ended in November of 1989.
Berlin Wall falling was the beginning of the end. In fact the wall wasn’t even physically dismantled until the next year, it was only opened up.
I think it’s something you can either understand or something that seems ridiculous.
I have a history-oriented mind, and many historians believe that the 20th century began in 1914 with the start of WW1 and ended in either 1989 or 1991 depending on when you would date the end of the Cold War. Some also end it as late as 1995. It’s called the Short Twentieth Century.
I think you could make the same kind of argument for decades. Nobody really talks about the “2000s” or “2010s” because unlike the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, these decades do not encapsulate entire eras in their own right. It’s kind of all just the “early 21st century” since today’s pop culture is still very similar to the early 2000s.
I wasn’t claiming to be an 80s kid, I’m simply arguing that I existed in the 80s, albeit in the tiniest way and thus I’ve been alive in 4 decades, not just 3. I don’t even think someone born in 1983 is really an 80s kid, they were 6 to 16 in the 90s so I’d say that like me they are children of the 90s.
Sure they do. In my opinion 2010s culture is already distinct from 2000s culture, and will be more and more so as the decade wears on. The borders if culture are fuzzy, yeah, but life and culture in 2013 is quite different than 2003.
I think the period from about 1992 to 2005 should be thought of as a distinct period of popular culture and style and the period since 2006 is another.
But really, the difference in style between today and as far back as 2001 is pretty small. Most of the changes relate to technology. Sure electronic dance music and indie hipster have largely replaced crunk and emo on the charts but EDM has dominated much of the world’s music scene since the late 80s/early 90s, so Lady Gaga is really hardly revolutionary. And hipster music has been mainstream since the early 2000’s, it’s just now the radio has finally realized it.
I disagree. I think it’s all a continuum, for the most part, barring seismic shifts like rap/hip-hop hitting the mainstream in the 80s. You can chop it up as finely or as coarsely as you’d like. To me, that’s too broad a period. I think the late 90s were substantially different culturally from the early 90s. For me, somewhere around 1995 was a big cultural turning point, and that’s mostly related to the Internet and World Wide Web.
And those are HUGE cultural changes to me. Culture isn’t just affected by music and art and fashion.
The sixties ended in 1974: Nixon out, disco in.
I’d actually say 68-74 is sort of a hybrid period. Sly and the Family Stone started in 68, the first “70s” band IMO. Beatles were pretty much done by 69, but there was still some psychedelia in the 70s. Yet on the other hand you had the Carpenters and other cheesy pop in 1970 that wouldn’t fly even a year earlier.
Pink Floyd’s DSOTM from 1973 represented the point where the spirit of the 60s met the materialistic spirit of the 70s and later decades.
The “true” 60s were from 63 to 67 and the “true” 70s from 1975 to 79.
The thing about “decadeology” is you either get it or you don’t. To me the “sixties” is more than just a ten year period, it refers to a certain era that can not be defined simply as 1960-69. 1961 is certainly not what I think of, when I think of the 60s. I know that might drive some people nuts but it’s the truth.
I would agree the early and late 90s were very different. I guess what I mean is that as early as 1992, the trend lines that would define things as late as the mid-2000s were already visible. Gangsta rap was big, the minimal and baggy look was in and would last a good 13 years or so.
1990 had little hint of what 2005 would be like, but you could already see it by '92.
1995 to '97 was definitely when the Web became popular and that certainly changed things a lot yes. Even though the Web wasn’t nearly as big a part of most people’s lives as it is now, it was a huge influence on the economy of the time and started the contemporary obsession with digital technology.
Prior to 1995 digital tech certainly had existed for decades but it was expensive, and not very useful thus the public was not sold on it nearly as much.
True, but I think a tech change alone feels sort of shallow without a shift in the arts and design, don’t you agree? I mean the 1950s was science fiction compared to the 1890s yet it shared many of the same Victorian values, thus making it seem in a sense not too much different.